NEXT YEAR I'LL BE THE TIN MAN

Zzzzz...

I'm ... uhhhh....worn out.

And today's the final day of Hell Week here.

Yesterday I left the house at 5:45 a.m. and returned at 10:45 p.m.

That's like ... 27 hours or something.

I first had to go to this PGA Golf Tournament thing. What a waste of time THAT was.

I had no idea what I was doing there. In the sense that ... I know what department I was in (transportation), but I didn't know what that meant.

A simple translation for transportation is "gofer".

If somebody needs something, I hop into a car and go get it.

If they need their wife to be picked up at the airport, I go get 'em.

If the wife wants to go to the mall, I take her.

If she wants to be taken to Heaven, I wag my tongue seductively at her and she melts.

The coolest part of this?

The ONLY cool part of this???

The car that I hop into ... is a 2004 brand new Mercedes with a sticker price of $55,000.

So yesterday, how many errands did I have to run?

One.

I had to go to Office Depot to get some printer paper.

Office Depot's about a mile away from the golf course.

I was there and back in ten minutes.

I REALLY want to drive to the airport.

That's a three hour round trip.

I could drive in this car for three hours.

Yep.

Bear with me people ... I'm exhausted. I had five hours of off-and-on sleep.

So other than getting printer paper, I sat in a trailer with my buddy Sonya and watched TV.

I watched my very first episode of "Little House On The Prairie".

My God. Now I remember why I never saw a single episode of that show.

What a pathetic waste of airtime that piece of shit is.

After my shift there, I ran to the Zoo for my volunteer stint there.

Originally, I had nine other people signed up to join me for scaring the crap out of small children.

Four showed up ... my next door neighbor Troy and a blast from the past ... Drunk-Assed Jamie and two of his buddies.

We were assigned to be in "The Scarecrow" scene.

There are five posts in the ground ... three of these posts have scarecrows on them ... the other two posts are for two of us to "pretend" we're scarecrows. And then when the Zoo's train comes around with the people on it, the scarecrows come to life, jump off the posts and bum-rush the train.

Meanwhile, while everyone's attention is focused on the scarecrow scene, on the OTHER side of the train the other three guys are being all sneaky in the dark and scream at the people on the other side.

Sounds pretty cool, right?

Yeah, well ... you had to be there.

The only light we had out there in the dark was one strobe light.

And apparently, the train took the passengers through SEVERAL scenes before us where the old "monsters on the opposite side of the train" trick had been well-worn.

So by the time they got to us, everyone was expecting monsters to jump out of the dark at them.

An extra added bonus was ... there wasn't much for us to wear in the costume department.

We all had to wear masks. We were all grown men. Most masks don't fit grown men.

So each of us were grappling with these masks, twisting them so we could at least see out of the eyeholes.

Not to mention, this was night seven of the big Halloween bash. Which meant six other strangers had worn this tight fitting mask over the last six nights.

The germs swimming around on the latex masks were in abundance.

I'll be shocked if I don't catch malaria from these things.

Anyway, at first the kids coming through weren't scared of us.

We came to this brilliant deduction because we couldn't hear anybody scream. Because NONE of us could see them.

So we decided to change things up a bit.

We ... uhhhh...we bent the rules a bit.

We reached out and touched the people on the train.

I know for a fact that I wallopped one of them in the face.

Hard.

I hit them so hard it hurt my hand.

It wasn't long before one of the head guys drove out there on a golf cart to tell us NOT to punch the living shit out of the people on the train.

We agreed that things had gotten out of hand and said we wouldn't be knocking out any more guests.

So now we just decided to run along the side of the train, screaming bloody murder at them.

I think that's where someone ripped Troy's mask off his head and almost dragged him down underneath the train.

Because the eye holes in these masks were so small, we all ran into each other several times, so it looked more like a Three Stooges short than a horror scene.

We decided that we would do our best to see the people on the train and that if we could find one little terrified kid, we'd run along the side of the train, screaming at that one kid. Screw the rest of the passengers...focus on that kid.

That worked for a while and gave us immense satisfaction.

Then, I came up with the brilliant idea that one of us would pick up the strobe light as the train came by and we'd shine it in the faces of the people on the train while ... say it with me ... screaming at them.

That really worked well because they weren't expecting that. People are expecting to watch a scene and instead they get a strobe light shoved in their faces so that they're all confused while monsters are screaming all around them, but they can't see them.

We got admonished again for that from the stick-in-the-mud head guy so we had to stop that too.

By 10:00, we all felt that we had made more people laugh than scream. Fortunately, it was the end of the night.

My feet are killing me.

I'm hoarse from screaming.

And damn...am I ever tired.

Did I tell you guys that I've got to deejay a Halloween party tonight?

No?

Well, I do.

Twenty-one more hours and I can go to bed.

I'll be counting 'em down.

Happy Halloween indeed.