Midnight and a Parking Lot and Aliens, Probably

June tenth. I bought a ticket to the midnight premiere of Prometheus on a Tuesday and told no one until after I'd already done it, which is maybe the purest form of a decision I know how to make.

There is something very specific about a midnight movie that a regular seven-thirty showing cannot replicate. The parking lot is warm in a way that parking lots usually aren't because you're noticing it. The line is filled with people who made the same slightly irrational choice you did, which creates an immediate sense of solidarity among strangers. My feet hurt before the previews even started because I wore sneakers that looked better than they felt, and I still think it was the right call. The soda was enormous and cost more than it should have and I drank every drop of it.

The soda cost four dollars and I felt no remorse.

I had the letterpress card in my bag, actually. The one I printed last month. I have been carrying it around in the front pocket of whatever bag I'm using, which I realize sounds like I'm waiting to give it to someone, but I don't think that's it, I think I just like having a thing I made with me. It survived the Prometheus midnight premiere in excellent condition. That felt worth noting.

I walked back to my car at two-fifteen in the morning with that particular hollowed-out feeling you get after watching something that is genuinely enormous on screen. The drive home was quiet and warm and I had the windows down. I don't know if the movie was good exactly, but it was the right kind of big, and sometimes that's the thing you actually went for. I was back in my apartment by two-thirty. Gerald was fine. I went to sleep.

Ticket in hand. No going back now.