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Halloween is sort of a funny holiday. Little kids dress up as something scary, cute, funny, etc. in an effort to get us to give them candy. We carve up produce and stick candles in it to decorate our porches, along with pictures of skeletons and monsters and bats and the like. It’s just bizarre.

Halloween always makes me think of the one and only time I ever smoked pot. It was just before Halloween in ‘95 or ‘96; I had gone to a party at this girl Crystal’s house and was told there would be some pot there. I had been wanting to try it, so I was pretty stoked. However, I left without getting to try it when this big dumb bastard showed up drunk with a handgun. I didn’t feel like sticking around after that because this guy was sort of crazy.

My friend Bryce had promised me pot and didn’t want to let me down, so we drove over to his work (a country club) to talk to a guy he worked with. He had a couple “joints” (that’s slang for a marijuana cigarette, kids) with him and agreed to meet up with us when he got off work (about 20 minutes later). We drove out in the middle of a corn field (in my shitty Buick - offroad machine!) behind a big pile of fill dirt and smoked up.

We headed back into town, and it wasn’t until we started to get back into town that I noticed I was starting to feel a little bit strange. My face went kind of numb and my perception started becoming slightly skewed. I probably shouldn’t have been driving after that, but I was fine (although I did, at one point, stop about 50′ short of the intersection at a red light). We dropped Bryce’s friend back off at the country club, then he and I went to get something to eat.

This is where the relevance to Halloween comes into play. We had been eating these generic Kroger fruit snack things at his sister’s house earlier and decided those sounded pretty good, so we went to Kroger. Apparently Kroger was letting people take their kids trick or treating there, because we walked in and I saw one of the funniest things I had ever seen (made so, of course, by being high). There were two kids walking around inside the store dressed as California Raisins. It was the last thing I expected to see, and until I saw all the Halloween decorations in the store, I thought I was hallucinating. Hysterically funny.

You can learn more about Halloween at your local library. To quote our friends, the California Raisins: “Books! Check ‘em out!” I actually remember the lyrics to that whole song they did in that commercial, but I’m not going to embarrass myself and post them.