Halloween Adventures at McGill

So it has come at last.  The sun is setting earlier, and almost rising in symphony with my haggard head and body.  The trees, a week ago flaming enticing reds and yellows, have turned bony and black as though signalling the end of hope and vitality.  All the while, midterms have swept in with the cold wind and left most McGill students sniffling, exhausted, and (as one can see in their pale faces) devoid of spirit and life.  The looming shadow of papers, and even the not-so-distant-anymore blackness of exams, have demonically invaded our peace of mind and killed the last blooms of summer joy. And to celebrate all this death and inner collapse, comes Halloween.

Now anyone will tell you that Halloween at McGill is something special. No, it is not the effort put into costumes nor the festive spirit.  That’s all for elementary school.  No, at McGill, Halloween is an excuse to take what we do most weekends a little further, while wearing obnoxious, disturbing, or slutty costume. Already, I have heard energetic plans being made about how fucked-up people are planning to get (loudly and enthusiastically proclaimed on campus as though they were preaching a gospel).  If this includes you, let me assure you that the snow is indeed coming and that the wait will not be too long; there is no need to start practicing winter sports with our noses.

The late afternoon starts off with games and fun, like when we were kids.  “Jake man,” a hand grab and shoulder-hug, “that costume is SICK! you’re dressed like a clown that would murder me in my sleep!”  And Caroline and Rosanna, they sure look fine as playboy bunnies or slutty nurses, or all those other costumes that the McGill female population seems to have a preference for; usually, the kind that can only be found on the shelves of a sex-store. Suddenly, “VODKA SHOTS!!!” resounds throughout the pre-drink gathering and, as though gold was being handed out in some surreal nightmare, all kinds of monsters, movie-personas and sex-caricatures flood towards the savage call.

Then we dance, then we drink some more.  Peter arrives with another crate of beer and a joint that looks like it can be used for baseball. Somebody puts on some reggaeton but you can’t tell the difference, you just bounce to it like the idiot you are slowly becoming. You have a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other; there’s nothing to complain about.  Oh, and look at that, Peter’s joint is on a set rotation towards your direction.  And plus all those playboy-bunnies are swarming the dance floor screaming “I love this song” with the same enthusiasm and, thanks to the vodka shots, stupidity characteristic of middle-school.  Not noticing, between laughs and gulps, time passes by as though it was someone you are avoiding on Milton. Suddenly someone shouts “WaterCan!”

At this point, the pre-drink is vacated, leaving the apartment looking like it was bombed by NATO.  From here, we take diverging paths into all sorts of adventures.  The WaterCanners enter a dark club, decorated to look like a morally-void shit-hole, and join the giant swarm around the bar. Others get lost in darker and dirtier bars that dot the plateau or into other club-hosted parties which do not have the great benefit of an open bar and are hence, in my opinion, a bad choice.

At some point in the night when we end up at some strange house party God-knows-where, and things start to look a little different.  The constant imagery of costumes, sarcastically and ironically reminding you of fantasies and horrors, starts to distort the stability of reality. You have another beer, sure, why-the-fuck-not?  And a tequila shot? Make it five!  It makes things a little more hazy and blurs out the negative vibes that were starting to bug you about this place.  After a while though, the comforting effects of binging wear off and once again you find out that you are in fact in a shit-hole, and that alcohol is in fact a poison.

After entering such depths of personal lowness, itself resurrecting the next morning for a day-long hang-over, the darkness of our libraries and early evenings seem trivial.  That is what Halloween really does to the McGill student, it blurs the lines between pleasure and pain in preparation for the coming academic and climatic hardships.  And for those of us that end up passing out on Sherbrooke only to wake up on the cold wet cement, it reminds us of the reason why we came to University in the first place.

                                                                                                                                                                                                     ~Igor Milosavljevic