It is a week before Halloween as I’m writing this. I have two Halloween parties on my calendar (on separate days) and am struggling to come up with a costume idea. I have my old fallback, which I haven’t worn since 2019, but it’s incredibly warm and not super great if I’m going to be indoors for the whole party since it involves wearing my heavy winter jacket. The last couple years, I’ve gotten by with some simple things, but they all took a little bit of planning to execute and I barely have enough executive function left at the end of my work days to keep up with my blog posts. I’m not going to spend any of that on figuring out a costume that I will inevitably need to order online after doing some lengthy shopping around since finding anything for a person built like me (tall, heavy, barrel-chested, and broad-shouldered) is incredibly rare in the first place. I mean, I can barely find socks in stock that fit me outside of the incredibly basic plain white type. There’s no way I can buy any ready-made put-on-a-single-thing type costume and expect even the largest size to fit comfortably even if it is advertised as fitting someone with my general proportions. Well, at least the ones listed since few of those kinds of costumes include shoulder/chest measurements in their sizing charts, which is usually where things fall apart for me. So buying anything easy is out and most of the stuff I’ve accumulated over the years that I could slap together into some kind of closet costume just doesn’t fit anymore: a problem I encountered and partially solved last year, except that none of that clothing is good for anything other than actual casual wear. All the random odds and ends one accumulates through the years that can sometimes be compiled into some kind of rather mundane costume don’t fit my shoulders anymore and I don’t really feel like going as “the hulk after he has shrunk back to normal size.”
Continue readingHalloween
Decorating A Haunted Office
He hangs the decoration, a scrap of white with a face facsimile adorning the lumpy top, and then shifts his ladder five feet to hang another. They do not match his vision, but they match his wallet. He pauses, steps away, and returns, shifting the decoration once listed as “hanging ghost” half a foot away. He might not take pride in the look of the thing, but he takes pride in the look of them all. These imperfect pieces must be placed perfectly.
When he is done, the room is dark. Lights turned off to check the effect are now off in earnest. He cannot turn them on again. The building has gone dark while he labored, his coworkers gone and the thermostat set low for the night. There is no one left to see if his vision is visible amongst the clutter and decorations.
He takes one last look round before returning to this office and the one light he could turn back on after time turned them all off. He packs his things, glancing out at the bits of cloth and draped cotton that are visible from his drawing board, all while silently hanging his thoughts on the wall for another day. These mingled doubts, anxieties, and notes of pride will still be there tomorrow, when he can act on them. He does not need them now.
When he is gone, the decorations battle the scant airflow of the greater office, fighting to stay where he placed them. They were not made with pride or care, but they were placed with an abundance of both and what little power they have will be spent to show everyone else the vision he so carefully cultivated: a room haunted in truth by the death of a dream no one supported.