Written by Jonathan Wojcik
October 31: And the Halloween Day post shall be...
I turn twenty eight this October 31st. If you had asked me ten years ago what I thought I'd be by now, there's a number of things I might have considered; a legitimate biologist, a professional artist, someone with a job, someone with an education, someone not going bald already...definitely not just some guy with a website.
Halloween is trivial to some people. Some people don't even like it at all. Overseas, it's seen derisively as an empty, gaudy American invention encroaching upon native culture. In some parts of the world it's seen as downright tasteless and offensive. Even here in its homeland, people try consistently to ruin its good name with trashy, drunken costume parties or campaigns to "soften" its "dark" image.
To me, however, Halloween embodies pure distilled childhood. Moreso than Christmas, moreso than anyone's first dozen birthday parties. It doesn't have to mean anything else. It doesn't matter if it was just cobbled together by Hallmark and Nestle. It's the one season where our cultural standards relax enough that we can scatter bones and cobwebs all over our front porches, dress ridiculous and nobody questions it. Halloween is one of the few things that even keep me on this land mass at all. Without it, I'd have already booked a one-way flight to one of those continents where giant African land snails aren't harshly outlawed. Yes, I really would abandon a country over Halloween and mollusks.
My point is, there's absolutely nothing I could ever post to the internet on Halloween itself that could possibly be special enough, and I won't even try. I haven't been able to make any plans at all and may never even leave the house, but I'm not going to spend the day just sitting on the internet. Even if you live in one of those desolate, third-world wastelands where Halloween is either unknown or unpopular, you could at the very least watch a monster movie, cut a creepy face in a pumpkin-like object or even just jump out and scare somebody...just once. Just a little.