The end is nigh

As I wandered through the streets of Ottawa on a misjudged constitutional, I was struck by two things.

One, people are making a bit of an effort for Halloween still, which personally I don't get, as Halloween for me this year is the most pointless of all celebrations. It used to be fun, with kids wandering around collecting sweets and stuff from caring neighbours - but over the years, I think it has tailed off into a miserable marketing ploy for those wankers in Walmart/Target/Loblaws/add in your most despised chain, who see it as a way to shift vast quantities of sugary shite to a suspecting and uncaring segment of the national demographic. It has, of course, got worse this year. Now kids won't even get the five minutes of exercise it takes to walk up driveways and beg for food. Instead, their parents will just plonk down a box of "fun-sized candy" in the living room and let the kids gorge till they vomit. Indeed, I shall myself be doing a variation of this, except of course, there will be an Ottawacker variant, despicable in its cruelty. (All the candy will have been eaten and empty wrappers, bearing nothing but handwritten notes advising of the futility of it all, of the inevitability of taxes, will be left in their stead. People really put so little thought into the "trick" part of "trick or treat" any more.) Anyway, I was quite impressed to see the odd ghoul hanging from a tree; the occasional pumpkin, carved and terrifying; the giant spider over a doorframe. 

Two - and this was infinitely more terrifying than the pumpkin-ghoul-Shelob nexus - there was a dusting of snow everywhere. What can I say? The end is nigh. And I hadn't even covered the garlic patch with the fallen leaves. This is what happens when you spend all summer slogging away on a project for which it appears you will now not be paid. Time gets away from you, and like the ant in Aesop's fable, you end up being miserable, while the bloody grasshopper discovers winter sports and has a fantastic time in summer and winter. That is going in one of the empty candy wrappers.