Pumpkins, Spice, and the Not-So-Nice

2010 WeHo Carnivale

Well we got through another Hallowe’en.  That day is a big, big deal in our little neck of the woods because West Hollywood closes off Santa Monica Boulevard for the legendary Hallowe’en Carnivale. It started as kind of a local thing in the mid-90’s (I don’t think they even needed to close the street) but grew and grew until Covid shut it down for a couple of years. It’s been open again for a few and is back to the previous numbers: over 250k people costumed and partying in the street from 6 to 11PM, at which point the scheduled entertainment stops and people entertain themselves and patronize the many clubs and bars in what is now called “the rainbow district” (“boystown”, while historic, was

2011 Carnivale

considered not inclusive enough) I, thankfully, don’t live right in the thick of it: crowds make me want to bite people, and my tolerance for drunk people is rather low. I have certainly aged out of the demographic that can get away with a revealing costume and was frankly a little too reticent to do so when perhaps I could have gotten away with it. So I stock up, stay home, and watch movies. We never even get trick-or-treaters: they go to the big houses North of the boulevard with the good stuff rather than wasting time on the apartment buildings.

After that we went off Daylight Savings Time. I hate “fall back” (sorry if you like it.)  I loathe it getting dark at, like, 3PM and these switches seems to screw with my wah more and more each year. The state voted in 2018 to just make Daylight Savings permanent but would require the Federal Governments approval and so far Congress has had better things to do.

Well, “better.”

Ballot Drop Box at West Hollywood City Hall

And finally we are coming up on our election. Which I am hiding from. Not that I haven’t voted, mind you. California arguably might do a lot of things wrong but one of the things they do right is elections: During Covid they decided that it would be best to make all ballots mail-in. You receive your ballot in the mail as usual, several weeks before the election date in a postage-paid envelope. You can mail it, drop it at any of the many collection centers around, vote in person at one of the voting centers that are open in the days before the election, or even go to your traditional polling place the day of and do it the old fashioned way. You can even, if you’re feeling paranoid, go to the registrar for the County of Los Angeles in Norwalk and hand it to them. I dropped mine at the collection center in front of West Hollywood City Hall and received an email a day or so later stating that it had been received and counted. Easy Peasy.

But now I feel that I should be exempt from having to watch, or even hear, the ever more strident political ads polluting the airways. Oddly, not for the presidential race- ads for those are few and far between, perhaps because California is so reliably blue that they’re not bothering. No, these are for State Assembly people or Congress with competing ads telling us that Candidate A is a crazed conservative who will be monitoring your menstrual cycle and tracking your whereabouts while Candidate B is an evil trial lawyer who loves nothing more than setting miscreants up with state-funded trust funds while clubbing baby seals while the candidates for Congress are either fat-cat developers who have spent years at the public trough (and look the part) or smarmily smiling frauds who have skeletons in their closet so unseemly they can only be hinted at. Broadly and endlessly. You would think YouTube would be safe, but you would be wrong- it’s polluted with ads touting competing candidates for WeHo City council, the only good part of which is the appearance of the “skip” button after five seconds.

So as of today, Monday the 4th, I have officially tuned out. I am sitting in my armchair imagining that I am by a comfy fire while I am watching Netflix, This Old House on PBS on demand, and old movies on DVD. This weekend after watching “The Mephisto Waltz” on DVD (check out the comments on Cinnamon’s last post for a recap) I wore Shalimar. By tomorrow and the election it may be Mitsouko. Or Muscs Kublai Khan. I might even layer. I wonder where that bottle of CB I Hate Perfume Musk Reinvention got to?

So are you hiding out until the election is over? Got some Netflix recommendations? Let us know in the comments.

Images: My iPhone, Pexels and Wikimedia Commons.