On a lovely Saturday morning in October, I woke up at 5:30 in the morning for a nice (but not really) 1.7 mile run up the hills of Berkeley with my fellow team members.

5:30 am/6 am in Berkeley, as I have realized, is total darkness. Running is nice. Running uphill is not nice, but all was as hellish as expected, except for the brief topic of conversation that kept popping up: clowns. Yes, those characters of entertainment, derived from their fun-house mirror past, reflecting an impish spirit within all of us -- except, nowadays the crafty play associated with the character is that of dark mischief. If I had heard of the public being terrorized by clowns years ago, I would have laughed it off with barely any caution. Though, after seeing videos on social media of these ghoulish incidents happening all over the country-- especially at dark -- all jokes are set aside. Just as everyone hates unsolicited phallic pictures, so do I get the heebie-jeebies when I found out unsolicited clown encounters are a thing of the present.

"Dude, I'm so sleepy" is usually the normal complaint for waking up early to go out, in general. "Dude, I'm so sleepy, but all I can think about are these clowns" is not a normal complaint. When the latter comment is followed with a "What if some clown just appeared out of nowhere while we're running?", we finally realize that the clowns have filled our minds with fear, terrorizing us whenever our current situation is eerily similar to the situations of those incidents.

For those who are arguing that the clowns are merely for entertainment purposes for Halloween celebration, let me just hit them in the head for a brief moment.

1. Okay. Most people are thrilled about Halloween, and most people are *dying* to go to a haunted house this month, but that does not mean that we welcome scary-looking clowns carrying weapons wherever we are. By all means, our excitement for the holiday does not give anyone the license to trespass someone else's private property and scare them. There's a difference between scaring us at a horror house and terrifying us when we discover that a clown carrying a weapon is intently walking towards our home.

2. Speaking of thrill, do consider that a good percentage of people hate Halloween too! Ain't nobody got time to be scared the living daylights out of. People got other important stuff to do. You scare these people, you're either going to get hit by a baseball bat, pepper-sprayed, stabbed, or land yourself in some other sketchy situation that no one wants to be the victim of. Then again, the clowns started it. They deserved it.

3. These encounters have been happening since August, when a woman in South Carolina reported her son's complaints about clowns trying to lure children into the woods. What kind of entertainment is this? And, even if it was entertainment, what kind of sick joke is this?!

I just cannot tolerate these clown pranks; I absolutely do not find humor in them. Even if all of this is a prank, it definitely falls in the bin of sickening pranks -- along with those involving terrorism, violence, and crime. Some people could be triggered from this, and their lives could be completely ruined. For the pranksters, I suggest staying away from clown-scaring people, lest you want to end up in the hospital or in a jail.