What Halloween Is Like as We Grow Older

No children to take out trick or treating, and it’s likely we won’t see any coming by the house this year because it’s going to be downright frigid where I am in Colorado. Ah, well. It’s been a long, difficult road to Over It.

You’d think a horror fiction writer, zombie post-apocalypse division, would be more into the Halloween aesthetic, with photos of my decorations and morbid musings, etc., posted every day. I’d have thought so, too. I’m not crazy about the fact that my last half-dozen posts have been old geezer griping about who-cares-what, but that’s how it turned out.

My enthusiasm for Halloween has dialed back considerably since 2007, my last good year for trick-or-treating with one of my children. I hasten to add it wasn’t just my children aging out of walking around the neighborhood with their old man. The housing crisis and recession that followed began making their presence known in Colorado Springs after 2007. There was a vast difference in the mood of the people we saw in 2007 and 2008. People were happy and sharing rum shots with attendant parents from folding tables set up in the cul-de-sacs in ‘07. In ‘08 they scowled from behind closed doors.

It was in 2010 that my 17-year-old daughter, taking pity on my poor depressed carcass, slapped a full-size rubber skull mask on me and took me out trick-or-treating for the last time ever. There were a few moments out there, especially when it got thick with children on that one street and it looked like the spirit was back, if only on that one street. 

Overall, though, the joy was gone. After that I resigned myself to staying home and passing out candy. It was a difficult transition, to say the least. Like everything else about my children’s growing up, I took the loss of Halloween badly.

As for reading and writing macabre fiction, I do that year-round. The month of October doesn’t make it any more special. I used to make a point of reading favorite stories from Ray Bradbury’s The October Country, “The Wind,” “The Scythe,” The Lake,” and especially “Homecoming” on Halloween night. After a while, it felt simply repetitive. The psychic gum was losing its flavor.

The same happened to a lot of the music I listen to. I still play In the Court of the Crimson King: An Observation by King Crimson throughout the month, but it’s no longer how I open my All Hallow’s Eve drinking session. Like all of my “traditions,” it just came off forced. I didn’t want to resent the season—any season, for that matter—feeling forced to do things simply because that’s we’ve always done.

My wife still decorates with a different mix from our many boxes of seasonal decor every year. I’m content with that. I delight to see the younger children who show up for candy. I’ve trended hard towards the happy and wholesome aspect of those three to four hours of evening. I don’t even feel an urge to watch a horror movie when its done. Just groove to the orange and purple lights, and hope these children I saw who said “trick or treat” and “thank you” in their cute little voices have many happy Halloweens to come.

Afterwards, I’ll go upstairs, turn on the music, crack some beers, maybe get some writing done. Like any other night, except I’ll have some candy and pretzels with the beer. I’ll also look forward to hearing the melancholy woodwinds of King Crimson’s “I Talk to the Wind” at some point before I turn in. That much is indispensable. It is, dare I say, haunting.

It’s not that I’ve lost the ability to take pleasure in the season. I’m just not forcing it. My party days are well behind me. Also, at this late point in my life, I have ghosts to last the year. I speak to them in my office every night. Here’s to all those people I know on the other side of the veil between worlds. Maybe I’ll see some of you in costume tonight.

As for the rest of you, you know the drill. Don’t drink and drive, etc. And Happy Halloween.

Rare Treasured Memories of My Youth: Sunday Afternoons with the Radio, 1973-1979

WARNING: Boomer nostalgia.

I look out the window at the Sunday afternoon light bronzing the trees and find myself thinking of Sunday afternoons over 40 years ago when I read books on my bed or built models at my desk while listening to American Top 40 with Casey Kasem from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m. on WCOS 1400 A.M. It was a great way to fill the time on the dullest day of the week. From afternoon to early evening, once it was done you were ready for Monday and everything after, fortified with the knowledge of what the most popular songs in America were up to that time. 

That timeless afternoon light, the same in any decade or century and yes, I can attest. Of course, in winter it was dark by the time Casey got us to Number One on the Billboard charts.

A.T. 40, as Kasem sometimes abbreviated it, occupied my Sundays from my middle to late childhood throughout the 1970s. I was in the latter half of sixth grade in 1973 when I made a habit of listening to it. I remember listening to the two-part year-end show in 1978. I might have heard the one in 1979, but I’m struggling to remember that. I’m certain I didn’t hear it at all after 1979. As of 1980 my radio listening went entirely over to F.M. radio with the rest of the world.

