Joyeux Halloween.
2016-10-31
Happy Halloween Everyone!
Some of you may not know that Halloween is my favourite holiday. It tends to come as a surprise to most I find. Perhaps it’s the expectation people hold that Xmas usually takes the top spot on many people’s lists.
Understandable, annual gift exchanges are all manner of fun. However, I’m a big geek, and that means I like any excuse to wear a costume. Halloween isn’t all fun and games for me though, my enjoyment and love of the holiday is tempered by a deeper pain, one I keep hidden from the world.
You see, for me Halloween haunts me (see what I did there?) with a yearly reminder of life ambitions unrealized. I know, Halloween doesn’t hold the same kind of soul crushing disappointment for most of you, but then I suggest that few of you have ever had a dream as glorious as Ghostbusting.
The year was 1984, I was 5 years old and I saw my future clearly. Without any doubt in my mind, I knew what I was meant to do, the thing that I was born to do: I was a Ghostbuster.
I spent the next 6 years preparing. Countless afternoons and Saturday mornings spent watching training programs cleverly disguised as cartoons. The fruitless trips to the library, which never had a copy of Tobin’s Spirit Guide (because it did not exist, unbeknownst to me). The discovery of some manner of gloopy substance which I was convinced was ectoplasm on a tree root at the school play field, but which was summarily confiscated by my grade 2 teacher. No doubt she wished to claim the glory of such a monumental discovery for herself.
My life was a clear path, at the end of which was Ghostbusting.
Surely I would grow up to ensnare the living impaired within traps and then deposit them into a laser containment unit. Never once did I question the veracity of this plan.
Unfortunately, a dream as beautiful as mine was not meant for a world as ugly as this. So it was that the trash compactor of reality crushed my fragile spirit at the tender age of 10. You see, as plausible as Ghostbusting and the related technology seemed to me when I was 5, by the time I was 10, the release of Ghostbusters 2 made it perfectly clear that ghostbusting was a work of fiction.
Ever since that horrible realization, I’ve floated aimlessly through my existence, seeking but never finding the meaning and direction of purpose that I once possessed. I’ve learned to live with the pain, but every year, on October the 31st, that old wound re-opens.
Halloween, the most ghostbustin’est day of the year. Don’t cry for me kids, I’m already dead. Which makes me some kind of zombie. BBRRAAAAIIINNNSSSS!