Once upon a time I had a hard and fast rule about getting tattoos only in what they call The Employment Zone: The areas of the body easily covered by a short-sleeved shirt and shorts. As of 2010, however, I’ve been self-employed for 10 years, working exclusively for the horror, Halloween and haunted house industries. To commemorate that, I got a pair of jack o’lantern tattoos on my forearms, something I’ve wanted to do (and talked about) for years. David “Half Pint” Martin of Marvel Tattoo did an exquisite job of taking my ink outline and paintings (as reference) and permanently marking me for Halloween.

Earlier this evening I was blindsided by a random memory from my childhood. In the 3rd grade, our teacher asked us to create a poem in which the letters of our names were the first letters of each line of the poem. Somehow, I remember my poem, verbatim*. This freaks me out a little, as my memory is typically… well, awful. Here’s the poem I wrote about CHAD SAVAGE:

Chad is my name
Halloween is my day
A bunch of spooks tied up in a knot
Do you know if they’re real or not?

Spiders and goblins, jack o’ lanterns*
A bunch of bats up in a steeple
Vampires, bogles (Scottish for “ghost”)**
And my dad (dressed up) always scaring people***
Going along the river’s coast
Ed (my uncle) dresses up like a ghost****

*I’m fudging this line – it’s the only one that, for whatever reason, just won’t come back to me…

**In the 3rd grade, I only ever checked out books of ghost stories from the school library. I had just learned what a “bogle” was.

***My father would put on a ghost costume when he took us trick ‘r’ treating – long, gauzy sheet, two eyeholes, and he’d wear sunglasses underneath to make sure the eyes were black. He would stand in the street, motionless, and let the wind flap his sheet as we rang each doorbell. In retrospect, I can only imagine how creepy that looked to people answering the door for me and my sister!

****My Uncle Ed had a huge plot of land on the Arkansas River, where I spent a lot of (happy) time as a kid. I don’t know that he ever actually dressed up as a ghost, but hey, I needed lines for my poem.

Northwestern University’s Medill Reports just posted an article on Spirit Halloween’s proposal to move Halloween to the last Saturday in October. Myself and Geoff “Kitty Zombie” Graves are quoted in the article – you can guess which side of the issue we both come down on. http://news.medill.northwestern.edu/chicago/news.aspx?id=142479