The definition of insanity is … writing a mixed bag of news that’s recycled for Halloween — like a bag of flaming crap on your doorstep, or stoop — and hoping someone will still read it! You right the ship by producing a bag of tricks that will have some kind of appeal to those who are demented in every which way. And then send them flowers, straight to their (out)house.

A bouquet of (white and otherwise bright) flowers on Halloween? Crap creeping up outside an outhouse, not in. Read all about it.

Halloween can be a mixed bag. Just see these next two paragraphs, as the situation is shown in two different ways. (Just like you can trick or treat on two different nights.) OK, and maybe the third graph, too. Boo.

My mom got a swath of sympathy flowers, for a death just prior to Halloween, and with nowhere else it place it, the bunch was placed right in front of one of her few pieces of decore for such a holiday, one that said BOO! Letters flanked in orange. And ghost tacked onto the end.

A black past, back to the scary future. I spied an outhouse with a line of pumpkins parallel to its front. This makes it easier to put some of the (flaming) crap literally, in a bag along with the guts of a carved out pumpkin and put it on the nearest (farmer’s?) doorstep.

(Nessie, as in the Loch Ness Monster, is again in the news. Freshly. Like Nestle on trick or treat night?)

Going closer to urban, on the way to my brother’s big house in a big subdivision, I saw on virtually every lamp post, and each house had one, a similar style of great pumpkin. Dozens and dozens of them. Does Linus, now elderly, live here? Or in that one place miles away that replicated this?

There are many houses decked out in large and small degree with Halloween decorations, but few in at I would call it at 60 percent clip. Seventy percent with lawn clippings included and fashioned in. As noted earlier, much earlier, inflatables are all the rage for big monsters, but even big monsters can deflate and lie flat in the yard. Boo if they’re more than dozen of them.

That even earlier rager, the skeleton of more than a dozen feet tall, has or had a preview of lying flat in disintegration. At its big feet was a smaller and obviously dethroned skeleton.  

While afoot at the home: Mom looked downward, where I had earlier broke my big toe and asked not which digit, but which foot? She specifically configured it about my fat toe. This reminded me, and I reminded her, about a quaint old Halloween record we listened to as young kids with the tag line, “that’s my skinny toe!” She didn’t quite remember. Maybe a good thing.

An even better thing, for this time, I think. Bodies or their pieces or just their hands have been seen sticking out, in solitary fashion, of the crabgrass, as that’s all that still grows this time of year, of various lawns.

At Mallory’s, on a crawl a short distance away from my apartment, I saw just inside its door an apparently dead bride and groom, in dress and tux, lying flat as in a coffin. One half of the story sung by Axl Rose in November Rain? Reminds me of a likewise very cryptically similar dream I had of an actual wedding that is acoming, since someone close who is very ill may be unable to attend. This one is no joke.

Halloween can be serious. Even if just in business, and in souls. Or both. My publisher at the Irish Gazette planned a big edition for October, since the Celts are big into the hallowed day when the veil between the living and the dead is the thinnest, but there were production problems. So see them in print just prior to another big one, Christmas.

Until then, happy holiday of Halloween. Joe.

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