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Oct 31, 2022·edited Oct 31, 2022Author

"OK—a small detour, because whoever greenlit the truly brain-dead idea of a movie with the Alien fighting the Predator deserves to be forced to watch the movie in a loop, A Clockwork Orange-style, for at least five years as penance for the movie equivalent of splashing tomato soup on a Van Gough."

I'm going to HARD disagree here. By the time "Alien vs. Predator" came out, the "Alien" franchise was a husk of what it was during the (first) Scott / Cameron era, and arguably jumped the shark after Joss Whedon resurrected Ripley in Alien 4. It was a moribund franchise, and completely fair game to finally pit the two biggest alien baddies from the '80s against each other in the mid-Aughts (especially after the Alien trophy case scene in "Predator 2"). Fortunately, for the "Alien" purists, you got "Prometheus" and "Alien: Covenant" to retcon the AvP silliness (which I enjoyed), and I'll leave it up to you to decide if the cost was worth it. (While I have my own issues with Scott's return to the "Alien" franchise, it's largely due to "Prometheus" being greenlit and funded instead of an adaptation of Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness" from Guillermo del Toro that was also in contention at the time.)

Now, to get to the meat of your actual post. I'm one of those heathen celebrants of Westernized commercialized secular "holidays". Christmas is the big one in my book, followed by Thanksgiving (not really a religious holiday), followed by Halloween. I'm not one to dress up any more, but I do enjoy the horror movie marathons and people having fun with the spookiness of everything.

This year, I celebrated the holiday by continuing a local tradition started by our housing complex during COVID where we got the neighbors together to watch the Bears get stomped by the Cowboys, invited some of the newer residents out to fire up their grills and demonstrate their hot wings game, and provided a safe place for the kids in the complex to get together and run around with each other in their costumes (that they were very proud of). Given the cold Chicago winter that will soon be upon us, the Halloween holiday is a great excuse for some outdoor fellowship and a great opportunity for us to strike back against the Putnam-esque atomization that I believe is at the heart of what plagues us in this day. I think we were so successful that we MIGHT actually end up with some neighbors getting together to do stuff on their own in the weeks ahead. (I'm rooting for another grilling competition, which I will likely have to miss due to some extended travel soon.)

Given that we also have a City-wide election in February to choose a new mayor and aldermen, I figured that I would play some "School House Rock" civics as well. Our long-time representative is stepping down, and it's a wide-open field at the moment to see who succeeds him. I managed to wrangle four of the six candidates (read: bribe with wings and candy corn) to come over and spend some quality time with our residents to learn about what we're looking for in our candidate and to start to put actual names and faces to the nodes on the edges of the constituent / representative graph. Despite a slow start, it was a VERY productive time spent, and I'm very confident that regardless of who we choose to represent us in City Hall, we have some quality human beings working to be picked for that job.

As someone who grew up in the Christian church and was subjected to my share of church "Fall Carnivals" that tried to distract us from the fact that our friends were getting to do real trick-or-treating back in the neighborhood, I'm not going to try and convince you that Halloween isn't the occasion that you imagine it to be. There's plenty to be critical of (can we just stop with the "sexy" Mad Lib costumes?), but there's also plenty of value to extract from day if you can recognize the value of adults hanging back together and chit-chatting while kids proud in their costumes (I'd actually argue that the holiday is more about showing off than hiding anything) run around the neighborhood together with their friends (old friends, and new friends made that day).

You may lament that college students and relatives don't make plans to return home for the holiday in the same way they treat Thanksgiving and Christmas (and to a lesser degree, Easter). I'd argue that misses the point. Halloween isn't a "family" holiday, it's a "neighbors" holiday. And I'd argue that as we grow more distant with our neighbors and find ourselves living alongside strangers, we can use as many "neighbor" holidays as we can get. And I'm going to celebrate those opportunities, every chance I get.

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