Halloween Dis-Ease

I think it's fair to say that, in my Mennonite prairie-town circa 1974, my family's relationship with Halloween was ... conflicted. On the one hand: dressing up the kids, walking door to door and getting tasty treats was good, innocent fun. On the other hand: wizards, ghosts, goblins, witches ... doesn't God take a dim view of such things? (Deut. 18:9-14, 1 Cor. 10:21, etc.)

I suspect my parents, like most parents (including myself) followed an intuitive moral line in this regard. The kids were allowed to dress up and get candy, but usually in sweet, good-natured costumes (the "Hobo" being a frequent motif). When I was a kid, nothing would have given me more pleasure than dressing up as Batman, but that was just a step or two over the wrong side of the line. I was smart enough not to complain; I was still getting the candy, and I had friends who were denied that pleasure, too.

Cut to the present. My girls plan all year for Halloween. Thanks to their actress (and seamstress) mother, their costume whims are fully indulged. Three years ago, the elder daughter knew how to tug at the old man's heartstrings when she requested a Princess Leia costume.



This year she's an all-too-convincing punk (no picture, sorry. Rest assured she'll come to your door). Her younger sister, meanwhile, is a mommy mummy:



That costume is probably the trickiest one my wife has yet assembled. The picture was taken in our church basement, by the way: we held a big Halloween party, and lots of kids from the community attended. I thought it was a super idea, and quickly retrieved my old motorbike leathers and Greasy-Kid Stuff to make myself up like Squiggy.

Notice the ceiling. The tile was smoke damaged from the firebomb, so it's gone. The nursery has been gutted and thoroughly cleaned. The supporting timbers remain sound, and the nursery will be rebuilt. But I have to admit: even though the kid who was chiefly responsible for all this damage is in custody, I'm still more than a little nervous.

There is at least one house in the neighborhood that freely admits to doing voodoo-type activities on Halloween night. One doesn't have to believe in the existence of a paranormal occult world* to acknowledge that if a person is angry, or desperate, or just plain foolish enough to summon something Dark, they will be obliged. It may only be manifest in a person's character, but the daily news should convince anyone that that is phenomenon enough to do a great deal of harm to a great many people.

I'm not sure what else to add to that. It's a hokey thing to say, but I do believe we have to work at bringing what light we can to our particular corner of the world. Since the fires, I've pushed myself out of my own comfort zone by pointedly smiling and saying hello to every sullen youth who slouches across my path. I'm not sure that's enough to counter anyone's dark impulses, but it'll have to do until I identify the next discomfort-zone I need to breech.

*Although you should count me among the believers, I expect that most adolescents drawn to experiment with the occult wind up experiencing something similar to Bobby Hill in The Witches of East Arlen.

Turn And Face The Strange

I've been somewhat unsettled to note a gradual slip in my blogular standards ("Cooking With Pooh," fer crying out loud!). Coincidentally, here I am at this mid-lifey moment, with a brain intent on worrying over the standard set of failing biological applications. In the past I've found mental stimulation on this mighty worldwide web, but here too I've been trading stimulation for distraction ("Cooking With Pooh" ... sheesh!). My consciousness seems reluctant to leave its cluttered attic of dusty divertissements, and almost determined to avoid any search for the coveted Third Way through -- art, spirituality, mental health, community, what have you. Yah, you old bum, get out and look fer a job already! "Cooking With Pooh," ... mutter, mutter.

Add to this my own personal Monster In A Box -- a heap of paper in which there are some truly beautiful moments, but mostly a collection of embarrassments that I simply do NOT want to burden my daughters with. I need to cull the beauty into a smaller, cohesive form, and drop the rest through a shredder. As my former aikido sensei once admonished, a person has to choose their particular discipline and learn to let go of the distractions.

With regards to this blog, I believe two roads have diverged. Route 1: frequent, shorter postings of lesser quality. Route 2: fewer postings, but (hopefully) better quality. Being the amiable, indecisive guy I am, I believe I'll give 'em both a try. November is, I'm told, National Blog Posting Month and we in the blogosphere are encouraged to post every day for that month. But once December hits, I believe I'll slow that down to once a week (every Thursday sounds doable).

