Timid Woodland Creature

Halloween is this Sunday and I am totally unprepared. We get a shit-ton of kids coming to the house (well over 100) and good lord if they don't all want something for free. The cats hate this night almost as much as they hate the 4th of July. No, the cats don't hate America and your freedoms, they hate fireworks and our doorbell. Luckily, the Trick or Treaters ringing the doorbell doesn't happen every night for an entire month like the fireworks do. Fuck you ineffective Chapter 148, Sec 9, General Laws Board of Fire Prevention Regulations, Massachusetts Fire Safety Code, 527 CMR 2.00. You are a joke law with zero teeth.

What was I talking about? Oh yea, Halloween and all the crazy spooky shit that goes along with it. I may have mentioned a few times that I don't do scary movies. I do not care for them. They can scare me and I find this unpleasant. I do not enjoy seeing gore or zombies or what have you. I am not good at keeping my girly shrieks at bay and I have found that using my hands to shield my eyes does not prevent the horrible sounds from getting to my brain. And this is where the sounds will put images that may very well be worse than anything the movie is presenting.

I remember scaring myself into thinking that I saw a ghost in my bedroom (after my grandmother on my mom's side died. She was the first dead person I had ever seen). I had pulled the covers up and jammed myself up against the wall next to my bed so that if the ghost bumped into the bed (?), it wouldn't brush up against me. So there I was all wrapped up and protected when the thought occurred to me that, "Wait, I can still hear things." Ghosts make that spooky sound right? I would still be able to hear that and I'd have a heart attack and die at 10 years old. That thought messed me up and I proceeded to jam a pillow onto my head to block out sound. Luckily I did not pass out from lack of oxygen or overheat and explode (I normally require lots of ventilation).

With Halloween so close, everywhere I look and every news or entertainment outfit has something that could potentially freak me out. "Top 10 Horror Movie Scenes!" shouts one article with a large picture of that fucking Exorcist kid front and center. "No fucking thanks," I say and click over to another site. "50 Scariest Movies!" proclaims the caption under yet another shot of Linda Fucking Blair snarling at me. Jesus fuck. I just want to read about the economy or something totally not scary like that (wink! it's sarcasm folks! zoinks!).

I can trace my aversion to the horror and/or scary movie genre back to 1975 when at the far too fucking young age of 5, my parents took me to see a little film called Jaws. Are you kidding me? That's messed up. When that severed head in the sunken boat clonked into frame, I'm pretty sure I had a stroke. From that day on their movie viewing choices were suspect. I remember my mom announcing one Saturday morning that "We're all going to the Granada Theater to see a movie today." Lovely, and what movie would that be, dear mother of mine? "We're going to go see Young Frankenstein." I balked because although she promised me that it was a comedy and I'd like it, this was the same woman who said I should watch Psycho with her one night when I couldn't sleep. Wow. And yes, I would watch the Creature Double Feature on Channel 56 nearly every Saturday. But that was mainly movies with dudes in cheap rubber suits. However there was one that stuck with me. The Brain That Wouldn't Die scared the bejeezus outta me.

If you'd like a quick gauge of my level of jumpiness I can provide it. As a kid I was frightened by an episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show. Yep. And not just by little Richie's horrible acting either (I can remember even as a little kid thinking "Wow, that kid is a really shitty actor. Why does he yell all his lines? Couldn't they just fire the little fuck and get someone who's good at this?"). I was freaked out by how freaked out Dick Van Dyke was. When he came home at the end of the show and they started coming after him from the other rooms? I lost my little mind. Morey Amsterdam's bugged out eyes coming out of the bedroom was terrifying. Seriously. Even when Laura comes cascading out of the closet on a wave of walnuts I was scared (at the 19:20 mark on this video).

So this past weekend I went on to Netflix and searched for that episode to see if it would elicit the same reaction now that I'm all grown up and (presumably) less skittish. I found it and streamed it off my PS3 (so cool being able to do that. I love technology). It is basically a spoof of a Twilight Zone episode and I was totally enjoying watching it. Then, that scene came up...yep, still spooked me. Maybe I'm just afraid of Morey Amsterdam? Lesson learned. No scary movies or even pseudo scary 49-year-old family television shows. Yea, I'm a real man alright.

Hey! Get Offa My Porch!

Halloween is this weekend (tomorrow as a matter of fact) and I'm not looking forward to it. When we first moved in together, the Wiff (then the GF) and I had zero trick or treaters come to the apartment. Granted, they would have had to have access to the building first so that's probably the reason. The next apartment didn't offer much in the way of Halloween festivities either and it wasn't until the 3rd apartment that we finally had a few kids come to our door. I usually would spend the night worrying that some shithead kid would egg my car or something. Nothing ever happened like that luckily. And now that most of our friends have kids themselves, the possibility of being invited to a Halloween party are lessening too. That's not something I'm missing at all, I just thought I'd mention it.

When we bought the house we were excited that we would probably have a few kids come and do the trick or treat thing. It was going to be fun! We'll get to meet our neighbors! We'll be able to establish our place as the cool house in the neighborhood! We even went the extra mile and bought a bunch of goofy stuff from this catalog and filled up little bags with toys and candy. We spent a couple nights sitting at the dining room table filling up the bags and trying to evenly distribute the chotchkies so that everyone got a fair share. It was a big hit and we got (if memory serves) 80-something kids that year. "Holy crap", we thought. "That's a lot of kids!" We were mistaken. That's nothing. The next year we got over a hundred and it has been steadily climbing ever since. The cats hate it as they associate the doorbell ringing with a terrifying attack or something because whenever it rings they bolt upstairs instantly. Oliver actually growls too. He's wicked intimidating.

We have since scaled back on the extra gift things and have gone with straight candy for the last 5 years or so. But that doesn't seem to matter as last year we got 135 kids. This year, who knows? Maybe we should start giving out Smarties or some other crappy candy or maybe pennies to make our numbers go down (by the way, when did the regular Halloween candies get so small? I remember the "Fun Size" bars being the disappointing standard but now they're all like "mini bars" or some bullshit. Whatta gyp). However, when we were cleaning out the basement during The Great Purge of 2009 we did come across a bag of leftover Halloween toys. We won't do the little gift bags but The Wiff will be handing out those toys on a first come/first serve basis. Hopefully no one will get stabbed on our porch during the mad scramble to get a shitty rubber skeleton and a pumpkin pencil. I don't actually interact with the little buggers because I find them annoying but the Wiff loves it. She does the whole sing-song voice thing and Oooohs and Aaaahs over all the kid's costumes. She's insane.

But Halloween also reminds me that our wedding anniversary is rapidly approaching. It was 12 years ago tomorrow that I proposed to Amy in a bar at Logan Airport. Classy. We were planning a vacation in Vegas and I thought that this would be perfect. Luckily for me she thought so too and we were married 3 days later on November 3, 1997. Happy anniversary Amy (a.k.a. The Wiff)!