Halloween Die-ary #6
I’ve got a confession to make. I scheduled a beach trip
during the Halloween Season. We’re staying at a house on Cape Cod for the week,
starting Monday.
This is where you learn that much of my public life has been
a ruse, that I’ve been faking my passions about Halloween, doing it for the
clicks, to sell some books. That I’m really a summer person. That I’d rather
stick a knife in a watermelon than a pumpkin. Watch fireworks explode in the
sky than a witch sweep past the moon. Drive an ice cream truck instead of a
hearse.
Or…the whole COVID-coronavirus-pandemic-lockdown thing had
us down a few months ago, and we needed something to look forward to that
wasn’t the next room in our house. We didn’t feel comfortable heading to some far off destination or to pull a road
trip across a disease-ridden country, so we nabbed a private house on a beach
two hours away.
If it’s any consolation, I also inadvertently scheduled the
beach house stay over the release date of my new book. So I might be pulling a
Woody Allen playing at a jazz club during the Oscars thing—except I’ll be on a
beach looking for horseshoe crabs instead of sitting dutifully in front of my
computer filling the socials with exhortations at avatars to buy my book…and
there are no awards involved. Or Jazz.
But don’t worry, we’ll keep it creepy at the beach and on
OTIS this week. We learned that lesson during the 2017 Halloween Season.
Remember Shores
of Horror? It’ll just be a different
kind of spooky, all Scooby-Doo running from glowing diver suits and John
Carpenter’s The Fog rolling in. Shades of Lovecraft’s amphibian-people and
maybe some ghost pirates fresh from Garfield's Halloween Adventure. And, of course, Cape Cod is still New England. That
means cemeteries to explore. The pins on that map up there, 90% cemeteries.
But this is another reason why it’s good to celebrate a long
Halloween, the opportunity to throw some variety into the season without
actually having to replace your traditions. Come the week after next, we’ll be
back in our black house surrounded by trees, wearing jackets and sweaters and
jaunting north to seek out strangeness instead of south.
I’m just going to do a little shark hunting first.
