Hallowhatever

Surely it's just me, detached from the dramedy of active parenting, but the thrill is gone from Hallowe'en.

The arc of anticipation is so long now, lifting off in late August, that it can't hold its own weight and collapses before today can arrive.

Is it about candy? Who can't get candy anymore?! Horror? Pick a channel, pick a theater, any day of the year: Torture porn to your heart's desire.

What makes Hallowe'en so special anymore?

I dreamed up this thesis last week walking the dog, working myself into a proper lather when I passed a duplex on a four-lane road near a busy intersection. The posted speed is 40 mph (25 when the school across the main road is open) but everyone goes 50 or faster. The sidewalk in front of the duplex suddenly disappears into a ditch.

Yet one apartment has each front window framed with little blinking orange lights, and paper decorations of ghosts and pumpkins.

Who in their right mind is gonna come to this house for trick or treat? Who's gonna navigate the nighttime dangers?

You can tell already my thesis dies for lack of support, which I realized with more dog walks. A kid probably lives there, or visits there, and the occupant has decorated for the kid's sake. If no one shows for trick or treat, it really doesn't matter.

Hallowe'en, as I've written before, remains for the kids.

So it really is just me. In the remove of children and childhood, the holiday for me has faded.

I'm one bad mother fuddy-duddy.

Still liking the adoption of El Dia de los Muertos
as an alternate celebration.

From my vantage, the holiday is temporary Hallowe'en superstores and their ghoulish business model of occupying the exoskeleton of whatever business failed during the year. 

By August their DayGlo®™ orange banners over the old store signs signal the occupation, and the selling of shock and schlock that will then ensue until today.

From my vantage, Hallowe'en is countless stories of inappropriate women's and children's costumes, stories meant for maximum tongue-cluck. If accurate, which I doubt, so what?! If no harm, then no foul. Let the day work its wiles, and tomorrow is another day.

From my vantage, Hallowe'en is a gun shop in town advertising a "Spooktacular" 50 percent off gun cleaning.

So very far from what I remember.

What I remember is that the night of Hallowe'en was a big letdown. The holiday was about imagining and planning costumes, about drawing spooky pictures, about the idea of candy and being attuned for imagined changes in the weather that day.

Actual trick-or-treating? It's cold and dark. No one can really see your costume long or well enough to appreciate it, and you certainly can't see out of it. Houses are scary enough at night without some jerk grownup spooking it up for the occasion, and I'm a big wuss. As a kid and then as a kid schlepper, I soon just wanted to go home.

(Here's my proposal: Each house buys three bags of bite-size candy … a kid comes to your house, give the kid one whole bag. After three kids, you're done. The kid's got all the candy he/she needs after five minutes of work, and we can call it a night.)

It's almost hard to imagine that at one point in our kids' lives — two actually! — we went over to another family's house for dinner, then joined them trick-or-treating in their neighborhood.

Our daughter had become friends with their youngest daughter through softball, and they were a close pair for a while. I think one year, in fact, they went out as a pair of dice. The family lived on the east side of Watt Avenue, a clear step or two higher in the economic strata from the west side where we lived. Maybe we believed the talk that the best candy came from that side of the street; whatever, it's instructive to note we didn't trick-or-treat in our neighborhood.

We're so far from that today. Nancy and I this morning realized we forgot even to buy Hallowe'en candy for the five or six groups that'll show. It'll be touch and go this afternoon.

Happy Hallowe'en, if you must. It's the 75th anniversary of Orson Welles' War of the Worlds broadcast, after all. 

And don't call me Shirley.

•••

Addendum: Half a block past the mural I wrote about last week, someone firing a gun from a passing car killed one Hallowe'en party goer and wounded six others on Del Paso Boulevard Sunday. In scarcity we bare the teeth.

About face

Hello, my name is Shawn, and I'm an emoticon addict.

It started with the small stuff, just a little tweak to take the edge off. I swear, no harm was gonna come to this sweet, innocent logo:

The realistic bits — the Fred Flintstone nose, the Charles Nelson Reilly glasses, the Opie Taylor T-shirt, eyes floating flounderish on one side of my head — would all grow back.

