Revelations. Realizations. Epiphanies. That ‘Eureka!’ moment.
And I can’t for the life of me remember what that was. Possibly thinking ‘Eureka! I’m old!’.
so there was this little kid i saw at the gas station last night who asked me ‘did u have halloween when you were growing up?’
Yesterday was Halloween. I don’t know about you, but my memories of Halloween involved OD’ing on large quantities of sugar-loaded candy dressing up as characters one only saw in the Saturday morning cartoons or read about in books (one of my favorite costumes involved me being dressed up as a gypsy fortune teller). And the trick-or-treating late at night, when it was already pitch black outside, running rampant in the streets of my extremely suburban neighborhood among all the other hopped-up-on-large-quantities-of-sugar and costumed kids.
This was in the days of creepy masks (before people switched to makeup due to vision restriction) , sugar/fat filled candy (before this health nut craze), kids could run around late at night — with parental supervision (lots less stuff to be paranoid about)…
What did I see last night? I got home a little after 7p — prime trick-or-treating time, from what I remember. The streets were eerily empty. Kinda like the day before a big test — or some equally important day. Empty like any normal weekday night. Nothing special. You couldn’t really tell it was Halloween, with the exception of the Halloween decorations… and the large quantities of shaving cream piles, shaving cream graffiti, and shaving cream profanity(!?) littering the sides of the street. Peculiar.
My neighborhood felt like a ghost town. I did, in fact, eventually hear small costumed children on sugar highs in the streets — but this was after they had slammed the car doors and squealed their thanks to their father for taking them to the mall (WTF) for trick or treating.
The mall? What is this blasphemy? Kids go to the mall for Santa, for the Easter bunny, for that weird motorized giant teddy bear that had been sitting in the middle of my local strip mall for a couple of years. Not Halloween candy and trick or treating.
I know the world/society that we live in now is filled with so much more terror and danger than the world/society I existed in as a smaller cuter 25centlife — but this is ridiculous. I feel that it’s an insult to Halloween culture that kids don’t trick or treat on Halloween — instead they do it the weekend before or after (no points taken away if Halloween actually falls on a Friday/Saturday/Sunday) — or they trick-or-treat in broad daylight, which is another thing I feel completely takes away from that holiday spirit.
What else about childhood royally SUCKS (for lack of better terminology) now?
25 Cent Life 
I was thinking about this on Halloween as well, as I walked from the subway stop up Beford Ave and Nassau Ave in Brooklyn, right through a family-oriented neighborhood. The children were trick-or-treating from the stores on the street. I didn’t get a single trick-or-treater, not even the children in my building. It’s strange and scary how commercial our culture has become, stores pushing candy towards their consumers to be prepared for the trick-or-treaters they invariably take away.