It certainly has been a year. Full of ups and downs. Maybe too many downs, but some absolutely stellar ups: Weddings, engagements, scented candles, reasonably priced fancy cheeses…an immeasurable wealth of riches amidst a real doozy of a time to be living through history*.

I know what you’re asking yourself: “How, in these certainly uncertain times, do we summon the Octoberween Spirit, that most grooviest of ‘tudes?” Our Vibe Wizards are hard at work, downing cup after scalding cup of coffee-flavored water in various interdimensional libraries, reducing their Ohio-sized brains to puddles of Dickensian gruel in search of the true meaning of this Very Real Holiday.

Reader, that answer is still forthcoming. But we’re here to tell you that Octoberween is infinite. Octoberween will outlive us all. And if we (the one writer of this post, James Melville), have learned anything, it’s that we should trust the Vibe Wizards and Just Vibe. Drink the coffee-flavored water and open your hearts to the Glory of Not Really Being With It Right Now. Embrace the Dickensian gruel of your minds. Find your Halloween costume through a Buzzfeed quiz and know that it is valid.

Here at Octoberween Eight: The Quest for Vibes, we aren’t interested in telling you what’s Octoberween and what isn’t. Is it horror? Yes. Is it Godzilla? Sure, we did that once. Is it the ocean? Sometimes! Is it Christmas? No, and we are very interested in telling you that that isn’t Octoberween. We know we’re breaking our own rule, but come on. You aren’t Jack Skellington, a rascally skeleton man who famously could not stay in his lane. Please stay in yours.

In conclusion, Octoberween is upon us. Time is meaningless, and so is this. And yet, here we are, gearing up for maybe a season of holiday parties? A gaggle of feral weirdos play-acting at social interaction, laughing nervously and wearing, I don’t know, Gandalf costumes. It’s…uh…is 2021 the Gandalf Halloween? Like, should we all just do that to make it easier? I don’t remember how to talk to people, please don’t make me think about what to wear. Gandalf the Grey or Gandalf the White. Bang. Done. Now I can focus on asking every Gandalf at this party when we’re gonna get to the fireworks factory.

However this Octoberweason (Octoberween season. Don’t like it. Won’t use it again) goes, one thing is certain: Octoberween is eternal, and so are we. Time is a flat circle, and that circle is a Jack O’ Lantern. So, like, not exactly a circle, or even a globe. Time is a lumpy round-ish flaming gourd. You get it.

To wind things down, rather than quoting Gandalf, let me paraphrase noted magician enthusiast Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne ceaselessly back into the past, which I definitively mean to be Octoberween, which is also the present and the future. Hope that clears things up.**”

*This has, in fact, been the case for the entirety of human existence. Just a real doozy of a time.
**The Great Gatsby: Greatest Gatsby Edition. F. Scott Fitzgerald. Penguin Classics, 1976. P 221.