Calling all cosplayers

This has been a surprisingly productive Sunday– I need to do some lesson planning, but all of my grading and tomorrow’s lesson are set, we went outside and finished off the rest of the huge pile of sticks from a couple of weeks ago, and I’m writing a blog post right now, so I don’t really have much to do other than play video games and read for the rest of the night, which I figure is the right way to end a Sunday night.

We went out and got the boy’s Halloween costume yesterday, as I said. He’s dressing as a giant chicken, for some reason. The costume is hilarious but I would never have guessed that he’d have picked it. As I’ve said, I traditionally dress up and pass out candy in the driveway, because we’ve always had either escape-adjacent or doorbell-hating pets, and frankly I can do without hearing the Goddamn thing all night myself. I have a go-to costume, but I wanted to do something different this year.

And thinking about my son’s inflatable chicken costume got me thinking that an adult Oogie Boogie costume was probably something that existed out there in the world. And then I looked for one, and discovered that they do exist, but they’re either crappy or expensive, and it is also somehow possible that a costume of a dude who is literally a burlap sack filled with worms might not fit me.

Then I thought that it might be fun to wear my Santa suit while passing out Halloween candy, only that idea got shot down because there is a good chance as young as our Trick-or-Treaters get that some of them will want to hug me, and I’m not down with hugging strangers right now, nor am I interested in putting parents in the position of explaining to their kids why they aren’t allowed to hug Santa.

So now I’m all like … burlap’s cheap. It’s not like the pattern is going to be complicated. The trickiest part’s the mask, and that can’t be that hard. Use black wool for the stitches, and they can be wide as hell and sloppy and it’ll still look just fine. He’s literally a burlap bag. There are just not that many ways you can fuck that up!

Somebody talk me out of this, please. There’s less than a week until Halloween so all I have to do is go a few days without ordering the burlap and inertia will take care of the rest.