Halloween

Late Friday night/early Saturday morning, I sat on my couch with Blaise and Sarah Kelly, watching the 1981 Gregory Hines/Albert Finney movie Wolfen, about a race of mind-reading wolves killing people in the Bronx, largely due to some property development disputes. OoooOOOOOOoooh! It was easily the least scary movie I have ever seen, but that didn’t stop us from watching it, or delving into its plot points. “But what I want to know is,” Sarah Kelly said, her mouth full of microwaved s’mores, “if the wolves don’t speak, how do they know they can read their minds?”

Like most of life’s most compelling mysteries, this one went unanswered.

In order to get into the holiday spirit, I read up on the Jersey Devil on Wikipedia, and was disappointed that he wasn’t nearly as creepy as I wanted him to be. Any demon that responds to “shoo!” isn’t worth its own hooves.

Halloween party last night. I went a as a zombie cheerleader. Last year I was a zombie cowgirl. This is because I cannot possibly find enough reasons to wear fake blood, and also because I am a cheap lady who prefers to assemble her costume from the resources existing in her own closet. If Halloween came more often than once a year, I might soon exhaust all my zombie-combo costume ideas, and be forced to resort to zombie French maid, or perhaps zombie Bob the Builder.

This guy at the party was like, “What are you, a cheerleader zombie?” And I had to specify, no, I am a zombie cheerleader. Very different. Cheerleader zombie presupposes that somewhere there is a race of zombies who go about doing ordinary, mundane non-zombie things on top of being zombies, some entire suburban zombie enclave, with zombie firemen and zombie pastry chefs and zombie carpool lanes. There is nothing scary about this, and the only good thing about being a zombie, aside from the fake blood, is that zombies are scary. So I prefer to be cheerleader who had the misfortune of being bitten into an unending existence of living death, as opposed to a cheerleader who also happens to be a zombie, and instead of focusing on consuming brains, is more interested in cheering on Zombie High and then maybe drinking some Bud Light and going to the third base with the zombie quarterback after the big game. Wait. Maybe I would be into that. I’m confusing myself. I need to stop thinking so hard and go look up the Donkey Lady on Wikipedia.

Happy Halloween!