Life continues to move forward at breakneck speeds.  It's very convenient being a skateboarder and feeling accustomed to moving fast and reacting quickly physically to quick changeups and force yourself to skate through the pressure.  The good news is that I haven't bailed on any hills I've bombed lately.

The tone was set a few weekends ago when Inbum dropped the needle on a record of ghoulish laughter from beyond the grave.  It was some echoing voodoo caca hoohoo haha's.  He was playing it over Vincent Price's monologue from Thriller, a normally pretty scary thing to listen to, but the absolute height of freaky creepiness to me that night.  "Why can't I stop dancing to this?" I asked myself, as I clutched my skull fearing that I might seriously be tripping out.

It was a good thing I was dressed as a superhero that night, as was my cousin, because we needed some sort of supernatural force field to deflect all the deep pressure of the dark Halloween night.  The Chicago White Sox had just swept the World Series and beat Houston TX in baseball.  Every night during the weeks building up had been lively.  I had been spending a good portion of the night hours prowling the streets like a werewolf with restless energy.  The night before, my cousin and I visted a haunted house, where we practiced our ninja skills by jumping into every horror filled, strobe lit room and spooking the monsters and scary clowns before they could scare us. 

Mars orbited very close to the earth that very night.  I pointed it out to my cousin Cheryl as we drove west.  At 11PM, it was 65 degrees above the horizon and glowed strongly, a very bright red. 

"That's your planet!" I told my cousin, an Aries.  "The god of war.  I can't believe we can see it this clearly!  And its Halloween"

We mused upon the sight as we felt the effects of the chocolates sink in.  She put on her mask and gloves, I strapped my guns to my thighs and checked to make sure I had a lighter.  Both of us reapplied our lipstick and searched in vain for eyedrops.  We got out of the car and strode confidently towards the door of the party.  We stopped abruptly.

"Oh shit, I forgot my phone!"

"I forgot my wallet!"

Fifteen minutes later we were still in the car a few blocks away from the party and no closer to being ready.  We drove up closer so that we were right in front of the party, and finally we made it through the door.

"What the hell kind of superheroes are we?!?"

As the night proceeded, we made our way through clowns of masked strangers and found refuge in the company of some dancing bunnies with manic energy.  Everything in that party quickly developed a coating of booze, including somehow my hands and cigarettes.  We boogied down on a white glowing dancefloor with built in transitions, a floor to wall quarterpipe where the corners should have been.  I had been sulking enviously watching the girl dressed as a roller chick because she had roller skates on and could skate the dancefloor.  The guns were an absolute necessity as we fielded several leers or evil eyes and pushes and shoves, all of which were quickly stunned by a quick shot by the water gun.  I put perfume in it before I left the house and found myself being obnoxiously trigger happy.

"Where the hell is my skateboard?" I wondered out loud, and I looked around.  I spotted an old flat nosed torpedo of an old school deck flipped onto its side at the edge of the dancefloor.  "Whose skateboard do you think that is?" I shouted in Chewie's face.  He was wearing a bloody pink tutu and Mickey mouse ears

"That's Jeremy's".

"Who's that? I wonder if he'd let me ride it."

He pointed to the pillar, where I had noticed a figure standing motionless watching for the past half hour. 

"Excuse me, dude? Can I ride your board?  I've been wishing for a skateboard all night!  This shit is bananas, there's no corners on the dancefloor!  Seriously, when does that ever happen?"

I handed over to him my spray painted black squirt guns to make it an even trade, and skated the dancefloor.

It was nice to be able to skate around the crazy party in my costume for a moment and regain my sense of balance.  That skateboard, a wide sturdy Santa Cruz reprint of a 1988 Jeff Kendall board, was a solace to me.  The pressure of the night was building, and already felt intense.  Outside the night was filled by the sound of sirens and most of the people at the party looked like strangers from some foreign city underneath their masks.  And the boomers were kicking.  We ate the second half of the chocolate. 

"What we are witnessing here is the force of gravity between two large planets.  How could things not feel very intense when large heavenly bodies swing close to each other?  It is a natural phenomenon that we are seeing made manifest by everybody acting all bizarre," I reasoned pedantically like a geek as my cousin and I moved to the next party in the car.  "Actually this is all very normal."

We pulled over to park on a dark empty street, and I stepped out to the curb to smoke a cigarette and regard the night sky.  Cheryl was looking for her phone or something in the car, and Jeremy sat in the backseat keeping her company.  I had dragged him along, when I stood in the doorway of the party and demanded to know if he wanted to hang out with a couple of superheroes for the night or what.  So I was trying to relax a little bit and was in mid-thought when I saw a figure walking fast in the dark towards me.  I sat very still and watched as a man emerged in the light, trying the handles of the doors and looking into the windows of all the cars parked on the street that I faced.

"What the hell are you doing?"  I couldn't stop myself from talking shit in the silence of the streetlamps.

He looked up and saw me staring at him.  He shot me this hard look from across the street, then kept walking.

"Don't be a jerkbag."

He glared at me intensely and I glared back.  He walked away, swiftly, not looking back.  I stubbed out my cigarette and jumped back in the car and locked my door.  "This shit is bananas."

We walked down Milwaukee Avenue, past car accidents and police cars all over the place.  I was trying to remember where I put my id, when I heard a voice stop me.

"Hey! Come over here!"

I looked over and a policeman in a vehicle called me over.  I felt that I had no choice but to go over there.  He looked me over.

"You know we're giving out tickets for jaywalking tonight."

"Oh shit.  I am so sorry officer.  I didn't realize I was jaywalking."

"You're not supposed to cross the street until the light says walk.  If you don't, then that's jaywalking."

"Ok."

"Next time I will give you a ticket."

"Well thanks."

I walked away with the pressure of a thousand emotions.  When another cop asked me across the block what the matter was, I stopped again. 

"That guy almost gave me a ticket for jaywalking! Are you serious? I try to follow most of the laws every day and this is just too much for me to bear tonight!  I just stopped a guy from breaking into cars; where were you guys?  It's Halloween and I am just seriously overwhelmed, so I am sorry that I jaywalked, but I have had so much on my mind, I've been through so much this week and everything is just crazy! I am sorry for jaywalking, what else can I say!!"

"So where's your boyfriend?  That guy was just trying to talk to you, forget about him."

I didn't know whether to laugh or cry, but this was an emotional crescendo and I just went with what felt more natural, which wound up being the latter.  I started bawling.

"It should be illegal for you to ask me that!"  He let me go with no further questions.

As the night wore on, more images of ghosts and spirits swirled in my head.  I had to at least get off the street and away from the cops.  Far away from the noise and the light of the city, I huddled in a the sanctuary of a dark room listening to the voice of a boy whispering about the souls that haunt him, that continue to ride through life with him.  I told him a ghost story of my own.  It certainly felt like the eve of the beginning of the dark season of the year.

Ifelt the presence of certain ghosts, from Jim Morrison's voice singing
to me all day through the radio, in Walgreens and even on tv, and books
of his poetry falling off my shelves and into my hands, to Oscar
Wilde's plays making their way into my path.  I had visited both of
their graves earlier this year.

The ancient Celts count the first day of winter -the dark season, the end of the light season- as November 1st and bring it in with a festival called Samhain.  This was a time in which the realms of the living and the dead were blurred and chaotic forces would invade the world of order.  What a coincidence.  During this time, spirits of the dead and spirits yet to be born were said to walk amidst the material world.  Magic is most potent during this time of the autumn solstice.  In Norse mythology, it was a night said to be overrun by mischievous elves.  They were all most likely laughing at me.