it’s four days until we pick the next President of the United States.  I’m giving notice to my landlord without my girlfriend and I having located a new place yet, I’m about to leave my current job and embark on the biggest gamble of my 33 years, and I’m quitting smoking.  There’s a lot going on.

But today is Halloween. And so for today… we shall rock.

I don’t care who you are voting for in November. Sometimes awesome is just AWESOME.

UPDATE: Maybe it’s a lot of folks needing to blow off steam, or maybe there’s just been a lot of good material provided by the McCain campaign lately. In any case, here’s another video that surfaced today:

And just because it never gets old, here is what has been my favorite video of the entire election year:

I’m admittedly a pretty huge Apple fanboy, by the standards of such things. But even if you don’t dig their platform or products, you have to admit, it’s pretty nice to see a corporation put their money where their brand is:

Apple donates $100,000 to fight same-sex marriage ban.

Well done, Apple.

And don’t forget — even though recent polls have Proposition 8’s lead eroding, this race is still as tight as they come. Please donate if you can. It can help get some very effective ads on the air:

The trailer for the new Friday the 13th remake is finally out.

Not sure what to make of this just yet. It feels intense and in your face — mean, as I believe all good horror films should be — but it also feels almost exactly like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake (which should come as no suprise, given they both were directed by Marcus Nispel and produced by Michael Bay’s Platinum Dunes label).

One of the things I’ve been most curious about regarding this remake was how they would deal with Jason’s mother. As those who paid attention (or saw Scream recently) remember, the very first F13th featured Jason Vorhees only in a very tiny cameo scare at the end, with him bursting up out of the calm waters of Crystal Lake. His mother was the killer in the first film, avenging her son’s death-by-neglect-whilst-camp-counselors-got-their-fuck-on.

She was killed in the first picture, and Jason showed up in Part II, wearing a bag over his head (the hockey mask, in fact, didn’t show up until Friday the 13th Part 3).

It was a long and slow evolution towards the hockey mask-clad Zombie Jason most of us remember. They built on his myth film by film, and those first few movies still work remarkably well because of it; there’s an organic character progression there.

But this remake seems to be All Jason, All The Time. The Camp itself appears to be deserted, and the spooky mom voice-over infers that her killings happened in the past. So I’m thinking we’re looking at a prologue or flashback sequence where Jason’s Mom kills the counselors for revenge (i.e., the plot of the O.G. Friday), and then we have a gaggle of teenagers going up to the Spooky Camp Blood™ where local legend has it some crazy mom killed a bunch of kids. And said teenagers, much to their surprise, discover that there’s a seven-foot-tall maniac with a mask running around the camp who kills them all.

I dunno. It could work, but I’m of the mindset that the best — and most memorable — scene in the entire first movie is when Adrienne King as Alice is in the hospital after surviving the horrific night of terror at the hands of Mrs. Vorhees, and is telling the sheriff about her encounter in the water with young Jason. “The boy. Is he dead too?” she asks. The Sheriff, thinking she’s lost it, looks at her. “Ma’am… we didn’t find any boy.”

Alice gets this great thousand-mile stare on her face, and just says “Then he’s still out there.”

And as a viewer, this great visceral HOLY FUCKING SHIT thrill runs through your body, because you know the son now has some major issues after his Mom has been killed, and he’s going to come back and wreak some terrifying havoc.

It’s the same moment at the end of the first Halloween, where Loomis walks over the balcony and sees that Michael Meyers is no longer there; that he somehow survived the fall and gunshots.

It is the moment where a film previously tied to a primarily realistic world pivots into being about the supernatural, and you know the rules of the game have changed. It’s a wonderful, wonderful feeling to have in a movie theatre.

Will the way they’ve set up this remake deny us that moment? I hope not. (And don’t even get me started if they start fucking with Fred Krueger.)

George Lucas started all of this.

First with his Star Wars prequels, which took the bloom off the rose.

Those of us that came of age in the 1980’s were bummed out, sure, but hey, it was just for kids in the first place we said. And though we realized Lucas was taking advantage of our love for his previous work, we gave him a pass.

Then came the announcement of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Yeah. That one. It would be okay, we reasoned. Lucas may have gone crazy, but Spielberg would save the day.

Then the movie came out. And the rose was no longer merely un-bloomed. It had been vomited on, crucified, and set on fire.

But hey, trying to relive past feelings was a wasteful exercise anyway, right? So write off movies entirely.

The only thing left? The final, untainted element of my adolescence, that had not yet soiled itself?

Guns N’ Roses.

Yeah, I was one of those kids. One of the ones whose universe was rocked by Appetite for Destruction. Whose concept of idyllic love and melodramatic tragedy were formed by “Sweet Child O’ Mine” and “November Rain”. Who found voice for my own suburban angst and frustration in the music of W. Axl Rose, Slash, Duff “Rose” McKagen, Izzy Stradlin’, and Steven Adler.

And through it all, through Gilby Fucking Clarke (Rockstar Supernova, dude? Really?), The Spaghetti Incident?!, and even the NuGN’R shows, I was still on board.

One part of it was that I could always find reasons to justify my continued adulation (Nine Inch Nail’s Robin Finck was in GNR 3.0 — and I’d been a fan of his almost as long as Slash! That works!). Another part of it was because The Legend was always more important than the mundane reality.

But ultimately, it was because the recording catalog of Guns N’ Roses had remained static in my mind; pure. It still represented all of those things it had for me when I was a kid, because the perpetual delay of Chinese Democracy has essentially rendered the band unable to fuck up my memories. They couldn’t let me down in the most meaningful way — with the music — because they hadn’t released anything since the classic lineup called it quits.

See, it is easy to view nostalgia crash-grab tours as separate from the music that inspired them, when the music itself has been frozen in time. Crazy Dreadlocked Guy gotta eat, you know. No shame in doing the cover band thing.

But today, that changed. Today, Chinese Democracy became official. It’s coming out November 25th.

As a motherfucking Best Buy Exclusive.

I won’t bother going into how ridiculous a Guns N’ Roses record coming out at Best Buy is, anymore than I would bother talking about ridiculous a Sears Sex Pistols Box Set would be. It’s obvious, and you as a reader are either going to get it, or not, and care, or not.

But me… I care. Because if music is memories, an instant access to emotional touchstones in our lives, then something died today.

No, the old albums won’t change. My seminal life moments that were set to Guns N’ Roses songs aren’t chemically modified in my brain.

But something has shifted. The sliver of my adolescent self, that still believed in Sex, Drugs, and Rock N’ Roll, has to be honest now. That small slice of me that still wanted to believe Axl Rose has some secret Ethic of Artistic Purity, that he’d gone Brian Wilson on us these past 15 years, and was a more meaningful artist because of it, has to own up. And the last fraction of myself, that has tried to find solace in my own past, versus taking on and owning my own future, has to give up the fight.

When everything that you used to be is burned away, some call it purification. I’m calling it Chinese Democracy.