The 2024 OTIS Halloween Season: Is Halloween Getting Annoying?

Now I'm the Corpse Bride

September 8, 2024 — So…this is like the awkward Halloween Season, right? Last year was my first themed season: Can Halloween Save J.W. Ocker? For that one, I lifted the scalp of my Jack-o-lantern a smidge and showed some of my raw guts to you folks (even though all you asked for was a mere trick or treat). As I mentioned in the final entry of that blog series, Halloween didn’t save that dude. Of course it didn’t. The emotional, financial, physical, and philosophical damage to my life wasn’t going to be salved by roasting pumpkin seeds and shoving plastic vampire fangs into my mouth. Otherwise, I’d be asking you to buy my Halloween Self-Help Handbook this season.

But one of the many side effects of walking wounded through the corn fields was that I inadvertently saw the holiday via freshly cut triangles…and I found some of it to be kind of annoying.

Now, let me rein in the tone here. Halloween isn’t annoying. Halloween is awesome. I love it and possibly exist for it. But something is happening to this dark holiday that is annoying. And I don’t mean in the way that I found Christmas to be annoying (see my In Defense of Scrooge blog series), although to be specific I found Christmas not so much annoying as “a communal exercise in willful ignorance and desperate pretending” and a “fundamentally fake holiday.” Christmas completely collapsed for me under the lightest scrutiny. Halloween is a much more solid and honest holiday. At base it’s just “You’re gonna die, so live a bit.” It’s hard to fuck that up. The only thing that could collapse that framework is if billionaire tech moguls hate the idea of not being billionaire tech moguls so much that they conquer death and figure out immortality. Then Halloween is screwed.

Still, your pumpkin patch should be as sincere as possible, Linus.

This season I’m going to “Alas, Poor Yorick” the grave skull of Halloween from a few angles until this blog itself becomes annoying. But I’ll also be celebrating Halloween as hard as I can between the immovable elements of real life. Hell, by the time you’ve read this I will have already been to a Rob Zombie/Alice Cooper concert, a spooky bookfair, and had a private screening of Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice.

And I’ve brought gifts to this Halloween party:
So let’s celebrate Halloween together, you and you and I. But let’s also squint an eye socket at it a little.

Happy Halloween Season, Pumpkinheads. You’re gonna die, so live a bit.