I just needed something to boost the mood for my blog posts, in case I wasn't making myself clear. A pick-me-up … or a bring-me-down. Whatever.

They were gonna be like little postage stamps, just to reinforce, "I'm outraged! …"

Or, "My bad! …"

Or, "WTF?!"

Or, "How dare you!? …"

Or, "Um …"

Or, "We are not amused …"

That was gonna be it. Just a nice little stash of emoticons. Use 'em every once in a while, that's all. Just when I really, really needed them. I was in control.

No, I WASN'T! Who am I kidding? It wasn't enough! It's never enough. I needed more! I needed them bigger! These just weren't doing the trick anymore.

None of these could say what I wanted about El Día de los Muertos, for example, because suddenly I needed to say something about El Día de los Muertos:

Then it was swimming. Swimming this, swimming that. You're sick of me talk about swimming, I know, but I couldn't stop myself:

Enough to make your eyes bleed. Look if you must:

I disintegrated. After a while, it lost all context (I was admiring swimmers from around the world here. OK?! What's so wrong with that??):

Then I found out the high was higher on the rocks:
 

When that lost its thrill, baseball came along. Damn you, Giants:

It got, well, ridiculous. I'm ashamed …

 

I'm not gonna lie. The Giants had me on a roller coaster for a long time. It was a gooooooood ride:

Then it was baseball and Halloween. I was getting into some dangerous mixing:

It wasn't long before I crashed:

The time came for serious self-examination:

And reflection … 

I went through the five stages of grief:

OK, it was mostly anger:

Eventually, though, I may have found a new way of life:

Keep your fingers crossed — I think … I may be … on the road to recovery:

 And I can quit anytime I want:

(Hey kids! Print this out and make your own Shawn face flipbook! The first hit is free!)

Halloween leftovers

Oooh, very scary!

Designer and marketing maven Paul Vega came up with a charming and disarming way of branding his client's competition — depict them as zombies, oafs and thugs.
 
Nothing personal.

Paul had already helped establish Pacific Field Service as superheroes — literally — in the property inspection and management industries, and had me embody their services in befitting characters.

This time Paul had me help poke a little Halloween fun at the rest of the industry, for a pop-up-out-of-the-woodwork mailer sent to prospective clients.

One of the Pacific Field Service Superheroes (left) flies to the rescue when recipients open the mailer.

It's all very pulpy and comic-y.

Here are some of the early sketches, and the customer frightened by them all:

Thursday's thistles

Twelve ounces of irony: Red trash in the gutter tells the tale —Schools observed Red Ribbon Week last week, education's annual attempt to avert students from drugs.

(I wonder what impact the observance really has …)

Schools let the outside world know about it by tying tiny red ribbons to the chainlink fences encircling the playground, and jamming cups into the holes to spell out appropriate phrases ("We're drug free and proud!" "Don't do drugs!"). Wind and kids and passersby knock cups to the ground, making gibber of the words before the week's out.

Does anyone else note the irony that the phrases are often made with little red Solo™©® cups, evoking the summer's crass paean to the opposite advice?

On the fence outside the nearby Catholic school and church, someone had spelled — in white foam cups — FAITH! with a big rectangular frame of cups and red ribbons tied around the letters. Not sure what to make of it … a general encouragement? An alternate Red Ribbon Week slogan? Reaching out to the public school across the street, maybe over a test?

Hellowe'en: What a strange holiday, Halloween. Fraught. Fraught with fright, fraught with controversy. Fraught.

A take-it-or-leave-it holiday. Embrace or ignore, at least between few and far between handfuls of candy for the few folks for whom Halloween should mean anything, the little kids in dress-up.

