Halloweird

By any estimation, it was an unusual experience.
 

2007, this was. A cluster of us gathered around a makeshift plywood coffin, peering in at a friend who lay therein, his eyes closed and arms crossed around his exposed torso. The group’s ringmaster, dressed in a monkish robe and gazing at our mutual acquaintance through black-painted eyes, recited a few incantations before leaning over the face of the reposed and inserting a spoon, filled with “zombie paste,” into his mouth. Employing the help of his assistants, the non-monk closed the top half of the coffin, and per his instructions, the rest of us edged in, pounding on the closed box with hands and fists, and making riotous whooping sounds fit to raise the dead – which, after all, was the point.
 

This task completed, the coffin was re-opened, and the man lying within wrested himself to his knees, stood, and laughed. Then he reached for a whiskey sour and got blasted.
 

Only on Halloween.
 

Clearly, it’s a strange circle in which I travel. Not every host would cobble together a handful of amateur actors to ring in the holiday with an arcane zombie-raising ritual culled from the Internet. As far as Halloween celebrations go, it was admittedly over-the-top; most adults who still play dress-up content themselves with costumes and cocktails, maybe a Jello treat molded in the shape of a severed finger. The rest, having consigned All Hallow’s Eve to their candy-crazed children, engage in something simpler: Carting the kiddies around to various neighborhoods, where they knock on neighbors’ doors to collect Snickers bars and Junior Mints – all in preparation for ignoring their dentists’ warnings and gorging on treats until they slip into a semi-lucid sugar coma. You haven’t done Halloween right until you’ve lain groaning in a pile of empty Dum Dum wrappers and begged for a swift and merciful death.
 

It’s an odd time of year, with odd traditions associated with it. Curious, I took to my laptop to see how different cultures choose to acknowledge this most ghoulish of holidays, expecting that no custom could be as strange as pounding on a fake coffin and quaffing Jim Beam while dressed as a decomposing pirate.
 

I was wrong.
 

Apparently there’s something about this time of year that inspires people to ratchet up the creepiness factor to a skin-crawling degree. Viewed objectively, sure, trick-or-treating is an off-beat practice; we’re so used to it, having been exposed to it at a young age, that we fail to see the ludicrousness of begging for Smarties in a ballerina tutu. But as strange as this custom is, it pales to how the people of the Czech Republic choose to mark Oct. 31. Each year, the Czechs place a series of chairs by the fireside – one chair for each living family member, and one chair for each deceased family member’s spirit – and then they just sorta sit there. What they do after this is ostensibly a mystery; I guess you’d have to ask a Czech what comes next. Backgammon with great-great-grandpa Olaf? Bizarre. I’m betting the conversation at these shindigs is disproportionately one-sided.
 

This is according to pimpkinpatchesandmore.org, which cites actual sources and references, like a big boy. And of course, as we all know, everything on the Internet is completely trustworthy. Wink, wink.
 

Assuming the site is on the up-and-up, it reveals some downright quirky traditions smattered across world cultures – with one of the quirkiest coming from, of all places, England. You’d think English and American cultures would hew fairly closely to each other, since we split off from the mother country like a multiplying cell; but no, their Englishness goes beyond mere tea and crumpets. Instead of carving pumpkins, Anglo children carve designs into giant beets, which they call “punkies,” then carry their punkies through the streets while singing the “Punkie Night Song” and knocking on doors to beg for money. Not candy – cash. There’s a kind of collective genius at work here. I wish the United States had adopted this moolah-centric practice when I was a child haunting neighbors’ doorsteps. Almond Joys and taffy squares are fantastic, don’t get me wrong, but if I’d come home with a bag full of money instead, I could have used the loot to purchase longer-lasting mementos of the holiday. Important kid stuff, like Spider-Man slap bracelets and fake vomit. I consider it a lost opportunity.
 

Never to be outdone in the strangeness department is China, which celebrates a Halloween-like festival called Teng Chieh. During this unpronounceable holiday, food and water are placed before photos of the dead, while bonfires and lanterns are lit to illuminate the paths of spirits as they travel the earth. Now, it’s been my observation that dead people require significantly less food and water than do the living; you don’t see a lot of zombies ordering sliced ham at the deli counter. They also tend not to travel much, as most airlines still consider them checked luggage. But that’s not the topper. Teng Chieh’s crescendo comes when participants build giant boats out of paper, and then burn them to free those spirits whose bodies were never buried. The connection between freed spirits and life-sized origami boats has never been made clear. Maybe ghosts are afraid of the ocean. Too many jellyfish and whatnot. It’s understandable.
 

