Halloween Week: What Day Is This?

My costume this year consists of a stovepipe hat, fake beard, an assemble of jackets, vets and pants that I imagine resembes 19th century formal wear, and a big black porthole hanging over my stomach.

What am I? The Lincoln Tunnel. My girlfriend, in a blonde wig, holding tulips, and wearing a matching porthole, is the Holland Tunnel. Why are we dressing up? Well, What Day Is This?

I'll get three wears out of this costume (a costume party at a bar last Friday, a local kids' thing tonight Jen and I are volunteering at, and my school's party tomorrow). I normally consider it luck yot get two wears out of something. If anyone needs a cheap stovepipe hat after tomorrow, email me. - Sean

Halloween Week: Devil's Night in Bloomfield Hills

Raking at night.

I've never raked at night before. For years the idea seemed as ridiculous as reading at night: you can't see what you're doing. But this night, the night before Halloween, I had to rake. Had to make the place look nice for trick-or-treaters. There is appropriate spookiness -- novelty tombstones, plastic glow-in-the-dark skeletons, ghost colorforms to adhere to the window. Then there's the unraked lawn, dirty stoop, and Miller Lite empties sort of lawn. Who's inside: recently divorced dad? latchkey kids whose parents have left for a month? the sort of person who makes Saturday Night audience of the Fox network wonder why they don't put a shirt on before being arrested, or at least for pity's sake don't sign the form and get their face blurred?

My lawn is not that sort of lawn anymore, thanks to raking at night. It's more of a legal blindness: I can still see the leaves against the grass, but not the damage the rake might do, not the acorn caps and helicoptered seedpods I might miss, not the dead spot which makes raking or cutting or anything short of sod look good. At the end my lawn, in the dim moonlight, looked as good as the ones done by a service twice a week. Cue that Bette Midler song about from a distance, since there's no suitable song about the wonders of glaucoma.

Devil's Night in Bloomfield Hills taking place on October 30, appropriate for posting today. I didn't try to work in any supernatural horror of violence. It's sad more than frightening. --Jeff

Halloween Week: Thoughtless Neighbors

Thoughtless Neighbors is based on my actual neighbor across the street, who has fake tombstones and fake spider webs on display 12 months of the year. The lawn is atrocious enough so it took me a while to notice the lawn being the final resting place for Frank N. Stein and Your Name Here. - Sean

Halloween Week: Trick, Not Treat

Halloween certainly is a lot of people's favorite holiday -- I just saw a Mass Transit demonstration in San Francisco, thousands of people in costumes riding through the hills dusk-lit streets, gleefully stopping traffic as definitely as pyroclastic flow from a volcano. I saw devils, I saw angels, I saw women as men and men as women. I said hi to a banana, who said hi back. I saw tandem bikes, Victorian velicopedes, devices that seated four, five, and six people that were to bicycles what a catapult is to throwing a stone by hand. Everyone crossed under the Stockton Street tunnel, in a scene out of Fellini, out of Kaufman, out of dreams. There is a portion of everyone's heaven reserved for a stream of gaudy happy bicycle riders, encouraging you to come join and ride for a while.

Trick, Not Treat is not about one of the people who love Halloween. It's about a vicious little snot, one of those people who jumps from stealing candy bars to robbing liquor stores. This is before the jump, about coincidence -- or maybe fate -- trying to set him straight.

Halloween Week: Resensitized

After watching about eight zillion horror movies, you start to wonder if anything will shock you. Someone getting their head chopped off? Been done. Killed by monsters? Done. Stabbed with a corn cob? Done, somehow. (Stephen King's Sleepwalkers will always be known as Death By Corn Cob in the Daily Scares world.)

Of course, a lot of this comes from knowing the overlarge cast of horror movies exists solely to get a lot of neat deaths. (In the Final Destination movies, they get economical and everyone gets two neat death.) But sometimes a movie will have compelling characters, people you actually find yourself caring about. Hint; if you're not fast forwarding through the talking scenes, then the movie is doing its job to make the characters compelling. And you'll hurt a wee bit when that fatal corn cob comes thrusting at them.

Resensitized takes a whole different approach to this. I don't know why Harry has his change of viewpoint, but I know he shouldn't be in his apartment when he does. I'm glad it had a cutout of Michael Myers in his apartment, to officially give this one a Halloween hook. - Sean

Halloween Week: Playing Grown-Up

I'm very disturbed by Playing Grown-Up: I wish I hadn't written it. I have a pet peeve against hyphenated titles, that is.

See, In titles only the first letter of a word is capped, and even though hyphenated words read and are pronounced like multiple words, they're linked and thus one word. it's a classically phyrric grammatical rule: either leave the subsequent caps off and make it look but (but be right), or add caps to it and make it officially wrong (by seem okay to the hoi polloi).

