Ah, Halloween, every little freak's favorite holiday that doesn’t involve the giving and receiving of mass quantities of presents. Idiot that I am, most of you can guess that I made for myself quite an interesting evening this all hallow's eve, but trust me, you don’t know the half of it. Even my roommates don’t know what I was up to all night. And its probably a good thing, for me and Shinigami (that’s the guy from the last article who was referred to as a rebel, from here forth he is Shinigami) had ourselves a wild night out on the town.... sort of.
It started out like any other Tuesday. Lots of useless classes that I had to go to, most of which I slept through. And of course, the most mind bogglingly excruciating thing I do all week, Festival Chorus. But then, we'll save my ranting about Festival Chorus for another post altogether. It was afterwards that the real fun began.
I returned to my dorm and loaded up on all the supplies I would need. A camera, a few flashlights, and, of course, nerds to munch on while performing the nights ghoulish duties. And I tried to get Shinigami and Tamahome (the virgin for life, if you recall) to join me in my quest. I figured it would be easy, they're as into breaking laws as I am, so I figured they'd jump at the chance to roam around causing mischief on Halloween. I was half right, Shinigami was ready to go be stupid, but Tamahome managed to puss out, citing something about having to play Everquest.
Shinigami and I returned to my room to stock up, and were ordered by my roommates not to return without stealing a street sign. I think they were seriously kidding, but I mean, come on, when you joke about me performing my favorite hobby, you cant expect me not to do it.
So we set off armed with only flashlights, wrenches, the machete (which will no doubt be discussed in a later article), a camera, my pack of nerds, and Shinigami's imported Indian cigarettes. Little did we know the events that were about to befall us.
What was our first goal for the night, you ask? Why simple. I decided that if we ventured into a graveyard in the middle of the night on Halloween, it would provide us with some good material for me to put on the website. You be the judge of that.
Well, we looked at quite a few gravestones in the dark. I can’t say that they were all that interesting. One was really, really big and was just a huge rectangle with the word "Clark" written on it. Another had a big spooky statue on top of it. And Shinigami insisted that if I took pictures of them, that I also had to take a picture of the "Tree of the Damned" as he called it. The pics should be up on the page at a later date, I don’t have a digital camera, so I have to develop the film. Ick.
We tried to find something interesting to do in the graveyard. We even tried to play hackysack, but since we suck as bad as we do, we couldn’t get a good game going.
We were ready to leave, but it just didn’t seem right, leaving the whole graveyard on Halloween without doing anything freaky or having something supernatural happen to us. So, to remedy that, we performed a 30 second ritual where we each offered something to the dead. Shinigami placed 2 Indian cigs in the form of a cross, and I sprinkled nerds all over it. I think that’s a sufficient offering, don’t you?
Not too much to write about this one, but it is spooky. when we got back to my car, the light inside the car had completely stopped working. Why is this spooky? Ummm.... Maybe spirits did it. Anyway, it qualifies as horror because now I, a poor college student, must pay to have it fixed. Nooooo!!!
Well, we drove around for quite some time trying to find a sign worthy of our theft. Needless to say, that part of the evening was a total failure. We tried to swipe 2 signs without any success, citing the fact that the bolts had worn to the extent that we could no longer remove them with our wrenches.
Then we struck gold. Well sort of. We found a quiet residential neighborhood with a prominently displayed sign. We parked a bit away and walked to the sign. After about 5 minutes with 2 wrenches and not a single result, I tried a wrench and a ratchet. Now, I think we must've been cursed, because not a single bolt unscrewed for us that night. I broke BOTH of the bolts holding our target in place. Very loud noise, not a good thing when stealing. So we ran like hell. We got away with it too. Now a bike route apparently goes through my dorm room. Nice haul for the night, I think.
Now, I know most of you aren’t going to really care, but what I think was the scariest thing of the night was the fact that the school's form of mass communication, a little shuttle that never shows up when you need a ride and always leaves the parking lot before you can get to it, actually showed up exactly when we wanted it to.
No, I changed my mind, the spookiest thing that happened all night was listening to Shinigami sing along to cheesy love songs on the radio. The scary part was that he was completely sober when it happened. That is the horror of Halloween, I guess.
Anyway, after a successful haul like that, there was only one way to end the night, going home and watching a He-Man cartoon that I downloaded off of xe. yes, life is good.
--Scuba Steve, November 1, 2000