Do you ever look up and realize you are standing in the middle of a fully functioning Spirit Halloween? Do you ever find yourself on a woefully sweaty day on another endless afternoon shimmering in the sun's punishing gas, looking at Pennywise costumes for a small dog? Do you ever ask yourself, how did I get here, studying a "possessed nun mask" while animatronic ghoulies pop out of a row of hidey holes inside the guts of a former Stein Mart?

There's no easy way to say this, but: It's now Halloween.

No, no, time has really dissolved. I am telling you! The alleged sequence of existence has transmogrified into more of an abstract mind-bender than before. Recent research supports the notion that the known universe is expanding along with our perceptions of time. Take a moment, gaze out the window in distress. Walk gently past a 24-inch talking Chucky doll, $69.99. Consider the concept of entropy near the novelty witch socks.

For instance, there's this thing called cosmological time dilation; Einstein discovered it more than 100 years ago, clearly a man ahead of the curve when it came to seasonal big-box retail concepts. It means, ever so loosely, that time is malleable and can malfunction entirely. Time literally moved slower in the distant past.

Have you ever pondered this while staring at a sexy ghost poncho? While an employee tells a customer, "Your best bet will probably be the thigh-highs"?

It's just... OK. You may think it's barely September, but it's not, do you follow? We are living in a whipped cream canister of social constructs, an espuma of cognitive dissonance. I can only speak for myself, but as a writer doing the work-from-wherever lifestyle on the backside of a pandemic, formerly structured pockets of duty now slide into the time blob's fleshy folds. It'll be like, "Dermatologist!" And then, "Sentence structure!" And then, "Web traffic report!" And then, "Thaw chicken!"

Sometimes I'll look up after a lunch meeting and realize it's time for pickup from summer camp 45 minutes away. This means it is both too late to go home and too early to sit in the pickup line. It's also not enough time to pop open the laptop at one of 64 regional Starbucks. This also means, according to the natural laws of physics, that in the next 20 minutes, I'll have to go to the bathroom.

So this means the only choice is to run into the nearest grocery store. The people at Publix understand, I hope, that toilets are part of the social contract of running a store with the nerve to charge $8 for Cheez-Its in this economy.

There I was on a recent afternoon, running into Publix to complete The Agreement amid the weekly Tetris match of tasks, when I SAW TIME DILATE, JUST LIKE THE ASTROPHYSICISTS SAID. I SAW THE NEON ORANGE BANNER FOR A SPIRIT HALLOWEEN WOBBLING IN THE BREEZE. I saw the trends for the season, the Wednesday Adamses and the characters from TV's "Yellowstone," the pop culture pulse points that throb with urgency then wither, in universal nanoseconds, into obsolescence. I saw false eyelashes and machetes, flapper pearls and fangs, bubbling cauldrons and bloody limbs neatly stacked and shrink wrapped in the ever-thin veil between order and chaos.

I saw a young woman walking out of the store toting a pink Barbie dress in a plastic sleeve, because although Barbie is sure to be the hottest Halloween costume of 2023, one can wear a Barbie costume to the movie theater or, really, anywhere, at any time. People will simply not blink at a person dressed like a life-sized Barbie because the decades of the zeitgeist have accordioned in on themselves, the same way the Publix bathroom has somehow accordioned into my workday. Life is all one big depiction of other depictions, which is honestly FINE because TIME is all one big discrepancy measured by different cosmic clocks, and we should just enjoy our little roller blade Ken outfits as we search for meaning in the inky abyss.

Anyway. Happy Halloween, I guess.

Stephanie Hayes is a columnist at the Tampa Bay Times in Florida. Follow her at @stephhayes on Twitter or @stephrhayes on Instagram.

Photo credit: Emilia Willberg at Unsplash