Since 2024 is Slope’s 20th Halloween, I’m confident that I’ve written, annual, twenty times in a row, that Halloween is the best holiday ever created. You don’t have to make any freakin’ meals. You don’t have to buy any damned presents. Your total budget is maybe $50 in candy, the stock market stays open, plus you get to dress up. It’s awesome.
I have the duty of candy-handing-out-person in my household, and it’s fun for me because I love little kids. It’s tricky, because I tend to be super generous with the young ones, but I have to be careful not to run out of candy over the 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. traditional trick-or-treat timespan.
I also pride myself on handing out nothing but good quality chocolate candy. You will never get crap like Smarties or Skittles from this household. Only the good stuff.
One thing I’ll mention is that in the neighborhood of Crescent Park, which is where I like and is one of the two really nice neighborhoods in town (the other being Old Palo Alto, where Steve Jobs used to live, and where the Google guys still do), there’s a very thin line between rich people and poor people. I just took this screenshot below to show you this, because it’s so obvious.
The lower half is Crescent Park (these are, in fact, a few of the houses Zuckerberg bought at way-above-market prices, just so he could own the neighborhood). The top half is the shithole known as East Palo Alto.
What I’m saying is that a man worth a fifth of a TRILLION dollars could, from his yard, throw a rock really hard and have it land on the residence of someone who depends on government payments so they don’t starve to death. It’s kind of like India, except without the stench.
In any case, the kids in East Palo Alto have enough sense to abandon their own horrible neighborhood and walk over the Newell Street Bridge to get to where the rich people, and their superior treats, are. Indeed, most of the kids I handed candy to last night were from EPA.
It was really fascinating to me to see how they behaved, because I could tell pretty easily what their futures were going to be like.
Two young kids, for example, came toward the porch, and I asked them if they wanted a lot or a little. One of the kids just grabbed a handful of candies from the bowl. Yeah, you’re doomed, I thought. The other boy, however, made a gesture with his hand to indicate that he wanted just a little bit. That boy, clearly, has a bright future ahead and, quite obviously, I put an enormous handful of candy into his bucket.
I stuck around past 8, since there were a few stragglers, but by about 8:25, I figured, hey, kids, you’ve had plenty of time, I’m heading inside.
I still had about 20% of my candy bowl filled, and I wasn’t going to throw it away, and although I sneaked my fair share of nibbles throughout the evening, I wasn’t going to gobble this stuff down into my fat-ass of a body. So, I decided just to leave the bowl in the center of the porch, just in case maybe some more kids swung by.
I realized that the candy wouldn’t survive the first (older) kid to come by and take advantage of the fact there was no one there to watch him, and sure enough, when I checked the bowl ten minutes later, it was totally empty. I felt bad, because I knew some sweet little kids probably saw the bowl and were disappointed.
There are cameras all over my property, so I was curious who the no-goodnik was who took it all. I wasn’t surprised by what I saw. There were two older kids – – I’m guessing maybe 14 years old or so – – that came up to the porch. One of them, to his credit, took probably one piece and headed back down the walkway. His friend, however, was there a good long while, evidently putting the entire contents of the bowl into his bag. “It be empty now!” he declared.
It isn’t hard to envision the future this jackass is going to have.
I was instantly reminded of the marshmallow experiment. I believe we are born with our personalities, and that they are fairly immutable. If the election next week results in a crueler, more callous country, maybe it’s not all that bad, as disappointing as that will feel to so many folks. Too many people are willing to simply take whatever they can, without any thought or consideration for anyone else.
Including the sweet kids I saw later in the same video that faced nothing but an empty bowl.
