Thursday, October 15, 2009

Last year, right around this time, I stood before my front door, arms very likely crossed, puzzling over how precisely to prepare it for Halloween. Intrepid candyseekers would come knocking in a matter of days, and already neighbors were decorating their exteriors in a slow arms race to deploy as much demonic paraphernalia as possible. Escalation happened on a smaller scale, of course, because townhouses simply offer less surface area for the gauche, and should your plastic Grim Reaper or animatronic Hannah Montana encroach on your elderly neighbor’s yard, well, prepare for real hellfire.

But decorating wasn’t my concern. It’s not exactly my wheelhouse, you could say. Foreclosed on that house years ago, in fact. Instead, I was trying to decide whether it was worth the effort to sweep all the cobwebs off my porch. Usually I enter through the garage door, you see, which leaves the front stoop largely unused, with naught but the occasional pizza coupon distributor or religious pamphleteer ambling over it. The cobwebs weren’t the issue, though. Heck, people purchase synthetic webbing, so why pass on the authentic stuff? No, the problem was the wicked-looking spider that had set up shop right next to the doorbell.

In another time, another place, the homeowner’s association would have marveled at the startling attention to detail, perhaps awarded me duly for my festive, naturalistic Halloween sensibilities. This reality dictated, however, that a lawsuit would be the only reward awaiting me, were the spider to poison some hapless trick-or-treater. I quickly cleaned things up, driven by the threat of liability. And then, when Halloween day arrived, I disappeared, like a ghost who hates Halloween.

Don’t get me wrong. I love candy. I just don’t love buying bags and bags of it. To feed to strangers. Who ring the doorbell regularly, jarringly, throughout the day. So they may be served candy! It’s the kind of logic that could only be engineered by Satan or the Hershey Company. I decided I wasn’t going to invest in this holiday, so I disengaged. Drove off. Left a house devoid of individually wrapped chocolates.

I may appear to be a dick here. I wish to disabuse you of this notion. What I just described might sound like a Halloween celebrated by objectivists, where the day could only be improved with candles and Ayn Rand’s finest works splayed all over the couch. I don’t think I’m being selfish here. If I knew you, and you wanted candy, I would buy you a fucking kilo of Sweet Tarts. Halloween simply strikes me as an odd social contract, an unhealthy one to boot. Why not choose a day in November instead, when I can freely knock on your door, brush past you to your kitchen, and help myself to, like, chicken or something?