Halloween

If I may be unapologetically honest, I've really grown disappointed with how holidays have evolved. Commercialism and political correctness have successfully soured everything that was ever fun and personal about any choice holiday.

Except Halloween.

Halloween is one "holiday" that has actually benefited from the marketed hype. It's a day to not be taken seriously in any regard. With free candy, ridiculous costumes, a celebration of pseudo-sadism, and for many an excuse to combine "cute" with "slutty as humanly possible," All Hallows Eve is no longer a day of evil spirits and endless fear but rather just a running gag. It's a day that makes fun of itself -- a self-deprecating joke that never gets old.

That is why Halloween is phenomenal: it will never run out of steam because it only gets more absurd each year. And in Halloween's case, absurdity is the lasting tradition.

Take for example my grocery shopping trip on Halloween this year. While I'm pushing a cart of frozen pizzas around, I scoot past the following costumed people: a black cat, a Bob Ross imposter, and a very obese person in very, very short jorts. (Check that -- I'm not entirely certain that last one was a costume.) And my fellow shoppers' reactions? Complete nonchalance. There is no other calendar day where this happens. Wear an ultra-low-cut Rainbow Brite outfit on October 31 and you're hilarious and curiously sexy; wear it on November 1 and you're a sociopathic whore. And that's the beauty of it. You get one day annually to look, dress, and act as big a fool as your imagination can devise, and the general response from any given passerby is total tolerance. Suddenly the typical freaks are customary and the typically customary are freaks -- and lame.

Imagine working the 11pm-3am shift at Taco Bell or White Castle on Halloween night. Could that not be the greatest gig? Employees must fight for that shift. If I worked there, I'd put in my request for that shift around July. Of the previous year. Think of all the celebrity impersonators, fake blood, outlandish wigs, overflowing cleavage, and costumed innuendos -- most of which reek of booze and other influencing pastimes -- you'd encounter all night. Something about a guy in zombie flesh paint and a mullet made of horse hair sincerely trying to order a beef and bean burrito strikes me as endless entertainment and far better than any Halloween throwdown I've been to.

Which leads me to a shrewd, marketable suggestion to all the late-night joints: throw a Halloween party. Think about that, an all-out Halloween bash at your local Waffle House. Man, they wouldn't be able to cook the batter fast enough.