Yeah, I know, I’m a jackass. Here are these cultures honoring the memories of lost loved ones, and here I am squirting water at them from the plastic flower on my lapel. Yet it’s clearly the time of year for off-the-charts weird, and it seems none among us are exempt – least of all me and my coffin-thumping ways. Maybe the long, slow slide from autumn into winter just gives us all the willies, and this is how we react: Mammoth beets, empty chairs, paper boats, and blood-sucking vampires. Sounds like a party at Nicholas Cage’s house.
 

So have fun trick-or-treating, folks. On this day, it’s about the most normal activity there is.

Masters of guilt

Dogs are masters of guilt. You’ve got to admire them, in a way. Anyone who’s owned one will recognize the following scenario: You take a seat next to your beloved pup, scratch them behind the ears for a good five minutes while cooing and making inane baby-talk, and then you stop, ’cause we humans gotta do stuff – dust the living room, bake a pie, make a pasta sculpture of Ed McMahon, whatever. And the second you take your hand off that adorable head, it looks at you sideways with those hurt, imploring eyes. “Don’t stop!” they plead. “Love me forever or I’ll die!” 

 

Then you cave, and nothing gets done. You sit there, dusty and pieless, and scratch until your hand feels like it’s been slammed in the door of a Jeep Cherokee. I’ve never felt more like a scummy ax murderer than when a black lab fixes me with that needy stare.

 

We love them anyway. What choice do we have?

 

It’s cuteness, and relative innocence, which allows them to get away with acts that would be grounds for a restraining order under any other context. I’m thinking specifically of a dog so hyper and ill-behaved that, were he human, he’d be straight-jacketed and confined in a high-security mental institution, locked in a cell with a guy who makes papier-mâché hats out of dead woodchucks. For the sake of protecting this K-9’s identity, I’ll call him “Dipstick.”

 

Dipstick is a pitbull-boxer mix owned by a friend of mine, “Gandalf,” whose patience with his dog’s shenanigans is so high it implies an outsized tolerance for severe punishment. You could probably hook electrodes to his nipples and use the trigger to tap out the Bill of Rights in Morse code, and he’d just smile and say, “Is that all you’ve got?”

 

What makes Dipstick a handful is boundless energy combined with profound stupidity. Usually the low-IQ dogs are found among the smaller set, the shih tzus and miniature poodles – dogs that would almost be cats, were it not for a propensity to urinate on sofa cushions and mail carriers’ pants. That a mid-sized pooch can demonstrate such low aptitude is almost impressive, indicating some kind of head trauma in his past, or maybe a history of heavy drug use. The latter seems unlikely given his lack of opposable thumbs, but it would explain why he makes Ozzy Osbourne look like Aristotle.

 

Every time I walk through Gandalf’s front door, there’s Dipstick, bounding over to assault me with his coiled frame of taut tendons and sinewy muscles, a hyped-up mass of kinetic energy carrying the forceful wallop of an excavator’s wrecking ball. Up on his hind legs, front paws groping frantically at my torso like a breathless lover, it is apparently one of Dipstick’s life goals to pummel me to the ground, where he’d likely perform unspeakable acts with a tongue roughly the size of an airport runway. Standing upright in the face of such an attack is an exercise worthy of some kind of Congressional medal, the kind they give to front-line heroes who jump on grenades to spare their fellow infantrymen. Someone call Obama. Tell him it’d be my first medal since placing third in a sixth-grade three-legged sack race.

 

It’s not that I mind being mauled by a mutt, providing it’s a mild mauling, and short in duration – just long enough for the dog to get the initial excitement out of its system. In the proper context, such a greeting is delightful. I play doting uncle to a handful of friends’ various dogs, and it’s a treat to hear the clop-clop of paws clacking against the kitchen linoleum, and to feel the heat of excited puppy breath as it licks my cheek. Inevitably, I leave these homes smelling like Purina and butt. Completely worth it.

