After weighing the pros and cons of all the ways to secretly and irreversibly traumatize the children of my small community, I’ve decided that I will not be secretly poisoning the overwhelming majority of them this Halloween.
Hear me out.
It’s not that I don’t want to poison these kids – believe me, I do – it’s more about the act of poisoning them that I’ve begun to struggle with. In the old days, it was easy enough to get a nice, narrow, 31-gauge syringe, a couple of vials of arsenic, and a bag of Twix minis to get the holiday season underway. If it wasn’t arsenic, there was always mercury, lead, or any other of a litany of items from the periodic table. The process worked exactly how you’d think, and it was effective.
But it’s a little harder to get a hold of poisons these days. Of course I have bleach, rubbing alcohol, prescription pills, and countless other toxic products in my home, but what am I going to do with those? Can I start giving out bottles of water where I’ve replaced some of the water with rubbing alcohol? Of course not – no one is going to drink weird Halloween water that smells like alcohol. Can I do the syringe method with bleach at a high enough dose to inflict real damage? Probably not. I mean, I’m not handing out king-sized Milky Ways in order to give a high enough shot of bleach to knock out Braeden and Kaelinn. If anyone around here is getting a king-sized Milky Way, it’s me!
It pains me to say it, but maybe it’s just the end of an era. There was a time when parents let kids go trick-or-treating alone, which made it much easier to pat a kid on their exposed skin while wearing a glove coated in hydrofluoric acid (as you surely know, hydrofluoric acid can seep through the skin and rot the calcium in bones). But then the parents started staying closer to the kids and protesting my approaches.
Okay, fine. Winners adjust.
The next time the parents come close, I might offer up some homemade Belladonna berry muffins for the kiddos, and that could at least incite vomiting or seizures. But then the parents will start suggesting that their kids skip my house altogether, and then what?! Am I really going to have to resort to poison-tipped arrows?
It would be one thing if it were just about the accessibility of highly toxic chemicals. It would be another thing if it were just about kids not coming close enough to my door to get them. But the combination of the two things is really tough, and at my age, it hardly feels worth it. Call me a scrooge, tell me I’m not getting into the Halloween spirit, or even say that I should be imprisoned for life on account of past transgressions; however you slice it, I’m just not the man I used to be.
So, with tears in my eyes, I regret to inform you all that I will NOT be poisoning neighborhood children this year for Halloween.
Enjoy your candy.
