~George A. Romero
It's Halloween today. The monsters will soon coming knocking at the door and begging for candy. The monsters will be joined by vampires, witches, princesses, and various other characters. Some are meant to scare and others are meant to delight, but all are meant to consume vast amounts of candy.
It's a time to be someone other than your usual everyday self. It's time to let your imagination get the best of you. What wild ideas have children come up with? What characters have knocked on your door? Who thinks of some of these things? This year I couldn't think of anything, so I ended up looking like someone who has just been revived after dying of a candy overdose.
It's time for all the scary stuff: scary movies, scary books, scary stories, scary weather. The storms out east earlier this week caused a bit of anxiety even to those of us living far beyond the reaches of Sandy. The worst of the storm is over, but there's still plenty of storm left. I'm still waiting to hear how some of my favorite places withstood the tempests of Sandy.
The news is full of reports of how bad it was, and perhaps they're only showing us the worst. The whole area hasn't been demolished. Yes, there are millions of dollars worth of clean-up to do, but I would guess that it isn't as bad as many of us imagine it to be. At least I hope it isn't that bad. Those active imaginations at work can certainly make things out to be much worse than they really are. It doesn't look very good; but on the bright side, it could be worse.
Put your imagination to work, but don't let it run the whole show. Being scared is a fun sort of thing, but only in moderation. Being scared by monsters is one thing, being scared by current events is another. It's fun to be scared by things that you know aren't real. Today is the day to enjoy that phenomenon. Try reading Mary Shelley's Frankenstein instead of the latest reports of the Frankenstorm.
Imagination creates some big monsters.
Olivier Martinez
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