Occupy Elm Street (Halloween Edition)

        If you’ll indulge me this month, I’d like to open with a forgotten quote from the famed Swiss child psychologist Jean Piaget, “ I believe the children are our future. Teach them well and let them lead the way. Show them all the beauty they possess inside. Give them a sense of pride to make it easier. Let the children's laughter remind us how we used to be.” Dr. Piaget spoke these words in his famous address to the United Nations in 1962, where he outlined a stark future for the world’s children based on his predictions of a total global collapse of Halloween, which would preempt an unprecedented worldwide economic meltdown and finally a zombie apocalypse with a small pocket of survivors outside of Atlanta, Georgia. I find it impossible to refute the wisdom and prescience of that speech, but is it possible to save Halloween before the arrival of The Walking Dead? By now your palms are probably getting pretty sweaty and your pulse is quickening, while your impossibly small brain is trying to compute the consequences of your Halloween negligence. The bad news is, your underdeveloped medulla oblongata can’t possibly rationalize what to do. The good news is that I’m here to do your thinking for you, and as an added bonus if things continue to go wrong, the zombies probably won’t bother you because they’ll be distractedly shambling after my enormously delicious cerebellum.

        During my hiatus from writing this fine blog, I started work on a secret project funded by the Department of Homeland Security and powered by Google Maps. I’m endeavoring to provide every child in America with an iPhone app, since you’ve all bought your precious little snowflakes five hundred dollar smart phones which are ironically more intelligent than they are, charting the houses of “extremist childhood terrorists”, who are presenting a clear and present danger to our children’s lawful youthful development by giving out apples and toothbrushes on Halloween. Next year I hope to increase the database to include popcorn balls, candy corns, and black licorice. Get your heads out of your asses people and buy some candy for Christ’s sake. While you’re at it, do your karmic inner child a favor and spring for some full size stuff, not those tiny boxes of milk duds you’ve been giving out you fucking cheapskates. The joy on a child’s face when they reach reverently into a bowl full of checkout-line-size candy is worth the money. I know you’ve got the cash because I see you rummaging through my recycle bin every other week taking my beer bottles. Also, take some fucking time and pick out decent candy, don’t just grab a box of salt water taffy and call it a day. It’s not rocket science, it’s candy. You were a kid once remember? If you ended Halloween night by pouring your candy out on the floor and making a pile out of the stuff you didn’t want, break the cycle and stop buying that shit. One last thought on the candy situation, if you’ve gone through the effort to get the good stuff, don’t abandon it in a bowl on your doorstep with a sign that says “take one”. Guess what the first kid to come along is going to do? With kids today, you’ll be lucky if they don’t take the candy and the bowl you left it in as some kind of gang initiation.

        Alright so we’re getting the adults on-board with the candy, now I need the kids to listen the fuck up. The Halloween costumes are getting really pathetic and I’m about fed up with it. If you want to go trick-or-treating until your 18, more power to you, but god help you if you knock on my door this year wearing a Yankees jersey and hat as your costume...again. Along those lines, your Little League baseball uniform doesn’t count, and neither does putting on some lame ass mask you’ve worn for the last five years, or any of that other half cocked bullshit. That’s just fucking lazy and we can’t continue to reward lazy in this country. There are 67 Halloween stores on the Post Road in Milford alone, get an actual costume. In fact, forget I said that. Learn to be a little creative and make a costume like I did when I was your age. We’re becoming a generation of lazy shits who walk into a store and slap down twenty bucks for Halloween in a nice little package. This year, when your Dad’s rummaging through my recycle bin this Thursday morning cashing in on my bottles of Schlitz, have him grab some cardboard boxes so you can make yourself into a robot or a spaceship or something. I’m going to start rewarding creativity with bonus candy and start handing out homemade candied onions to kids that don’t get the Halloween spirit. Biting into that caramel covered vidalia on a stick somewhere down the street outta leave a nice taste in little Alex Rodriguez’s mouth.

        The last prong in our offensive is kind of a catchall I’ll refer to as Halloween spirit. If you’re not sure what that is, swing by my house this year and have a look at my neighbors to either side with their lights out and their doors closed; that’s me proving something like Halloween spirit exists by demonstrating a total lack of it. It’s kind of like dickhead antimatter. Serial killers don’t start out torturing animals, they start out as kids whose neighbors didn’t give out candy on Halloween. If that’s you, you deserve to have your house egged, in fact it will probably be me doing it. And another thing, I know we live in a hyper-sensitive, bubble your children type of world now but trick-or-treating isn’t something you do at the mall in the middle of the afternoon; it’s something you experience on a cold fall night under the stars, lugging around a pillow case full of candy until every last house light is out. We used to do that with our friends as kids, it was safer then though, so I’d encourage you Occupy Wall Street parents to put your signs down for a day and try Occupying Elm Street, where life’s real battles are won and lost. We can just pretend being a useless dirty hippie is your Halloween costume.