nighttime thunderstorm

My parents went away for a few days, so they dropped the dogs off here for us to babysit for two nights. Jesus. It's like having children! Babies, specifically. Mitch and Pip are beautiful, I love them to pieces, but they're not the easiest dogs to look after. Mitch - it's not really his fault. He's 15, his legs don't work so good, he's deaf and he has a psychotic (Pip) for a sister, and she spends most of her time stepping on his face, so its understandable that he gets grumpy and whiney and stares at you intently when you have nachos. Pip... well. She's psychotic. That's about it, really. You know it all.

The first night they were here they were both a little out of sorts. Mitch sucked it up, though, and went to bed quite happily (in my room, of course). Pip, on the other hand, would not settle at all. Running around, panting, barking, sniffing. I thought maybe she was restless to be outside, so I put her out, and then she started whimpering. She basically wants humans to move outside and live in the bushes. That way, she can have her cake and eat it too - lots of things to shit on and eat, plus people to play with. So I finally relented and stuck her on the bed with me. I've slept next to some pretty interesting people (well, not that many really) but having a 30kg Labrador next to you is like sleeping with Sadaam Hussein after a big night. The hair, the smells, the kicking, the licking, the sneezing, the dreaming, and BREATH. I don't think I got more than an hour's consecutive sleep the whole night. Needless to say I wasn't feeling too crash hot at Uni yesterday. So last night me and CK took Pip for a late-night walk down to the supermarket, gave her a chance to work off some steam before bed. She was much calmer, slept beside the bed and didn't disturb me til 7am when she wanted to go out for aforementioned shit and food. So you'd think, based on having two calm happy dogs asleep in my room, that I would've slept well, right? WRONG.

I have a giant poster of James Dean above my bed. Everyone knows that spiders like to hide behind posters. (But this is not a spider story). Everyone knows that spiders only creep out from behind those posters late at night, when it's all dark and quiet. Having a poster of that size (over 2 metres tall!) above my bed is a HUGE deal. Imagine how many Huntsman spiders could be under there? A whole NEST. They could be using Jimmy as a front, running all kinds of nasty illegal operations from under that things, all their little minions running around doing their nasty work for them. We are in Carlton, after all. So having the poster there has always made me a little nervous. But only because of the spiders. Never for the fear that it would fall on my head in the nighttime. Dear reader, this is exactly what happened last night. Giant James Dean fell right on my face. This doesn't sound particularly impressive or anything, but let me assure you, it was one of the most single frightening experiences I have ever had while sleeping. You ever accidentally kick the wall and wake yourself up? That's a bit scary. Your heart pounds for a second. That shit has NOTHING on the terror I felt last night. I thought the world was ending. I thought it had ended, in fact. I thought it was all over, the Germans had invaded, the Hellmouth had opened, the spiders were attacking - we're fucked. I woke up, of course, to the sound of it crashing down onto my head, but then was stuck underneath it, unable to tell what it was in my groggy sleep-state. It felt like a monster of the most hideous sort, flat and a bit shiny, papery-thin so it has no bones, just sucks out your life essence and leaves you a hollow husk, dead on the bed, not even dead but soulless and mindless and empty. Then I kinda came to a little bit, realised it was all ok, James must have fallen, it's just a poster, it's all ok, no Hellmouth.

Well.

Right at that minute - right when I've just decided that it's all going to be ok, that I'm a terrible over reactor and really need to get a life and stop being such a fucking pussy... right at that minute, Pip jumps onto the bed. Sleeping next to a 30kg Labrador with the breath from hell is bad enough. Having one you basically forgot was even there actually jump on you in the nighttime is... beyond words. Beyond. It was like being hit with a thousand bowling balls, scratched with a thousand knives, exposed to a thousand years of rotting fruit, swallowed by an otherworldly being and tossed around it its stomach with a bunch of other shit it ate.

At that point, I did a little wee in my pants, politely excused myself, and went to cry in the toilet.