The Touch of Satan John Shepard (radiographite@gmail.com) - Fri Nov 13, 2009 05:31:04 GMT - 1099 Halloween 2009 was a month long. When I say a friend of ours throws these epic Halloween parties, I think people first imagine lampshades on heads, people waking up in bathtubs, cops being called at least twice during the night. I guess she went through that phase in her life years ago and kind of outgrew it. Or maybe you imagine the opposite: cocktails and hors d'oeuvres, standing crowds, stilted conversations through gnashed teeth ("Glenda looks fabulous since the plastic surgery, don't you agree?") (me: "why, was she in an accident?") and tinkly piano music piped in. I'd walk out of either kind of party. This year it was a rented cabin up in the woods. You can't take a bad picture up there, there's a stream running 50 feet from the porch with little steps leading down to it. Maybe this is what I should be planning for, that when I retire (ha!) it'll be to a place like that, some cabin with a stream in the yard. Then I'll do like Maxfield Parrish, stop drawing girls on rocks and just do landscapes for the second half of my life. Not. The staples of these Halloween events every year: pumpkin carving and a scavenger hunt. The location is usually chosen specifically for scavenger hunt opportunities: in 2004 it was at Edgefield, in 2005 it was a beach house in Seaside. 2006 the scavenger hunt was in a graveyard (in the daytime, I gather she tried the nighttime version years ago and said never again). 2007 was in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart, part of a "seven deadly sins" theme (Wal-Mart being greed), 2008 was just sort of wandering the streets of Portland's Laurelhurst district. 2009? The woods. Middle of the night. Flashlights. Rain. As a general sense of the flavor of the scavenger hunts: we are instructed not to buy anything, and not to, you know, go to our cars or go home to get items we happen to already have. As for theft, it is disclaimed "it's only illegal if you get caught" and there are usually a few things on the list that might only be gotten by stealing. Nothing is planted so expect to find maybe half the list, depending on what's lying around on the day. Items have a point value. A gum wrapper may be five points. A dead animal (you are provided bags and gloves) maybe 500 points. Only once has a dead animal actually been brought in (a seagull) (for some reason only vertebrates seem to count). There are usually a couple of very high-point but damn-near-impossible things on the list, so if someone got really lucky, they could bag the big item and go sit back. We're usually divided into teams. And there's a physical prize for the winning team, usually on the order of a book or DVD and a gift card of some sort. Lastly, an innovation the last couple years is that larger or impractical items can be photographed, or at least there's a "pictures" section on the list. Don't kid oneself that these events would be safe to bring kids. We've got sick senses of humor. So how'd the scavenger hunt go? Two teams, three people each. I didn't do so well personally. I think my blood sugar collapsed during it, I came back feeling kind of broken. It was fun traipsing around the woods at night, but trying to actually look for stuff, you'd be amazed how hard that is. I mean simple, woodsey stuff like pine cones and mushrooms. Must have been the wrong season. For that matter, you can't go four blocks in Portland without seeing a dead squirrel, but in the woods, I guess, there are janitors; we saw no vertebrates alive or dead. Lots of spiders and slugs though. I was overall having One Of My Moments and I think I felt the whole time like I was letting my team down, leading them on wild goose chases or something. I still get those moments now and then. It's the only downer of the whole weekend. That said, I'm having a heck of a time making a tellable story out of the good parts of the weekend. I guess I was too busy being there to think about how I'd blog it. We broke out the bad movies. Centerpiece this year was The Touch of Satan, courtesy Mystery Science Theater 3000. It's a Mike episode, which I know is the off button for a lot of people, but I always liked Mike better and never could get into Joel. This episode is probably why. The film is practically made for MST3K - a typical conversation in the film might be like: "I'm going to the store." (pause for eleven seconds) "Do you have a list of what we need?" (pause for fourteen seconds) - all these tailor-made pauses exactly the right length for insertion of commentary. We figure the film could be collapsed to about 30 minutes if they edited