Its all people talk about! I'm getting TOTALLY sick of it. I'm not wearing a danged costume OK! I'm not going to any wild drunken Halloween parties and there won't be any bowls of candy laying around for me and my wife to add to our waistlines. We haven't had a trick-or-treater in years. How do you say 'trick-or-treat' in Farsi? The idea of these rich Iranians and overstuffed Yuppies who live in this neighborhood climbing these steep streets in the quest for a free candy barrette when you can buy a bag of them down at Target for $3 is ludicrous. You're just asking for a speeding BMW whose cell-phone occupied driver is talking with his wife a block away to mow you down like ninepins in the autumn gloom.

Speaking of autumn, what idiot put Halloween in a season where temperatures plunge into the low seventies or even the sixties as the sun goes down? These pampered children are never allowed outside anyway and spend most of their time playing 'Grand Theft Auto' or downloading porn off the internet. You think they're going to don some idiot costume and wander the streets panhandling candy bars when they can just bully Mom into driving down to Costco and getting the institutional-sized tub of Oreos for them to eat in their locked bedrooms while they paste Hannah Montana's face on the female co-star of 'Motel Mamas' in the new cracked copy of AfterFX they just downloaded off the web? I don't think so. Kids are not what they used to be.

I cast my mind back to the halcyon days as a boomer youth, happily participating in the orgy of vandalism and misbehavior that was Halloween, or the night before which was labeled 'Mischief Night'. This was the time to prop spikey ten-penny nails under the tires of the neighborhood grumps. Trees hung with toilet paper, windows were emblazoned with every foul curse that Larry Weiderspan's older brother learned in reform school, shrubbery was turned into torches with a liberal dousing with lighter fluid. We didn't ask our parents permission to go out in the freezing cold pitch darkness with a gang of our friends. They were glad to get rid of us at all times. There wasn't an egg left in a single refrigerator and we made water balloons from random hoses for the pitched battles with those punks from the next street.

Kids don't do that kind of stuff anymore. In these decadent times they go to organized 'events' in malls or, if they're older, they find places they can congregate and do some binge drinking. The older youngsters, those in their teens and twenties, have turned Halloween into a drunken Pagan orgy. Women aren't any looser than the young boomers, that would be impossible, but they wear better underwear to a Halloween party purchased with their individual accounts at Victoria's Secret Online and egged on by the lastest round of Paris Hilton scandals. Boys have been reduced to brain-dead oafism by the ADHD drugs the school gives them to wash down with gallon-sized jugs of Jose Cuervo that their big brother buys for them them at Costco. Offices encourage their employees to dress up, a sure method of separating the alienated from the sincere. Eat sugar, you helots; a fat slave is a happy slave! Who of us hasn't snarled with contempt at the administrative types and their retarded sense of 'fun' ? It makes you want to burn the place down with all of them in it. The Age Of Obama will fix their Democratic-voting adzes.

But the best part of Halloween is the commercials! You know that Mattress World is going to dress up their employees as mattresses and sofa cushions listlessly waving their arms that are sticking out of these badly-sewn furniture costumes. They might as well have a sign behind them saying 'Help Wanted- Half-Wits Only'. Kind of like what they should be putting behind Obama in his commercials.

This might be the last big Halloween. The consumer culture that created this beastly wallow in oral hedonism and piggery is probably going to be a thing of the past soon. People won't be so eager to party as the standard of living tanks and the currency becomes worthless. Devils and ghosts won't be so funny when they come down to earth and make your Iron Rice Bowl pension effectively worthless. That second house up at the lake will be just as worthless when environmental regulations take away your car and leave it the spooky, broken-windowed, abandoned haunt of ghosts and raccoons. It will be harder to put up a funny skeleton display in your front yard with the one 40 watt $250 mercury-gas-filled light bulb you can afford to illuminate it. The hard drinking will go on. That is a characteristic of Socialist societies. Having children is not.

Now in the autumn of our country the thoughtless crowd seems to be in the mood to temporarily put down the bag of Three Musketeer miniatures screw the cap back onto the generic bottle of Walmart Gin and load the cats, the kids, the illegal alien live-in maid and grandpa's ghost into the Mini-van and drive this bloated and obese crewe twenty yards down the street so they can all vote for a New Age Of Change. Trick or Treat Mr. Big Government! Just put all the free goodies in the bag and we'll be on our way. A hundred years of Socialist failure mean nothing to these lard-brained, mouth-breathing morons... Obama is as persuasive as the guy from Mattress World and he wants to give you more than just a free mattress! People are so stupid its scaring me to death. We've been cursed with the demons of ignorance, selfishness and greed and they will steal every penny from the fools who think they can vote themselves something for nothing. A country cursed.

Well, I'm going to go fill my sink with water and put an apple in it and try to grab it with my teeth. Tradition.