Halloween (guest blogger Erin C.)
When we were kids, Halloween meant something!
For most kids, it meant dressing up like their favorite superhero, or space alien, or hobo. And candy! For me, it meant panic attacks, stress-induced bloody noses, and crying jags. And fuckin candy! I was a fat kid, which explains the costume drama AND the love of candy.
Now, the love for candy was directly proportional to my hatred for dressing up. It was full blown bullshit and ugliness- and hot & wet cheeked hyperventilating conniption fits. I didn’t like it, I didn’t get a kick out of it, I barely tolerated it.
Look, my folks weren’t really hands-on parents. Mom didn’t sew us any costumes, and Dad didn’t construct us any props. I had the shitty store-bought plastic character costumes. The kind of plastic that felt specially constructed to worsen ensuing panic attacks by adhering clammily to any exposed skin, while the mask suffocated you from all sides and left you only a coin-slot-sized slit out of which to breath, belaboredly. Agonizing. Humidly.
It still upsets me, slightly, when people ask me- NOW, in my adult life- what I’m going to be for Halloween. What am I going to be? I guess I’ll be untouched. Unfazed. Uneffected. More likely a spoil-sport, a sour-puss, a sad-sack. They don’t make any specific costumes for that. But any costume that is hastily patchworked together using items pulled out of your mother’s clothes hamper and from under the sink will suffice. There’s little in this world that hobbles the creativity more than self-loathing and so it went.
Halloween became fun for me later in life. Stretched out, prone, on the benchseat of a K-car. Smoking pot, talking loud about destoying things, daydreams of bloodlust and serial killers. I was too timid for real destruction, but we joked about it, then watched horror movies and kicked dead leaves into piles while wishing we were trick-or-treating. Oh hell. Halloween has never been fun.
I’m still here, in the interim between being a kid, and having a kid.
I think that’s when Halloween might be fun, when I have kids that I can sew the most grotesque and horrific costumes for, we’ll spend weeks planning them, I’ll buy fabric and glitter and pipe-cleaners. And we’ll make floating ghosts out of cotton balls and kleenex and twine. I’ll bake cookies shaped like jack-o-lanterns with candy corn eyes, and the kids and I will carve pumpkins while drinking hot cider.
Oh Horseshit. I’m not having kids. Because I’d be even more hands-off than MY parents were, and I don’t want to be. I’d rather just… not, you know.
So, enjoy Halloween you well-adjusted little shits. Me and the rest of my ilk are content being ghoulish year-round.
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