I rarely hear the caterwauling anymore over Halloween's evil influence. All sides have gone to their corners, sitting out a tense détente. Horror movies still spill out of theaters, one torture-porn feature after another. Churches hold alternative events, commonly called harvest festivals (and doesn't that sound like fun? Celebrating how, before supermarkets and suburbia, folks gathered in the apples and wheat and made their own pie! Have a corn stalk!) or fall fun fests, or trunk-or-treat, where kids move from one car to another in the parking lot, drivers handing out treats in a sedate tailgate party manner. Everyone trying to ignore the 800-pound gorilla in the Angry Birds mask. What kid is gonna ever call it a harvest festival?

John Hersey's Dia de los Gigantes!

One church called its event a Candy Carnival, which carves closer to the bone but only trades one evil for another, and which is the lesser?

On the other side of the aisle, I've heard the holiday called Hell-o-ween. I may be late to the costume party, but I'm surprised that name hasn't been conjured before. 

Call it Dress-Up Day, because that's its purest distillation. A day to be something or someone else, to live in someone else's skin, superheroic or scandalous. No weapons, no blood, no war imagery or devil horns or scream masks though, please.

(I sometimes teach elementary school students to draw their own superheroes, and before I got going last time, the teacher launched into a long recitation reminding students of all the things they COULDN'T depict with their superheroes. So practiced, she sounded like the draft board sergeant in "Alice's Restaurant.")

My favorite iteration of the holiday is El Dia de los Muertos, with its roots in Latin America, for its graphic power and magic, but I'd rather its roots not get messed with.

To my delight, I just discovered this work (above) by John Hersey, one of the pioneers of digital illustration, even though it's been around since the San Francisco won the World Series in 2010. Hersey reimagined the Giants' devilish closer, Brawley-raised Sergio Romo, as a sugar skull, and despite Hersey's great breadth of work, it's his best selling image. Perfectly fitting for Halloween, when the Giants returned to The City to celebrate its 2012 World Series.

Proceed to party!

The scariest Hallowe'en of all

The wrathful calls stacked up immediately, their toxins crackling nonstop (save for commercial breaks) over the air.

Frenetic frothy voices on KNBR's overnight call-in show, one after another, creating an infinite loop (if only they could!) of variations on the theme, "I told you so!"

The San Francisco Giants had just lost the first game of the postseason, 5-2 to the Cincinnati Reds Oct 6. It was game over, season over, dreams over for these distraught callers, as each one pointed out the Giants had not heeded their repeated warnings, delivered via call-in shows, had the gall to ignore their simple but vital corrections for the Giants' flaws and feeble leadership.

The Giants had gotten by on luck and loopy hot streaks and a hot-knife-through-butter journey around a weak division, the callers cried — some almost literally — and now better teams would lay open their weaknesses for the world to see and ridicule. So many callers! So angry at the overnight talk-show host, Marty Lurie, for not delivering their lifesaving advice to Giants' management.

The Giants did, in fact, get worse, pummeled by the Reds 9-0 the next night. If they had any chance of going farther, the Giants had to win every remaining game in the five-game series against the Reds.

Which, somehow, they did.

Stumbling again through the start of the next series, for the National League championship, the Giants had to force a seventh game, and win all of the last three, to advance. Somehow again the Giants did, beating the St. Louis Cardinals by huge margins.

Though I expected the same do-or-die struggle in the World Series against the Detroit Tigers, the American League champions never came to play. The Giants beat the best pitcher in baseball, Detroit's Justin Verlander, and the Giants' pitchers never let the Tigers' heavy hitters flash their muscle.

Somehow the Giants beat the Tigers in four straight, hitting 'em where they weren't while Detroit's hits seemed always to find a Giant glove, topping one impossible acrobatic play with the next, covering all the bases literally and figuratively, and taking advantage of balls that hit bases and squibbed off for doubles, and a bunt that refused to roll foul despite several desperate offers.

Somehow.

Though that first postseason loss seems so long ago, my favorite call remains vivid. Seething with rage at the Giants' ineptitude, apoplectic that the Giants didn't make changes and immediately, the caller screamed, "THIS ISN'T ROCKET SURGERY!!"

Now it's over. All that zeal to see if the Giants could really sweep the Tigers was misplaced, because the game goes back in mothballs for five more months.

