Writing on Halloween

Now that my children are older and eat only healthy foods like apples and smoked mackerel and flecks of green-leafy lettuce, my wife and I sit at home alone, hoping that we will have at least one trick-or-treater knock on our door.  For the past 3 years we haven't had a single child visit our home on Halloween night . . . which says a great deal about our popularity in the community and the deep desire children have for the world-famous boiled egg-on-a-stick that we usually hand out.

I had even dressed up for Halloween last night as a mental hospital patient, and was walking around the house in a diaper.  You'd think some kid would visit, but I suppose the sight of me would have been too traumatic and some parent would have called the police.  Nevertheless, I did get quite a bit of writing accomplished in six hours while sitting beside a bowl of decaying eggs in my Depends.

Halloween has become a very lonely enterprise around our house, and my wife and I are forced to eat large quantities of eggs afterwards (how else can you keep forty dozen from becoming rancid?).  Our house now smells like a kolache factory or a swine farm and it may be Thanksgiving before the rooms air out.  We'll be lighting a lot of lavender-scented candles and will leave the ceiling fans on high throughout November.  After Thanksgiving we will bring in a pine bough and start coughing.

One of my great achievements on Halloween night was locating a publisher for my humorous childhood memoir.  I've been writing on this thing for five years and still hope to trick a publisher into taking it.  That would be a treat for me.

I do look forward to Halloween each year.  I know I'll be at home.  I'll be alone.  And I'll have hours at a time to write in peace and quiet.  No ringing doorbell.  No children visiting in costume.  No love.  Just me and my diaper and a wife who thinks I look hot in a tight white cloth.

But if anyone craves a boiled egg for breakfast, please drop by.  I'll leave a few on the front porch.  The neighborhood cats love 'em.