My fogginess in recalling my last time listening to American Top 40 reminds me of that meme, “And then came that day when you went outside to play with your friends for the very last time and didn’t know it.” By the time I’d quit listening to A.T. 40 I’d been following it for nearly half my life. I was 18 and the lesser dramas of high school were already a year behind me. 

The pop music scene itself was also changing. I remember when Deep Purple’s single “Smoke on the Water” played for the last time on A.T. 40, as it had slipped from its peak to somewhere at number 37 or 38, and feeling like a corner was turned. In 1973, it most certainly was. And 1979 was light years away in time and sensibility from 1973—as far as it is from age 11 to age 18 for most children. Despite a few good songs by New Wave acts, disco had also made pop radio insufferable.

All in all, it ended when it had to end, at least for me. Casey Kasem’s lively, friendly voice “countin’ down the hits to Number One!” belongs to a childhood that needed all the lively and friendly it could get. 

Boomer Hate Is Booming

Again, at least the Millennials are getting a break. For the moment.

I love this, if only to poke at those tiresome old pseudo-intellectual posers who proclaim The Rolling Stones were“better” than The Beatles, if only because the Stones didn’t have three all-time classic songwriters’/vocalists’ egos competing with one another in their band, nor the sense to quit while Mick and Keith could still grind out some hits among their misses. The Beatles took all the time they needed. When they were done, they were done. They remain influential enough for people to be complaining about them half a century after making their last album. The Stones, well, they’re a nostalgia act. Q.E.D.

As much as I understand and even appreciate much of the open contempt for the largest generational cohort aging into oblivion, here’s something no one seems to have thought about: early Boomers born in in the years between 1946-54 were the great bulk of whom served and died in Vietnam. 

Vietnam. Remember that one? In the course of complaining about the stubbornly pervasive stench of Boomer culture and nostalgia for the same, as if their movies and music were the only things that mattered—again, I get this—people forget the huge gravitational mass in the room that sucked so many young men in, some never to return. Of course, that’s because no one brings it up.

Moreover, it was the so-called Greatest Generation who sent the Boomers to Vietnam. And for what? Well, to keep that military contractor gravy train going, that’s why. That’s all. Vietnam fell to  the little men in black pajamas and the world didn’t end. “Oops. Guess we were wrong about that Domino Theory. Sorry about those 58,000 dead sons and fathers and the millions more who came home sick and crazy from what they saw and did. Now, listen, if we don’t get some boots on the ground in [remote sovereign country], then [remote sovereign country’s leader], whom we’re told has weapons of mass destruction will do Very Bad Things.”

Thus the not-so-great Greatest Generation passed their hubris onto the Boomers, and thus did succeeding generations get sick of their nonsense. I only wish those hating on these passing elder generations would keep in mind that many did not live so long precisely because of the nonsense their elders and their fellows sold them and everyone else back when respecting authority was looking more and more like a chump’s game. 

Now it’s generally accepted to be a chump’s game, but it’s the only game in town, whaddya gonna do? I’m not judging. I’m just saying, hey, you notice how everyone just pretends this thing that killed all these young Americans for over a decade never happened? “Yeah, well, they were Boomers. Screw Boomers, I hate Boomers, they had it comin’....”

Never mind.

Just think, all those years from 1963 through 1975, all those young men sweating turning 18 and getting their draft lottery numbers. Young men have been looking forward to turning 18 for a while now, but it wasn’t always so. For the longest time, a young man just out of high school stood a chance of being brought into the Army, forced into weeks of hell at boot camp only to be sent away to a horrible jungle on the other side of the planet to get shot at, and shoot back.

So many sons, brothers, husbands, fathers, best pals, ornery cousins, zipped up in bags...and then there were all those who came home, having seen and done things they could never explain to those who never went. Not all were rattled in the brain pan, but those who were, well, we laugh at them. They’re the ones in the memes who start up “Fortunate Son” on their sound systems when the alphabet bois (BATF, FBI, etc.) kick in their doors and the booby traps start going off. 

Over a decade of civic-induced misery, death, disfigurement, an atrocity of mass-murder and grift for the ages. It was bad enough listening to putative conservatives of the day whining about young people’s loss of respect for authority and institutions, as it never occurred to them that people might resent being lied to, let alone sent off to be crippled or killed for a lie. No, in A.D. 2019, we’ve long since we reduced veterans of the Vietnam debacle to a meme. A punchline.

Of course, they were Boomers. Screw them, right? “Ugh, so sick and tired of hearing about those people....”

Did I mention something about Millennials getting a pass? I’ve read in two places online this week the term “NuBoomers” for particularly entitled types. Let's hope it doesn't catch on. Let the Original Flavor Boomers take the term "boomers" to the grave with them.  Everyone's hating on Boomers; I'm hating on careless generalizations, stupid terminology, and misdirected resentment.

