The Dharma Bum

By Jaysen Buterin

"There is great ability in being able to conceal one's ability."

- La Rochefoucauld

And so boys and girls another Halloween has come and gone, crashing and burning into the annals of history from its maniacal sugar high, it's door-to-door costumed chicanery, it's flaming bags of dog poo that Ted shouldn't put out with his boots, and it's undeniable allure for kids of all ages who, despite national anxieties and fears, nomadically scavenged the neighbourhoods in gangs and tribes of ghouls, ghosts, goblins, vampires, animated figures, action heroes, patriotic icons and of course, the commonly misperceived and horribly denigrating stereotypical visage of the witch - complete with broomstick, pointy hat, green mask and proverbial wart - elucidating the historical irony of assuming the appearance of an iconoclastic entity whom the orthodox institutional patriarchal majority vilified, persecuted, and for the most part lashed out against with puerile assumption, that has now become the latest in a long line of preternatural pop-culture coquets to sneak its way into the pantheon of plastic and latex goodness that one can find at the costume section at the local Wal-Mart wedged in between the discount gun rack and the profligating grandstand exhibit of Christmas wares that herald the surreptitious transition of seasons and its capitalistic cohort in crime - the shopping holiday, and of course, denotes the departure of "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown" from the airwaves for a whole year, leaving us to our own devices, but I digress...

...whether the Great Pumpkin brought you bunches and bunches of Halloween presents if you were good or skipped over your pumpkin patch if you were not-so-good, Halloween is still the most exciting holiday of the year (except for maybe those dangerously debaucherous Arbor Days and of course the occasional pixilated St. Crispin's Day) for so many reasons: not a soul can resist being transformed into a candy cormorant as you sell your soul for sugar-saturated sweetness while you pile bag after bag of candy into your cart, stockpiling a virtual reserve of tasty treats, trying to convince yourself that you're buying it for the kids while the whole time you've already allocated every possible hiding spot in your humble abode to stash your stash so that you can fraudulently hold up the empty bowl to the little parading pack of Pokemon kids at your door who aren't falling for the sugar-coating you're putting on your apology and have already mapped out an expedient attack plan involving your house, a carton of eggs, your car tires and this odd hissing sound, and the aforementioned bag of flaming dog poo, that can all be narrowly avoided if you purchase an extra forty or fifty hectograms (there's that cruel metrics system they taunted us American kids with in grade school rearing it's ugly head) of tricks and treats that you can actually hand out while giving yourself a fulfilling sense of altruism instead of diving across the entire length of your living room, shutting off the light switch on your descent as you army crawl behind the sofa in the now pitch-black room because your candy-coated rapacity has you hiding from the mini-me versions of Harry Potter and Jar Jar Binks that are ringing your doorbell with trick-or-treat glee...

...of course you can avoid this entire nightmarish debacle by remembering three simple words...no, not "I love you," not "cogito ergo sum," and certainly by no means "Who let the dogs out" because quite frankly that would just be absurd not to mention two words too many because we're talking about three words boys and girls - location, location, location - you see, the geographic locale where I reside with my dearest Drusilla is an odd little fulcrum in the sense that it is smack dab in between two of the busiest streets in Greensboro and seeing as how most parents aren't keen on their offspring sprinting across five lanes of traffic because its really hard to sprint in a Yoda or Queen Amidala costume when you've got your head stuck in your candy bag trying to mentally sort out the good stuff that'll crank you up for hours and the faux-candy alternatives like granola and apples that sick people sadistically think you'll enjoy - not to mention that red lights seem to mean "stop if you want to"...oh and the shady hotel across the street with 1/2 hour rates, plastic sheets and lots of great "deals" going on, kept the kids from our door, forcing my friends and I to sacrifice ourselves on the altar of practicality and eat most of the candy ourselves while watching the Buffy Halloween marathon. And that dear readers, is the longest damn sentence that will ever appear in OFF! So as the sun sets slowly in the west, I bid you a fond farewell, tripping the light fantastic on a sugar high that could solve the energy crisis and missing all of you more than you know.