The Day Inbetween

Today is the day after Halloween and before the election. As a biologist I saw put it at the beginning of her seminar today: “This Monday is like being between the devils and the deep blue sea. I guess the devils are past us. Let’s now just hope we don’t drown.”

So given the options, let’s talk about Halloween.
Halloween is the time to be either more yourself, less yourself, or both. Invited to a party themed around coming dressed as your adolescent former self, I was most happy to take out my skateboard, spiking hair, and doing all those other things that transformed me back into that 15 year-old. Into that better version of me.

It seems the whole night got carried away with the idea however, as I suffered something that happened regularly in my teen years – a failure of my green Subaru. True, it is a different Subaru than then, and a different green, but it is just as good at getting a flat tire right as you are planning to go somewhere.


...
Sunday was a little better. Although we got only a few trick-or-treaters at our door, some were simply as cute as little pumpkins.
Some in fact were little pumpkins.

This time I took a different approach to costume and character, I think with some success: And how hard was it hard for me to go as an obnoxious French philosopher named 'Jacques'?...


…unfortunately, not as hard as it should have been. Of course this raises its own existential issues I'll have to face up to, but at the least I was told my fake accent was tres bien. (Note the “weight of existence” hefted in the right hand, and the empty jar under the left arm. What’s inside? “Nothing. It is em-pty. zis is ze nat-ure of ‘uman life.")

And then there are the lives of some authentic American francophones of more immediate and central concern to many of us: Monsieur Kerry and entourage, I wish you the best of luck demain.
And the rest?
c’est la vie, comrades, c’est la vie.