Curious Customs of a Faraway Country: Schoolin’

We’re talking that distant realm called “the past.” As in, “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” (L. P. Hartley.) Also, “[F]or time is the longest distance between two places.” (Tennessee Williams.) Got it? All right, then.....

I recently celebrated a birthday. Not that I needed the occasion to think back on things; I just thought I’d bring it up. I’m closing in on the completion of my sixth decade on this Earth, as a citizen of the dominant, albeit moribund empire on the planet in the early 21st century.

This means I have memories from the late-middle to late 20th century. It’s the period from the late 1960s to the late 1980s that fascinates me most, because it’s when so much changed, “some forever, not for better,” as another former young man once sang. 

Looking west down Parklane Road in northeast Columbia, South Carolina, February 1977, a year before they turned it into a four-lane. I took this photo with an old Brownie camera and developed it old-school style in a darkroom for a photography class.

I’m not sure when this changed, sometime in the late 1970s or early 1980s when I was already out of school, but I remember when you could fail a grade. And by “fail a grade” I mean, “you didn’t go on to the next.” 

Go ahead and send your parents in to yell at the principal. If your marks were bad, too bad, you should have done better. You repeated the grade until you got it right. (I actually knew one kid who repeated 9th grade four times until he finally stood up in the middle of class one day, screamed, “I can’t take this anymore!” and ran out never to return. By then, he was old enough not to bother, anyway.) You were stuck with the little kids coming up, and they most certainly would not look up to you for your advanced age. Indeed, you’d look pretty stupid being the biggest kid in the class. 

It was enough of a mark of shame if you had to attend summer school, which was your only option if you wanted to attend next year’s classes with your peers. You weren’t just wasting your summer. You were a fool.

Shame was a thing back in the day, but that’s more than I can wrap my head around right now. Honestly, there was a lot of bad to go with the good it enforced, and I would make it clear that I do not write any of this out of nostalgia. My line for all those pining for the Good Ol’ Days: How truly golden was your Golden Age if all it came to was this? 

This is the part where one might post a photo of 10-year-old cross-dressers with their garishly attired adult groomers by way of driving home the point, but I’d rather look at these cows instead. The countryside west of where I live...ah, you’d hate it. Seriously, cows? Boring! “Eeew, how can you stand it? There’s nothing out here!”

Something that never comes up, even among putative conservatives is that, up until sometime between the Great Depression of the 1930s and the 1950s, high school was optional. That’s why it was called high school; it was higher education for those children of Good Families who aspired to go to college and take their place among the managerial classes. The rest were free to find jobs, or, better yet, apprenticeships to trades. It was what most people did, and by the age of 17 the smarter and more able ones were as good as full-grown men, fit to support a family.

But then someone got the bright idea all young people, regardless of interest or inclination, should be forced to sit at desks and regurgitate meaningless information for state-mandated tests until age 18. Children could not work to draw a paycheck until age 16. Oh, and now everyone is expected to go to college. You don’t want to be some dumb plumber, do ya? Naw, sir, you wanna work with your mind.

Oh, how I could go on. Suffice it to say, “I was the first in my family to go to college” is a quaint expression in A.D. 2019. I was the second generation in my family to go to college, and I’m proud that both of my adult children have ignored that mandate of mid- to late-20th century U.S. civic fashion—and, wouldn’t you know it, are making more money doing their respective things that their grandmother or I ever did. 

A broken, antique manure spreader enshrined in a stone-facade flower garden in the fading sun seems an apt metaphor for U.S. education, n’est-ce pas?

Like much of the mildewed and rotten furniture of our changing culture, the only way to fix our education system, K-12 and college alike, is to torch it. Burn it down, brush away the ashes, and build something that doesn’t waste everyone’s time, patience, and money. 

Educate people according to their gifts. If a child enjoys solving math puzzles but hates reading books and writing book reports, don’t make him read novels, and don’t make him write book reports. Train him how to write for his field and stop going out of your way to make such people miserable. Same deal with liberal arts types. Stop making people who will never use anything beyond common everyday arithmetic suffer through polynomial equations.

And what’s up with sitting at these desks for hours at a time listening to some jackass drone on and on until everyone glazes over in a stupor of ennui? And as for those children who can’t be fussed to learn nothin’, who just show up to cut-up....

We’ll stop here. We all know nothing so sensible will be permitted to happen. The smart people will homeschool. That’s all. Given what my own children went through, it’s what I’d do if I could do it all over again.

“All we need is an internet connection and we’re good to go.”