 

The problem with Dipstick is that the initial excitement, that friendly fervor, doesn’t end. Ever. I could camp out at Gandalf’s house for a month, and there’d be Dipstick, snapping playfully at my hands and scratching at numerous areas of my body with claws that could puncture the hide of a callus-ridden elephant. It’d be helpful if he could follow basic commands, but no. While he knows certain key phrases, like “sit” and “get the hell away from me,” he complies for roughly the duration of a mouse fart. Then it’s back to sticking his snout in my business. He’d be a good door-to-door salesman, if he didn’t have the cognitive chops of a newborn baby.

 

His transgressions are many and grievous; you can’t enjoy a simple evening of television without the bugger making his presence known, usually at decibels that could shatter diamonds. And yet, when he nudges his head under my hand, I crumble like a dry cookie and rub behind his ears as though he were the sweetest, most benign creature this side of Winnie the Pooh. It’s the eyes, the upturned ears. I’m a sucker for a cute face.

 

This isn’t something a human can get away with. If a buddy of yours stands in the middle of your living room and shouts obscenities at the TV during “The Simpsons,” you don’t spare him punishment because he makes doe eyes and curls in your lap afterward; you sock him in the arm and tell him to shut up. Then you realize he’s on your lap and get really creeped out.

 

With a head case such as Dipstick, sanity and peace of mind are sacrificed in the name of interspecies companionship – which, for animal lovers like me, wields a certain strange power. Anything is better than the guilt that comes from ignoring that rub-me gaze, a resourceful dog’s get-out-of-jail-free card in times of misbehavior and general bad antics. Maybe I’m a sucker, but a dog would have to do something shockingly out-of-bounds to warrant permanent disapproval, like knocking off a federal bank, or forming a Britney Spears tribute band.

 

At some point, tough, you’ve got to draw a line in the sand. That pasta sculpture won’t finish itself.

 

Sweet sorrow

She doesn’t remember this, but I do.

 

It was 1994, and kids were still wearing neon socks. I was 12, she was 11, and though we attended different grade schools, we were both part of a program called SPARK, which was basically an advanced curriculum for so-called “gifted” students – boys and girls who exhibited an aptitude for scholastics and were expected to achieve some form of greatness. In my case, I squandered much of my advantage on writing short stories about flatulent vampires. She’d go on to fare a bit better.

 

SPARK kids from all the area schools got together toward the end of spring for a series of mock debates, though with summer imminent and middle school just over the horizon, there was a higher-than-average prevalence of doodling and booger-flinging; the best among us weren’t immune to the unique joys of an especially adhesive schnozberry. On the last day, two teams of debaters squared off against one another. I was a judge, which required all the mental acuity of an aardvark.

 

The first time we spoke was when she came over to enter her name in a logbook I was keeping of all the team members. I took a look at her as she approached. Glasses, check. Freckles, check. Pigtails, double-check. Clearly a nerd; clearly my people. I felt comfortable around her even before she opened her mouth.

 

“What’s your name?” I asked.

 

Her response: “Guess.”

 

I hate that game. The whole point of asking a question is to avoid the very act of guessing (said the snark); things could have started off badly between us, had I already completed my metamorphosis into a true-blue cynic. 

 

But they didn’t. After a pause to consider my response, I mimed writing in my notepad, and said, “Okay, let’s see. B ... I ... T ... C ... No, really, what’s your name?”

 

It was a gamble, because even though it was meant as a joke, she easily could have been offended. I wouldn’t have blamed her. Here I am, 12 years old, playfully bestowing upon her a mild swear word which would have earned me a good scolding had an adult overheard. 

Turns out we had a similar sense of humor. She giggled.

 

“Kristen,” she said.

 

It was the first time I ever heard her laugh. Twenty years later, it hasn’t gotten old.

 

The “Kristen” in question has orbited my life like a spectral comet via circumstances that are difficult to describe. The Reader’s Digest condensed version goes something like this: After moving on from the Lilliputian land of elementary school, we attended the same middle school, which is where her memory of the origins of our friendship start coming into focus. After that, high school. Then, weirdly, the same college, where we co-hosted a radio show that probably broke myriad FCC regulations governing cuss words and general decency. (We’re degenerates, she and I.) It was an unlikely journey which, considering the already long odds, should have ended there.

