The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
Just spent an hour outside, in full costume, in 35 degree weather and a driving, visibility-limiting snowstorm, because I rock Halloween just that hard.
An inch of snow fell on my front yard while I was waiting for trick-or-treaters. I gave every kid who came by a full candy bar and told them to just take a handful out of the bowl of candy. Because Jesus what is happening out here.
Regular programming should resume tomorrow.
H
mm.
Here’s my plan for Halloween this year: my son is insanely excited about the holiday, so I’m dressing up too, for the first time since, I think, 1999. Halloween used to be my favorite holiday. It has not been, for many years, but the boy’s enthusiasm has been infectious and there seems to finally be a backlash happening against the onslaught of obnoxious “sexy XXX” costumes that have been plaguing the holiday for the last too many years.
The idea is this: Walk around with the boy and my wife a bit, and then stay outside my own house to pass out candy. We have two large and excitable dogs, so past practice has been to keep the candy outside so that we don’t have lots of doorbell-ringing and door-opening and there’s no chance of one of the animals getting past us and getting someone hurt. We generally have a bowl full of the traditional stuff and I buy a dozen or so actual candy bars for kids with exceptionally good costumes.
Things I still need: black sweat pants (I’m sure I have a pair, I just need to find them), black shoes (don’t even need to find those), zipties. You can’t see it, but the second set of chains-n-hooks is being worn as a belt– I’m going to ziptie them together so that I don’t have to try and tie plastic chains. The first set is actually threaded through the sleeves of the outer robe so that they dangle by my hands, which I think is a pretty neat trick.
Unfortunately, I probably need a new mask, too. While I like the idea of the mirror mask, and it’s suitably creepy, I’m actually still kind of having a panic attack from trying to breathe in the thing and while I’m planning to wear contact lenses while I’ve got it on, visibility is still a real problem. Plus, if you look closely at the picture, you can still see big chunks of my neck and what I’ll try to pretend aren’t extra chins, and that’s not the look I’m going for. I found a decent old man mask at Target that was basically mask for the upper half of the face and a lot of beard for the lower half, and I feel like that ought to do the job just as well, or I could always go with some sort of monster look. There’s no way I make it two hours in the mirrored one, cool as it looks.
It was an excessively pleasant day today, with October-perfect weather. We went out and bought pumpkins (the boy picked all three of them out) and the boy is so enamored with his personal pumpkin that he insisted on it staying in his bedroom with him tonight. We got the yard raked and I enjoyed it (it is so rare as to border on impossible for me to enjoy doing yard work) and acquired most of the rest of his Halloween costume. We also figured out what I was doing about my Halloween costume, which I didn’t actually realize I was wearing until the idea popped into my head.
And now we’re gonna watch the season premiere of Constantine. So, yeah, good day.
(Not “good blog post,” I admit that. I’ll try and be interesting tomorrow.)
Netflix recently made Curious George: A Halloween Boo Fest available for streaming, and it has quickly become the show du jour around here.
I’m going to compress the plot into a couple sentences, because it’s not like it will make more sense if I go into more detail: there is a haunted, or maybe a ghost, scarecrow. He lacks a head (that’s him in the background there) and he is therefore known as No-Noggin.
No-Noggin dislikes hats.
If you walk past No-Noggin’s tree on Halloween (because No-Noggin’s not there, or you can’t see him, or something) and you are wearing a hat, he will kick your hat off. And then steal it.
My son has insisted on us putting a scarecrow in the front yard, and his favorite game now is to go outside and stand under the tree next to where we put the scarecrow. My wife and I are supposed to walk past him, at which point he kicks our hats off. Note that we have never actually been wearing hats when we do this, and I don’t know what he would actually do if I was wearing a hat while he was being No-Noggin and kicking hats.
He has been able to turn every conversation into a talk about kicking hats, and whether one should kick hats, and whether one is kicking hats or not, for at least a week. Today at day care, when I picked him up, I was told that he’d hit another kid. I’m pretty sure that what he actually did was kicked him.
He wants to be No-Noggin for Halloween, which means the wife and I get to find a way to jury-rig a costume.
Th’boy’s too young for cosplay, methinks.
Whee.
Something has occurred to me. My brother, who has gotten the good looks in our family, has dressed as Axl Rose for Halloween on at least a couple of occasions, and has a phenomenal costume.
My physique is more appropriate for Homer Simpson.
Next Halloween, we’re both dressing as Axl, only I’m going to make him wear a sign around his neck with “1987” on it. I will dress identically and wear a sign around my neck reading “2014.”
It will be brilliant.
In other news, I’m about to go spend a week’s salary, literally, on new clothes.
Sigh.
First things first: sent the summer teacher grant application off today, meaning that I’ve applied for nearly fifty thousand dollars’ worth of grants in 2013, which seems kind of ridiculous. Now we get to move into my favorite thing: waiting to find out if people will be giving me money. Cross your fingers for me, ‘k?
I’m in my office right now, hiding from Trick-or-Treaters because they’re too much of a pain in my ass to deal with.
I hate Halloween. There, I said it.
This hasn’t always been true– in fact, for most of my life Halloween has been one of my favorite holidays if not my actual favorite holiday. It was great when I was a kid, and there have been scattered moments of greatness in my adult Halloweens as well– dressing as Darth Maul right around when Episode One came out was certainly a highlight. But I am officially too old and too crotchety to enjoy this shit anymore– working in a middle school, for one thing, has ruined Halloween for me, because it turns my kids into such huge pains in the ass– and on top of that the cultural shift where “slutty _____” has become the default costume for every girl over ten years old everywhere has turned me into a goddamn puritan.
Not everything has to be about fucking. Halloween isn’t supposed to be about fucking. There should not be any such thing as a “sexy cat costume.” Cats aren’t sexy! No one thinks cats are sexy, and if we find someone who breaks the rules and does we lock them the fuck up and feel good about ourselves for it!
(Which… huh. I don’t appear to know how to link to Google Images sites anymore; Safari just puts the damn search term in the address bar. Ah, there we go, it works in Chrome: None of these women look like goddamn cats. This is what Mardi Gras is supposed to be for, goddammit, not Halloween. You wanna have a holiday called Dress Like A Stripper Day? I’m in, and I’m willing to insist that guys dress like Chippendales for it too. That’s not a cat. It’s a stripper with stupid ears.)
Also, and this is more of a personal thing, we have two huge dogs and neither of them are terribly great about strangers, meaning that we have to do whatever we can to keep the doorbell from being rung all night. We currently have our candy in a bowl on a picnic table in the driveway to keep the kids away from the dogs. Many of the children, unsurprisingly, are not bright enough to notice it– some of them will literally walk around it on their way to the front door, which I’ve done my damnedest to make look uninviting And it’s raining, which means that even if they were wearing cool costumes, and most of them aren’t, they’re covered up in raincoats and umbrellas and hoodies and shit. Sacrifice for your art, goddammit. Get some bloody waterproof makeup and show off the damn costume. Assuming you’re actually dressed as something, that is.
(Huge ruckus outside; I prepare to actually literally go tell some teenage kids to get off my damn lawn.)
(Ruckus ends abruptly as it started; I think the neighbor’s Rottweiler tried to eat someone. Good.)
Note the following: I will drop at least some of my objections to Halloween as soon as local jurisdictions acquire some goddamn sense, drop this October 31 nonsense (not one person in a hundred can explain why Halloween is October 31) and bloody move the holiday to the last Friday in October. Halloween during the week is idiotic for a wide variety of reasons, not least among which is going to be the spike in suspensions at schools across the country tomorrow.
Bah. Humbug.
