Halloween Countdown

 This year marks another Halloween party that I will be co-hosting with fellow housemates although this year I am in a new house. I intend to bring the same epic enthusiasm to the party as usual, though I'm not exactly in Halloween spirits this year. My costume is far from done and I can't say I've really placed Halloween as a high priority this year. Take solace in the fact that I suffer, my hateful readers, even on a night I celebrate with year round anticipation.

This year will be another themed group costume with my usual halloween cohorts. This year will one again be post apocalyptic as we have done a similar costume before. Although to be fair, the costume theme at that time was "Road-Warriors".

I thought this would be a good opportunity to share some of the costumes I have constructed in the past and share them with everyone.

Lets start with a costume I made that, though wasn't for Halloween,  was pretty awesome and deserves to shared.


A long time ago, in the year 2004, a group of friends and I decided to stage an event called "BoxFight" where we created robo-costumes out of card board to battle each other with. It was good fun. There were a lot off politically driven box costumes there that we pit against each other, but the grande finally was something special.

Myself and 3 others made 4 very special costumes.
 A friend and I chose to be to be Airplanes, while 2 other friends chose to become Twin Towers.
We then re-enacted history.

Let the terror begin.

Planes and Towers collide

 And Just like on that historic day, no one won.



That year for Halloween I took a few months to grow my hair so that I could style it in a very recognizable hair style. That was the year I went as Wolverine. Not dressed in super hero attire but in the cost friendly street clothed "Logan" costume.


All it took was some jeans, a mock bomber jacket, a plaid shirt, and some claws fashioned out of coat hangers, some card board, and silver chrome paint.  The hair was styled with the use of knox gelatin and a hair dryer.

All in all I really enjoyed that costume a lot.



Cue the next year, where I used...
a red shirt
a hat bought at sears and painted by myself
a pair of oilfield overalls
2 yellow circle pieces cut out of a panago pizza box
some black crape hair and some spirit gum
and a pair of white gloves and brown shoes

....to become Mario.


Another year later was the aforementioned "Road Warrior" Halloween. Where some friends and I used old sports equipment, fur, old clothes, face paint and chains to create that wonderful Mad Max style.

I was the guy in the red face paint.

There were a couple of shitty Halloween costumes between then and 2008 that I don't really wish to share.

By 2008, though, we were back in the halloween groove, and a group of friends and I put a lot of work, effort and money in to fashioning and sewing together some of the best Halloween costumes I have ever seen. Mine was done with a lot of help from a friend (Alecia) and I think it turned out wonderfully.
We went as some DC comics superheroes.

(from left to right) Martian Manhunter (Kalvin), Wonder Woman (Nelle), The Question (Brent), The Huntress (Alecia), Lobo (James), Captain Marvel (myself)

The tights were fun but they made my ass look like a red tomato.

And finally in 2009 we ordered in some costumes, as we new from the previous year how hard and stressful sewing group costumes could be. There was still some sewing, and constructing, and hair dyeing involved, but it was a lot less work when we ordered the shirts off of Ebay.

The costumes? Star trek.

Bones (Brent), Medic (Amber), Kirk (Cory) Yeoman (Nelle), Spock (Kalvin), Orion Slave-Girl (Alecia)

I was finally able to become Captain James T. Kirk, whom I have always felt a great kinship with.

This year we decided to go "post apocalyptic" although I haven't really started my costume yet. Halloween is only two days away and as you can plainly see, I have a lot to live up to.


Wish me luck.

Give Her Fiction.

     I would never go as far as to say I was a poet. However, I do take a creative writing course in school that forces me to occasionally spread my creative wings.  That means I have written a couple poems now and today, in my first ever blog post, I will share one.

    First off I would like to point out that I'm a little fascinated with relationship dynamics. Perhaps it is because I haven't been able to keep a relationship going for more than 1.5 years. The ones I'm in tend to burn bright and fast, before quickly turning to ash.  The reasons for this always seem different, even though some of the same issues are always present.
  
    In any case, this poem dealt with one of those issues that I see repeated in some of my relationships and the romances of others: the pressure of living up to fictions (or really, failing to do so)  and the rather fantastic, unrealistic identities we create for each other.

Give Her Fiction

At first, all we would do was talk.

She would speak to me as though

I was the only person left to hear her.

She would listen to me intently

and we would begin to share.

She would tell me stories.

They were like predictions for our lives,

of adventures we hadn’t yet had,

near our home and in faraway places.

They were tales of our future told in the past tense.

I, in turn, would dismantle our past

so that I could re-write our history.

I’d turn the mundane into the extraordinary,

with misremembered hardships

that we had only overcome together.

We didn’t live a lie, per se.

The truth was what we made it.

She would scoff:

“Isn’t that true of everything?”

And laugh in the face of reality.

I loved her enough to continue the charade,

to join her daily exercise:

conjuring up the story of us.

The more that was said by her and me,

the less I could live up to.

There was a difference between I and the fiction of “I.”

“I” was madly in love with her.

And she was madly in love with “He.”

And he and I were no longer the same.

And she preferred the fiction.

Knowing that truth would never be enough,

I transcribed for her a lifetime

and placed the fiction in her hands.

She embraced the story and kissed me goodbye,

And I knew I would not be missed.