(10/31/23)

Today was a good day. Halloween. I didn’t dress up as anything. I was myself all day, no escape, no fallbacks. Caleb dressed as Dracula's shorter cousin. He wore a black cape that was textured like a birthday party tablecloth and slicked back his hair with a fistful of Tyler's gel. He also bought a pair of plastic vampire fangs, but he accidently spit them out on the drive over to Julian's and they are now lost somewhere in the depths of Tyler's Prius. We all went over to Julian's apartment and watched Scream. Tyler had, of course, never seen it, and he was genuinely surprised when Matthew Lillard turned out to the killer. Then Reese showed up after the movie and did Tarot readings for everybody. I thought Tyler would be hesitant because it was like a "Pagan ritual" or whatever but oddly enough Julian was the only one that refused to do it. He said that he doesn't mess around with "spiritual stuff." I pulled the hierophant (?), which Reese said typically means that I'm going to get married or baptized soon. I'll keep you updated if either of those things somehow befall me.

I remember as a kid never liking Halloween because I was scared of everything. I couldn’t watch horror movies or even look at poster without my mind inventing some horrible version of it that was usually way worse than what whatever the movie was actually about. At Family Video I always hated walking down a certain aisle because there was this movie called Species, and the box had this nude alien looking lady with a large syringe going into her head. After watching it a couple of years ago, I can confirm that it was not at all what the cover made it out to be. My parents called this fear a symptom of my “over-active imagination.” I was always looked at strangely in elementary school. In the first grade the teacher put me in a desk apart from all the other kids that was circled with tape. If I moved the desk outside of the tape I would be punished. The school therapist told my parents that I had ADD and tried to prescribe me medication. They took me out of that school and put me in another in the district. My parents never believed in solving anything.

~clancy