I've chosen to side with the hoi polloi in this case -- and THERE'S another tiger trap there, since hoi means the and I've said "the the people." Same with Al Queda -- Al is The. Whoever is responsible for only the nouns and not the articles of other languages carrying over into English is doing a crap job.

Oh yeah, the story. It's about a costume shop. Clerks there often have to dress up in costume, so every day is Halloween to them. For others, though, dressing up isn't a job requirement but an honest attempt to pass as normal. --Jeff

Halloween Week: Horror Marathon

My school showed Hostel II in a common room yesterday. I hadn't seen it yet, just like the 99.9% of the country that didn't bother either. This movie was widely blamed as the one that began the decline of "torture porn" movement, where whole movies are built around murdering someone in the most painful way possible. I personally put more blame with the Saw movies. Hostel and Hostel II both give you plenty of time to get to know the victims before they head off to that dank basement full of power tools. The Saw movies started with big plot holes, which got exponentially bigger as the series went on. Saw IV could just be an Itchy and Scratchy episode at this point.

The fellow higher education students in Horror Marathon are attempting to watch even more movies than me (just for reference's sake, after watching Hostel II I went home and watched The Hoax, two Sopranos episodes, and a Treehouse of Horror). They should be so lucky as to get to watch all the Saw movies. - Sean

Halloween Week: Nutritional Information

I could be due to check myself into the Department of Redundancies Department for say this for what may only be the second or third time, but a lot of these stories (mine at least) are a few years old. 2004-era, which isn't really Roman times. But the idea behind this particular type of Halloween candy was purely speculative when I wrote it, and it's fact now.



Well, it's "fact" in that a clearly bogus study for Enviga iced tea says if you drink three a day it'll cut 100 calories. A study of 30 people -- not 3,000, not 30,000, but 30 -- that did not study any other behavior like activity or sedentary behavior. If that's how little it takes to build a scientific ad campaign around, I may have a lemonade powder that'll make you almost seven feet tall yet, miraculously, totally unable to play basketball. My test subjects will be the New York Knicks.



Oh yeah, the story. It's called the stunningly beige-y Nutritional Information.

Halloween Week: Dr. Evan's Boo-Ha-Ha

The worst Halloween party I went to was at a gym in high school. 1% of the people were in costumes. Want to take a guess if my friends and I were that 1%? We ended up shrugging our vampire capes off and sticking them in a broom closet, so we could stand around awkwardly and have a better chance of not being noticed.

The best Halloween party I went to was at some college friends' rented house. Three theater girls and one gay guy shared the house. The threat was that if you didn't come in costume, the gay guy would make you a costume - and he was Peter Pan, so he'd just be stripping you to your underwear and calling you a Lost Boy. EVERYONE wore a costume. Dr. Evan's Boo-Ha-Ha is in that vein, but with Dr. Evan doing more than just pantsing his uncostumed guests. - Sean

Halloween Week: Candy Coating

This was one of the first teensy stories I ever wrote, before the idea of having the title be a sort of meta-commentary on the acts of the story really made their way prevalent in many of the pieces. So that's why the woman in Candy Coating is in fact not named Candy. She's Wanda. And she's the sort of person who the world might be better if if she talked more, and acted less.

Oh, and speaking of acting less, this one's short. Less of me, better for you.

Halloween Week: The Prophet Norbert

This may be a bit of a stretch for us here, but we want to go two week for Halloween, not just one. It's such a rich vein to write about -- the costumes, the history, the inherent scariness aspect of it. It may be we tap out in the middle of next week -- Halloween is on a Wednesday, so the Thursday to Saturday stories might be stale. But hey, maybe like the drug store we can start posting Thanksgiving stories then! And the Christmas stories right up through until February, where there's a week of reenactments of the St. Valentine Day Massacre.

But that's getting ahead of ourselves. Let's start off the almost-fortnight of Halloween with The Prophet Norbert. Thanks to Big Love and the horrendous Jeffs trial --thanks for ruining an otherwise fine name, pal --the idea of these towns of religious fundamentalists is more out there than when i wrote this. I may have goofed on then celebrating Halloween, though. Seems like one of the first things they'd ban in their new community. But with so many splinter factions, surely one of them must approve of dressing up?

Vampire Week: Dress Up as What You Fear

When Sean starts posting, I realize he'll probably have to pick a different font color. We had me in orange and him in white. White against our dark gray (grAy in America, grEy in England: your mnemonic of the day) background is fine, but white against the white of people's emails is awful.

Charitably, maybe one could read it as a gigantic spoiler that has to be moused over by the brave. Or that the choice is actually part of a metatextual game -- start looking for references to bees and the Hanso Corporation! Or that we're just fairly new to this wheelhouse (the Forte Bailiwick: our specialty is what we're good at) and made a mistake. Either way, Expect Sean to pick a non-white color so his words will magically not-disappear.

Today's story is one of mine, called Dress Up as What You Fear. You ever wondered what vampires do for Halloween?