The hirsute drinker snubbed out his cigarette on the bar as closing time approached. "I should be out there right now," he complained, "but it's pointless." From the vicinity of a Bud Light bottle suspended over the next stool came "Yeah, now the only way I could get a rise out of people would be to toss some flour in the air. I'm as patriotic as the next American, man, I'm not going to exploit things that way."
The laments of the Wolfman and the Invisible Man are all too common this Halloween, as the realities of the modern world have driven down demand for traditional sources of fear. Generally, fiends and monsters make enough income from personal appearances in October to fund their depravations for the next year, but this year many of them may find themselves on the unemployment rolls.
Count Dracula is suffering more than most. "What most people don't understand," he says, "is that the main nutritional value I get from sucking people's blood is the adrenalin - if they're not frightened when I bite, it's just empty calories". He declined to say what he is doing to pay for his weekly adrenalin injections at the local health clinic, saying "It's just too humiliating", but investigation by We're All Doomed has turned up invoices in his name for "Modeling Services" at General Mills' advertising agency, in a folder related to the upcoming redesign of their Count Chocula cereal boxes.