On Halloween

Fear and trembling

By Moristotle

Daily walks for days now in my neighborhood have made me witness to blow-up ghosts, goblins, ghouls (and cartoon Goofy’s) that neighbors paid hard-earned dollars for at Target or wherever these flimsy, quickly deflating toy balloons can be found. Are they competing with each other for ghouliest, or gaudiest?
    Or for cleverest gravestone “engraving”?

• Cris P. Bacon
• Rest in Pieces
• Who lies here is Randy Lee, one who should’na messed with me, 1986-2022

I wonder how many loaded guns lie around that last household?
    Or trying to entertain their kids? Ken Marks exposed that as a lie last October on his Scratching Post:

Of all our yearly observances, it’s the cruelest and most misguided. Millions of adults annually go out of their way to scare the bejesus out of little kids. They delude themselves by imagining that kids enjoy it, but the small fry have misled them. To save face, they’ll tell you, “Yow! I think my heart stopped! Ha ha ha!” Fright is supposedly fun.

    I wish we could forgive all of this foolishness as people’s desperate attempts to distract their minds from greater fears. As Søren Kierkegaard put it in Fear and Trembling:

If...at the bottom of everything there were only a wild ferment…; if an unfathomable, insatiable emptiness lay hid beneath everything, what would life be but despair?

But I’m afraid its motivation for most is just to follow the herd, fit in, party, try to have fun. Still, there is that underlying emptiness....

Copyright © 2022 by Moristotle