One weird Halloween everybody dressed up as Elliott Smith. Everybody wore a beanie that didn’t quite cover their ears, pants that didn’t quite reach their ankles; everybody frowned deep parentheses into their soft faces. It was turning out to be a pretty boring Halloween, so everybody took it further. Everybody method acted the most depressed and self-destructive singer-songwriter of their generation. The milder folks moped around living rooms, smoked on forlorn porches, gloomily strummed acoustic guitars. The more daring got magnificently intoxicated, forgot their lyrics in front of thousands. Obnoxious fundamentalists leapt off of cliffs, only to be non-fatally impaled by trees. Everybody gave grim interviews, everybody claimed indifference, everybody looked like hell. Secretly, everybody yearned for that Shakespearean end, shrouded in conspiracy, leaving their legend to metastasize through the generations—but nobody wanted to die. There was an awkward hour where everybody glanced at each other, waiting for somebody to do it. Then somebody did it. Then everybody else did too, obediently stabbing themselves in the heart, removing the knife, stabbing again. In the morning there was nobody left to beam meaning into it. There were just a bunch of wet hipster corpses clogging the storm drains.