Smoking Santa

Days till Halloween: TOMORROW

Tis the season and all, so I thought I would regale you with a true ghost story that takes place in an eerie little town that I like to call the District of Columbia. Now let me give you some background on the area, because apparently there has been some confusion: this spooky little ghost haven is not, contrary to popular belief, in either Virginia or Maryland. The district is actually just that - an independent district located between two states, which lacks Congressional representation but makes up for that with a mayor that gets reelected riding on the coattails of his previous cocaine and prostitute benders. See, we all just learned something there - and they say ghost stories aren't educational!

Anyway.

In the district, there is a derelict building full of bloodthirsty murderers, deranged psychopaths, and foreigners of indeterminable scent: this is my apartment complex. One would imagine any spectral beings lurking around the property to be missing several limbs and quite possibly be covered in a splattered array of blood. However, I believe I have finally come in contact with a spirit, and to my great surprise, he is a peaceful, kind spirit, who is unable to enter the front door; he spends his dreary days wandering the grounds, gazing speculatively at the sky without really seeing it at all. And chain smoking close to 40 packs of cigarettes a day. This ghost is Smoking Santa.

Anyone got a light?

Smoking Santa keeps a steady guard over the front doors, almost as if protecting his beloved inhabitants from the ever-present threat of hobos, anti-abortion protesters, and Republicans. When he doesn't suspect a threat, he wanders into the bushes, his tiny, rotund body poking out from beneath a sprout of Chimonanthus, the lively wintersweet horticultural specimen (not to be confused with the bastard Chionanthus, whose fringe-tree shrub is the work of the devil.) It always gives him the appearance of an exceptionally fat elf, with the top of the bush looming like a jaunty green cap, blending nicely with his long white beard.

Okay, so he might not actually be dead. He could live inside the building, or he could even be a wandering hobo, but the man is out there close to 20 hours a day, as far as I can surmise. He is out there in the early morning when I poke my head out the window to see if it's magically snowed so that work might be canceled; he is out there when I depart at 8:30am; he is there at 6:15pm when I arrive home; he is there at 7:00pm when I go to watch tv at Erin's because I cannot function on my own for extended periods of time; he is there at 12:30am when I return home despite the fact that the temperature has taken a nosedive; and he is there at 2:00am when I go to bed, still merrily puffing away at his cigarettes, the red tip a burning beacon in the burgeoning darkness.

(Not that the darkness is technically burgeoning at 2:00am, but I really like alliteration.)

And that is my story. There is a fat old man outside my building at all hours, who resembles a squashed-looking Santa, and he smokes so many cigarettes that I'm amazed his lungs haven't violently repelled themselves in a giant fit of dry heaves. Give me a freaking break, it's the day before Halloween, my brain is hardly in top form.

In other news, since tomorrow is 1) Halloween and 2) we are old ladies that cannot handle going out and drinking when we have to work in the morning, we are having a Horror Movie Marathon! I present to you three movies we will be watching, and one we will not be watching:




Hocus Pocus: We begin with the Halloween staple; the hijinx, gleeful mayhem, and child aura absorbing that makes Hocus Pocus a Halloween classic. I used to be in love with Thackery Binx, and I wanted to grow up to be Sarah Jessica Parker's character. While I still strive to be just like a fictional portrayal of SJP's, her ditzy flirt persona has been replaced with her hard drinking, pessimistic, sarcastic journalist persona, and that fits me better. ILU, Carrie Bradshaw!



28 Days Later: I went into this movie with my ex, thinking I'd have a thrilling time, scream a little, laugh it off, enjoy getting spooked. What actually happened was I screamed so loudly for so long that I gave myself laryngitis, instead of laughing I clawed all the skin off the back of the poor guy's hand, and instead of getting "spooked" I spent the next four years sleeping with the light on, convinced that an Infected person would come bursting through my window and chew me into a bloody, unrecognizable pulp. Actually, I'm still scared of it.



Flight of the Living Dead: Well, Erin and I just watched Children of the Living Dead (the bastard younger brother of the Romero trilogy) in which the most frightening thing in the entire movie was the acting, and a rogue chicken that some PA kept flinging across the screen. I'm just hoping that there's a Samuel L. Jackson look-a-like that bursts onto the screen and screams "Let's get these mother fucking zombies off this mother fucking plane!" Zombies + Planes = my greatest fear. Seriously, that shit is just too fucked up for me.



Erotic Nights of the Living Dead: Yeah, this'd be the movie that we're not going to watch. Because as thrilling as it would be to watch a porno comprised entirely of rotting corpses rutting each other like there's no tomorrow (ah ha, maybe that is the point!) I just can't handle it. I lied before: planes + zombies aren't my biggest fear, it's pornographic necrophilia made by a fat 47 year old man that lives in his mother's basement and will never lose his virginity no matter how hard he tries. Now that is truly frightening.