Happy Halloween, dear reader!  That’s it…I just decided…Halloween is now the official start of the New Year on the Gallaway calendar.  Now I must come up with an official traditional celebration of this holiday.  The reasons for this are myriad but make total sense to me.

And by making my New Year on the last day of the month, we can dedicate an entire day and night to celebrating with reckless abandon, then wake up on the first of the new month, ready to get to work on This Year’s Project(s).  Brilliant.

Our traditional celebration will have nothing to do with trick-or-treating.  Sure, I was into it as a kid, but now trick-or-treaters just annoy me.  I could do without that particular tradition.  But I’m into costumes one day/night a year, so costumes will likely be part of it.  And liquor, of course.  I don’t know…I’m going to have to flesh this out.  I’ll get back to you as developments warrant.

Did you ever decide what you’re going as?  I might have mentioned mine was a toss-up between Art the Clown and The Mad Hatter.  Yesterday I decided I’d just be Garbage.  It was just the easiest option.   I thought I was being original, but everybody that’s come to the door so far has also been Garbage.  Weird.

Anyway, something for you better than candy: 10 of my favorite books/stories to read around this time of year (in no particular order):

1. “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” by Washington Irving
2. “Dracula” by Bram Stoker
3. “Frankenstein” by Mary Shelley
4. “The Haunting of Hill House” by Shirley Jackson
5. “Something Wicked This Way Comes” – Ray Bradbury
6. “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe
7. “The Shining” by Stephen King
8. “Ghost Story” by Peter Straub
9. “The Witches” by Roald Dahl
10. “MacBeth” by William Shakespeare

N.P.: “Grim, Grinning Ghosts” – Ghosts

It’s Halloween Eve, dear reader!  Which fills my heart with joy.  Had to kick on the heater last night, there’s rain in the forecast, and the nights are getting significantly longer than the days.  Tomorrow we get to get juiced and dress like dicks and menace the gentry for candy.  Then Sunday night we again abandon the foolish absurdity of Daylight Saving Time and return to Actual Time.  And I’ll have plenty to say about that when it happens.  I’m just glad it’s happening.  All of this to say that for a Halloween Eve, today was a fine day.

But it was a tad dull.  It lacked excitement.  It was certainly no 1938.

On Halloween Eve (October 30), 1938, Orson Welles scared the living shit out of the American public with his infamous radio broadcast.  Picture the scene: a nation teetering on the brink of war and uncertainty, suddenly pummeled into hysteria by Welles as he unleashed Martians upon the unsuspecting masses.

This was no ordinary Halloween prank, dear reader.  This was a full-scale assault on the fragile psyche of the American public, plunging them into the delicious pit of paranoia.  Broadcasting from the Mercury Theater on the Air, Welles and his band of mischief-makers adapted H. G. Wells’ “War of the Worlds” into a radio play that would transcend entertainment and catapult itself into the realm of mass psychological experiment.

Seriously, picture it: families gathered around their radios, the dim glow of the tubes casting eerie shadows on the walls, when suddenly: news bulletins of Martian invasions!  Alien machines!  Death rays incinerating helpless New Jersey residents!  The more gullible folk sprinted for the hills, convinced that the apocalypse was happening.  Listeners fled their homes, the highways clogged with panic-stricken masses, and the telephone lines blew up with people calling each other, trying to figure out what was happening.

This was the birth of modern-media sensationalism, a flashpoint where fiction blurred into perceived reality.  Welles, ever the anarchist, shattered the comfortable cocoon of pre-war America, and it was amazing.

So tonight we drink to Orson Welles, the man who turned a lazy Sunday afternoon into a nightmarish ride through the cosmos.  His broadcast remains a testament to the power of storytelling, and a cautionary tale of the media’s impact on a gullible and uncritical public.  Perhaps the latter lesson is the one that contemporary Americans would do well to heed.

N.P.: “Thunder Cash ’69” – Cody Parks and the Dirty South

Travel day.  On the go since 06:00.  Didn’t write shit.
Eight days until Halloween.

N.P.: “Down to the Bottom” – Dorothy

Well, shit, dear reader…9 days until Halloween and I haven’t done a damn thing to prepare.  Not sure what I need to prepare for…I don’t do anything on Halloween anymore.  I just like Halloween.  I’ve never thrown a party, but if I was going to, I kind of assume it would be a Halloween party.  With my almost perverse affinity to the cold and the dark, Halloween is more like my New Years.

My schedule for the rest of this fetid year has no room for parties.  Alas.  But I do love Halloween.

N.P.: “Double Lucifer” – TVAM

Tonight, dear reader, we pour some out for Kerouac.  October 21 marks the anniversary of the passing of one Jack Kerouac, a literary rebel whose words still almost pulsate with the restless energy of the Beat generation.  I spent a lot of the early 90s reading Kerouac while drinking port.  I think I was trying to channel him.  He struck me more as a force of nature than a writer, which was what I was looking to become.  The port did nothing to advance that cause.  It killed Kerouac, and did me no favors.  I even tried to get into jazz.  I took pride that Jack Kerouac and I were both alive on the same planet for a few months. It was a weird time.

Kerouac’s journey began with what would become his manifesto: “On the Road.”  For those of you in the “it’s not about the destination, it’s about the chaotic, poetic journey, this is your jam.  On the road was (as far as I know) the first American road trip novel, and was the third such novel that I encountered, and the one that cemented the genre as one of my favorites.

Kerouac wrote the draft of “On the Road” on one continuous long scroll of teletype paper so as not to disturb his flow.  The other day I was imagining Jack being alive now and having literally endless digital paper at his disposal, leaving no reason (except for a power outage) to ever stop typing.

He once said, “The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved…”  This was Kerouac’s ethos – a torrid love affair wild, the untamed, and the beautifully chaotic.

I’m not sure if the new generation is even capable of appreciating Kerouac.  They seem completely detached from The Past and seem remarkably inept at perspective taking.  And so much for them.

Here’s to Kerouac, a true literary badass.

N.P.: “Desolation Angels” – Jack Kerouac