You can, I can't.

Now self, be yourself.

No sign of the stucco people. Maybe there's a tar paper, chicken wire crew that's followed by a separate stucco crew working elsewhere at the moment, but I suspect either way they won't arrive until the sky clears. Then again, then again. I'll just keep the curtains closed and assume Ms. Emmy will be able to find her kitty litter now that it's been moved.. Excitement here at the end of a month.

I hadn't really considered the fact Halloween comes on a Friday. Generally it comes in the middle of a week and parents have to think about herding their costumed supercharged on sugar kids on a school night looking forward to getting them up and dressed for class the next morning. This evening the older crazies in addition to the kids will be out there joining forces. It's a Friday night, the moon behind the clouds, but you know its cooking its mischief and so I'll turn the lights out tonight and pretend I'm somewhere else attending a party.

You buy candy, no one comes and you're living with this large bowl of candy with no one around to eat it except, well, yourself. You don't buy candy and the crowds descend and all the mothers in your building have you down as a cold fish who doesn't understand the program. And there are many more mothers with small children around, the number doubles, each and every Halloween, multiplying Mandelbrot-like, mothers and kids popping up like fractals begetting fractals. Why is this?

You're in stale territory. Everyone's been here, done this, including you. You wrote something similar last year.

You mean everyone is pretending they're attending a party somewhere else?

No. They, unlike you, actually are attending a party across town.

So complicated, Halloween. There are a number of parties going on in San Francisco tonight, although they're again discouraging anyone from going to the Castro district. I've thought of photographing the Castro Street Halloween party every year now forever and have dodged every instance. I'm pretty safe here with this sprained toe business at the moment, but I suspect I'll be moaning the loss come 2009. Well. Of course.

Later. The sun is poking through now in the mid-afternoon, so maybe there's not all that much rain on the way. Which means people are looking up at the sky, noticing the lack of rain, looking over to their elaborate Halloween costumes hanging on the back of their closet doors and deciding to indeed set forth, maybe take a couple more belts from that bottle of Old Haymaker sitting on the kitchen table to get the blood flowing. Here in Oakland.