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. |
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.
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.
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... |