To an alien species visiting Earth for the first time, Halloween must resemble a kind of sexy war. People and monsters stumble through the streets, slick with blood, knives plunged through their heads, while erotic nurses bounce between divisions, doing a terrible job of triage. Not even the children are spared. In fact, they are frenzied participants, screaming through the shadows with flaming bags of shit or hustling between cobwebbed houses carrying severed limbs and sacks of teeth-rotting courage all night long, or at least until curfew. At the end of it all, everyone either passes out from overstimulation or has sex with a stranger; those are the only two options.

Our forensics swap will be as mediocre as our costume choices!

Halloween is a celebration of reckless indulgence, honoring the dead by living really hard for one night. And while that sounds completely awesome, the bully in me sees other people using it as an opportunity to shed their awkward selves and become superheroes, seductive vampires or Heath Ledger Jokers for a few hours, and my immediate impulse is to ruin it. I'm not fooled. I know that this is just one big live-action role-playing game for nerds that the rest of us were tricked into playing. Well, bad news, dweebs; consider this column the shitty popcorn ball in your bag of candy. With any luck, it will spoil your favorite holiday just a little bit.