who are the monsters?

(originally posted 11/1/2015)

The day after Halloween is always a weird day. As you’re pulling down the toilet paper out of your trees, cleaning off the egg from the windows and painting over the “Die Fag!” graffiti on your garage, sweeping up the broken glass from the bricks thrown through your car windows and making sure the flames are completely extinguished from where the shed used to be you can’t help but wonder what the term ‘monster’ really means.

The night before it starts just as the sun begins to sink below the horizon with the real little kids coming to your door all dressed up. Princesses and Spidermen clutching plastic pumpkins and asking politely for a piece of candy while their parents hover at the end of the driveway just in case you decide to grab their offspring and throw them in a pit you dug in the basement. “It puts the candy in the bag or it gets the hose.”

It ends with the usual screaming at teenage Donald Trumps and Hillarys to stop lighting bags of dog shit on my doorstep.

That’s Halloween. So who are the real monsters?

Ghosts and werewolves clogging the streets and yet the scariest person I saw all day was the man at the McDonalds hours before. He was dressed up as a cashier and he was being mean to a small balding man who had come as a small balding man with no self-esteem. The man at the cash register was yelling at him because he had wanted a plain hamburger in his kid’s Happy Meal but the man dressed in his McCostume made it plain he had heard a cheeseburger and that’s exactly what he was going to give him. I knew that if I had ordered the wrong sandwich this cashier would have never uttered a word, but because the small man in front of him was one of those people that just looks like he expects life to climb up on the counter at every opportunity and take a giant dump on him and he is helpless to do anything about it, the cashier saw a chance to make another human being even more miserable than they already were.

So who was the real monster?

I have to believe they both were. They exist and crash around and inflict themselves on everybody they meet and the truth is on any given day you and I could have easily switched masks and played either role. Two monsters acting out their little scene surrounded by other monsters waiting for their food. Some of them waiting to bring that food home to their own little monsters. Monsters that will shriek with glee at the site of the most unhealthy, shitty food that has even existed before throwing on another mask and heading out to reap a bounty of sugary treats. Shit in. Shit out.

I read these words and realize that the best and worst monsters live in my own head. Why bother with a disguise? I want to march out to social events dressed as a lonely basket case and dare anyone to try to guess who I am. But I don’t.