Well, to say this was unexpected would be a grand understatement: Halloween, this year, turned out to be my most photogenic ever.

As in, thanks to two separate walks, of roughly the same route, I took yesterday northward and back through East Capitol Hill, this year's Flickr photo album contains 111 shots—104 photos, 7 video clips—and that's not just an all-time record for Halloween, but it's by a shocking margin. We're talking about Halloween albums that date back 25 years, the largest of which, before now, was 2012, the decided advantage here being Shobhit's and my first-ever West Hollywood Halloween Carnaval. And that year's album contained 70 shots. This year's increases in size over that one by 59%.

So, what are the advantages this year, just in terms of photographic volume? There are two key elements, which ironically come after having gone out of my way to bad the album a little bit because I really thought I would have almost nothing to get pictures of this year, the first in decades when I had no in-person party to attend. The photo album contains a whopping eight shots before it gets to the photos taken yesterday itself, which numbered 103, for this album anyway. But, then: first, I took two different walks, which greatly increased the number of photos over what I'd have had I only gone on a walk once. And second, the truly key part I cannot believe it took me 13 years living on Capitol Hill to come around to: the route, northward along 17th Avenue and back southward on 18th Avenue.

I just got a shit ton of great photos of house Halloween decorations and displays. That's all it took. I smell a new, easy, free and highly photogenic Halloween tradition coming on!

The first walk I took was with my neighbor, Alexia. I really must credit her with this idea to begin with; she had actually told me some weeks ago that this area of Capitol Hill, where the higher-end houses are located, essentially becomes one gigantic block party every year on Halloween. She's walked through it in the past. I even got a comment on my Instagram post about this from Claudia, telling me "Usually this is the “candy cane lane” of trick or treating. We used to go there every year." How did everybody in town keep this a fucking secret from me! Well, now Alexia was cluing me in.

So, even though Friday was the only day this year that I actually dressed in costume, and even though my jacket covered it any time I was outside, I stayed on brand with my The Twilight Zone T-shirt, masked up, and headed out with Alexia.

With her, we first walked north along 15th, but then cut over to 17th Avenue at John, and decided we would turn back on 18th once we reached Highland Drive. From there we wound up walking all the way to Madison before turning back toward Pine St and our building, in the end walking a total of 2.5 miles.

Now, I had somewhat of the same idea last year, when I took a walk with Shobhit up Broadway and back, thinking there would be fun things such as window displays to take photos of. That walk last year yielded 10 extra photos, which I added to the 32 I had already taken at work that same day, on top of four others taken earlier in the month, making for a nice, 47-shot photo album for the holiday. This walk with Alexia yesterday, which we left for at noon, yielded 24 photos on its own; I had initially thought I would walk with Shobhit up Broaday after dark, and let's just say that would have yielded another 10 photos. Added to the Halloween album photos I already had, I still would have had 48 shots, at least, for this year.

But! Taking that walk with Alexia, I saw way too many awesome house and yard display that I absolutely knew would make better photos after dar. I decided then that, soon after Shobhit got home from work, we would retrace those steps so I could get nighttime photos.

So, that's what we did. When Shobhit and I left, though, we cut over to 17th sooner, just one block up 15th on Olive—I got three photos immediately, of a great decorated roundabout on 17th and Olive. And we also walked up 17th to Highland, except once we got there, Shobhit decided to keep going an extra block, up to E Galer St, before heading back south again on 18th. And then we turned back to 15th slightly early, using E John St to cut through Kaiser Mermanente to stop by Aviv and bring some falafel home for dinner. All told, the walk with Shobhit, round trip, was 2.9 miles. So I, between the two treks by foot, walked a total of just shy of five and a half miles yesterday.

Now, I did do something else unusual with yesterday's Hallowen photo album on Flickr. Although the file names are still numbered in chronological order as usual, I actually mixed the photos from the two walks together, so that whether they were taken before or after dark, they are all (to the best of my ability) in the order they would have been seen along the walking route taken: straight up 17th, back down on 18th, instead of up and back twice over. This way the several shots taken of the same thing both during the day and at night are right next to each other in the set.

I do still have a lot left to do with those photos—literally none of them are captioned yet, and the tagging is only partially done. But, with photos like these you can still just tab through and get the idea.

When we got home, Shobhit and I had a fairly heavy dinner made up of a combination of leftovers from his birthday dinner from Saffron Grill, falafel and french fries purchased at Aviv, and one of the bags of chana (garbanzo beans) swiped from my work office while I was there late yesterday morning—I rode my bike there to swap out paperwork, and swiped six bags of instant Indian meals from the pantry cupboard shelf labeled OK to eat. I had left for my walk with Alexia within about half an hour of getting back.

Anyway, we ate dinner while watching Clueless, which I rented from Amazon Prime Video. Shobhit was relatively amused by how closely it really does stick to the plot points of Jane Austen's Emma. Then we watched a few episodes of The Mary Tyler Moore Show.

Earlier in the day, after my walk with Alexia but before Shobhit got home from work, I tried to watch Hocus Pocus on Disney+, for a Halloween afternoon movie. I could only make it 40 minutes in before I couldn't take it anymore. God, that movie is awful. Sure, it works for children; I get that. But the best movie work for both kids and adults—and in the latter case not just because a parent is happy a movie is making his kid happy, as was basically suggested by Gabriel on a somewhat brief FaceTime call late last night, when even he, amazingly, kind of defended it. I'm sorry but that movie is dumb as shit. I literally fell asleep and I went back to the bedroom to take a nap.

I think that about does it for Halloween 2020, though. Gabriel and Lea, who basically had a quarantined Halloween party last night at home with Stephanie and Tess over, certainly made the best of this year's limitations. They all dressed up as Marvel characters and even bobbed for apples. Gabriel told me, "I actually had a good time." And I thought about it for a split second and said, "So did I, actually."

Honestly, even if I go forward not really leaving town for Halloween like I used to every year to go to Dad and Sherri's, I feel like a new tradition of simply walking the residential streets of East Capitol Hill will work out quite well for me going forward. I suspect it won't yield quite a many photos next year, as I bet there will be a lot of repeat decorations I don't need to get photos of, but people still get creative with themse for separate years, so I'll still get plenty of shots, I'm sure.

Incidentally, not only was 2020 the first year ever that I had no in-person party of any kind to attend, it was also the first year Halloween has landed on a weekend since 2015. That year, I was with Shobhit in West Hollywood. That was on a Saturday, and it skipped Sunday and went straight to Monday in 2016 due to leap year. So the time before that when Halloween landed on a weekend was on a Sunday, in 2010.

In other words, the last time Halloween landed on a weekend but I was in town and thus celebrated at work on a separate day, as happened this year, was ten years ago: 2010. Had Halloween landed on Friday this year, I could have just padded the photo album with photos from work festivities since it was still also actual Halloween Day itself. That is indeed what I had to do last year (2019) and 2018 and 2017, simply because non-work-related Halloween photos were just too few. (Going back to 2016, that was the last year I was in West Hollywood.) Going forward, with a new tradition of the neighborhood walk, specifically on residential streets and no longer the misguided route of arterials looking just for Halloween window displays, this should no longer be a problem.

It gives me a lot to look forward to for many Halloweens to come. Yay!

[posted 12:43 pm]