I’ve become addicted to Site Meter. Strangers are visiting my blog! That must mean that I exist! Even though I suspect that the visitor who found my site by typing “bloor street full service message” into Google quite probably mistyped a vowel in the final word. I hope he wasn’t too disappointed.

Tonight didn’t feel like Hallowe’en (reclaim the apostrophe!) at all. It’s amazing how important the little details are when it comes to psychological gravitas, and when a festival that celebrates death and the end of the harvest year falls on a Monday, at the beginning of the week rather than the end, it feels just plain wrong.

TGIF: the work week draws to a close. You’re packing up, finishing your chores, the night is closing in and it’s time to sleep. On the seventh day, he rested. And that’s what Hallowe’en is all about: the end of one thing, and the pause before the beginning of another. Winter is about to descend, there’s nothing you can do to stop it, but it’s not… quite… here… yet. Autumn is the year’s twilight zone. If sleep is a kind of death, that’s why the ghosts come out at night; and if a week is like a longer day and a shorter year, then that means that Hallowe’en is the perfect holiday for a Friday or Saturday night, when you’re getting ready to die for the weekend and springtime and Monday seem so far off.

Sunday night isn’t perfect, because you can see the sun rising on your next seven-day-long day, and you’re gearing up to go back to work. And you certainly can’t celebrate death on Monday. That’s the start of the cycle. It’s like holding Hallowe’en in springtime, celebrating the end of the year at its beginning (no offence, sezrah, if you’ve migrated over to read any of this; how do they celebrate All Hallows in New Zealand, anyway?). You get the feeling that any real ghouls or ghasts or ghosts or goblins out on the streets tonight would be nonplussed, rather unsure what they were doing there, like those pedants who insisted on celebrating the end of the millennium on 31 Dec 2000 and then wondered where all the booze was.

And it was drizzling rain, too, which didn’t help. What a dull and anticlimatic Hallowe’en this was. Oh well, it hits the end of the week again in 2008. Something to look forward to.