Five things I will NOT be doing on Halloween night

I’ve made little effort to hide the fact that among all the various holidays recognized, celebrated and or honored by various cultures, social goups, etc, on Earth, Halloween is totes my absolute fav!

Yeesh!  You know what… I’m sorry, I can’t even leave that alone.  Sure, I might have only been trying to be silly there, but just writing the end of that sentence made me cringe. So, let’s try it again, but with 100% less annoying high-school girlspeak:

Halloween, totally, is my absolute favorite holiday. 

As of this moment, we are also within 72-hours of designated Trick-or-Treat time in my neighborhood, which, thankfully, observes real, genuine Trick-or-Treating rather than the more convenient yet utterly obnoxious practice of scheduling the annual costumed candy-grab the weekend before the Official Day.  If you really want to know, I’ve got more reasons why that gets my crotchety inner old guy’s temper up than reasons why you should never get involved in a land war in Asia. Heck, if you ask me, even scheduling Trick-or-Treat times is Wrong, Wrong, WRONG! But I suppose I’m in the minority there.  At any rate, you’re in luck, because all that grumping is another post.

Anyway, as we are t-minus three-days and counting to Go Time, I figured this might be an auspicious moment to quickly run down a list of misconceptions about how I’ll be spending my Halloween night.  Thus, I proudly give you Five Thing I Will NOT Be Doing on Halloween Night.

1. Wearing a costume – Yes, yes, I know…how terribly lame of me!  How can I claim to have more love for Halloween than your average Labrador Retriever has for his/her owner if I’m not even willing to deign to dress up.  Well, look, first of all, the modern definition of a Halloween costume for adults apparently includes the obligatory modifier “sexy”.  You can’t just be a nurse or a devil or a sanitation worker, oh no!  You have to be Sexy Nurse or Sexy Devil or, um, Sexy Sanitation Worker  (yeah, I’m not really sure how that last one works either, but let’s just go with it).  At any rate, you don’t want to my see Sexy Zombie costume, and, trust me, because that probably includes short-shorts and an cleavage-bearing shirt.  Believe you me, that’d scare the kids out begging for Tootsie Rolls to the tune of about 10 years of intense psycho-therapy.  Oh, and a secondary reason for the “no costume” assertion: I’m not Trick-or-Treating; my kids are.  I’m just in this for the creepy factor.  Allegorical converse: Kids (aka high-schoolers) not in costume sure as HELL better not expect to get any candy.  I have an air-horn for those rotten no-good bastids.
2. Drinking as we go – I guess it’s become part of the tradition for Dads to take part in a kind of beer relay when one’s out going house-to-house with the kids.  And goodness knows that trying to traverse a neighborhood with four kids (ages 9-4) on foot is enough to make one want worship at the altar of Jim Beam, but the fact of the matter is that I’ll be trying to traverse a neighborhood with four kids (ages 9-4) on foot.  At four different lengths of leg, meaning four different paces of chaotic dash between houses, Trust me, it’ll be all I can do to keep my young ‘uns within a loose 10-foot diameter circle of pandemonium that I’ll be at the center of.  Accomplishing this will require a feat of focus and concentration I’m not sure even that NSA code-breaking computer could accomplish.  Clearly, alcohol will not help assist said mental challenge.  Besides, there will be time for beer later.
3. Watching the usual TV shows – I, for one, will definitely not be watching my usual Wednesday night shows this week.  Well, to be completely honest, I have no Earthly idea what my “Wednesday night” shows are.   Keeping track of “what show is on when” is sooooo TV Guide circa 1987.  I can’t be bothered to have to think about all that nonsense these days.  My DVR handles all the drudgery of keeping track of it for me.  Which is lucky, since obviously every ounce of my brain-juice is necessary to produce such witty and insightful posts as well, this one.  At any rate, regardless of whatever my DVR records Wednesday, you can bet that I’ll be up late instead, watching creepy movies with questionable production values, because that’s what Halloween is all about.  I’m thinking this year I might have to see if Sleepy Hollow is available on Netflix.  Why, you ask? Because Johnny Depp and Christina Ricci and Ichabod Crane and a ridiculously silly Headless Horseman adaptation, THAT’S WHY!  In other news: The Headless Horseman from Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow has been my favorite Halloween scary thing since I was, well, old enough to be scared of things.
4. Eating ludicrous gobs of candy – Because candy’s totally not good for me and at odds with my new running lifestyle and oh, HEHEHEHEHEHE Hahahahaha LOLOLOLOLOL seriously, I can’t even do this with a straight face.  What a complete, utter, pile of rubbish.  On Halloween night, you can rest assured I’ll be stuffing handfuls of fun-sized candy bars into my gaping pudding hole with all the careful reserve of one of the Three Stooges.  In other words, All Your Snickers Belong To Us!
5. Writing anything – I don’t often take a day where I don’t write anything.  In fact I generally keep the old writer’s adage about writing something every day very close to my heart.  But for one thing, Halloween is a special day for me, and for another, on the day after Halloween, the starter’s pistol goes off on NaNoWriMo.  In other words, as soon as I’m done stuffing chocolate covered goodies into my yapper, I’m on the hook to produce 50,000 words of a new novel in 30 days.  I think maybe a day of rest for the word-making muscles before the crazed sprint through November get under way isn’t the worst idea ever.  I guess we’ll see.

So, there you have it.  I think that somehow those five, well, four things I won’t be doing on Halloween offers some pretty solid insight into what I will be doing on Wednesday night.  Which is to say, hopefully, enjoying myself immensely.

What about you, though?  What kind of Halloween tricks do you have up your sleeves?

Pud’n