Thinking about Halloween

Thinking about Halloween, I don’t remember specifically what I wore when I went trick-or-treating as a kid. I’m sure it was with one or both of my sisters, and my mask was one of those weird plastic things with the eyes out so you can see

Maybe it’s partly because I don’t have a lot of photos of me then. I had this wonderful red photo album of mine, which I believe was left at my grandmother’s house when I went to college. Like my LPs and my baseball cards, it disappeared either from theft or subsequently when my grandmother’s house left our family’s possession in a narrative too complicated to get into here.

So, I remember Halloween as an adult much more than I did as a kid. Mostly, it’s because I have photos. I’ve mentioned before Sid and Shirley. I was invited to lots of parties.

Then, I would go out trick-or-treating with our daughter, which was fun. The funny thing about going trick or treating with my daughter is that she would get lots of candy, but a lot of it had peanuts to which she was allergic. This was good news for my wife, who loved Reese’s pieces.

When our daughter was old enough to go out on her own, I also liked staying home and handing out candy. I found that was very much a community thing, as we live very close to an elementary school. We would give away 200 pieces of candy at Halloween. Of course, in 2020, we passed. But the numbers haven’t come back post-COVID.

People complain that teenagers and young adults shouldn’t be going out, but I think they’re being too fussy.

Inbox

I was looking through some of my Gmail because I have way too old emails. I have about 700 items marked Use It. I’m going to post some of them here because I obviously kept them for an odd reason. Many were sent to me by my friend Dan.

I had been working on a comic-related project with ADD in 2015,  and I contributed this as the scariest story I had ever read:

I used to own a bunch of the EC box sets that Russ Cochran released in the 1980s. (Why I don’t is irrelevant but annoying.)

Links

White Zombies by Key and Peele

Aliens abducting Cows – the holiday is mentioned.

My late near-relative Arnold Berman sent me Rhinoceros – An Animation of the Absurd. In high school, I was in an Ionesco play, The Bald Soprano, so its absurdist sentiment resonates.

Dogs can sense magnetism!  What they found is that dogs, um, poop along Earth’s magnetic lines, which is spooky.

This one has nothing to do with Halloween, though the guy is a nightmare: Le papier ne sera jamais mort / Paper is not dead on influencia.net ! It was sent by an SBDC colleague named Leslie.

Daft Punk Cockatoo has no Samhein connection except its oddly mesmerizing enthusiasm.

Those were all from 2012 to 2016 and were buried in my Gmail. More recently:

fillyjonk decorates for Halloween

We Want Our Mummy (1938) The Three Stooges

The Skeleton Dance