Friday Night Headphone Music

Rhino Records is slowly moving to the head of the class as my CD label of choice. I clear my throat and shuffle my feet a bit when I say this, because Rhino trades almost exclusively in nostalgia. My first glance over their list of Rhino Music Artists I quickly realized I didn't come here to discover the next Marah or Galactic: I came to re-collect all those old LPs I threw away, the ones I listened to with headphones, after midnight, on a Friday, in a vain effort to ignore what a loser I was for not finding a party to crash.

*Cough* But what music that was! I'm particularly drawn to the reissues of the early X, Ramones, Talking Heads and Television, but when I scroll down their list I wind up clicking all sorts of unexpected names. What's John Coltrane doing here? Or Little Feat? Say, is that The Blasters? And the BoDeans? Suddenly I'm reveling in memories of Friday nights pleasantly spent being out and about.

Now that my Friday nights are taken up with Daddy Duty, I typically close the night with a splash of scotch, a comfy chair next to the glowing stereo and ... headphones. I've come full circle, so why not embrace it? I figure I'll start with Donald Fagen's forthcoming Nightfly trilogy.

Speaking of which, Mr. Fagen seems taken with this Music Video Interactive rig. Having neither the required SurroundSound outfit or the desire to travel down that road, I'm sure I'll be entirely oblivious to its better qualities. Have you exposed your ears to this format at all? What do you think?

From My Eight-Year-Old To Yours

"That is just so wrong!" sez she. But she can't stop giggling.



Get your copy here.

It's an über-geek's world -- the rest of us are just cluttering it up like so much botched code

Scott linked me up with this interview with Kristen Bell. The quote that caught my (and his) eye is near the end: "The New Beverly in Los Angeles had a double feature the other night of Tron and the Last Starfighter. So I was like I kind of needed to see that at least just once in my life because that seemed like an awesome double feature, you know?"

My immediate response to that statement was contemptuous disbelief. "I miss playing Veronica Mars, but I went to Comic-Con to fish for a role on Heroes because it's just, like, SO KEWL!" You're just telling the fans what they want to hear, you shameless hussy!!

Then I thought back to this photo (SFW, link via Yahmdallah) of "The Slave Leia Appreciation Society" that showed up at a Star Wars con ... and the penny dropped.

I was a young man back in the days when a Tron and Last Starfighter double bill was a "males without wheels" feature. In those days, the women that mustered up the courage to attend a Sci-Fi con tended to look more like Doris Lessing than Carrie Fisher on a stay-trim-with-cocaine regimen. Back then "Asperger's" was just a clever name for what the REAL Alpha-Males made out of the geeks among us.

Brother, but the ground has shifted below our feet....

Who Is To Blame For The Leafs?

Damien Cox says we should stop booing the players (or GM John Ferguson) and start booing these guys for the Leafs' abysmal hockey. I can picture it now: Ivan Fecan wheels his Escalade into the CTV parking lot, is stopped briefly at the gate for the mandatory security clearance. The security guy gives Fecan the once-over, nods him through, then adds, "Hey, Fecan -- you suck! Where'd you learn to own a team anyway, you moron?"

Yeah, go on and boo the owners. They're just doing what any owner of the most financially successful hockey franchise in the world would do: stay the course and rake in the mega-bucks. If I lived a little to the west, or to the south, I wouldn't care because I'd be out-of-range of Leafs-dominated network television. But since I am where I am, I'll just keep booing the fans who pay so willingly for this garbage hockey.

Shades of genius in Idiocracy?

"The Costco of the future has aisles numbering in the tens of thousands. There are rail stations to help shoppers get around. Racks soar overhead till they're lost in darkness, and a long shot reveals a field of neatly ranked red sofas stretching to the horizon. Joe's new friend Frito is nostalgic visiting Costco, because he went to law school there. And at the entrance stands a greeter, a young man the size of a sumo wrestler, who morosely tells each shopper, 'Welcome to Costco. I love you.'

Now, there are plenty of jokes circulating about Costco's vastness, but the greeter's 'I love you' is a bit of genius."

Even though I am a fan of King of the Hill and, to a lesser extent, Beavis & Butthead, I believe I'll take a pass on watching Mike Judge's Idiocracy. But I'm sure glad Frederica Mathewes-Green didn't.