Our culture is changing. It always does. Quite often in response to wider events. I can stop my own doom scroll and limit my news in-take. I can speak up where it might make some small impact. I can do the right thing by those I meet. Yet, I cannot stop noticing the signs of despair and fragmentation among my neighbors and nation-wide. It tells me we collectively are a long way from the hope of 2008, when change seemed possible. Positive change, not the violent, traumatizing kind that seems bubbling up everywhere.
Personally, I’m in a pretty good place. I don’t have long Covid, the initial viral infection just sparked a bacterial one in my sinuses. 24-hours into antibiotics I started feeling like my old self. I’ve had clarity of purpose in my work and a degree of mental peace from learning to trust my ability to make moral choices and accept whatever comes next. It helps that my small domestic world is full of joy and pleasures. I picked beans and treated the weathered front door. Dinner is in the slow cooker. All the neighbor kids are in the dining room playing D&D with the best of all DMs (a doting father). My beloved is building a garden shed out of salvaged hardwood doors. Life really does not get better than this. I even have time to write and interrogate the shift I’m seeing.
Exhibit one.
I posted this on Instagram as a story. I thought it was silly and unexpected. Then a colleague helped me connect the dots. It is a pre-packaged BORG or more accurately in this instance a BORL.
A BORG is a Black Out Rage Gallon. I kid you not. It has a wikipedia page. And these are all the rage I’m told on college campuses. Around this country, our smart young people want to lose consciousnesses. To stop the rage? To feel the rage? To embrace the rage? Whichever it is they certainly want to forget it all.
The practice is so common that companies are now emulating the packaging and recipes to bring this to a liquor store near you. There were other flavors but this one leans into tongue and cheek patriotism and a shade of artificial blue reminiscent of anti-freeze, that famously sweet ‘treat’ that has killed many an unsuspecting family pet.
It’s good business to make something cheaper and more convenient than one can make at home. This is a sound example of entrepreneurship in late stage capitalism. Make it easier to black out and give the people a little joke to chuckle about as they do so. The elites can thumb their nose at the packaging and think it ironic. The working class can embrace the messaging and thumb their nose at the judgy elites who would never buy such a thing. Something for everyone.
Genius.
Exhibit 2.
This is Spirit Halloween 2025. The whole business model of the company profits from the failures of late stage capitalism. Aged malls are full of abandoned spaces. A big box store closes and no new company wants to move into a failed space. 99% invisible did a fabulous deep dive on this so just go listen to that for the corporate context. Spirit Halloween rents those places at deep discount for just a couple months of the year. No long term contracts: fast cash into the landlord’s pocket and no off-peak costs for the tenant.
For the customers the annual opening marks the beginning of the ‘holiday season’. More and more I hear friends and friends of friends say Halloween is their favorite holiday, more than Christmas, more than Thanksgiving. I get it. You decorate, but cooking is at a minimum, and far less pressure to be with your family of origin. Back in the day, Dan Savage, a sex-positive gay advice columnist, used to call Halloween ‘straight pride’. Go head and do a little bad cross-dressing. Get into a slutty nurses outfit. Play with handcuffs with your cops and robbers costume.
My kids adore Spirit Halloween. My beloved and I play act our way through each visit. Do you like me in this mask? Don’t we need this giant fake battle axe? We learn a little more about our children’s internal fantasies, fears, hopes, dreams by watching them interact with the ever more dazzling array of plastic crap. This year as we approach the store one kiddo says she wonders what the theme will me. Carnivals and Carnies was last year. It is always that sort of thing. Gothic Horror or Mad Scientist or anything else you might find as a theme for a haunted house.
By now you’ve realized what the pictures are. It’s this years theme–the NYC subway.
Somewhere in a corporate creative unit they workshopped this idea. What are we afraid of this year? Not Nazis, they’re back in fashion. Creepy Doctors? Plague? Too soon. Pedophiles? Could be too political.
I KNOW. PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION.
*cough* Unsegregated Urban Spaces *cough*
Thanks Fox News.
What’s the biggest baddest city of them all. The most iconic. NYC of course.
Didn’t you hear those people want to elect a brown muslim mayor? One who might actually address issues like public transportation and the cost of living.
Spirit Halloween creative team hit the nail on the head. There is profit in fear. They serve populations with cars that shop on Stroads. People who can at least dream of owning a 20 foot skeleton and having a place to store it in the off season. They may live near those urban centers, but they don’t necessarily know how to navigate those spaces. They tell stories of rich panhandlers pretending to be homeless while living in deluxe apartments right off Time Square. The city is not for the innocent or the naive.
I understand. I travel. Each new transit system takes some learning. But while I’ve smelled death on the subway (don’t get in the empty car, it is empty for a reason), it never features in my nightmares.
Instead, when the night gremlins come to wake me up at 3 am, they only ask, will my children be able to move through this country and the world with the incredible freedom and joy with which I have?
Liv Mariah Yarrow 
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