Demons to Some

TNL moved from an adequate office space in Livonia to an absolutly giant house in Brighton. The move took 2 days, after hours, and we are all beat to hell right now. Scott, our Sr. Systems Engineer and my best friend, pushed a 27hr day last Friday to get us moved whilst I pushed a paltry 23. Our cubes are up, our servers are in their shiny new cabinets in the basement spider dungeon of doom and we are back in business.

Halloween is nigh upon us and with it comes every little thing I love about the year as a chronological entity. Were the year a pop song Halloween would be the hook. Were the year a video game, Halloween would be the final boss battle. A roller coaster, the first drop. A Tootsie Pop, the Tootsie Roll center. Scanners, that part where Michael Ironside blows up that scientist’s head with his own head. A fleeting moment buttressed at one side by eager anticipation and at the other by subtle but lasting discontent. During that moment, however, nothing could be better. I wrote a short story once in which a character referred to a satisfying bowel movement as “nature’s other orgasm”. I would make a similar statement about Halloween, excepting the fact that I didn’t wait 24 years to go trick-or-treating for the first time.

It seems to me that the eve of All Hollows is a very stable bastion for those whose hearts wax eccentric and can often be mistaken as a harbor for losers who wear costumes and act like idiots. I like to think of it more as a symbolic doorway to one’s own childhood and one’s own imaginative lore regarding the nature of things. It isn’t All Saints Day. It isn’t a Pagan harvest celebration. It isn’t a festival of death and drama. It is as sort of free pass holiday whose interpretation is varied and wide and whose spoils can be alluring to both young and old.

I am still planning that party. The vast scale of my original plan, which could almost have been considered a production at its most exaggerated point, has been trimmed down to a more manageable breadth due in no small part to a budget similar to what my mother would give me for hot lunch in middle school and a cynical interpretation of the situation by the local parent groups. I use the word “parent” here loosly.

You see, people bite. This is a generality to be sure, and I am sure your friends rock the party that rocks the body, but the sheer vastness which describes those out there who would seek to dampen your sunshiny day is almost staggering. We’ve got parents who won’t support the gig without chaperones, but don’t themselves want to have anything to do with chaperoning. I’ve got parents who want little Johnny to participate in the pumpkin carving event but who don’t believe they should have to produce the discounted and, frankly, ridiculously low price to actually purchase the pumpkin little Johnny will be knifing six ways from Sunday. My meetings have only produced a single resident (big ups to the one like Jeanie) who wants to help, yet I am positive that this weekend will bring a swarm of parents wanting to drop their children off for the party. It should also be mentioned that neither I nor Jeanie and her husband have responsible, as they say, for our own younglings. We are putting on an event for kids we don’t have anything to do with and whose parents could give a rip.

The above may seem discouraging, but know this: When those kids get all piped up on sugar and are sticking their hands into jars of goop and popping balloons filled with toys and whipped cream and are winning prizes and generally freaking the hell out for Halloween I will be satisfied – and not until.