 

Only, here’s the coup de grace: She’s managing editor of the Journal Tribune. Yup. She’s that Kristen, and she’s sitting next to me right now, managing and editing simultaneously ’cause she’s a beast, and probably juggling a bunch of other stuff – angry phone calls, letters from whack jobs, things of that nature. Having her at my side has become as natural as beer burps and flossing, and decades of prolonged exposure to each other has allowed us to develop a shorthand that likely confuses and horrifies any unfortunate eavesdroppers. All to our mutual delight, I’m sure. We’ve got a bit of a sadistic streak.

 

Every train arrives at some sort of destination, though, and Kristen’s stop is coming up; she’s leaving the Journal for greener pastures, while I remain here to write columns about hiccup cures and bird poop. For once, we’ve got tickets to different places.

 

And I’m happy for her, of course. I’d be kind of a tool if I wasn’t. Thing is, I’m also a little afraid.

 

When you work at a place as long as I have, you see people come and go; it’s only natural. Hers won’t be the first departure that leaves me feeling melancholy, and likely won’t be the last. I’m not always the best at displaying the soft and gooshy side, but it’s there – a diamond buried in a lump of coal – and there are ex-coworkers I miss to this day, people I think of the way you think of distant relatives, separated from you by miles and time.

 

Except Kristen and I are a different animal. And “time” really is the operative word, isn’t it? No bonds are stronger than the ones forged by shared history. A million years ago and in another life, she and I would rap about the future – what we’d do, where we’d go. Back then, neither of us could have predicted that our courses would run so parallel to each other; it would have been a notion as farfetched as any hackneyed sitcom story arc, too contrived to be realistic. Yet here we are, riffing about cheesy heavy metal mascots, shoehorning our brand of absurdity into whatever gaps we’ve got left in this crazy business. That’s what I’ll miss the most: a constant tether to the random palaver which, exempting a few short breaks, we’ve never really gone without. 

 

Do you mind if I address her directly for a second? Yeah, I know, it’s rude. You’re a regular reader, you’ve come with me all this way, and now I’m gonna go soliloquize to my buddy. I’ll make it up to you in the form of vintage wines and various pies. Just sit tight. This’ll only take a minute.

 

Dude.

 

You know you’re leaving me in the lurch, right? Jerk. I’ve found myself wondering how many times in the coming weeks I’ll catch myself turning to your desk, itching to share my latest brain fart, only to find an empty chair. They say amputees are sometimes roused from sleep with the sensation that all of their limbs are intact; they wiggle nonexistent fingers and toes. It’s only upon waking from a dream that they’re reminded a part of them is gone.

 

So I guess this is where I’m supposed to offer you some parting advice. Here goes: Don’t stop and give rides to hitchhiking bridge trolls, always wear a helmet while riding a unicycle, and never cut the red wire when disarming a car bomb. And maybe bring the pigtails back. Those were a good look for you.

 

Oh, and I love you. There’s that, too.

 

There. I said it.

 

Now get outta here.

 

Do do that due diligence you do do so well

“Due diligence.” I would do horrid, unspeakable things if it meant never hearing that phrase again. I’d French-kiss a donkey. I’d let a hippopotamus with swine flu hock a loogie in my ear. Anything.

It’s something I hear a lot while covering various municipal meetings, and to be fair to the people saying it, most probably aren’t aware of how tired and overused those words have become. Language, after all, is contagious. The longer you’re immersed in a situation – whether it be a city council, an Army regiment, or a middle school history class – the easier it becomes for the native jargon to seep into your own vernacular, become a part of your natural modes of speech. Hear “due diligence” enough times, and it quietly slips into your consciousness on a subliminal level; before you know it, you’re tossing it around as though the two words were born together, ejected from humanity’s lingual womb like a set of conjoined twins. 

Only that’s not what really happened. What really happened is that someone, somewhere, said “due diligence” and decided it felt good on their lips and tongue. So they said it a few more times. The person sitting next to them thought it had a nice ring to it, so they started saying it. And on and on, until now you can’t be on a board or committee without dutifully doing your due diligence. Of course, “do your due diligence” is the mutant child of that parent phrase, and sounds like some tongue-twisting line in a ’50’s Motown ditty. “Do do that due diligence you do do so well.” Gladys Knight and her Pips only wish they’d thought of it.

