That Hideous Strength

          I woke up early in the morning on my real birthday -- never sleep too much after drinking. I took some time to get the apartment in respectable order, since my folks would be visiting today. Ian and my mother dropped in and took me, Jules, Nathan and Johnny to lunch at Swish Shabu. After we ate, we took a few pictures together, hung out for a bit, and then they took off again. Julia turned up eventually, and we discovered that the pinata had been forgotten in its hiding place! Taking turns gingerly propping it up on the end of a broom, we smashed it up with one of our several bats and feasted on its innards.
          On Julia's recommendation, she, Nathan and I started a horror flick called VHS, comprised of various unrelated reels of "found footage." Early in the movie, near the end of a very freaky sequence about a vampiric(?) hookup at a club, I began to feel thoroughly uncomfortable. Within a minute or so, my head was spinning and my pulse racing so quickly that I thought I was having a heart attack. I stumbled into the kitchen, threw open the freezer and grabbed the first thing that came to my hand (a bag of frozen peas.) I then lurched across the apartment to the bathroom, fell in on the cool tile and pressed the bag to my throat, wheezing for air. I wasn't sure if I was going to throw up or pass out; eventually, when neither had happened and my heart had slowed considerably, I went and laid in my bed in the dark to calm down. I suppose this was my first panic attack, no doubt helped along by my diet that day: one meal of sushi, then only a ton of candy, alcohol (we made neon-colored drinks before the movie) and marijuana.
          Nathan and Julia were kind enough to switch the movie over to a Jim Gaffigan special, though I intend to finish it next time we hang out. Gaffigan is a really funny dude, though personally I think his "audience voice" can be overplayed at times (a la the Jon Stewart "this is ridiculous" face.) I walked Julia back to Allston at the close of the evening, and she lent me her Sennheiser headphones for the walk back. I forgot what it's like to hear the bass! Walking alone, an image from VHS kept running unbidden through my head: the vampire girl in shadow, assuming a dancer's posture, and an earlier, frantic line from one of the ill-fated characters: "She's dead! She's dead!"