Here in the Rockies, fun-loving kids and adults are preparing to trick or treat in monster costumes, toilet seats worn over downward spiraling economic charts, stretchy nurse suits and latex masks.
Me, I'm checking my Netflix queue. Color me uncool. But in a culture that lives for its annual fete du macabre, I am a fervent HalloWeenie.
As a kid, I trick or treated with my friends in polyester witch-wear. But after a short but profound flirtation with scary-fun Dr Phibes movies in my pre-teens, I decided that scary was just...scary. And nothing embodied that scariness like Halloween. The older I got, the more profound my HalloWeenieness grew.
As a reformed insomniac, waking the dead sounded cruel to me. And a reformed NYC fashion worker, "dressing up for fun" made no human sense.
My first job after college was in a fashion PR firm between Madison and Fifth. The costume required for role made Halloween look simple by comparison. No pants. No jeans. No unstockinged legs. No patterns. No casuals. No humor.
As someone whose favorite designers were Jean-Paul Gaultier and Hello Kitty, this uniform was as foreign as wearing a rubber catsuit to work. But once I viewed it as a costume for a ghost I played from 9-5, I was able to pull it off.
My cover was blown when our new departmental assistant, a woman my age, showed up for work in a gold prom dress, shredded fishnets and Chrissie Hynde hair-do. Her look was a welcome contrast to the Chanel channels around us, I thought. But that visibility was the problem, my bosses said. The young woman's clothes were ghoulish...vintage. It was my job to convert her to the path of Gucci, or at the very least, Gitano.
How does one deliver such ghoulish news? I didn't. A short time later, I left fashion for the allure of fiction, where folks could wear what they wanted, where they wanted, when they wanted. During this time, I also gave up on Halloween.
But that didn't mean that Halloween had given up on me.
A few Octobers later, I was debating the merits of blue versus green curtains for a scene I was writing in my shared office suite in Chelsea, when an otherwise nice-looking man dropped by to tell us that our landlord had used the last six months of our rent money to pay alimony to his French ex-girlfriend.
"This is a prank, right?" someone said. At which point, the otherwise nice-looking guy evicted us.
Moving on the fly is always a nightmare in New York. But the spookiness multiplies when you move on Halloween, through Chelsea's Halloween parade. Sights that were beautifully odd when I was unstressed took on ghoulish dimensions that day. The 6th Avenue fallen angel was one of them.
On regular days, the 6th Avenue angel stood outside the 23rd Staples wearing a dirty white tutu and tattered angel wings, like New York hope incarnate, slightly crazed, despite the smog.
On Halloween, the street was overrun with angels and devils, impersonal, if more elegant. I spotted the fallen angel for a moment. But instead of looking like hope, as he did on regular days, I saw him swallowed up into the crowd.
Still, I held out hope. One's approach to holidays is more a Rorschach test than a reflection on the fest, of course. I couldn't change Halloween. But perhaps I could change me?
A year ago this week, I moved to a rural Rocky Mountain house-share with three guys I met on Craigslist from Brooklyn. My new home was a split-level attached to another split-level on five otherwise unpopulated acres. It seemed like the perfect place to sit out Halloween in peace.
As I unpacked, a man with a snake-tattooed shaved head knocked on the door, introduced himself as my pagan neighbor and asked for his effigy.
My middle housemate, a professional circus artist specializing in flammable materials, handed over a life-sized figure doused in kerosene in return.
All Hallow's Eve was the pagan New Year, my new neighbor told me. Time to burn the old, welcome the new.
It sounded like a positive, if scary approach to Halloween. And had the pagans not burned up their house last month, I might have been tempted to check it out this year.
Instead, my dog and I spent the first week of October moving again, in keeping with annual tradition.
In our new home, high above town, things seem much safer. That may sound uncool. But uncool, compared to last month's 40-foot flames, is something worth celebrating to me.
We won't be dressing up this Halloween at my place. But we will be partying down. While millions worldwide get their jollies by scaring each other senseless, my dog and I will be in our jammies on the couch, enjoying our Hallo-Weenie selves, and our life's lack of dark surprises.