How do I get what I want? What do I have to do and in what order?

These are the questions to get ahead and demolish the competition, right?

And what are you willing to do? Will you step on someone? Will you step on a friend? Will you kill a puppy? What obstructions in your path are you willing to eradicate with no sympathy whatsoever?

If you’re going to get what you want with more than just dumb luck, you certainly will have to be finding out the answers to these questions. Honesty is key and mistakes, I understand, will be severely punished with sharp learning curves.

In other words, there is no half-assing it. There is no try. You go in, you better do it ruthlessly.

And lo — some people do.

–

Speaking of doing it right and living it up, the boy and his boys are really doing it right in the Central European part of this globe. Sure, they’ll come back saddened to be reminded that they’re Americans, and that life will not then be what it once was. But for now, it’s all it CAN be, as they say, and no one, not the Haight entourage or the ‘lou boys are doing it as well as these kids because they have the advantage of multi-national travel in addition to the fun. Fabulous work gentlemen.

Bring me back some absinthe and we’ll party like hobbits over squash.

–

Monday night was weird. Yes, there were people dressed up in strange garments and asking for free stuff but that’s because it was all hallow’s eve. We tell all the children to go forth and hoard as much chocolate as they can from perfect strangers. And while we’re confusing them with lessons conflicting with the norm, we should tell them to cross the streets without looking, take off their seat belts and take up smoking. That’d go over well.

But that’s not why it was weird.

Engulfed in work in the past few days, I find it increasingly hard to actually get home. Work follows me with a deviousness I cannot escape these days. While the folks were enjoying the company of our height and age-challenged neighbors, I was (and I’m not even joking), solving inverse logic truth tables by hand in between creeping the hell out of trick-or-treaters.

“What’s you’re costume of?” The kids would ask.

“I’m an IT consultant. Scary, right?” Total confusion on their faces. “ETHERNET!” I yelled at the short blond one, and I’m pretty sure I saw him flinch. His did didn’t laugh.

“Here, kid, take some candy and…NO, DON’T TOUCH THAT.” Now I had a crying 3-year old on my front porch and an irate father.

“Sorry to scare you but your kid was reaching for an inverse truth table and that’s just like an apple with a razor blade in it but without the apple.”

I didn’t get many return visitors. I did, however, enjoy turning the fog machine on occasionally spraying the older kids with a hose when they got too close to my jack-o-lantern. But the scary thing is that I was using my degree.

Weird, eh?

Stay in school kids, and don’t take candy from that handsome Professor Snape over in the crazy lady’s house…yeah, the one with the bad-ass jack-o-rockin’-lanterns.