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Halloweentober 2023

The O's are in the playoffs, fresh off winning the AL East. They've just a season that consistently had me pinching myself. But yes, it was all real, and they play the Rangers here at home today.

Halloween has taken a huge truck stop-after-chili dinner dump all over our home. Jack-o-lanterns sit on every table and mantle and sit aglow in warm candlelight every night. This time of year just makes me happy. It's rather simple: autumn, Halloween, horror movies and ghost stories, lots of candy and pie, the chill in the air, it all makes for the most wonderful time of year. I'm currently reading Autumncrow by Cameron Chaney. So far it's better than anticipated.

I'm on vacation in a few days, and I plan on writing my Halloween short stories, and overdosing on Reese Cups and slasher films. I'll try to make time to walk Betty Boxer. Another new addiction is watching 1980s and 1990s Halloween commercials. I've got a playlist on YT that's into 6-hours. And I just received a cool Halloween-inspired grab bag from Chris LaMartina, the creator of WNUF Halloween Special. This included a DVD-R mix tape style of aforementioned Halloween commercials and news specials of this great day. I'm not sure how to describe the euphoria of falling into hypnotic trance-like state while watching these videos. I slowly fade into time travel, sitting in my old home in Dundalk, it's Halloween in 1986 or the like, bag of candy spread before me, still in Dracula make-up and cape. I go back to that place inside my head to find happiness because it's so very hard to find it today.


I'm in the midst of building a shadowbox for my McDonalds Halloween Pails translite (1986). I want to back-light it, and display the pails below it with fake ivy like the translite. I'm old enough to remember when McD's still used bulbs w/translites for promotion, rather then the flat screens in use today. Personally, I feel that the translites worked better.

I vividly remember this Halloween pail advertisement below (or above, then). Sitting in our local McDonalds on Wise Avenue as a toddler, eating my McNugget Happy Meal (w/honey like a madman!) and staring at this beautiful piece of Halloween art. I was enthralled. I still am today, which is why I framed it on my wall. I can stare at it all day long.


These pumpkin pails (McBoo, McPunk'n and McGoblin respectively) were far superior than any toy the great Clown could've included with this Happy Meal. I've always had an affinity for the Jack-o-lantern, and these are at the top of that long and illustrious list.

It's quite remarkable these Boo Buckets have become so popular these days. They've reached some kind of legendary status in the collecting/Halloween/nostalgia groups. Dinosaur Dracula was discussing these pails over a decade ago. But something clicked for me in particular about 5 or 6 years ago, and I had to find my original buckets. That didn't happen so I visited the 'Bay.

I have begun to question the nature of nostalgia today when I began collecting the McDonalds Halloween ephemera. What makes a person want to collect pieces of fast food's past and spend money on these things. I know I feel a sort of short shot of euphoria with this stuff in my home, in my office, so perhaps this is the nature of nostalgia alone. I don't see any end to this in the near future, because every day I open a long-recessed memory, or find something else from childhood on another site that I simply must have... Should I feel shame in this emotion, or just go with it for now? Every day it's a little harder to live in the present, so these quick hops into the past seem to make me feel better overall.




Last night was the first night of pumpkin carving. Time to keep the nasty spirits away from our home and make the house look cute in the process.

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