Programming note: Halloween season, and Millennials' inability to celebrate Halloween outside a Saturday

Just a brief note that I will continue ignoring the 24-hour news cycle, the cravings of take junkies from social media, and so on and so forth, notwithstanding the upcoming election.

The last few posts could've been written at any time, and are more of an update on the media's abject failure to figure out what planet they're on. Standard, boring stuff that's not intriguing, or original, or insightful -- but that needs to be spelled out in detail, at least once, ahead of another major election that they're going to completely fuck up in predicting.

There might be a final lighthearted post when the libtard tears start flowing on election night, but until then, it's going to be Halloween themed around here. I didn't want to delve into these topics right when October began because it dilutes the holiday's energy when it's spread across the entire month, and people are basically habituated to it by the time October 31st rolls around.

It's too bad that the coronavirus pandemic has shut down the party atmosphere this year, because this is one of the rare years where Halloween falls on a Saturday.

For the past decade, the socially awkward Millennial generation has altered the day for celebrating Halloween, to suit their inability to cut loose and have fun every once in awhile. For them, the only acceptable day is "the Saturday before Halloween" -- everybody's routine already includes Saturday night as the consensus night for going out to party, so why disturb the routine?

If you celebrated Halloween on October 31st, that could very well fall on a school night / night before work. That's part of the carnivalesque inversion of rules and roles that these holidays allow us to indulge in. But for the hidebound Millennials, you can't just show up to school or work the next day in a post-party buzz or hangover -- that would disturb the routine of school and work! You need that buffer of Sunday before things return to normal on Monday, with any mischief and merrymaking safely quarantined to Saturday.

Since Halloween coincides with Saturday this year, the awkward Millennials wouldn't have their typical excuse not to celebrate the holiday on its real date. That ought to make it feel like a rare treat for them: "Wow, it's been so many years since we got to party on literal Halloween night!"

As in so many other areas of life, Millennials have a knack for cucking themselves. They're self-chaperones. "Don't worry, Mom and Dad / Mr. Principal / Supervisor Karen, we're not going to party on a Tuesday night or anything crazy like that..."

It's not that they're so responsible or conscientious -- they're used to half-assing everything due to grade inflation being the norm in school. It's that they're socially awkward because their helicopter parents raised them in a bubble, and they've grown up incapable of adjusting to the social-cultural world beyond the bubble. Helicopter parents would never allow partying on a Tuesday night, but they would convene a family meeting with their children, and reach a sensible compromise of partying on "the Saturday before Halloween". Crisis averted -- bubble integrity unbreached!

Like the Silent Generation before them, the Millennials are going to absolutely go off the deep-end when the social-cultural mood becomes outgoing instead of cocooning, and crime rates start steadily rising again. They'll be in their late 20s, 30s, even 40s, and they'll feel the irresistible urge to live bubble-wrap-free for the first time in their whole lives, once the social mood has shifted to make it acceptable and standard to let your guard down, go with the flow, etc.

It wasn't Boomers who the hippies drew from, but the Silents who were shaped by the cocooning Midcentury. But, unaccustomed to the novel environment, they were unadapted and unprepared for it, and they were the ones who got easily sucked into drugs, divorce, and the rest of the bad parts of the late '60s.

If you think that won't happen to Millennials when the culture becomes more guard-down, just remember they can't even celebrate Halloween outside of a Saturday because it would threaten their humdrum workday routine. How are they going to handle the next "let it all hang out" kind of zeitgeist?