the horror!  the horror!

i'd spent the past week on a mini-vacation.  nick and i went camping.  we went to the state fair on opening day.  we drove thru the wine country to bodega bay [yep, the place where hitchcock filmed his great movie about killer birds] and back again.  oh, i ordered about half-dozen poetry books from spd which arrived two weeks ago and i've read thru all of them, while also discovering writers i should've read 20 years ago, like gary snyder.  it's been an eventful few days.

but i've lost sight of the pleasures of watching a good, even a goodly cheesy horror movie.  to be quite blunt, i've not been watching movies this summer.  not many blockbusters out in the theaters caught my attention.  i have a stack of dvds i still have not unwrapped.  i catch snippets here and there.  i'll put in a disc for a scene or an extra.  that's about it. 

at any rate, this evening i took a book into the bedroom [on going, bootstrap press; 2007 by tom morgan (a wonderful poet)] and because i'm a modern man turned the tv on too.  i opened the book to the page i've left off and then scanned the channels.  and there on the channel devoted to horror, chiller, was a program called can you survive a horror movie?  silly premise?  definitely.  what i liked about the program was its horror geekdom.  three easy-on-the-eyes goodlookingly horror nerds are put to various tests manufactured from horror movies to see if they'd survive the challenge.  goofy.  what kept me watching was the panel of experts regarding the skill levels you'd need to survive something like a psycho stalking you thru the woods and/or house, or a zombie apocalypse.  back to silly premises, yeah, yet there is something about the horror genre that literally calms me down and gets my blood pressure under control.  horror films make me happy.

so does halloween and halloween imagery.  today we went to a birthday party for j. the son of our very good friends, b. and c.  j. is also nick's best friend.  the party was held at a public pool where we also have season passes.  so we arrived a few hours early to get some swim time in.  i was sitting on the pool steps with anna as nick was splashing all kinds of crazy around us.  a little girl swims past us and says to me regarding my tattoo on my left shoulder, i like your halloween pumpkin.

thank you, i answered, i do too.