We should have been willing it to keep going, even to a seventh game — Halloween! — the Giants coming to the party in orange and black, their standard attire, all of us in orange and black at home, and black and blue from self-flagellation because a Game 7 would have meant a giant Giants collapse, and every pitch and every swing of the bat would have portended death or shocking rebirth.

By "we," I don't mean that many. The World Series got the lowest ever TV ratings. A big deal to Giants and Tigers fans wasn't so big for others, who were probably watching the really big deal, Superstorm Sandy, wind up to clout the East Coast.

In our household, almost every day since April has been adjusted and folded and pushed just so to make time to follow the Giants on radio or TV. The warming air was woven with layered narrative by wonderful storytellers (Jon Miller, Dave Flemming, Mike Krukow and Duane Kuiper), of new players and the rehabilitated wounded and the newly wounded and the jolly clowns and soon-to-be has-beens. Promising newcomers broke promises, a hanger-on and a new has-been arose from ashes, a horse brought us a perfect game, a superstar brought big hits until bitter betrayal, and a minor trade brought to the No. 2 slot in the lineup card the most amazing hitter I've ever seen, there to knock in the winning run in the final game of the World Series. The least surprising feat in all of baseball this season.

Their stories are no different than for other championship teams, comprising stories of heartache and redemption and surprise, but the Giants are unique: Likable players who really seem to mean it when they said they wanted to win for each other.

They brought me everything and nothing: Entertainment.

Wednesday will bring a ticker-tape parade in San Francisco and, given the day, new horrors. Angry, anxious talk has rekindled anew: The Giants' longtime bench coach, Ron Wotus, may become the Colorado Rockies manager. Agonizing-ace-turned-amazing-reliever Tim Lincecum may go to the Boston Red Sox. Centerfielder Angel Pagan, who I couldn't tell from angel food cake before the season, may command too much money for the Giants to match.

I wanna call in to scream, "CAN'T WE ALL GET ALONG?!" Can't umpteen million satisfy you? Why megamillions? Don't change! I like you just the way you are!

Oh well, I didn't like change before the Giants this season got Pagan, greatest-hitter-of-all-time Marco Scutaro, and the human strobelight Hunter Pence, who used to be a giant Giant killer, and they helped bring the second World Series title in three seasons.

The Giants won too well, ended it all too soon. The winter already hangs heavy and cold.

Someone I know has already trotted out the old joke: Pitchers and catchers report in February.

Not funny.

I don't not hate Halloween

El Dia de Los Muertos, anyone?

OK, I began badly:

I don't not hate Halloween for me alone, an empty-nester approaching geezerhood. I love it for anyone else, most of all children, to whom the holiday should be returned. We adults have co-opted it, making it into other things for ourselves — things hyper- horrific or alcoholic — and some kind of blanched community benignancy for kids.

All you have to do is get stuck watching one of those tony Giada de Laurentiis/Martha Stewart/Today Show Umpteenth Hour TV cooking-and-craft programs this time of year to see that. What these latter-day homemakers do with dried apricots, black licorice whip and bittersweet chocolate chips should convince you how Halloween has become an adult product which we reconstituted and forced upon our spawn as safe and, therefore, uninteresting. The spawn on these particular shows didn't look like they were enjoying themselves.

{As for holidays in general, to quote my son —  in turn quoting from some pop-culture phenomenon to which I'm not privy — meh! Holidays just wash over me, I'm not sure why. Maybe it's their frequency. They seem to occur every year. I could throw my limited resources behind a moratorium on holidays. Give us a chance, perhaps, to appreciate them by their absence.

My sister said Halloween is her favorite because it's the only "free" holiday — free of conflict; free of a myriad conflicting shining expectations, and the realities that inevitably desecrate them all; free from guilt; free from the tension of having and not having, and not having enough; free from the press of religion.

All you have to do on Halloween, my sister said, is be someone else for a day, get goofy, party and eat candy.
 
