The Head is back in her guise as Halloween Ghoul Lady. I was going to paint her face an eerie ghostly white or yellow fluorescent and hang a spider from her nose, but couldn’t find either, well, without buying enough paint and spiders to decorate an army of heads.

So as you can see, I’ve draped her in a black tinsel shawl dotted with little shiny ghosts, along with a sign with the word “Boo!” she’ll be shrieking every time a little goblin, witch, Spiderman or Romney-masked teenager comes along. I wish! Wouldn’t that be funny?

In case you’re wondering why The Head is perched above my basketball hoop . . . my ex placed her there when she appeared in the vacant lot next to the house twenty years previously. Probably abandoned by someone tired of her mouthiness and that dead pan stare. Or maybe she was in the Pageant of the Masters or the Laguna Theatre and got too old? It’s a cruel world out there. But we took her in. Like we took in that woman with the two huge cats who showed up in the lot that time and stayed for three months. I’ll have to tell you that story sometime. It’s a good one. Actually it pisses me off when I think about it. But I digress.

So anyway, there above my basketball hoop The Head has stayed, rain, hail or shine. Sometimes I’ll come out and see a twenty-something guy standing in the driveway staring up at her with a nostalgic look on his face. And then he’ll say something like, “That thing used to scare the crap out of me when I was little, but then I got used to her and now she reminds me of the fun we had on the street.”

Ah yes, this is a fun street.