Variations On A Theme: October

Rock-tober: A month dedicated to the act of rocking out, banging one's head, shaking our respective booties, thrashing, slam-dancing, and doing "the Mashed Potato," if you happen to be older than my parents and drunk at a wedding. During the four-week period of Rock-tober, all available cash MUST be spent on tight leather pants, cases of Aqua-Net, tickets to shows held in smelly clubs in the warehouse district of your city, and prescriptions for whatever they're using these days to cure the clap (backstage after-parties are a motherfucker, sometimes literally). If you choose to not participate in the month of Rock-tober, you will be considered "a square" by the cool kids and made to listen exclusively to the collected works of England Dan & John Ford Coley while wearing a dress. And not a pretty dress... a denim jumper or something made of thick, heavy flannel. It's best if you just participate in Rock-tober.

Jock-tober: You'd think this would be a month dedicated to athletic events and the like, but you'd only sorta be correct. In all actuality, Jock-tober is a four-week period sponsored by Tide Detergent specifically to emphasis their product's ability to get any sort of stains out of our nation's collective jockstraps. ANY kind of stains, mind you... Jock-tober is going to get real weird, real fast. Also, extremely smelly.

Smock-tober: Arts & Crafts! Arts & Crafts!!! ARTS & CRAFTS!!!

Jacques-tober: We'll all spend a month talking about fish with very "fwainch" accents and watching Animal Planet documentaries about how sharks will eat our faces off, give 'em half a chance. You can also watch that Wes Anderson movie The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou that all the hipsters like despite the fact that it is deathly dull and somehow managed to make Bill Murray unfunny.

Clock-tober: You like clocks? You won't after Clock-tober. Clocks fucking everywhere, all up in your grill with their tick-tick-ticking and the chimes... holy shit, the chimes!!! Clock-tober is honestly the worst idea since Strep-tember (...so many sore throats...)

Shock-tober: This is kinda, sorta like the ACTUAL October, in as much as it involves a lot of scary things and creepy, atmospheric situations and so forth, but there's a catch... It's all real. Monsters really chase you across bubbling swamps, serial killers really try to carve you up in abandoned amusement parks, the Devil really does come down to Georgia, lookin' for a soul to steal. That last one can easily be defeated as long as you went to Julliard for fiddle playing, fyi, but that's not the point; the point is if you survive the month of Shock-tober with most of your limbs attached, you're a badass on par with anyone who went toe-to-toe with Freddy Krueger and won.

Mock-tober: It's where you make fun of things for a whole month straight like some sort of wiseacre cutting up in sixth-period algebra. Needless to say, ZFS! is huge in Mock-tober.