saw three of my saudi students at a small grocery store; they informed me that it was the "unofficial halloween" as declared by the american students, the weekend that, because bars would be closed on the real one, they would celebrate instead...these guys were getting ready to celebrate with them. i'm a little embarrassed when they get truly integrated into the culture, wondering what i've done, wondering if i've led them to a path of bizarre behavior their other countrymen would never understand. the idea of costumes is, itself, completely foreign to most of them, but they come to recognize it as generally harmless, which it's not, really. i mean, it's true that we all wear costumes, every minute, every day, so the concept of costumes is really just an exaggeration of our everyday selves. but it can get quite bizarre and quickly. i try to remind them that, believe it or not, halloween was a children's holiday.

that's hard to remember in a town that is probably 90% between the ages of 18 and 23, and on weekends like this one maybe more like 99%, since all the old farts like me are holed up out on the edges, knowing better than to venture into town. but i'm at the breakfast joint this morning, with my older sons, 19 and 23, and i press them for details. since halloween rioting and partying in general is a tradition in this town it's of more than passing interest whether it turns violent, how violent, how big, how much, which windows broken, etc. and who was involved, and, if violence was directed at anyone, whom.

they say that there was a lively interchange between the occupy protesters and the student partiers, many of whom had wild costumes and had to walk right past the "occupants" as i call them. those occupants have gravitated across the street so that their tents now guard the interfaith building that houses our quaker meeting, with its overgrown garden and twisted pines, brush by the railroad tracks and more-or-less uncut grass. they were in and out of the place, and double in number, and still in significant number across the highway in the grounds of the metal bucky-dome frame that the university threatens to take down. a steady occupying presence, on both sides of the street. so apparently everyone was drunk enough to tell the truth and shout at each other as the revelers walked by, and one was even dressed like a protester, and another was dressed all environmental, just for mirth i suppose. and that gets them branded as "the 1%" which is now the bad word for anyone you don't like, or in my case, the milk i don't like. i've begun using terms like "the half-and-half" or "the two percent" for people like me who are ambivalently making enough money to actually pay taxes, and feel like i have some say in what's going on, if only i had enough time to use it.

but to get back to last night, there was, apparently, quite a bit of serious partying, some wanton violence but not much which is reassuring, and of course there was the big cards victory, world serious, fourteen to six, which, i must say, couldn't have got much bigger, unless of course they win it all which still could happen. some people are dressed all up in this redbird stuff, all red, red and white with s-t-l all over it, but you can accuse them of not actually wearing a costume since they tend to wear that stuff all over the place, to work, on the streets, anyway. a real costume would be if they wore the other team, but then, that would force them to go meet and talk to someone from the other team, and know them well enough to actually borrow a costume from them.

reminds me of a friend of mine back in the day who borrowed the costume of a police officer, and this guy had long hair all the way down his back which was supposed to mean, back at that time anyway, more or less the opposite, so he thought there wouldn't be much questioning of his true credential, since, if anyone knew him, they'd know it was a costume. but it was such a good costume that he was talked into going to some fringe parties, not the ones he'd originally intended to grace, and at some of these they didn't know him so well, and in fact, he'd hidden his long locks pretty well in the getup that he had, and to make a long story short, everyone thought he was real, and then got really angry with him after all their friends had run away out the back door, or flushed the drugs down the toilet, or whatever. and they kind of turned on him and chased him out of there, kind of like you would if you thought you could get away with it, with anyone who wasn't really welcome at your party.

so there was the elation of the cards victory, which is not shared a hundred percent by the way, cubs and sox fans each having significant presence in town, and all these student revelers going about drinking and wilding, and the protesters trying to hold signs and hold up a highway location even as it gets steadily colder and the classes become steadily more serious, and even require some homework occasionally. but there's more: a strike is looming in the air, and everyone is a little on edge about that, because it could blow your whole semester and make a lot of work go straight down the toilet so to speak, and jobs & careers could be lost in the process too of course. and this is truly a one-horse town, the university is all there is, so when the university teeters on the brink of disaster, so does virtually everyone, it's felt right straight down to the homeless and the other powerless. whole classes of people are feeling marginalized.

then there's the police scandal, and i've more or less let that one go, because it's on the city level, and it involves our neighbor whom we love, him and our family, and because it involves who investigates whom and how is certain information obtained and we are entirely out of the loop, except that his wife comes over occasionally and fills us in, but even then we don't hear much and certainly don't even ask to hear what we do hear. it'll be a wild year to trick or treat, that's all i can say, but with but a week to go and we don't even have costumes, i'm sure we'll be too busy to actually stop and visit with the neighbors on our way around; and, as to the question of whether it's actually dangerous neighborhood, one in which people wander around stealing things out of parked cars, i can only say, anything can happen, and maybe they could steal some of the leaks out of ours. you can only make so much of a costume, you can make a good car look like a humble one, and a police car look unmarked, but in a town like this people don't even use turn signals, because everyone knows where everyone is going, and the bottom line is, you mostly only get robbed if you happen to own something. i worry about the older boys, wandering around uptown where drunks are often getting rolled and relieved of their money but, once again, you clearly don't have much if you walk out of a restaurant with dishwashers' soak all over your midsection; maybe you'd think they'd go after the 1%, but then, if they hit the 1%, then surely the police will throw the book at them.

so then, nationwide, the pressure is on, the protesters are keeping it up; their ranks are swelling and they aren't leaving places like zucotti park or the financial district of chicago where they just arrested 130 of them. in some places a good hard cold snap might send them indoors for tea but in a place like this that doesn't happen until maybe mid-january. as the pressure rises it changes the political climate; people wonder about all the stolen money, the useless wars and the economic injustice involved when "too big to fails" walk off with billions and all the young people with babies are forced to face a bleak and desolate job market, or leave the country. one could make money, maybe, making t-shirts that say, "99%" on them, in various incarnations. or, one could go into the police business, since they seem to be getting a lot of overtime.