Ah, Halloween, I love you. I hope you never end. The only thing I don’t like about trick-or-treating from door to door is the high rate of gun violence. It’s uncomfortable having to wear bulletproof armor under one’s costume.
Yet here we are, many decades later, still going out for candy. This year, I dressed up as a hotdog bun. Then, when my friends and I came home, we spent the night watching scary movies:
We started out with a classic, “The Gremlins”; and then we watched all of its sequels. After finishing, we were still in the mood for films like this, so we watched “The Goonies” and all of its sequels; after which we watched “The Critters”, “The Ghoulies”, “The Munchies”, and “The Tumblies”, as well as all the sequels to those. Then we watched “The Re-Animator” and “Darth Vader” and “Phantasm 4” and “Nightmare on Elm Street” and “A Very Brady Christmas”.
So, when we finally went to bed that night, we had dreams where memorable aspects of all the above films got mixed together into something like a Grand Halloween Opera.
And whatever costume each of us had worn for trick-or-treating was what we were wearing when we woke up the following morning, for we didn’t bother to remove our costumes before falling asleep. — So it was like that scene in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, where Satan awakes and looks around at all his fellows, the fallen angels who were thrown into Hell with him, and he marvels at the change in their appearance, for they all look demonic now that they’ve been Goddamned out of Heaven.
Yes, there we were — a very motley crew:
As I said, I myself was dressed as a hotdog bun. And my friend Beelzebub, who was sleeping nearby, was dressed as a coronavirus.
Our pals Mammon & Mulciber were dressed as Phil & Don Everly of the popular country-rock band The Everly Brothers. (It was funny: while they were lying there with their eyes still closed, they happened to start singing in their sleep the song “All I Have to Do Is Dream”.)
Our friend Belial wore a blank mask and carried a lit torch — I don’t know what he was supposed to be (maybe the angel from Duchamp’s “Étant donnés”?) but I was glad that he didn’t end up dropping the torch in his sleep and burning the place down.
Uriel copied my ghost idea and wore a white bed-sheet, but his was covered with grass stains.
Adam and Eve were a gutted gourd and a dying cat, respectively.
Since he’s an alien, Ithuriel normally must dress up in order to fit in among earthlings; thus, on Halloween, he can just be himself and disrobe, and everyone thinks he’s costumed as an extra-terrestrial.
Zephron & Abdiel were Shannon Doherty & Luke Perry. They made passionate love, all night long.
Lastly, our good friend Moloch was dressed as Tamar from chapter thirty-eight of Genesis. That’s the story where her father-in-law Judah chances upon her while traveling and, not recognizing Tamar as his daughter-in-law, assumes that she is a prostitute because her face is veiled; therefore, Judah impregnates her with twins; and the twin that eventually comes out last manages to breach the matrix first because, while striving to be born, he sticks his hand out of the womb long enough for the midwife to tie a scarlet thread around it. So, Moloch’s costume consisted of a sexy veil, plus a fake baby-arm strapped on to the loins.
I asked Adam, whom you’ll recall was dressed as a gourd, “Why didst thou hollow out thy guts and place a candle instead thereof?” And he answered that the flickering flame represents the soul, and the fact that the breath of life can extinguish it with a puff signifies that the soul is just as mortal as its body. Only the spirit — the wind that bloweth where it listeth — is eternally indestructible. [See the Gospel of John 3:8.]
No comments:
Post a Comment