doom letter #17

There are certain times of year that I am willing to set aside my holier-than-thou attitude toward the masses and just have fun. One of those times is Halloween. I love it. People get to dress up either weirder, sluttier or scarier than they usually do, and it is social acceptable. This year for Halloween I was a zombie, partially because zombies are awesome, and also because it is the one “costume” that does not require much preparation. There is also my obsession with doom, and zombies are pretty distopic characters…

This Halloween I noticed two things. First, and perhaps most importantly, I noticed many kids trick or treating without even bothering to put on a costume. Since I don’t give candy to kids that are not wearing a costume, I would ask them to tell me what they are dressed up as before they received their treat. Most said something stupid and didn’t get any candy, but one girl actually said to me that she dressed up as “a depressed teenager.” Clearly, she got more than her fair share of my candy, since that is a pretty bad ass reply to the question. So, are these kids just too lazy to put a little paint on their face, or is it that the $3 required to pick up a thrift shop sheet as shown above was too big of an investment? Are their parents just lazy fucks that don’t really care what they are wearing when they go out begging? Because honestly, if you are not dressed up, you are no longer taking part in the tradition, you are just begging. And even a half-way decent beggar will tell you that in order to be successful, you need a gimmick. Based on this limited information, and since I believe the children are our future, I believe that our future is pretty fucked and we are doomed to dependency on uncreative, unmotivated and generally unimpressive shithead slackers.

The second thing I noticed this Halloween at my Mom’s house is that very few people in her neighborhood were passing out candy. This is a neighborhood that normally sees over 200 kids in the two hours that the city recommends for trick or treating. People drive their kids from other neighborhoods to this neighborhood to walk them around in a safe and fairly compact area. I don’t know what exactly the reasoning is for the decrease, different people have moved into the area and many of them are younger. Like me and my sister, they may look at Halloween as an adult holiday (particularly since it was on a Saturday this year) as much so or more than a children’s holiday. Therefore they may have been drinking or getting ready to go out to a party themselves, so why bother handing out candy to kids when you don’t know any of them anyway. I may be bias, since this is my favorite holiday, -and this may be a stretch – but it seems wrong that people do not want to participate in their immediate community. It seems like all of our technology has separated us from dealing with the people around us on even a minimal level and instead we use our communications abilities to keep up with a smaller and smaller number of people that are part of our overly-exclusive in groups. People should connect to other people around the world and share ideas with whom they have the most in common, but it should not be to the detriment of local civil society. Unfortunately, I think that is what is happening. If you are not in my group, I probably won’t like you anyway so I don’t need to bother interacting with you on even the simplest level.

I want to continue this but I also want to save a little of it for later. For those of you that may be interested, I will soon be offering a podcast on this site and also will be making some changes to the overall layout of the site. Going into 2010, in the face of all that is coming at us, I feel rededicated to making a go at developing my internet self. I have also started to work on a stand up comedy routine and hope to do some touring in 2010. Because of the direction my life was going before, with all of my lost things, I am making some changes and trying to improve upon myself while also becoming less terrestrially-tied so that I may be able to find a more perfect place or places where I can put down some little anchors when I get tired of floating around.

Doom love,

mike