Happy Freaking Satan-Loving Halloween

Not to be too, too much of a buzzkill, but nothing pisses me off more than adults who insist on celebrating Halloween at inappropriate times and places. Like the post-middle-aged woman working at the supermarket dressed as Ted Bundy — or maybe she was just a clown, which is even more disturbing — and I don't want that freaking thing touching something that I'm gonna eat. Seriously, you're an adult: you can buy your own goddamn candy, you no longer need to extort it from your neighbors.

I remember my final Halloween. Fourth grade was the first year I didn't win Most Creative Costume at the annual Halloween parade, fifth grade was the year some fucking teenagers vandalized our jack-o-lanterns while we were at the parade, and by sixth grade, I kind of stopped believing in the magic of Halloween. It was two years since Grandma passed the costume designing torch to Mom, and Mom tried to take Halloween in a new, artsy, and heavily misunderstood direction. She'd come up with these weird-ass costume ideas: an anthropomorphized toothpaste tube, an anthropomorphized sandwich, an anthropomorphized model of our heliocentric solar system. I was an aquarium one year, and what clinched the deal for me was sixth grade, when Mom turned me into a spider web. Unfortunately, that was a bit too cerebral of a costume for my sixth grade peers... and teachers, and everybody thought I was Spiderman, who's totally puerile.

Here's the moment I knew I outgrew Halloween. I was trick-or-treating with my next-door neighbors, Jerry and Laura. It was cold and raining — it always rains on Halloween. We were at house number four, the folks next door to the Bartlesons. The woman there answered the door; we stood on her front porch, staring, expecting candy, but instead we got, "You're not even gonna bother to say 'trick-or-treat?'"

I guess our hearts just weren't in it anymore.

Which is the thing about when adults get all dressed up — it's this half-hearted attempt to get back some vestige of kiddieness that's invariably futile. There's nothing more pathetic. Well, there's one thing more pathetic, and it wears an oversized Battlestar Galactica t-shirt and yammers incessantly about Advanced Dungeons and Dragons.