The Top Ten Halloween Costumes Evan Has Worn

Another week has ended. Progression slows from a rolling boil to a simmer. I’m taking a few days off from writing to get my head straight. The sample chapter is somewhere between forty and fifty pages at the moment but there is much work still to go. I hope that by the end of next week I can begin editing myself before printing out three or four copies for confidants and close friends to critique and edit. As is the norm around here, I will post updates and reports. I don’t have a good gauge for how interesting this self-reflexive style of writing (or, blogging) is… It’s not as self-scrutinizing in this space as it is in my head, but if I sat here and complained about how neurotic each nuance of the process made me, you would be bored probably to tears. That’s why I attempt to make it carefree and jovial whenever possible. Of course, the past week or two I’ve been told that this has resembled more of a diatribe or missive that slanders pretty much the entire human race. One person said, “It is funny how each day over the last week or two your blog has gotten progressively more and more annoyed at people in general.” My response was, “Yeah. I’m fucking mad. I want to move away and be a hermit. A hermit that fucks high school girls for a living.”

A man can dream, can’t he?

And now- a slice of humor. Your weekly Top-Ten, courtesy of the fine folks at Mel’s Diner and the Los Angeles Times.

THE TOP TEN HALLOWEEN COSTUMES EVAN HAS WORN

10) Freddy Krueger – The most trite of costumes. I don’t remember when I did it, but I remember I was young enough to think this was a cool idea for a costume. I’d never even seen Nightmare on Elm Street. In fact, I still haven’t seen any of the Nightmare on Elm Street movies. I just thought he was fucked up looking, and his red sweater kinda creeped me out. On a related note, I used to wear that sweater to school sometimes also. I just really liked it.

9) Lawrence “LT” Taylor – Was the first costume I wore to school. I was in first grade and enjoyed football quite a bit. Of course, I didn’t know the guy that I was emulating would one day become just another crackhead battling legal troubles once his professional sports days were numbered. At least he waited for his career to end before he fell off the fucking charts.

8) Dwight “Doc” Gooden – In second grade I decided I liked baseball way more than football. I always wanted to be a pitcher in the major leagues, but because I was kind of small and not very strong, this dream died by the wayside when I quit little league in middle school. Of course, Doc’s legal battles are even more woeful than LT’s, which makes my first choice of costumes completely and utterly awesome. I basically went to school as a crackhead for two years in a row, only they wore different work uniforms.

7) Some ghoul mask – In middle school, Halloween isn’t so much about dressing up as it is about going out and causing a scene, getting in trouble and stealing as much candy as possible. That’s why the costumes usually ended up being a $5 mask from the mall across the street that you could wear with jeans and a t-shirt and still be considered “in costume” by old folks in the suburbs. I had one that’s still in my closet. It stinks like fucking burnt rubber. It’s some Nosferatu-looking guy with his mouth agape and some bloody fangs. It’s pretty dopey, really. That’s why it sucks harder than most of these other costumes.

6) Clown – Everyone wants to be an evil clown. Not me. When I was in elementary school I wanted to be a normal clown. I still may have pieces of the costume in my closet. There was an orange jump suit with yellow furry buttons, a blue hat with yellow fur balls, and a wild incandescent wig. It was childish, but it was also one of the only real costumes I ever bought to wear on Halloween. Most of these other ones were constructed from my own wardrobe, which is pretty frightful in its own right.

5) Hulk Hogan – A family friend went to some wrestling event and caught Hulk Hogan’s real ripped t-shirt that he had worn, and I thought this was the greatest fucking thing that had ever happened. She gave me the shirt and I used to shroud myself in it it like a Jew who wears that blanket over their shoulders when they go to temple. I might have just worn that over underwear on one Halloween during elementary school… I remember the shirt was big enough to be a shirt AND pants. Anytime you can get away with not wearing pants to school, you’ve had an incredible day.

4) The Ultimate Warrior – This wasn’t so much a Halloween costume as it was an everyday costume. My mom, after a few tries, became very adept at drawing the Warrior’s face paint (dare I say makeup?). So I would ask her to do it whenever I felt like I wanted to strip down to my tighty whiteys and wrestle stuffed animals around the house. I’m pretty sure I had her do it for Halloween one year, but that’s only because she did it just about every other day of the year.

3) My Doppleganger – While attending Livingston High School, it wasn’t very cool to wear a Halloween costume to class. At least, I didn’t think so. Sure, it was awesome to see girls spend a day dressing even skimpier and sluttier than normal (I’ve always said, “Nothing says a girl likes top or bottom more than the whole devil vs. angel paradigm), but no one ever really dressed as something that made me stop and curse myself for not thinking of the idea first. There was always the kid who came wrapped in seran, or the kid who wore a robe with nothing underneath… But those were just stupid. I liked breaking out my glasses on Halloween. When people ask what my costume is, I say that I’m my doppleganger. I think that’s pretty inventive. Let’s see the seran wrap kid come up with something so high brow.

2) Laser Beam – I don’t even remember where this joke started, maybe it was The Simpsons, but I remember my group of friends getting a kick out of saying, “When I grow up, I want to be a laser beam.” I don’t know why it was so funny at the time, but then in like 7th grade I thought it would be incredible if I dressed up as a laser beam, just to revive the old joke from those halcyon days. I wore a red sweatsuit. That was about it. I might have worn red chucks, also.

1) Anal Thermometer – This was by far the most ingenious costume. I don’t remember what year it was. It was either 8th or 9th grade. 9th grade, I think, was the last time I wore a real costume. This rather brilliant idea came to me as I frustratingly searched for a costume minutes before I was due at a friend’s party. My mom was yelling ideas at me and somehow I just snidely said I wanted to be an anal thermometer. She put a streak of duct tape up a white sweatshirt with some numbers on it. I wore a hardhat covered in tin foil, and I don’t remember what else. It wasn’t so much the costume that slayed so hard, it was banging on people’s doors and correcting them when they called me a thermometer. “No, I’m an ANAL thermometer.”