Are you ready for a scarifying spooktacle of horror-tanic booportions??

So we’re only about 15, maybe 20 minutes into the in-flight screening of Fantastic Four on the plane from Edmonton to Ottawa, and it’s already fairly clear this is one of the most retarded films ever made. Oh! They just got blasted by space radiation. Still don’t care.

Anyhow, in case you didn’t already know, Kristine and I are going to be in Montreal for the next three days, where I’ll be writing a travelogue for Rue Morgue about this four-day Halloween party called La Grande Masquerade. It sounds like it’ll be pretty cool, actually—last year the event drew about 75,000 people, and this year they’re expecting closer to 100,000, they say. There’s lots of street events during the day, some ghost tours through Old Montreal, and a bunch of parties happening every evening—so I’m looking forward to getting a chance to unwind in a place that isn’t Edmonton, even if it is still technically business.

But yeah, the hosts of the festival are the ones footing the bill (whoa… I just looked up at the movie for a second and for some reason the Human Torch and whoever the hell Jessica Alba is supposed to be are snowboarding for some fucking reason, even though I thought they were still in space. Oh no he’s on fire now look out Human Torch! Use your flame powers to fly or something! Also, it’s amazing that Jessica Alba can’t even pretend to look smart enough to believably deliver a line like “Something has fundamentally altered our DNA.” And it’s equally hard to believe that the technology they’ve used to make the Thing’s latex suit has managed to progress so little since the days of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies. FUCK.)

Okay, ANYHOO, as I was saying, the hosts of the fest are paying for everything, and they’ve put Kristine and I up in what looks like a pretty swank boutique hotel right in the heart of the Old city, and they’re also offering to take us to an apparently rad costume shop called Ponto so they can buy us something to wear for the big warehouse party on Friday—that’s the horror-themed one, and subsequently the only party I’m interested in for my purposes, though there are also parties on Saturday and Sunday with fantasy and superhero themes, apparently, which would no doubt be hilarious. But we’ve only got a couple free nights in town, and it’d be nice to get out and maybe go see a gig or something.

But whatever we end up doing, it’ll be a welcome reprieve from Vue, which has become increasingly intolerable for me over the past couple weeks. Things got so bad that I was actually fantasizing all day Monday about getting off of work and buying a bottle of port, of all things. I mean, hey, I like port about as much as the next guy, but yeah. I don’t think I’ve ever been port-guzzling mad about any job I’ve had before. Anyhow, it was tasty. So fuck all y’all.

…and through, the magic of time travel, I’m now writing from my room at the Hotel Gault in Old Montreal; I’m also kind of late for the opening party for this thing, so I should probably head out and see how out of place I can possibly feel since I don’t yet have a costume. Surely, there’ll be other writer nerds there who didn’t dress up yet, right? RIGHT? I’ll keep you posted.

AND HORRIFIED.