out the pauses and the 15-minute opening credits. Girlfriend and I caught this episode when it first aired and for some reason it, and no other MST3K episodes, has stayed with us. We drop the riffs into dialogue all the time: "the walnuts are tearin' through the hay" "well, time to go puke on the Maverick" "I love the Yelling Channel" "I'm a tiny frog, get these rocks off me" "everybody must be burning their grandmas today". Screw Manos: The Hands of Fate, this is their masterpiece. So this year we broke it out for the whole group and they started quoting it too, even the ones who don't like Mike. "I've said 'ZA' in better towns than this." "This is where the fish lives." I wish I had a better story to tell. I think it's just that for the first time in a long while, I could just go do stuff and it wasn't about figuring out how I was going to blog it. There's no subtext this year, no "brief vacation from an awful life" - things just worked. Boring. Well, not boring, but boring to read about. The good kind of boring. I'll get some pictures up later, maybe. Halloween 2009 was a month long. Earlier weeks included such activities as apple-tasting and construction of scarecrows. Actually those two are related: the place throwing the apple-tasting was also running a scarecrow contest. We built scarecrows one weekend and entered them into the contest the next weekend. Mine won first place. I wasn't trying to win. The prize: a gift card at an orchard. I still can't eat apples. One weekend the group all went to see Paranormal Activity. It may reasonably be said to be Blair Witch Project Indoors. Creepy film. Same basic premise: handheld cameras, improvisation, characters with the same names as the actors, and very creepy things going on. Done much better than Blair Witch, less annoying, but still didn't feel like a satisfying meal. Worth repeating: I think 90% of "haunted houses" are just bad feng shui and bad airflow, and I think 90% of horror films are based on the idea that if the characters weren't idiots making poor decisions, it wouldn't be a horror film. People were rooting for the poltergeists here. I mean, you're going to see the movie for the thrills and chills, not for the problem-solving skills of the characters, but it's hard to suspend disbelief when the characters actually do hit on bright ideas and useful plans and then talk themselves out of them. Get out of the house, you morons. It may follow you but there's some physicality to it, it takes awhile to catch up to you, leave. I of course speak from experience here. (It's to be said: our current apartment is the least haunted place I've ever lived. Not that I think any of the places I've lived were truly haunted, not by anything invisible anyway, but this is the place where the least weird stuff happens and I get the fewest Weird Feelings. Doors stay shut. Stuff doesn't vanish. No weird lights or noises. No cold spots, except right next to the metal front door.) And another weekend, a ghost tour of Oregon City. (Hey, I'm sure it was a city when they named it back in 18-something-something.) This went MUCH better than the last ghost tour we went on - the one in the hideously-overhyped Shanghai Tunnels, the one that seemed interesting at the time and later you realize you never actually saw any tunnels. This vastly better ghost tour may possibly lead to the formation of a paranormal investigation group - although out here such groups tend to fall apart too quickly, we've noticed. And me not working at a gas station at night anymore, were such a group to form, I might be able to participate. I likes me a good ghost story and I'm also skeptic enough that I might be a useful addition to any such group that actually gives a shit. My basic theory is, if there really is such thing as ghosts, the only way to prove it is to first clear away all the crap people pretend are ghosts so you're left with just the genuine article. It remains to be seen if that, as an opinion, would endear me to the group or not. I saw no ghosts in Oregon City but I did smell one. There's a bluff overlooking the town and innocent men were hanged on that spot in 18-something-something - and in one particular spot, on a windy night where no such whiffs should accumulate, I caught a strong whiff of decomp. I'm really hoping there's a dead raccoon among the rocks or something. I can wish for better ghost stories than this. I apologize again that Halloween 2009 is not an epic saga. The overall drama level is about the same as 2005 at the beach house yet this is much less of a read. I'm out of practice making a novel out of every leaf that falls. Gimme time to get back into the swing.