Halloween (-In Loco Parentis-)

Costumes of Mammon and the Golden Calf See Record Sales

The treats have been unbagged; have been assorted; have been stored in the customary receptacle: a grinning orange polyurethane bucket; but go, as the night goes, untaken. The parents, well into middle age, shuttle their children from house to predesignated house. The neighborhood association provides helpful routing instructions. Rental properties are bypassed. Tent cities are bypassed. Chemiluminescent play jewelry—wristbands and armbands, bracelets—aid visibility, a dollar per dozen, a great value, in fun assorted colors. The dye factory has been unshackled from regulation. The deliveryman was prompt and polite, a top quartile customer service experience. Dangling polyester animatronic ghosts, complimentary on store credit, belt out contemporary pop songs. The dream of antiquity, when every fen and bog held tutelary spirits, has been revived, in zones coded single family residential.

“An Ignis Fatuus, or Will-o'-the-Whisp: as seen in Lincolnshire and taken upon the spot in 1811” by Robert Wilks

Elsewhere, across town, on lush planted campuses, the students commence, as they have been commencing, for the past week, with their own celebrations. Glossy posters and glossy pamphlets, interactive mobile applications, provide legal and ethical guidelines, in loco parentis, regarding intoxicants and sexual contact. The dream of antiquity, rationally attenuated, entails a large administrative overhead. It requires a healthy endowment, diversified investments and real estate holdings. But a more licentious past still haunts the nearby environs. To the right of visitor parking, beyond the alumnus pledge fountain, the ruins of budget off-campus housing stand dim and sullen in the rain. There, the residual psychic imprint of unsupervised parties can sometimes be observed. Drunken dissolute ululations, drunken offkey pop song reinterpretations, diffuse spectral and sourceless into the night. But these voices belong to the living, not to the dead. They have simply moved on, through professional development, through diversified investments, into desirable neighborhoods, zoned single family, where they stand guard, half a life later, as their children make cautious crossings.