Welcome To My Daytime Nightmare

Did you re-watch the original Halloween for Halloween? The one with Jamie Lee Curtis and Donald Pleasance and the spooky score? If so, you will recall the scene where Donald, the psychiatrist treating Michael Myers, drives up to the asylum at night with the nurse who is supposed to drug Michael out of his mind for a trip to court. Why they came at night is beyond me. I guess daylight hours would not have been scary enough.

Anyway, the nurse drives that unfashionable station wagon onto the grounds, and of course it just happens to be raining, and through the downpour we see white blobs. They are the patients, roaming about a field, wearing hospital johnnies, and shuffling catatonically in random directions. That scene makes my heart go thumpity-thump.

Imagine my sudden intake of breath when I drove The Pony home from his doctor's visit on Friday. It was around 10:00 a.m., but the rain was pelting down by the bucketfull, and T-Hoe's wipers were running full blast. The headlights were on, and the effect was more like evening than mid-morning. We crested a slight rise by the prison, and I was shocked to see seven state employees shuffling along the right-of-way in the driving rain. They were wearing state-issue dark gray ponchos, and waving metal detectors slowly back-and-forth. All that was missing was the spooky sound track. This was just too eerie for me. The hair on the back of my neck, right under my lovely lady-mullet, sprang to attention.

I have no idea what was going down. These dudes were on both sides of the road, fanned out from the main entrance to the prison grounds. All I could speculate was that a) somebody had flown the coop, and possible discarded some contraband keys, or b) somebody had stabbed another somebody, and the prison personnel were looking for a weapon that might have been carried out by an accomplice.

I really need to watch more prison shows, and fewer reruns of Halloween.