John wrote a blog that made me reflect on my Hallows Eves past, and I just had a revealing blogspiration and decided to come on and share. Check this out first… HALLOWEEN, by John.

Now…onto what I think! Weeeeeeeeee!

I agree! Halloween means FREEDOM through and through. It was that one night of the year where you didn’t have to prowl the neighborhood after dark in secrecy! At least for me (I was a bad girl). I loved going out trick-or-treating with my brother and sister and later, my friends. In fact, I KNOW my parents viewed Halloween as freedom as well and here's a traumatic short story to prove it!

The Halloween I was about 14 years old and my brother was 11, we'd planned to go as California Raisins, I believe. I might be getting my years mixed up, but I do recall a California Raisin Paper Mache costume theme that my parents had made for us, right around that time. They were crazy about Halloween, always doing an amazing job with costumes and decorations. Anyway, many might say that 14 is too old for trick-or-treating and Halloween and I would tell those people to bite me :)

So he and I were goofing off one afternoon after school, the week of Halloween, and we were getting into things we shouldn’t and boredom set in, and subsequently, so did mischief. Being the insane pyromaniac latch-key kids we were, we decided to make a homemade blow torch. Yes. You read correctly. A blow torch. I never said we were normal kids just because we participated in Halloween like the other ‘normal’ kids. We also smoked twigs and ate poisonous mushrooms from the yard for crying out loud! Well I did at least and might I say: Thank you Ipecac Syrup for saving my life so many times! We had Poison Control on speed dial. This reminds me of a brief tangent involving The Simpsons, that my friend reminded me of the other day and that is the time when Bart bets Homer $5 to eat the old box of baking powder out of the refrigerator (that came with the house) and Lisa preemptively calls Position Control and says, “Fran {Poison Control Employee} It’s me. Just a heads up...” haha That was our house. :)

So we gathered the appropriate items for making said blow torch, which were:
-1 half burnt candlestick
-1 antique copper candle stick holder
-1 bottle of Rave hairspray (pump)
-1 bottle of Aquanet hairspray (aerosol)
-1 box of matchsticks from Cantler’s Riverside Inn
-1 person to hold blow torch
-1 person to be chased by lit blow torch (this was not me)

SO…we placed the candle in the holder, lit the candle and tried the spray bottle of Rave first. Got some fire shooting for sure! WOW! This was great. But how do we get a STREAM of fire, was the real issue at hand? Welp, out comes the Aquanet. I decided it would be best to go OUTSIDE for this experiment, which I felt was very mature on my part really. ;) So I started spraying, he put the candle underneath, and BAM! As soon as it lit, he dropped the candle like a little bitch, screaming and I chased him with the hairspray shooting fire. Ahhhh good times. Also a perfect time for my mother to come home, and out onto the deck to see what my brother was screaming about and…well I got in a lil bit o’ trouble.

First she beat my ass (remember, I’m FOURTEEN!) with a plastic cooking spoon that over the years of beatings, she’d affectionately named, “The Hearing Aid”. She called this spoon The Hearing Aid because, if you weren’t hearing what she was telling your ass to do, you must need a hearing aid. So she whacked me on the ass with that several times, chasing me simultaneously. Damn if that thing doesn’t hurt when she gets you good though, oww! It doesn’t hurt as much though when she’s only getting you in bits and pieces because you’re running. She is running after you screaming, “Stop running or you’re REALLY going to get it!!!”

Ya know what? I had a feeling if I DID stop running, I was gonna get it anyway! When she caught me, she started smacking my ass with that spoon and was yelling, “Stop laughing! Move your hands! MOVE YOUR HANDS I SAID!” Naturally, I was covering my ass! Hello?! Who wouldn’t? She is a freakishly strong woman! Well I think this was the turning point in Lee discipline where she decided that smacking me with The Hearing Aid isn’t going to work anymore; I had to suffer on a much more adult level.

I waited in my hole of a room anxiously, while she thought of something terrible indeed that would punish me, yet that my father wouldn’t pick up on the fact I was being punished for fear that he would not hit me with The Hearing Aid had he found out, but rather he would likely have snapped the end off and stabbed me in the heart with the jagged edge. Then he would have probably burned my remains with what was left of my blow torch. It was just “his way”, bless him. So she was faced with handing down the ultimate punishment, but still having it be unnoticed by the tyrant ruler for fear that he would in fact take me from the earth and, can I just hypothesize for a moment and say that this just proves that she liked me after all? ;)

