Happy Halloween 2012






October 31, 2012 — Over the past month and a half, this Halloween Blog has featured such weirdness as brains in jars, a Ouija board gravestone, and Joe Piscopo, but you know what? It’s this post right here that’s the most surreal one. Halloween is here. Just like that and just like the calendar promised.

There are times throughout the season that it feels like Halloween is never going to get here. Other times like it’s worn out its welcome a bit before it arrives. And every once in a while, every strange once in a while, it feels like it’s the norm for life.

Today is the truth, though. Halloween is here, and tomorrow it will be gone.

Like so much confetti after a party.
The thing about immersing yourself in a long Halloween is that you’re okay with letting it go, exchanging it at the customer service counter for Christmas. Part of that is because you know it’ll come back around again just when you need it. Most of it is because you’ve been posting for 49 straight days and just don’t have the energy to hit that upload button again. I might be projecting a bit on that last one.

Of course, this year I was helped out on that task immensely by the publication of The New York Grimpendium, from which I posted lots of photo essays based on my book. That sounds like a segue to a sales pitch, but I sincerely just want to bring it up to thank every one of you who bought it (or will buy it), who dropped me a line telling me that they liked it (or liked my other book better), gave me a review on Amazon, or talked about it on their personal website or on social media. I appreciate that support way past italics and bold and underline and caps lock.

But the end of the Halloween season isn’t the end of The New York Grimpendium, just as it wasn’t the end for its predecessor back in 2010. The macabre is relevant year-round, and it’ll make a unique Christmas present.  Even Christmas has its spooks. Also, even if you don't live in New England or New York, I’d like to say that buying my books regardless of your own geography is a way to support OTIS in general, because a successful audience reception opens doors for me to do more and varied projects apart from the website, which in turn inspires me to keep at the website itself. Ok, that part was a sales pitch.

And while this season might have started out as the Halloween of The New York Grimpendium, it ended as the Halloween of Sandy, the Frankenstorm, the Superstorm, the Hallowcane. Here on the New Hampshire-Massachusetts border, we got tons of rain, lots of wind, some power outages, a couple of work-from-home days. Nothing terrible. I did have to chase down my recycling bin at about midnight and my town lost a 20-foot-tall moose statue.


But that’s cool, at least for those of us not in a disaster area (and to those of you who are, I hope everything gets back to normal for you soon). It gave the days leading up to Halloween a great ambiance, since howling wind and torrential rain are some of the ingredients for a perfect season. Except for Halloween night itself. The kids must trick-or-treat.

And speaking of which, my kid is finally just old enough to trick-or-treat...which means, tonight, that same weather willing, I go trick-or-treating for the first time in, I don’t know, 30 years. I’m a little nervous, a little excited. And I kind of wish I had made more friends with the neighbors since I moved in.

I guess I’ll tell you all about it on next year’s Halloween Season Blog. Maybe by then I will have a consistent name for this event.

Until then, your regularly scheduled programming will resume shortly here on OTIS: Weird travels, personal anecdotes, a thought or two, and maybe I'll get around to that article on seaQuest DSV once I finish watching the entire series.

Happy Halloween, everybody.

Still my most favorite moment
of the season...