Halloween, where art thou?!

Internet, it has come and gone. By it, I could mean one of two things. The first possibility is my sanity which I fired back in the 1850's for being an absinthe drinking bum after its return from a vacation in Paris. The other is one of the few times of the year when furries can come out in their fursuit regalia and the ordinary world just thinks they just have far too much time on their hands. Prison escapees also spend this day looking much less conspicuously like prison escapees. Ladies and Gentlemen, I am talking, of course, about Halloween. Welcome to my several-days-late obligatory Halloween blog post.

Personally, I love-hate Halloween. It's one of those pseudo-holidays that cycles between awesome and terrible. See it was terrible at first when I was wayyy younger because I lived in a far away land that did not celebrate Halloween. It was only when I moved to Halloween celebrating territories later because of an series of events involving a oxygen harvesting crime syndicate and an air tank cartel that I singlehandedly took down at age three (long story), that I realized, not only did I get to play dress up...I GOT FREE CANDY FROM STRANGERS. Anyone who has gone to an anime convention with me knows that it is my personal mission to get as much free candy and other sweet stuffs from as many random people as possible. Internet, I know no shame when it comes to this. I have declared all out warfare on the entire cast of Axis Powers Hetalia because Italy refused to share his gelato with me.

Be ye not fooled by the extreme girlishness of this dubious "Italy" character. He is a male.  Evidently a severely bulimic male considering the girth of his waist and thighs in relation to the copious amounts of pizza, gelato and pasta he must surely ingest.

Anyway, going back to my mixed relationship with Halloween. Several hundred cavities after the first bite of free candy, you start to question your ways and you begin to think the unthinkable. Could I have outgrown Halloween?! (This is especially true when you are a pre-teen and you are desperate to prove to your parental units that you are all grown up and are quite capable of making adult decisions about adult things like mortgages, pre-nups and the cute boy next door.) The next few years of Halloween then become super lame because you spend it trying to prove to yourself for some godforsaken reason that you are above dressing up and getting candy.  If anyone reading this is still young and impressionable, let me save you a lot of time and worthless deliberation. YOU ARE NOT.

I finally came back to my senses this year. I started dressing up for Halloween again. Internet, some people need a 12 step plan to quit nicotine, my inner child needs one to quit costumes. Every time there is an occasion to put on a costume, my inner child starts firing dopamine happiness lasers at the rest of my cerebral cortex so that it is forced to shut up and be trapped hostage in an alien world of unicorns and sporadic dancing to Caramelldansen in a blonde wig fueled by a cocktail of Red Bull and Holy water.

But besides dressing up, there are other things that are fun about Halloween that can be appreciated by children ages zero to one thousand. The decorations! Some restaurants, for example, will put up some skulls, fake spiders and cobwebs to frighten their paying customers into paying the bill. It's a subliminal message. You see, the waiter or waitress will hand you your check, smile and say "Thank you" only what they're thinking is, PAY OR YOUR DECAYING FLESH SHALL FEED OUR FAKE SPIDERS.

Now Internet, I am going to be truthful for once. I don't like spiders. I'm not afraid of them persay, but I just don't like them. I don't trust anything that can still sorta hobble after you hack off a leg or three. This threat is very effective on me. But this year, I went to a restaurant with a friend of mine and found this:

If you couldn't tell and once again I would be surprised if you could because my camera is as old as a trilobite fossil... there is a black BIC pen hanging on the cobweb. As if my dislike of spiders weren't enough, now even the pens masquerading as terrifying Halloween paraphernalia are going to haunt me in my sleep.