Had good discussion this week with X, AcademeGuru, regarding this my most favoured holiday. He gets this, always got this, about me. Halloween is adopting another persona, getting caramel stuck in one's teeth, trying to be terrified to get the ol' adrenal juices flowing, thinking of the dead and the morbid and the dying smell of rotting plants, Witkin photos that are elegant death. Halloween is not and never will be adorable Hallmark crap, cute and adorable smiling pumpkins. No, Halloween (and please toggle over to archive from last year's All Hallow's Eve) is the aforementioned as well as prankishness and smashing of jack-o-lanterns when it's proper to do so = under cover of darkness, in the middle of public streets and when the day/night is done. It is sad, but it must be done. It dispels the ghosts and after Halloween there is nothing sadder than a jack-o-lantern forlornly smirking as it implodes. Memory: Mr. Hung (whose handy diagram of the extro/into-vert dialectic I've hung alongside my desk) scooping 2-inch white fuzzy mold out of my jack-o-lantern last year, afraid I might be overly saddened that it had done its job and was sitting on a radiator festering. Fercrissakes, get that thing into the trashroom pronto, I suggested.
Be bad, be good, be everything in between.

Love, Pronto.

ps: My Annual Conceptual H'Ween Costume?
This year I am, I so am, Condoleeza Rice. Put that in yer corncob pipe and be terrified.