And so it arrives.  The Main Event.  Halloween proper, the zero hour of the Gallaway Calendar, which, if you’ve been paying attention (and I know most of you haven’t, because you were busy duct-taping fake intestines to your front porch or mainlining candy corn like it’s Adderall), marks not the end but the beginning.  The Big Bang of the weird.  The first tick of the cosmic clock that runs of mischief, masks, and the sacred art of pretending.  You want to be a sexy vampire?  A depressed cowboy?  A sentient bag of Doritos?  Today, the universe says: “Yes.”

Like any good New Year, today demands a resolution.  Not the gym membership kind.  Not the “I’ll stop doomscrolling after midnight” kind.  I’m talking about the real stuff.  The marrow-deep vow to live louder, weirder, and with more intentional chaos.  To reject the tyranny of the beige.  To embrace the sacred disorder of the human soul.

Because Halloween is the only day the world agrees to play by Gallaway rules: that masks reveal more than they hide, that fear is a form of worship, and that the line between comedy and horror is not a line at all, but a Mobius strip make out of rubber bats and existential dread.

So tonight, when you’re out there – whether you’re chaperoning sugar-addled goblins or dancing in a warehouse dressed as a haunted spreadsheet – remember this: you are not celebrating death.  You are celebrating the refusal to be dead.  You are ringing in the new year of the beautifully deranged, the spiritually feral, the unapologetically strange.

Happy Halloween, dear reader.  May your candy be spiked, your costumes be cursed, and your soul be just a little more unhinged than it was yesterday.

Now go howl at something.

N.P.: “This Is Halloween” – Marilyn Manson