fear mongering

Halloween is here again, playing the yin to Christmas' yang with its overstock of ghosts, goblins, and underage vamps. It's that time of year when children take to the streets in droves in honor of some saccharin revolution and childless adults sit at home at the ready to feed the addiction of the local spawn.

The last time I donned a costume and went door-to-door begging for a hit of Smarties was the Halloween of my fifth grade year. The break in the cycle during sixth grade made it just the pause from tradition that meant I'd never go again, even though plenty of my peers continued through puberty and into their late-teens. I don't really think I missed out, but I think it did create a certain disconnect with the holiday for me.

Costume parties have their purpose, but I don't really need to wear a mask or put on a new visual persona once a year to purge my inner demons. Although, I realize the intent is more toward drunken and disorderly.

I do, however, get into creepy movies.

If there's one thing that makes Halloween for me, it's those unpredictable chills of a good scary movie. Now when I say scary, I really prefer those atmospheric and real world sorts ("Open Water", "The Exorcist", "The Others") as opposed to the obvious sort that are more about shocks than suspense which Hollywood generally peddles.
However, I'm in a different mindset today. My mind is involved with a different sort of fright. I've never considered myself a conspiracy nut, in fact the use of nut there assumes that I'm critical, however, I've been reading You Have No Rights - Stories of America in an Age of Repression by Matthew Rothschild, and it's downright unsettling.

It has to do with the seemingly random, but likely systematic squashing of constitutional rights of the U.S. citizens by the powers that be (AKA "The Administration"). For anyone who'd like to brush up on their constitution can go here, although I can't guarantee it won't be redacted before I publish this post.