Paper faces on parade!

A cookie to whoever can tell me which work the title of this entry is a line from. A second cookie will be awarded to he or she who can recite the sentence uttered before it in the same work.

So it's that time of the year again. There's no escaping it. McDonald's attendants are in costume. Supermarket tellers are dressed up in silly flashy rags you couldn't associate with a fantasy archetype if your life depended on it (I mean, I was assisted by a young wooman clad in red, with red see-through "flaps", for want of a better word, of fabric dangling from her sleeves and the hem of her dress and with her hair dyed shocking red. So what is she supposed to be, "Period Woman"?). Herds of young children from kindergartens will deambulate in double files, dressed in either their own costumes or readily provided (or rather, improvised) costumes of sorts, brandishing long stick of wood, which become makeshift magic wands, swords, canes, rifles and an all-round good idea, to provide young enfants with tools of scratching, bruising, cutting, poking and eye-gouging. Thumbs up, safety! Unless it's a clever plot to weed out the unrulier ones. Then even I'll condone with that.
Ah, well, here I am, sounding all bitter and sarcastic, when, after all, this is one of the few inescapable silly times I actually rather enjoy. Let's all shed our routinely worries and become our fantasies for a few hours. I'm all for that, really, for as long as it's harmless fun. Even tonight I was surprised to be passed by a fellow running in white hooded overalls, bearing the fearsome yellow and black "radioactivity" insignia on his right breast and a larger version on his back. Remember those t-shirts with the saying "I'm a bomb technician, if you see me running try to keep up" stamped on their back? It felt a bit like that... with the added factor of the tardiness of the hour (nigh on or past 3:00 AM).

Which brings me to a topic I'm really disgruntled about. I got myself in a bit of a mess, with my biological clock all messed up. I find myself unable to sleep at night, but come late morning or early afternoon, I'm out like a light until early evening. So perhaps I'm becoming a vampire, and not for Carnival only. That would be swell, wouldn't it? To shed morality and mortality alike and roam the night everlasting. It bothers me little that I can't sleep at propper hours, I'll shrug it off, somehow. What gets up my nose is some hellish little birds who'll pick whenever I'm trying to get my sleep in order to screech with their shrill chirps at bloody 4:00 AM. What the hell, it's 4:00 AM in the winter, the sun won't be up for hours and already you're chirping like your miserable existences of nary consequence depended on me not getting my timely sleep? Rejoice in that I can't find you or reach you unhelped, for I'd wring your single occipital condrilus necks in a heartbeat without a second thought. The pox on you as well. Now go bother the supermarket people. You'll find you have some in common after all.

Pax vobiscum atque vale.

ArabianShark has had way too much of a not-very-popular so-called energy drink, the thought behind it being that, If I can stay awake for the night, as I have lately, and the whole day after it, then, come next night, I'll be far too exhausted not to sleep well. However, this energetic beverage seems to be wanting some juice...