Published October 30, 2005 in the Hibbing Daily Tribune
By Aaron J. Brown
Tomorrow is Halloween, which means All Saints Day is just around the corner! OK, it also means candy, decorations and little kids wandering streets wearing flammable outfits.
Halloween was once about fear, spreading fear and inducing fear in small children who look to us as guardians. That is, until recently. A fake ax in your head raises nary a blink or double take from the Halloween crowd these days. Now trends seem to demand some sort of ironic Halloween costume, such as Osama bin Laden in an Uncle Sam suit or a giant faucet with the letters C-I-A listed on it. (I’m the CIA leak in the White House, get it?!) Maybe I’m just going to the wrong parties.
The fundamental theme of Halloween gets just a bit harder to pinpoint every year. Initially, you had your autumn harvest celebration. It’s also the night before the chaste, serious All Saints Day, which means it’s your last night of merriment before you’re on the holy clock (or so tradition indicates). The costumes, tricks and treats joined in later, and of course eventually Halloween became a “scary” holiday.
The very concept of vampires, reanimated human corpses and werewolves used to be enough to make Halloween scary. Now these things seem rather tame. All the recent zombie movies put the old school trudging, groaning zombies to shame. If zombies aren’t track stars who can climb brick walls while shrieking, they’re nothing. So, what can we look to for a traditional Halloween scare this year? I’ve thought of some possibilities.
Boo! A billion dollars of your federal and state taxes might soon go to a coal gas power plant proposed by a startup company run by lawyers and lobbyists. And they want to build it on a scenic state highway. And the technology has yet to be proven commercially viable. And the company has been granted an unlimited right to use eminent domain if they can’t buy out landowners in their way.
OK, that’s scary, but not Halloween scary.
Try this.
Boo! When marathon runners push it to the max they sometimes lose control of their bodily functions toward the end of the race. Some runners deal with this by rubbing oil on their legs to allow anything from above to slide easily to the ground below.
Scary? Maybe. It sure is alarming. I heard from someone that this actually happens just last week and it’s been stuck in my head since. The news hit me hard because I took up daily (or, more accurately, “dailyish”) running early last summer. I’ve yet to have such an unpleasant experience, though I tend to top out about 22 or 23 miles short of marathon distance. I even did “research.” Try Googling “marathon poop” and you’ll see what I’m talking about. (Incidentally, don’t actually Google that phrase unless you’re prepared to think about what you read off and on for the rest of your life).
OK, so that’s scary, but still not quite All Hallows Eve “Great Pumpkin” scary.
Boo! When you’re out driving around this Halloween, mysterious brown four-legged creatures wait along the roadsides. They weigh about 200 pounds, sometimes more, and some have sharp pointy weapons protruding from their heads. They run silent, fast, and tend to jump out on the highway in front of your vehicle to cause mayhem. People hunt them, but they never go away.
Now that’s scary, and plausible. Happy Halloween! If your ironic plastic costume gets too close to an open flame, remember: Stop, drop and roll.
Aaron J. Brown is a columnist for the Hibbing Daily Tribune.