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: 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: 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: 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: 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?

Haunted House Week: Toys in the Attic

Of the hundreds of teensy horror stories I've written, Toys in the Attic has got to be in my top ten. Hopefully you'll like it as well.

Haunted House Week: The Haunted Radiator

Announcement: Don't look at the tags of The Haunted Radiator if you want the surprise ending intact.

Addendum to announcement: Alfred Hitchcock would have announced that announcement a lot better. So would William Castle, or really anyone with more of a sense of showmanship. I just throw the steak on a garbage plate and douse a Dixie Cup in A1 Sauce.

Haunted House Week: The Family Chiroptera

Sean is, as you will find out from the eight or nine upcoming Cave Weeks we have here, quite the caver. As he'll explain in the upcoming Karst Week, Lava Tube Week, Stalagmite Week, the totally unrelated Stalactites Week, Flowstone Week, Cavern Week, and Monster in a Cave And in the Last Sentence It Jumps Out Weeks, he's been in dozens of them. He's taken me through two or three. We've hardly ever gotten trapped.

One feature of caves, as everyone knows, are bats. I already knew bats were teeny things, and if you disturbed them they'd flap around and waste their body energy and most likely die, because you disturbed their sleep. We went in one cave with bats, and I tried to avoid touching a bat the way I'd avoid touching a house of cards.

But someone else touched them, and bats flashed in and out of my helmet light. They reflected the light enough, and we so small, that I seriously thought they were moths instead of bats. Quite the duhn-duhn-DUUUHN! moment when I found out the insects (or whatever moths are) were really flying rodents (or whatever bats are).

Wait: I know what bats are. They're in the The Family Chiroptera.

Haunted House Week: Shuttered

I'm giving myself a bit of a challenge, and hopefully a bit of a guessing game for you folks playing along at home. I'm going to try ot go all week -- me at least, Sean is probably going to be uncreative and actually write about haunted houses -- with twists on the haunted house.

Shuttered, for instance, is a skyscraper. That's one big house. No one's haunted a skyscraper before. (I will clap my hands over my ears and pretend you're not saying "poltergeist 3." Or "The Grudge.") But with Leona Helmsley dying recently, we may have our first case. If you are being haunted by Leona Helmsley, try announcing that your shoes cost less than $50. It'll make her run shrieking ectoplastmic despair for miles.

Witch Week: Spell Check

If you can cast a spell then you're a witch, right? No need to be all goth-y and morbid about it. You could be a bubbly person and be a witch -- perhaps a bit too bubble-headed, as Aly in Spell Check turns out to be.

Haunted Houses up next week -- as well as some crazy cross-posting, because Sean and I cant try to sort out the difference between a haunted house and a ghost. I mean, does a ghost story necessarily have to be a ghost out in a field or a yard to NOT be considered a haunted house story? And can you truly have a haunted house story withOUT a ghost? The "ghost" in Jane Eyre was human, yet there's a definitive haunted house right there. We've got some ontological razmatazz to sort out by tomorrow's post. -- Jeff

Witch Week: Butcher Paper

I am a sucker for a phrase that sounds more malevolent than it really is for these stories. Such a phrase is Butcher Paper. The stuff is used for all sorts of wrapping. It's what people sit on when they go to the doctor. And, of course, the Macaroni Grille and many other cheese-n-pasta establishments use it as a tablecloth.

I know a fair lot of pagans/witches/druids/wiccans, and they all have radically different takes on what it exactly is they're worshipping, if they worship it at all. In a lot of ways it is make-your-own-religion,a nd I don't mean that in at all negatively. There are some people, though, who the sort of people who go to the timeshare weekend just for the trip and skip the sales pitch. They are interested in religion solely for the superpowers. The folks in this story are these kinds of witches, although they're a distinct minority...possibly because a few candles and thinking real hard won't turn you into Willow, not even third-season Willow where it was just a pencil floating around.

Witch Week: Angry Mob

The date of this story, Angry Mob, is about five hundred years ago, back when Lithuania was an actual Grand Duchy. Being a big fan of the Simpsons, who ware in turn a big fan of rabid mobs, I feel I must warn you that there are no crowds waving pitchforks and torches. Being from Northern New Jersey, I feel I must also warn you that guys named Vito and Joey and Carmine do not make an appearance either. Not even any Russian mob connections.

I have no right even using the word mob, in other words.

Graveyard Week: Disinterred

Fortuitous timing lets me conclude Graveyard Week with Disinterred, a story about the grave of a victim of a witch hunt. Fortuitous because next week is Witches Week!

I don't know if we can keep this up every week: it may be a one-time occurrence. Certainly when we go from Sea Monster Week to Montana Week we'll have some problems, Montana not being by the sea. Ditto for Mummy Week and Martian Week -- although we never do see Marvin the Martian's face. Maybe it's mummified.

Graveyard Week: From Kennedy's Lips

Some of these story just barely have enough story to last their alloted two minutes. Some of them seem like they could go on longer but -- trade secret here -- that's all we had, and we didn't have no more we coulds puts in thems. Some are worthy of the full-on short-story treatment.

From Kennedy's Lips, then, should have been the pilot to a TV show. It kinda is, in fact.

