Halloween - What Is It Good For?

Halloween’s good for plenty of things when you’re a kid – 1) Gobs and gobs of free candy, 2) Stay out late on a school night, 3) Hang out with friends and joke around, 4) Dress up like a girl, etc., etc. But all the things that Halloween’s so good for when you’re young are summarily executed and tossed out the window when you get older - 1) Candy now makes me very fat if I were to eat gobs of it (1 gob = 8 pounds), 2) I’m too tired after a hard day’s work to stay out past 8:30, 3) My friends are super-serious and don’t like to hang out. They just like to schedule conference calls and discuss the complexities of modern-day thermomechanical wood pulp processing. Or some shit like that. Anyway, it’s no fun. And 4) In New York, men dress like girls every single day of the year. To do so on Halloween is so very passé.

Two years in a row and I haven’t dressed up! Does this mean it’s official? Is Halloween dead to The Mill? If so, I sincerely mourn the passing of my Halloween-celebrating days - if indeed those days are gone for good. I still halfheartedly try to come up with costume ideas, reasoning that if I find something fantastic, I’ll absolutely have to dress up. Even tonight, with mere hours before All Hallow’s Eve begins, my mind is chewing on the topic of Halloween costumes. Should I finally wear that Viet Cong guerilla outfit, and pretend to plant booby trap baby dolls and soda can nail bombs around town? Or is that still very offensive, non-PC, incredibly irresponsible, and asinine? Let’s hold off for another year, at least. Can I recycle my Serena Williams costume, originally worn back in 1999? What is the statute of limitations for re-using costumes? And would I even be able to pour myself into that tiny tennis dress? Probably not, although I can still fit into my Bar Mitzvah suit. But that wouldn’t make much of a costume. “A man in an ill-fitting, moth-ridden suit,” we could call it.

So I’m without a good idea this year. But there are plenty of other folks who lack good costume ideas, and still manage to participate in Halloween. How many Mahmoud Ahmadinejad costumes will we see? That one is so damn obvious. I’m sure we’ll also see numerous John Edwards’s, Dennis Kuciniches, and Jake Gyllenhaals, just to name a few easy ones. Oh, and William Hurt. I bet you'll see like 25 William Hurts this year. Why can’t people be more creative? And no, the “Cereal Killer” (guy tapes a bunch of cereal boxes to a sweater and walks around with a fake knife or knives impaling the cereal boxes) is not creative. That’s just stupid. And a waste of perfectly good cereal.

Wow, great William Hurt costume. Very lifelike. Too bad hundreds of others will have the same idea this Halloween.


A douchebag's classic standby costume. And so terrifying - a terrifying waste of cereal, that is!

Perhaps I'll be inspired in the hours and minutes leading up to Halloween. Although I'm not holding my breath. In any case, everyone knows that the weekend before Halloween is when all the good parties take place, and I definitely missed out on that this year (insert sad face emoticon). Thanks for bringing me to your friend's wedding this past weekend, Jaimi! We all dressed up in costumes. Wedding guest costumes.

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