Who wants a little taste?

This is a wonderfully weird season. Every year, as October arrives on a deep orange wave of cool air, falling leaves and a general sense of getting back to business after the overheated frivolity of summer, pumpkin appears in inappropriate menu items and symbols of death surround us.

I was in Walgreens the other day, stocking up on the items that any swinging, attractively world weary bachelor should have at all times (Orbit gum, plastic dinosaurs and
Chihuahua Connection magazine) when I had one of those jarring moments of clarity, one of those moments when a basic absurdity that you take for granted day to day leaps out and dances in front of you, shaking its rump and calling attention to its fundamental freakishness, and thought ‘Man, there are a whole lot of fake corpses in here.’

And there were.

The drugstore was packed with morbid imagery. Anti-itch cream shared shelf space with decapitated heads, rotting skeletons stood grotesque vigil over lithium batteries and a disemboweled rat lay, decomposition frozen in time, near a rack of scented candles.

Which is great.

For one month out of the year, after summer’s parade of beer and blame-broiling, but before the obtrusive cheeriness of the Holiday season the culture collectively decides to share the aesthetics of weird junior high kid, who listens to music by Icelandic druids and spends Health class furiously scribbling totally sweet skulls and demons on his Trapper Keeper. Dowdy mothers of four delight in traumatizing children with “eyeball grapes” and dry ice, and black cats are treated, briefly, with the respect they deserve. Even Phyrra, a city already packed to the gills with zombies, skeletons and goblins finds a way step up and extra-spookify the joint.

Truly, the best of times.

And so, in the spirit of the season,
stab a gourd in the face, paint a skull on a toddler and beg a stranger for something sweet, before November rolls around, bringing the frosty good will of a nicer, but far less entertaining world.