Graveyard Week: Hold Your Breath

On a previous commute, I drove by a graveyard. Held my breath just about every time, just like I was on a bus in second grade on a field trip. I always liked the story behind it, that nothing bad would happen if you didn't follow the ritual, but something good --an extra year of life -- would happen if you did do it. Must have been tough back before cars and horses were invented.

Hold Your Breath, then, is my deconstruction of that wonderful belief. But a nice little story nonetheless. If you were Abner or Lushana you'd do the same thing.--Jeff

Graveyard Week: The Seventh Foot

The Seventh Foot is (if you'd read him) rather blatantly Lovecraftian. I had found a great site which posted all of his stories up. He's public domain, so there's nothing Napstery about the site doing it or me reading it. Every day during my lunch hour I'd read a different story, and see if it kicked up any inspiration in my mind. Often the stories I wrote after them felt nothing like a Lovecraft story: but good creativity doesn't have to work like sourdough, only replicating, never inspiring.

So there's a lot here in the two minutes of broadcast. This would be one of the easiest stories of mine to film, since there's so much action. But pretty expensive, considering what I can write with a noun an adjective could cost a whole bunch of union carpenters a whole bunch of time making.

Additional note: since we're heading into October, which is the month of Halloween, Sean and I have some special things planned for this month. Graveyards seem appropriate for All Hallow's Eve, as will the other themes this month. Come November, back to Accountancy Week and Humidity Week.

Baseball Week: Scalper

We finish up the baseball week with Scalper, one of those tidy stories where the title's pun drives the whole denoument. My job was mostly to make the inflated-price ticket seller as enjoyably loathsome as possible.

I mentioned a few days ago that I needed some special kick-in-the-pants, some liquid Schwartz, a gulp of go juice, to get me really excited about baseball the way I was when I was a child. Well, I'm going to Cooperstown, New York in a few weeks, home of the baseball hall of fame an an extremely dubious baseball origin story involving war hero Abner Doubleday. (I prefer to think of the first game happening right here in New Jersey, over in Hoboken. Hoboken's also home to Big John the ten-story toilet. And Sinatra. Note the order in which I placed those three.)

Next week is Graveyard Week, featuring tales of fog-heavy cemeteries where the tombstones all rattle with the undead forces that claw beneath them, trying to escape. Or one story of that, and six about drunken spectators watching a graveyard. One might actually be a monster truck story about Gravedigger. Can't remember. We'll find out together, next week.

Baseball Week: Seventh Inning Stretch

I have the honor of presenting today's story Seventh Inning Stretch, and have one more lined up for this week. Both of mine are about people attending baseball games, not the game itself. I think this is because however many fantasy scenarios I play in my head about bad people and accidents and ghosts and whatnot, I'm more or less imagining them through me.


And "me" does not include "athlete." I've put on the imaginary athlete shoes (or cleats, or ice skates, or whatever it is boxers wear -- boots? Slippers?), the same I've imagined the vagaries of life as a member of all the people in the world I'm not. And I never really carry myself beyond the initial layers of life as an athlete, which would make for a stereotyped story at best.


Mostly, I think I just don't have a huge interest in it. (Funny, since we're doing a week about baseball, with a football week not that far away.) I have to think a big appeal to the millions of sports fans is that they get to vicariously experience some innings via the pitcher/batter/fielder they're watching. There's no root appeal to me. Give me a choice between a Ghost Rider DVD and a chance to throw a ball from the Yankee mound, and I'd be watching a Nicolas Cage movie.


I did, once. I loved the Red Sox growing up outside Boston, wanted to be an outfielder. But when my family moved to the footballania town of Green Bay (where I'd have to be rooting for the Brewers of today's story) I didn't have the heart. Make that hat: I got a wonderful hat from a baseball clinic in Boston, and lost it in, to quote Anthony Kiedas, the woods of Wisconsin. My dad painstakingly recreated another one for me, but it of course wasn't molecularly identical, so the magic wasn't there.


Maybe, like a cruel adult who starts weeping when Santa gives him his long-lost Duncan Yo-Yo, if someone found that hat I'd develop a huge abiding love for baseball. Anyone in Wisconsin: my hat was maroon, with a white M on it. Carries a piece of soul with it, and twenty-plus years of schmutz.

Baseball Week: Southpaw Conversion

We're approaching the postseason race in baseball. In the Daily Scare neck of the woods, the Mets are chasing away the Phillies for a wild card spot. How did anyone watch this game before the wild card? The Wild Card pushes back the window of mathematical elimination so much the last week before October turns into the joked-about last two minutes of a basketball game--aka the only bits you have to actually watch.

I had unfulfilled dreams of writing a different Daily Scare about each position in a baseball team, and then working all the stories together so that all these horror stories were actually shared by one extraordinarily unlucky team. But the stories I came up with involved the fans too much, or the more writable positions like pitcher. (Quick: tell me one substantive difference between shortstop and second base. I'll wait.)

But I got enough, and Sean has some, so together we're doing a whole week about the great American pasttime. Before that officially switches over to Reading About Starlets in Rehab.

Our leadoff hitter for this week is Southpaw Conversion. Which lets you know if the team I was thinking of was Al or NL.