As I always do, I geared up for trick-or-treaters at the NCS headquarters last night. I filled a bowl with nasty death metal band stickers to hand out, because candy is apparently bad for children. To enhance the spooky atmosphere of the night, I bought lengths of pig entrails from an unlicensed butcher and draped them from tree limbs. I shut off all the exterior lights so the kids and their parents would experience the thrill of seeing dozens of large glowing eyes in the loris compound when they hit them with their flashlights.

To provide a full sensory experience, I lit bags of burning dog shit that I’ve been collecting from local parks over the last few months and strategically placed them along the dirt driveway, which has been turned into a mud pit from three straight days of heavy rain in the Seattle area. Above the burning shit bags, I impaled simulated goat corpses on spikes so they would be lit from below and look extra spooky. Cool idea, huh?  I even rigged up a couple of boom boxes outside so they’d start blasting Mayhem when activated by motion sensors.

And then I waited. And waited. And waited. And once again, no trick-or-treaters arrived. I don’t get it. Don’t kids trick or treat any more?

While I waited for those timid knocks on the door, I watched a lengthy series of news reports about the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy in New Jersey and New York and got my own Halloween shocks from that. Really awful stuff, seeing the most densely populated part of the U.S. completely fucked, with massive flooding, fires, homes lost, dozens dead, 6 million people still without power, sewage and toxic chemicals floating in flooded streets, and the prospect that storms like this are going to happen more frequently in the years ahead.

To cheer myself up and block out the impatient gibbering from the loris compound, I also watched four new metal videos, to while away the hours while waiting for the non-existent trick-or-treaters. The bands are: Eye of Solitude (UK), Funk Vigilante (Canada), Blast Rites (Poland), and Lokurah (France). Continue reading »