¡Feliz Dia de Los Muertos!

I realize it’s still 2 1/2 hours early to be celebrating the Day of the Dead, but oh well. Halloween is damn near over anyhow, and I’m not going to be awake when the clock strikes midnight. At least, I hope I’m not awake. I gotta be up at 4am. Hooray for commuting and corporate America!

Halloween has been a nice mellow day this year. I decided early on today that I wasn’t going to sit up and hand out candy all night. I felt really bad making this decision, but when it comes down to it, Sunday nights just aren’t good nights for kids knocking on the door all night. We usually go to bed early on Sundays around here because of all the hard partyin’ we’ve been doing all weekend. Next year I suspect I’ll be more than happy to sit up all night with a bowl of treats.

I felt even worse about this decision when I peeked outside at about 6pm and realized that most of my neighbors had darkened their porches and homes, and there was this small, merry band of costumed children making their way down the block. How horrible to be that young and excited about getting dressed up and getting candy…and then you find out half your neighborhood is closed up tighter than Hilary Duff’s legs. When I saw that, I almost burst from the house with my bag of candy, flinging apologies and 100 Grand bars at the kids as they passed my yard. One of the littlest children was dressed as a ninja turtle. Jesus. I suck as a human being.

Aside from the lack of treating, I watched a whole bevy of horror flicks all day long, pausing only to vacuum during a particularly slow part in Inferno, and then for an hour while I carved my pumpkins (god bless TiVo in all its glory). I think I did a decent job on the pumpkins, although they are very obviously a mere shadow of my past orange-globed glories. Sad comes in many forms, people, and this is most definitely one of them.

At the moment, I am watching Ernest Scared Stupid. As if that isn’t sad enough, I’m watching it on DVD. Yes. I own it on DVD. My TiVo is cranking away, recording the Mario Bava mini-marathon on IFC right now, and I need something else to watch in the meantime. I haven’t seen Ernest Scared Stupid in about two years, so I thought it was high time. Besides, it has a cool theme song. Who couldn’t love it? And the movie has a “story” to it for me. My friends and I went to the movies intent on seeing People Under the Stairs. But the theater wouldn’t sell us tickets, saying you had to be 21 to see an R flick. We were all 17 and we knew they were full of shit, but what could we do? So we bought tickets to Ernest Scared Stupid with the full intent of sneaking into People. Debbie’s boyfriend Mike and I were the last two to try and sneak in, and we got caught and subsequently banished to the movie we bought tickets for. The thing that pissed me off the most was that Mike had already seen the movie. He laughed like a moron throughout the entire thing while I just fumed over missing what I figured was going to be a kickass movie.

Years later I realized how much I dug Ernest Scared Stupid and how it reminded me of those wacky fun days as a kid. So yeah, it holds a special place. A tiny one, but a special one nonetheless.

Ah, I’m climbing in bed in the hopes that I will fall unconscious before the scintillating Bavarian Miak scene…woo-wee, is that one ever a gut-buster!

At any rate…Hope you all had a happy Halloween, and ¡feliz Dia de Los Muertos!