Every year, usually at tear down, I flirt with the notion (never seriously) of giving up this eccentric Halloween hobby. Maybe I could buy myself a dirt bike or a quad like the rest of the dudes in the neighborhood- stand out in the driveway in the toasty summer evenings with a beer in one fist, endlessly revving the engine as my neighbors are trying to watch television. (Why the hell do they do that, anyway?) I could buy myself one of those oversized, 11 mile to the gallon (highway) trucks with a lift high enough to make myself a threat to migrating birds just to get my dirtbike, quad, and beer out to the desert on holiday weekends. There I could rev my engine with hundreds of other like minded dudes all revving theirs, twangy country music playing in the background and the smell of beer hanging thick on the air like the smoke on a bar scene.
Naw, I don't think so.
Clean up was tougher this year than it had been in years past. I ran out of juice towards the end. All my mojo evaporated into the ridiculously long lasting summer heat that settles over the Temecula Valley and sticks there like a leech. The walls were heavier, the props bigger and more unruly. The stacks of decor and building materials loomed before me like mountains. The extension cords went on seemingly for miles.
Not only is cleanup a first rate bitch, but it's sort of depressing too, like having some turd at the beach come along and stomp on the sand castle you spent half the day building. I got my walls stacked (three piles of them this year) and everything else made its way into the garage into something resembling ambiguously themed piles. Over time those piles morphed into one big indistingishable pile, and that's how it was until just a few weeks ago when I finally mustered the motivation to get it all back into the rafters where it rests during the "off" season.
I thought, not for the first time nor for the last, about how over-the-top I had gone once again to bring my vision to life, and how miserably I had failed to bring even a portion of it into existence at that. And still I marveled at how well it had all come off, and how no one had gotten hurt. We scared the shit out of lots of people, and it had been damn fun doing it. The feedback was great from those who took the time and had the inclination to give it, and even though I had overspent my budget and shed gallons of sweat putting it all together, the payoff had been huge. In the currency of the home haunter, the payoff comes in the form of screams. My wallet was full, metaphorically speaking.
Each year I swear off my weird hobby as I'm busting my arse breaking it down. The gravity of the expense (physically and monetarily) snaps down on you, and in that instant you never want to see it again. But when the heat of summer returns bringing on its heels the inevitable return of the Fall season, the haunting "itch" returns with it. You start surfing the net to see what the professionals are innovating in the world of prop building, you revisit all the haunter's message forums trolling for great ideas and in so doing allow yourself the luxury of not believing your hobby is all that insane afterall by reconnecting with other haunters around the country. You start to have dreams at night about where to run your queue line this year and how to improve your throughput without compromising the quality of the experience or the safety of the event. All the while that knot of expectation begins building in the pit of your stomach, and the crash after the high is completely forgotten as you begin to scheme how you will outdo last year's efforts.
It's Summer time and on the horizon I can smell October. The count down to Day31 has begun, and the "itch" is back....
