I would love to find something exciting about Halloween this year. I really would. But the fact is, it’s a redundant event now. Cosplay culture is constantly, permanently active throughout the year, Horror is a niche as unkillable as its antagonists, and the world is completely horrifying and crushingly sad all the time. It’ll go ahead as always, but it’s basically pointless.
This is one of the things that hadn’t quite dawned on me yet when I was planning to release the episode that is currently in progress a week from today. Another such thing was the fact that being away on vacation for three weeks was going to make it impossible to finish in that amount of time.
There is a third thing: I kind of have a private Halloween of my own. There are no festivities attached to it, no grand gestures, no costumes, not even any real sharing of anything. It’s the date when I used to do something I was, at the time, unwilling to do on any other day of the year, although this is no longer the case. For years, every November 30th, I would actually listen to Pink Floyd’s The Wall in its entirety. The fact that this is the date when it was released in 1979 is a factoid that got stuck in my brain permanently due to a combination of Q107 FM’s obsessive promotion of the day-long broadcast tie-in that took place on that date in 2004 (the album’s 25th Anniversary) and my own nerdy retention of such things. I still remember how difficult it was to carry out basic tasks without seeming distracted, aloof, somehow overwhelmed, if I had immersed myself in that album at any time during the same day as a teenager. I lacked a name or a description for the experience it gave me. It felt like a constant, low hum – every time wind whistled through the trees or the far-away voices of kids screamed and laughed, I felt like I could hear David Gilmour’s delay-drenched licks from “ABITW Pt. 1” darting around the negative spaces between these sounds. Every pregnant moment of angst and/or dread felt like it demanded an echoing howl of anguish and a gut-punching blast of guitar and drums. Every movie that someone else was watching in another room was The Dam Busters. And the amazing thing is, even all of this pales in comparison to the effect that seeing the film of the same title had on me about a year later – and so, of course, the same hesitation to consume it in one sitting applied, for about the same number of years thereafter. But this did not stop me from deconstructing its individual scenes obsessively, to the point where now I could probably describe the entire film shot-for-shot at the drop of a hat. No, I’m not kidding. I can sketch at least half of the shots without reference, too. Name a song. Name a fucking individual lyric. I can tell you EXACTLY what plays out visually overtop of it. EXACTLY. It’s….insane.
And so I’m going to make an exception to my usual rule of publishing on a Saturday. I believe November 30th is a Wednesday this year. Or maybe a Thursday. Whatever. That’s it. That’s when you’ll get it. Why? Because I’m addressing a kind of private alienation in a different, more dramatic, more confrontational sort of way with this one. Which makes The Wall’s influence on me, I think, significantly more obvious than before. I’ve decided to honour that rather than avoid it.
Oh yeah, and also, this room will be a bakery….thought you’d like to know….