SO, she asks me to come up with my OWN punishment. What did I think was fitting? Well naturally, my first response: Punish Chris. It was his fault really. I was naturally trying to STOP HIM from this pyromaniac behavior, but was overpowered by my 11 year old brother. She vetoed that. I was older, I should have known better (or some hooey). If I had a dollar for every time I got punished as a message to others, mmmm boy, I would be living in those condos across the street from my work building on 23rd and M Street and then I could crawl to work…in my Dolce and Gabana suits. ;)

So my second runner up suggestion was that I should be forced to clean my room and not talk on the phone that night. NO. Apparently fire is a big offense. So I suggested that maybe I rake all the leaves in front yard. NO. Apparently I was going to be doing that anyway. Life is one big punishment when your parents give birth simply to have slave hands. Ok so that’s an exaggeration. So she decides I’m doing a shitty job of making punishments and hands down a sentence of ‘No trick-or-treating this year”. I couldn’t go out on Halloween, and not only that, I couldn’t give out candy, have my friends hang out on the porch or near the house or even come out of my bedroom. NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Oh the horror!!!! Ughhhhh! :(

OMG this was terrible. Was she for real? Guess what? She was. :( I stayed home that year. I snuck out of my bedroom window later that night to meet my friends after midnight, but that’s not the point here people. ;) The point is: WTF kind of cruel and unusual punishment is this? One that worked I surmise. Revoking my freedom meant that I never set a fire (intentionally) again until recently when my friend Dave and I tried to make a blow porch on the back deck while Nikki was away in San Diego, and it was just so I could reminisce about my childhood, so I’m considering that “therapy”. Not to mention, I think he was grandly intrigued not by the moral of my story but rather, would this actually WORK?! It didn’t work by the way. I think that the new aerosol cans are low pressure or contain less alcohol or are “environmentally ozone safe” or some silly shit and it just didnt work. ;) Kudos to him though for giving it a whirl with me. Brave boy, Brave boy indeed. Fortunately I think he rather enjoyed the beating he sustained later from MY homemade Hearing Aid but that’s another blog altogether now isn’t it? ;)

So YES JOHN…Halloween is synonymous with freedom. As a side note I would like to tell you a wee bitty bit about a little thing I like to call KARMA (endorsed highly by Carson Daily). That year, Chris did get to go trick-or-treating and some bad boys drove up behind him and his friend and stole his entire pillow case (yes we Mago Vista kids don’t f*ck around when it comes to massive amounts of candy, we lived in a huge community!) and swiped his bag, poor little fire-loving soul. The whole bag…how sad. :( I wonder if he’s worked through that emotionally yet? Hmmmm Anyway, I wasn’t happy to hear it had happened although it was GROSSLY unfair that I was punished and he, my lab assistant, was permitted to “do the Grapevine” all the way through Spriggs Cove Community. Mainly I wasn’t happy to hear it had happened because this meant that NOW I had to steal candy from ERIN! And she was slow and prissy! This is NOT a good combination of handicaps when it comes to successful trick-or-treating! Here was a kid who was always dressed as something princess-like and had ZERO concept of Halloween time management and trick-or-treating strategy. Plus she was 8. Plus she was the baby. I wasn’t getting away with taking her candy dammit! Chris was my only hope for diffusive theft! I don’t really know what became of Chris’ Halloween bag fiasco, but I doubt he went without candy that year. I certainly didn’t. Though I believe I was a bit more into Beast Lite at that point anyway. ;)

The second part of this follow-up is a little concept I liek to call: deterrence and rehabilitation. I, having been SERVELY punished, never made fire again (intentionally) until I was unnaturally coerced by Dave (who was a bad boy from Brooklyn Park). CHRIS on the other hand, later burned down ALL of Schooler’s Pond (a natural wildlife preserve mind you) and all of the marsh and brush surrounding the area at the end of our road. My mother, being sound of mind as we all know she is, decides that the best measure here is to cover up the entire incident for when the authorities get involved. Remind me to commit my next crime with HER around. So yes, Chris never broke his obsession with fire, and I did. So THANK YOU MOM! I think…

Ok bloggies, I hope you liked that sad little tale. Today (All Saints Day for all you Catholics), I am still suffering a candy hangover having eaten 5 pieces of chocolate within 10 minutes of having arrived at home last night. I blamed it on my shaky nerves. Thank you Nikki for jumping out from behind the couch with a terrifying devil mask on when I arrived at our front door last night. Had I been like the little Harry Potter wizard look alike that was 10 steps behind me (wand included) I might have been able to get out a good, “STUPIFY!” But no such luck. By the way…all the mothers in our community now loathe Nikki for scaring their small children with that mask and laughing like a maniac whenever she achieved the proper level of utter terror from a 4 year old little girl in a Snow White costume. Good work Nik.

I’m off. Hope you all had a Happy Halloween! :)