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This week's episode of the Skating Atheist is brought to you by Zip Recruiter and by Volgherty for charity

2019. Get your Wallace out. It's time for sweet sweet revenge. And now the Skating Atheist.

Hi, this is Brian and though I'm sure you've heard it before, the truth of the matter is we did in fact a ball from Filthy Monkey Met.

Yeah, it's Thursday. It's October 31st. And there's nothing in the rulebook that says you can't trick or treat when you're 30.

You're 32. I'm no illusions. I'm Eli Bosnick still stands. I'm even right. And from trick or treating Eli Bosnick's New Jersey.

Cincinnati Swing State and good as been Georgia. This is the Skating Atheist. This week's episode will use our powers for good like Monster Mama Tautas. I'm Matt Gaetz and I'm part of this intro.

And Eli will reluctantly agree that it doesn't have to be the Volgherty for charity.

We said we'd put a pin in it. But first the diatribe.

The diatribe.

I'm pretty excited about Halloween this year. It's finally here. We've got our yard all decked out. We got the pumpkins carved. We got bucket loads of candy to give out. And I'm finally done putting all those little razor blades in them in my nefarious plot to murder random neighborhood children.

I sure hope their parents don't check the rappers again this year though or I'll be foiled yet again.

I mean, look, we're a pretty fucked up culture when it comes to holidays. You know, we celebrate a fictional resurrection by hiding eggs and we celebrate a gift giving holiday by forcing our children to sit on the lap of an overweight man earning minimum wage. But if all our holiday traditions, I'm pretty sure the weirdest is the annual candy checking ritual.

And maybe I'm just old and people don't do this anymore or maybe you're listening from a sane country and don't know what the fuck I'm talking about. So to be clear, I'm talking about the period after trickier treating his over when little Noah comes home, freezing to death by this toilet tissue, thick came our superhero costume way down with a pillowcase full of candy. But before he can eat any of it, mom and dad have to inspect it to make sure it hasn't been tampered with. And by tampered with they mean had a

razor blade inserted into it by a sociopathic neighbor who can't think of a less obvious or less trouble some way to murder random children. And they were super clear on that. I'm not sure why the supervillain wouldn't think to re glue the package afterwards, but my parents were or at least claimed to be utterly convinced that a there were people out there trying to booby trap my Halloween candy and be a cursory glance at the package would be enough to foil that homicidal plot.

I honestly can't decide which of those is a weirder thing to believe. Of course, this was hardly idiosyncratic to my parents. Everybody's parents did this. They warned you about it in school. They had little public service announcements about it. Don't take Halloween candy that isn't wrapped. If some elderly lady took the time to make candy apples for every child in the neighborhood, it's safe to assume she poisoned them. Right. So don't take the chance. Stick with healthy standards like chocolate covered other chocolate and tubes of food.

Sugar that have been dyed blue so it's a little less obvious that you're literally sucking down a tube of sugar. And to be honest, I don't know if society really believed all of that shit or if it was just one of those convenient lies to tell children like the tooth fairy or religion. It makes sense that my parents would want me to be scared as all hell to eat my candy while I was still out trick or treating right.

Or maybe it was just so they could divide it up evenly between me and my siblings or maybe it was just a way for my dad to stash away a bunch of snickers and Reese's cups before we'd done account. But regardless of the reason through ignorance or malice, my parents convinced me that there were people in the world cruel enough to stash razor blades and candy and that those people were so numerous that you had to operate as though there was one in every neighborhood.

I think about what a fucked up world view that leaves kids with because I took that shit seriously when I went door to door asking if I could rake leaves or shovel walks for a few bucks. I did so with the trepidation appropriate for a person who believes there was a good one in 30 chance that the person on the other side of the door was an elaborate psychopath. Right.

I would look at the candy in the store and I would think hey, what's the stop the razor blade chocolate tears from branching out beyond Halloween is any candy safe and why just candy couldn't one of them get a job at McDonald's and really speed this process up.

And look, I know I just did a diatribe about a rational fear last week, but if there's ever a time of the year, I can get away with back to back diatribe about fear, right. And I think it's important to draw a distinction here.

It's bad to teach kids to be afraid of demons and ghosts and alien abduction. That can fuck them up something fierce, but you're on a whole new level when you start teaching them to fear each other.

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