Ironically, I think religion is what I'm missing from Halloween, the suggestion of the supernatural and other-worldliness; not the horror of zombies or monsters or even ghosts, but spiritual forces making overtures to us on the periphery of our consciousness. I think I'd enjoy being part of El Día de Los Muertos, the Day of the Dead, that mixture of Catholic and Aztec ritualistic tribute to dead ancestors. Its art certainly draws me … and check this out about La Catrina.}

I wouldn't get in the way of anyone's Halloween celebration, because I loved, loved, loved Halloween as a kid, my memories still so sharp:

• How my dad once made me a costume by painting my old toy football helmet green and turning it into a space alien's head, including scavenged tin electrical pipe through two of the vents at the top for antennae, each antenna topped with a tiny flashlight bulb that lit when I pressed a button on a battery pack hidden somewhere in the otherwise store-bought costume. Lights may also have shown through holes in the mask. That's where my memory dims, for I don't recall exactly how I turned on the lights, nor do I want to remember that I may not have asked for the costume, or appreciated all my dad's work creating it, or that he may have cussed a black cloud putting it together …

• How my next-door neighbor, Buddy, and I decided one year to keep our costumes a secret until the moment we met up for trick-or-treating, and how he showed up at my house to reveal that we were each dressed in drag. Now that I've finished writing that sentence, I realize it takes on a diametrically opposed and unintentioned nuance than it had 39 years ago. Back then it was just hilarious to us that by coincidence we had decided to dress as women. Photos are probably extant, and will begin showing up on the Internet, scuttling my political aspirations …

• How Halloween afternoon always felt so different than the afternoon before or after. Sometimes in Lompoc, that afternoon came dead calm on the heels of a hot Santa Ana wind, which always stirred people to restlessness. Sometimes that day instead signaled the first crispness of fall; October on the Central Coast is usually the clearest, most comfortable month.
  
  The evening sky, burning orange to red and purple, more intensely than other skies on other nights, held weight and foreboding. The forest of scrub oak across from my house grew blacker against the scorched sky, hinting at the sinister somethings and the finality of matters, earthquakes and tidal waves and brushfires, all my dread obsessions.

• How I tried frightening my sister with drawings of bats and Grim Reapers and headless horsemen, until my mom caught me …

• How each Halloween brought closer to mind Agnes. Every town, I've come to realize, has an Agnes, though she goes by different names. Commonly she's Bloody Mary, so invoked in the latest of the Paranormal Activity movie franchise.
  
  (A facebook fan page dedicated to the collective childhood memories of people from my hometown includes several references to Agnes. It amazes me how we share such stories, and how, without the benefit of documentation, we all know our story.)
  
  Our Agnes haunts Harris Grade, a pass in the range of hills between Lompoc and a "shortcut" into Santa Maria inland, serpentined with a narrow deadly road (where several high school students died in separate accidents my junior year). Long, long ago — some say nearly a century ago — as we in Lompoc know, Agnes' car (or wagon?) overshot one of the hairpin turns, and she and her baby fell to their deaths over the steep dusty white embankment and into the chaparral below. (I've always imagined it took place in the 1940s or '50s, and it was a fiery death.) Now Agnes roams the grade, keening for her baby and grasping at cars, trying to push them over the side in her vain search.
  
  Or maybe the baby lived and Agnes can't find her, damned to eternal vigil? I don't know if an Agnes authority exists who can settle such details.
  
  Like Bloody Mary, Agnes will also appear if you call her name three times aloud in front of the mirror of a pitch-black bathroom. Always a dark bathroom. Why?
  
  I was never to find out if it was true, for I never dared say Agnes' name aloud even once in stark daylight, let alone three times in the dark.

In plain terms, I was a wuss. Still am. The only reason I know Paranormal Activity conjures Bloody Mary is because I saw it in the trailer on TV. I scare easily enough without going to the movies and having to pay for it. A lot of people love being scared, or seeing others scared, thus the plethora of Halloween horror movies. They're welcome to it, even the torture-porn of the Saw movie empire. Just don't invite me.

You can leave a little candy, though. Or a coupla sugar skulls. The fading relic of the kid still inside me needs nourishment.