Hello there! If you’re reading this it means that Frankenstorm hasn’t totally rocked you. Not yet, anyways. Or, if you took the proper precautions as I did, you’re safe in a bunker, leisurely tapping away on a hard-shelled laptop produced in 1995 and powered by a Soviet-surplus generator.

Mother Nature is a powerful woman of antiquity, but I’m a crafty miscreant in the digital age.

Anyways, welcome to the Monday Morning Commute, the weekly meeting at which we confess our darkest entertainment secrets. Can’t tell your boyfriend about that comic book you bought? Come to the MMC! None of your coworkers will appreciate the Japanese import you just got in the mail? Come to the MMC! Pretty sure your wife doesn’t give two buttery squirrel shits about the fact that you’re going to beat Super Mario Bros. 3 without the use of a single warp or whistle? Come to the MMC!

I’m going to get things started. But then it’s up to you to share what you’ll be doing this week. C’mon, it’s electronic show and tell!

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[OCTOBERFEAST is the greatest celebration of the year, a revelry dedicated to pop-culture’s most nutritious Halloween detritus. Plastic screams and artificial sweeteners have never been more bountiful. In the old country, villagers refer to the extended party as Satan’s Snacktime]

The heavy iron gates have been torn asunder. Children howl, fire in their eyes and sugar in their guts. Geezers don masks, chuckling their emphysema chuckles and launching bottle rockets at the Hunter’s Moon. Women hike up their skirts, tempting the menfolk to make decisions most unwise. The torrent of maniacs has flooded the campgrounds – there’s no mistaking this dark carnival for any other event.

Welcome back to the OCTOBERFEAST!

Today’s festivities feature musical accompaniment, a score to facilitate the fermentation of the parishioners’ blood from a vital red to a syrupy orange-and-black. Yes, instead of bat wings flapping and incantations groaned, the revelers tap their toes to a sludgy Gothic manifesto. One born out Brooklyn, no less.

Let us all raise the fist of the metal child to October Rust.

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When I met Type O Negative and Peter Steele I was a fat, confused, sixteen year-old. I was beginning to realize that my parents were as fucked up as me, the path of glory led to nowhere but the grave, and rot awaited all of us. In other words, the dude spoke to me. A penchant for the melancholic, his discussions of life and death and fragility and infidelity made a real lot of sense.

Over the years I haven’t listened to them as much as I used to. Mr. Steele and his lamentations have faded into the background of my mind. Steele, much like what used to be my incessant obsession with my own mortality, floated to the forefront every few years only to drift away.

It seems fitting then, in a year that has had me caring for a withering grandmother and once again uncomfortably aware of my own impermanence that Peter Steele would pass away.

Oh, you would do that.

One of my most magical concert moments ever took place at a Type O Negative concert. I must have been a junior in high school, and I went to the show with a pack of friends. During the bridge to Love You To Death, Steele polished off the bottle of wine he had been drinking the entire time and gunned it into the crowd. He then told us to give ourselves a hand, and the quiet bridge accompanied the sound of applause. I don’t know why it’s stuck with me throughout the decade-plus that’s passed, but I’ve always recalled it fondly.

Maybe the thing I enjoyed so much about Type O Negative was their ability to turn the morbid into the beautiful. Their songs about death weren’t nearly as depressing as they were pretty. Steele somehow managed to capture the gorgeous decay of existence.

Steele passed away this week. So it goes.