Halloween still chills me to the bone.

I never knew what to be for Halloween. I never knew what to be, period. Donning a disguise is probably easier when you know what you are; otherwise, it’s hard to feel certain about what you aren’t. I must have aged out of dressing up around 12 or 13, and I remember experiencing googlehalloween game 2018   it as a relief. It felt better to stay in and witnessthe night than to enter it myself.

It still does. Not that Halloween is frightening, per se: But it’s suffused with a strange, intense energy. The holiday gets its depth and intrigue from the layering of things that seem frightening but are really benign — toothy jack-o’-lanterns, ghoulish costumes, tales of ghosts and witches and monsters - shaun white halloween costume-atop things that seem benign but are really frightening, such as the passage of the harvest season into the long, cold dark, and its attendant reminders of ever-present death. With its invitation to embrace the eerie and ominous by way of temporary transformation, Halloween serves as a kind of pressure valve for our deepest anxieties. It’s a celebration of thinned boundaries between life and death, good and evil, what you are and what you could be.

I know: It feels a little ridiculous to take an occasion ostensibly dedicated to children so seriously. But that’s part of the holiday’s oddly layered character. There’s nothing particularly meaningful in a kid suited up like a Power Ranger on the hunt for candy. But there’s something altogether more pointed in the admixture of sex and death in the provocative costumes of adults, not to mention the way that certain tensions — about politics, religion, and culture— tend to manifest in the night’s disguises, as well. There’s a note of experimentation google doodle halloween 2018-there, and of danger: People making play of things that normally worry them, toying with thoughts they don’t normally entertain and behaviors they wouldn’t typically condone, in a context where social expectations are momentarily suspended.

Perhaps the whole thing feels more immediate now that the spirit of Halloween seems to have bled beyond its mandated night. Contemporary politics is haunted by a kind of sharply pitched, ambiguously menacing rhetorical tendency that seems to have been birthed online, where Halloween never ends. On the Internet, heidi klum halloween 2018, where social contexts are hard to judge and impossible to regulate, where everyone is a stranger and nothing seems real, costumes are in some sense the norm.

And there’s no relief from it. Right after Halloween comes cold, sober November, with clean autumn light and a nod toward Thanksgiving, Halloween’s cathartic opposite — the chipotle halloween 2018

holiday on which you are most fully yourself, embedded in family and community, led to gratitude for what you have, not fear over what you imagine. But online, that clarity never comes: Everyone always remains hidden, if not fully submerged in anonymity, then at least performing some character or another on social media.