Welcome To My Nightmare

So I had contemplated posting another college diary entry I had written years ago about my Halloween night from October 1987, but I just changed my mind at the last minute. For one, it's extra long, and extra emo, considering how long ago I wrote it. Sadly it's still a lot funnier and more creative than anything else I've written in the last five years. Be that as it may, be grateful that I spared you. Happy Halloween!

I grew up on a cul-de-sac where all of my closest and bestest friends lived within the circle, so a lot went on in that little turn around in the center of the street, with children and so much easy access to each other. Sheryl, the pretty one, was always something cute like a princess or a kitty cat. Jeanne, the funny one, was always something inventive like Igor with a back brace. I was... eh, I guess whatever I came up with that year, usually duking it out between my mother, who wanted me to be pretty, and my father, who like Jeanne, was the funny one in the family and was always trying to stick me into something goofy. I think the scariest costume I ever created was a paper mache mask I made in my 5th grade class at Cape Henry that went from complete random whatever into what I called a witch doctor head, and I painted it up pretty freaky and my mother made me a long black poncho that dragged the ground so it appeared that I was floating. I'm sure the Cape Henry A/V archives still could have the video footage of the 5th grade parade where I walked past the cameras and I actually made the camera man jump back in alarm. Well, maybe not that footage anymore. My crowning lifetime achievement, lost to the ages.

As a teenager Jeanne and her brother Lee and I used to do our own annual set-up in the Jeanne's front yard, beneath her willow tree which glowed extra spooky at night under the bright moonlight. Her mother worked at a funeral home and she used to bring home all these various styrofoam heads as well as other life-like appearing ones that the people used to work on to perfect the make-up on corpses. We'd stuff some old clothes with newspaper and slather make-up all over the head to make it as realistic as possible. Attach to the body and dangle from the tree, and fuck if that didn't make the lit'lins piss their Underoos. With a little dried ice effect we'd fill a cauldron with those black plastic spider rings and cobwebbing, and Lee in his perfect Dracula costume would ladle out "spider soup" to the trick-or-treaters while Jeanne in her Igor costume (sans back brace) would leap out from the willow tree branches and chase the truly frightened children down the end of the cul-de-sac.

Now I suppose the scariest thing I'll experience this evening is sitting at the desk my company seems okay with me still having despite my demotion (since I empty the "cancer pan" every other day that keeps it clean and tidy) while covering my ears trying not to hear Rihanna sing "Disturbia" for the umpteenth time in one night. I suppose we all our demons that truly terrify.

Have a harrowin' Samhain.