Not that I’m annoyed or anything.

Actually, I’m probably being a bit harsh, considering most of us have done something similar at least once in our lives. When I was around 10, it was fashionable to utter a sentence, and then tack the word “not” to the end of it to indicate that we really meant the opposite. It worked something like this: “I enjoy being manhandled by coke-snorting gorillas. NOT!” Colloquially, it was a way for us kids to make a statement in a “hip” or ironic manner, with the added bonus that it confused adults and made them regard us as though we were a species of tiny space aliens. Grammatically, it was an abomination. But it caught on and spread, and I’m totally proud to have been a part of it. Not.

Such phenomena were inevitable since the very point of language is to spread. It’s how human beings communicate with each other. When a person is born, the mind is a blank slate, and it gradually gets filled with the language and thoughts of others. My first word was “car” because my father was fond of talking about vintage muscle cars. To this day, I owe him credit for much of my salty vocabulary, populated by unprintable words that mostly refer, in unflattering terms, to various body parts and biological acts. It’s only natural that we carry with us some infantile vestiges of mimicry, and repeat the things we like. Monkey see, monkey do, as they say.

Where this becomes a problem is that we live in an era in which language, unfortunately, has been simplified and parsed down to its essentials. That leaves a shallower pool from which to draw our pet phrases and sayings. This wouldn’t have been a problem in, say, Victorian England – an era in which the mother tongue was nimble from wrapping itself around ornate, creatively complex turns of phrase. A quote from Charles Dickens’ “Great Expectations” illustrates what I mean: “I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place; and, as the morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so the evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw no shadow of another parting from her.” A beautifully rendered description, but outdated, since it doesn’t fit into the 140-character limit of a Twitter post. Nowadays, that same sentiment would be whittled down thusly: “Dude, score.”

With options and influence decidedly more limited in this age of monosyllabic brevity, we fall into the trap of uttering the same phrases over and over again. And it doesn’t stop with “due diligence.” There’s a long list of cringeworthy sayings which, in a perfect world, would be stricken from use under punishment of bludgeoning from a steel-knuckled goon. These include “at this point in time”; “moving forward”; “in my opinion”; “outside the box”; “putting the cart before the horse”; “it is what it is”; and “at the end of the day.” These have been repeated so often, they’ve almost stopped meaning anything; you could assemble a sentence by arranging them in just about any order, and still manage to say nothing of substance. “At the end of the day, we have to think outside the box moving forward at this point in time.” “In my opinion, at the end of the day, we have to do our due diligence moving forward and stop putting the cart before the horse.” Ugh. Someone whack me in the noggin with a rusty shovel.

Oh, well. It is what it is.

It’s easy to fall back on that kind of stuff, especially with the demands of modern life placing strains on our originality. So no one’s to blame, really; it’s just one of those things that happens, like the spread of a flu virus. But as language has shown a capacity to evolve, so too does it have the ability to devolve. Sometimes I wonder what Dickens would think, facing an onslaught of generic nonsayings and trite palaver. I imagine it would inspire him to weep silently into his own dog-eared copy of “Oliver Twist,” despairing as only a writer would over a bruised and battered lexicon.

Though I hate to be a pessimist. I’m sure the language will rebound from this scourge and flourish in a glorious renaissance, a tongue triumphant in its rise from the ashes.

Not.

Traveling down a rocky road

Here’s my new strategy for getting from Biddeford to Saco: Rocket packs.

 

I’m a genius.

 

Now, equipping yourself with the proper technology could be a challenge. It’s not like you can just stroll into a hardware store and buy rocket casings and fuel; this isn’t Syria. This means you’ll probably have to make your own, and as much as I’d love to launch into a full step-by-step description of how to build your own flying apparatus, two things are stopping me. One is that it would be irresponsible to provide directions for assembling a device that could be used to cause even the smallest harm, like singeing the hairs on Tom Selleck’s mustache. Two is that I have no idea how. I doodled through chemistry.

 

For the sake of argument, though, let’s assume you’re a prize-winning physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project and could make a toaster out of two paper clips and a can of asparagus. Let’s also assume that you have to travel from, say, Biddeford High School to Thornton Academy in Saco. In this scenario, a home-made rocket pack is probably your best bet, because with all the construction going on, driving there in an actual car would take longer than reading “War and Peace” while on heavy painkillers. And it wouldn’t be as fun.

