I Love Halloween (Because My Mom Stores All The Halloween Shit In My Bedroom)
Spooky season is here! The leaves are changing colors, there’s a nip in the air, and my mom finally took all the Halloween shit out of my bedroom.
Eleven months out of the year I struggle to fall asleep in my bed, sandwiched as I am between a full ream of novelty gravestones and a college biology department’s worth of life-size skeletons. But during October? I have room to do whatever the hell I want while the decor gets to fulfill its purpose on the front lawn.
You’ve seen our yard. It’s the one with a full-sized tableau of seven-foot Frankensteins holding their hands up like they’re doing the Thriller dance from the Michael Jackson video. Where do you think all that stuff goes when it gets taken down? The garage? No way, dude. That’s where my step-dad blasts Foghat and does military presses after work. All of it goes in my room. Where I sleep.
Some enjoy the Halloween season for the romantic fall aesthetic, some look forward to house parties so they can get dressed up and be reminded that their alcohol tolerance is nowhere near what it was in college. But me? I like it because it’s when my mom moves $13,000 (retail) of seasonal merchandise out of the place where I sleep every night.
People weren’t kidding about the importance of utilizing the Japanese concept of “feng shui” in your bedroom! Who would’ve thought that simply tweaking the placement of my furniture, opening the blinds, and eliminating the suffocating prison of orange and black plastic tarantulas would have such a positive impact on my mental well-being? Certainly not my Halloween-obsessed mother.
The animatronic Dracula, whose flailing arms have made getting up for a glass of water in the middle of the night a living hell, is temporarily replaced by my TV. Sunlight finally streams through my window, since the inflatable pumpkin is out in the yard and not functioning as a blackout curtain in my room. No more synthetic cobwebs on my CPAP machine!
Yep, things are definitely looking up for me. The stretch from October 1st to the 31st is my only chance to exercise and get myself back into shape since my step-dad uses a “breadwinners only” policy for his Foghat gym. I might finally attempt that P90X thing I heard people talk about. Though, I guess it would need to be an abbreviated P31X for me.
