by Michael Frissore

Created on: October 08, 2009

Trick or treating is an amazing thing. Not only is it a superb example of alliteration, but it's the one night of the year that a child can walk up to dozens of strangers' houses and say, Give me some candy or I'll set your house on fire. It's legalized blackmail! Well, if you don't count juvy. And who does? Wipe that slate clean when I hit 18. And hand over the sugar or I'll turn this place into Waco.

I tried many times as a boy to make candy begging a year-round thing. The same people who gave me a miniature Snickers and boxes of Junior Mints in October chased me down the street with a shotgun in May. What a way to confuse a child!

Now that I'm an adult the news media has ruined Halloween. Every year they try to scare you with their warnings. Watch out for 3 Musketeers bars with razor blades sticking out of them like they're in a pro wrestler's wrist tapeOh, and by the way, those candy apples? Dipped in arsenic. Happy Halloween!

This has never happened! Yet parents today believe the tales so the streets are not nearly as filled with happy little dressed-up children as when I was a lad. They're all at some Bible party dressed as one of the animals on Noah's Ark. Between the mythical razor blade candy and pedophiles, Halloween could very well die off in the next year or two.

This is why I still go trick or treating in my mid 30's. I ain't afraid of candy. Usually I wait until nine o'clock or so when everything is really dead. I lay face down on my living room floor with the lights out so none of those pests come to my door. Occasionally I'll set up a lounge chair on my lawn and just heave candy at passing children and shout, Happy Satan's Holiday! But those times are rare.

Once I've woken up from my living room Halloween nap I'm off on my own quest for delicious, tooth-rotting candy. Wearing a mask that covers the entire head helps greatly when you're as old as I am. For all these treat givers know I'm just an extremely large 12-year-old. They exist, and I always produce a copy of the Weekly World News if they should question me. Hey, underneath this Dick Cheney mask lies the face of a tortured junior high school child. So make with the candy. Stat!

If they refuse that's where the trick comes in. Maybe it's in the form of a flaming bag of poop. Maybe it's in the form of a home invasion. You just never know on Halloween.

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