 

It’s bad enough that Route 1 is blocked off. Not only is it a convenient artery through the city, but there are a lot of local businesses that reside smack-dab in the midst of the maelstrom; to patron one of these establishments, you’ve almost got to be air-dropped like a care package from an Army helicopter. 

 

But if you take the alternate route to Saco, down Biddeford’s Main Street, you’ll be locked in traffic for longer than it takes to get onto a ride at Disney World. That’s because the detour goes right through the heart of downtown, a busy area to begin with; and at the epicenter of all of this stands a lone traffic cop, directing vehicles this way and that, and likely wishing he was doing something exponentially more exciting, like writing tickets for expired inspection stickers. I kinda feel sorry for whoever’s got that beat, considering what they have to do. Stand ... point. Stand ... point. There’s more intellectual stimulation in the plastic ball pit at Chuck E. Cheese.

 

For years I’ve been wishing that the state would start patching over myriad stretches of pockmarked roadways with a less punishing surface; the shocks on my car have already gone through several rough drafts of a suicide note. Now I’m getting what I wished for, and it’s been an unforgiving reminder that the fulfillment of wishes is always a more complex business than we assume. When I envisioned the city’s streets undergoing much-needed rehabilitation, I figured it would be done in sections, staggered so that getting from A to B wouldn’t involve the kind of planning usually required of vacations and mob hits. Instead, the strategy is apparently to do everything at once, which has made Biddeford look like a city recovering from a Godzilla attack. At least a monster rampage would have given us some fun anecdotes, maybe a cool picture or two.

 

Unfortunately, Biddeford’s only a microcosm for a state-wide road work extravaganza. The turnpike is a Kardashian-level mess. I zipped up to Lewiston a few weeks ago to hang out with my dad on Father’s Day, and found that even the simple act of driving in a straight line for an hour is fraught with complications. At least three different sections of the Pike were whittled down to single-lane travel on the short 50-mile stretch, and the Lewiston exit – to my chagrin – was completely blocked off. Closed. Inaccessible. A myth as fanciful as the unicorn, or the mighty hammer of Thor. I understand Lewiston has a reputation for being a rough burg teeming with ne’er-do-wells and hard-drinking goons, but on rare occasions, people do actually want to go there. The way it’s been quarantined by heavy construction, you’d think the strategy at the state level is to let the city cannibalize itself, collapse under its own weight like a dying star, so the land can be razed and a 24-hour mega WalMart erected in its wake. One of the lame ones, too, with no air hockey table.

 

Most Mainers have heard the old joke that there are four seasons in this state: Almost winter, winter, still winter, and construction. (Cue rimshot.) The yukster who coined this aphorism probably had a summer in mind like the one just past, one dominated by pavers and diggers – which are great fun if you’re six years old and playing with Tonka trucks, less so if you’re 46 and stuck in gridlock, the guy in back of you blasting Springsteen at window-rattling decibels. Obviously, this road work is long overdue, and there’s no way to get it done without flaggers and orange cones and the whole grand production. But to do it all at once feels like some elaborate prank, a state-sponsored “neener-neener” that bounds on sadism. Somewhere, in a dark office with thumb tacks pinned to a wall-sized state map, sits a hard-hatted supervillain, laughing maniacally while stroking an evil-looking cat. Think Inspector Gadget foe Dr. Claw, but with a mustache.

 

I’m all for infrastructure improvements, given the appropriate planning. The nation’s roadways are starting to resemble the lunar surface, minus dimpled balls left over from a spirited game of space golf. It’s just a shame that large swatches of travel routes have to be blocked off in the process. A few more weeks of this insanity and it’s off to the shed to construct a flying apparatus; I’m thinking that, given enough Diet Coke and Mentos, I can create enough propulsion to at least get myself to the bridge. From there, it’s about a 20-minute walk to Thornton; not bad, considering the current glut of detours and logjams.

 

Now all that’s needed is to figure out a safe landing procedure. Something involving a body suit made of foam insulation and marshmallows? Could work. A quick call to the patent office and it’s clear sailing.