It's Halloween, my favorite holiday. Tonight we celebrate the dead and the undead. We pretend to believe that the undead are alive. But most of know, deep in our black hearts, that the dead are not undead, they are un-alive...which means...are you ready...they are DEAD! Do you hear me, you superstitious fools? Do you wish to be undead when you die? Would you want to drag your crumbling corpse out of its comfy coffin and go gallivanting around the graveyard and scaring the living to death? Okay, I admit that it beats just lying there forever, with nothing to do but rot, but we have to be realistic here. Like, how the hell are you going to lift the lid of that coffin, when it's got six feet of heavy dirt piled on top of it, even if you do happen to be undead? Hm? Give up?

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Now I suppose you're going to trot out the old "spirit" business. "The spirit lives on, though the body decays." I'm sorry, sonny, but I'd rather drink my spirits than communicate with them. I do admit that sometimes my steely certainty is compromised by certain unexplainable events. For instance, tonight I made my traditional trek through the cemetary, down by the abandoned church. I do this every Halloween night, to demonstrate my haughty disbelief in such silliness as spirits hovering over the gravesites. I strode confidently down the path through the center of the cemetary and was feeling quite frisky. But then, I felt a bit of a breeze, no...it was almost like a soft breath, brush across my forehead, and then the back of my neck. It made me just a tiny bit nervous, but I brushed if off and walked on. Then, there was another breath, and another. I turned around and saw a tiny, bluish light, bobbing around, just out of my reach. I blinked, thinking it was my imagination, and then opened my eyes WIDE, as more soft sparks of blue glimmered in the air, all around me. I felt like I was slowly spinning, propelled by soft puffs of air circling me. At that point, I almost succumbed to superstition, but somehow managed to pull myself together and took off running as fast as my puny legs could go. I reached the groaning gate just as the church's chimes struck twelve.

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Once outside, I regained my reason, and scoffed at my foray into fright. And next Halloween, I will take my traditional trip through the cemetary once more, but at midday, not midnight.