10-31-2006 – Halloween night

"My greatest trouble and my wife’s is our family, mighty out of order by this fellow Will’s corrupting the mayds by his idle talke and carriage, which we are going to remove by hastening him out of the house, which his uncle Blackburne is upon doing, and I am to give him 20l. per annum toward his maintenance. The Queene continues lightheaded, but in hopes to recover. The plague is much in Amsterdam, and we in fears of it here, which God defend.”

– Samuel Pepys, 31 October, 1663 (pepysdiary.com)

So… this is how Halloween’s gonna be, huh? Cozied up on a quilt-piled couch, candles burning on the coffeetable as much for chill-chasing as illumination, a couple pounds of greasy chow-mein leftovers congealing in the refrigerator… catching up on the day-to-day doings of a London diarist who’s been dead for 303 years. Party.

If I was feeling a little less logy, I might let holiday-guilt kick my square ass out into the streets to find something, anything that remotely resembles a party, just to say I’d done my duty. Halloween is a hoser High Holy Day, and this is the first time ever, ever, ever in my life that I haven’t at least smeared some dollar-store “zombie” makeup on my face or whipped up a weak-ass sheet-ghost costume and gone out to ogle all the tarted-up chicks. I feel like a loser – a warm, comfortable, relaxed, sober loser, but a loser still.

Honestly, though… a Tuesday? What am I supposed to do with a Tuesday, since I find myself in a day-job situation? Come into the office reeking of tequila, pumpkin seeds, greasepaint and duct tape, bits of cobwebbing still clinging to my curls? Maybe I could have done it and been OK, but my energy reserves are critically low; after the boozy Brewtals revival Friday night, a ridiculous birthday party/séance-planning meeting in a rockin’ retail basement Sunday night, and a shot-filled evening that ended in the company of partymaster Carson Cole last night, I have more than done my share this weekend.

Ah, but none of those were proper Halloween parties... and so, my duty remains undischarged. No last-minute group costume workshops, no freezing my ass off in stupidly climate-inappropriate gear like my Sub-Mariner outfit (fish-scale swim trunks, only) of a few years back, no piles of cash blown on cab after cab hitting houseparty after houseparty, no kitchen grabass with soused fetish angels, no desperate maintenance of rapidly deteriorating costumes, no hotboxing a rubber mask.

Excuse number two: the weather. Snow on Halloween is one thing, but this froze-ass December shit really puts the clamps to the party impulse. Basically, it’s like we followed (as we are meant to) the lead of our ads and retail store displays and skipped over Halloween to get right down to the business of Christmas. These pagan festivals are supposed to be in touch with nature, right? Well, the druid inside me took one step outside, felt the Wendigo blowing ball-shrinking ice up his hempen robe, saw the late-late-late-blooming poppy in my flowerbed frozen so quick its bulb snapped right off when I shoveled my sidewalk, and said “fukke ye the Samhain fires… yon Solftice of Wintre be nowe ‘pon ye lande!” Our tribal duty has shifted from partyhopping and dressing up as robots to Making This Giving Season Special.

Still… spacey and dreaming in the MSG-whirl of the Combo For Three, Willie Nelson’s Stardust tootling on the hi-fi, Pepys complain/bragging (as always) about how much his doublets, cloakes, collares and pantaloons are costing him…? There are worse ways to spend this Night of Nights. Next year, though… next year... it’s going to be freakin’ massive!

“But thus everything lessens, which I have and am like to have, and therefore I must look about me to get something more than just my salary, or else I may resolve to live well and die a beggar.”