For some reason I keep thinking that Halloween is this week. I am fully capable of reading calendars, and so have in fact deduced that it isn’t so. But the heart wants what the heart wants, and apparently my heart craves the spooky and malign.

Actually, I always seem to think I want things to be scarier than I actually want them to be; this is something of a theme with me. Recently I was talking with a friend, and said: “I wish I’d been a spookier child. You know, so my parents thought I was seeing ghosts all the time.” The friend looked at me seriously and said that one of his childhood friends had been exactly that kind of child, and then turned out to be schizophrenic. “So when he said he was seeing demons, he really was.”

I guess I do not want that.

Another example: for the past two years, Jezebel has been posting an open comment thread for readers to contribute their most terrifying true-life (or, at least, “true-life”) ghost stories. I can subsist on those threads for weeks – they never stop, you never reach the bottom. Eventually I just get so spooked out that I either have to cut myself off or accept a life that doesn’t include sleeping or regular heart rates.

And I really like sleeping.

(Note: as yet there is no Jezebel thread this year, though it’s possible I’m a being bit over-eager in re: thinking that it is a week closer to Halloween than it is in reality. Here’s hoping they come through.)

Perhaps I’m in some kind of one-person time vortex where Halloween is always closer to me than it is to the rest of the world. Perhaps I’m being haunted by the ghosts of Halloween Past. Perhaps the calendars are all wrong. Perhaps it’s always-already Halloween. Perhaps it never is.

To keep me nominally focused on the real world, I think I’m going to start watching some scary movies. It’s not a great plan. (For one thing, while the movies themselves will exist, the storylines themselves are arguably fantastic.) But it’s what I’ve got. And I am open to recommendations, if you have them.

Happy almost-Halloween!/false Halloween/never Halloween!