So, I ducked into my favorite local burger emporium last night to grab some take-out. I was in a hurry, because it was Halloween, after all, and I wanted to get back to The Girlfriend’s place before Michael Myers got her, or me. The place looked safe enough on the outside, an island of friendly red neon standing firm against the cold darkness of All Hallow’s Eve. But when I got inside and took a look around the place, I thought the dread power of the Great Old Ones had caught up to me after all and swept me off to some horrible mirror-version of 1986: all the young female counter staff were wearing torn, off-the-shoulder sweatshirts and leg warmers, and they had their hair pulled up into long ponytails worn off to one side of their heads. The lone boy working one of the cash registers up front was stylin’ in a double-breasted, blue-and-white-striped linen sport coat and a fake mullet. It was my high-school yearbook, reanimated without a soul and shambling through the graveyard toward me with ironic detachment in its eyes.

“You know,” I said to Counter-Boy in a small-talkish voice, “I used to have a jacket kinda that one.”

“Really?” he replied. “I got this from my dad.”

I didn’t tell him that I’d probably gone to school with his dad, or that if the, ahem, experiences of my younger self had gone just a bit differently, I could have a son about his same age.

The realization that I’m now old enough to have a teenaged child who would think that my old ’80s clothes would make a good Halloween costume — and that the ’80s are now as mockably distant for today’s kids as the Flower-Power ’60s were for me and my friends — was the scariest thing I encountered last night. Michael Myers has got nothing on the relentless march of time. Not that the damn kids these days would know who he is, anyway…