HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

This year I decided to go as my favorite character from the Bible:



And here's a Halloween Party Pic of the whole fam damily.

From left: my Witch-ay Woman, Lucky Lucifer, Thea the Reluctant
Butterfly, and Darth William, Dark Sith of the Standridges.

Happy Pagan Festivities to everyone!

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Halloween: Top 5 Favoritest Costumes

I love Halloween. It's my favorite holiday, for a variety of reasons. I love the candy, and usually come out the other side in a bit of diabetic distress due to my inability to keep from sampling. (Those peanut-butter taffy Mary Janes will be the death of me.) I love the ritual of trick or treating, the door-to-door demanding of sweets by adorably macabre youngsters that only the most curmudgeonly could deny. (If you sit inside with the porch light off and ignore the doorbell on Halloween night, I'm sorry to have to tell you this: you're a bad person.) I love the all-night horror movie marathons on TV and the outrageous scary flick DVD sales that leave me broke but happy.

I also love the fact that it's the last great Pagan Festival on the books. (That "All Saint's Eve" is not fooling anyone.) The ancient history, the cultural tradition, the idea that you can go out and have a blast without having to worry about your eternal soul or sinful nature. (Of course in recent years my youngsters have routinely brought back in their pumpkins at least one religious tract about the evils of the holiday and how God is watching you, clucking His tongue disapprovingly at all your devilish merriment. It's the kind of thing that makes me want to egg somebody back to the stone age--but I resist, praise Beelzebub.) Churches always speak out against it or have competing "Fall Festivals," but they're uniformly lame and not worth your kids' time. Get out there, get treating, and get scared, that's my motto.

But of course mostly I love the monsters. Vampires, werewolves, ghosts and creatures. As a kid, picking out my Halloween costume was the most important decision I made all year. I was never one to be a Power Ranger or a Super Hero or something like that--for me Halloween was about the fright, and the one requirement of any costume was that IT HAD TO BE SCARY. Otherwise you might as well just be playing pretend in the back yard. I've lost the photos of most of my childhood costumes, which were largely of the plastic-tunic and rubber-band mask variety (Wolf Man, Frankenstein's Monster, the Creature from the Black Lagoon--all in a handy square box! God, I miss those), but in the past several years I've had some fairly good costumes, all in the name of refusing to grow up. So here I present to you my Top 5 Favoritest Halloween Costumes Evar--with pics!

(click the pics for larger images)

#5: Gore-Streaked Ghoul


This was my costume a couple years back at work. Even though it was just a rubber mask (with gore added post-purchase), gloves, and black clothes, I think the effect worked out pretty well--especially once I perfected my shambling, flesh-hungry, lunging walk. I stayed in character all day. And into the next day, too.


#4: Wednesday and Puggsley Addams



This was the first year back in Arkansas after our sojourn in Baton Rouge, and at the last minute Sarah and I decided to throw a Halloween party for all our friends. We didn't have costumes, but in a stroke of brilliant inspiration my lovely wife came up with this idea, which was not only something we could do with some clothes and makeup we had, but also a tandem costume! Double-score! I loved this, and you can see that at the time the Puggsley image fit my body type.


#3: Punkin


This is the earliest known picture of me on Halloween, and I love it. Though my costume is more conceptual here, you can see the joy and excitement in my chubby little face, even at such an early age. Tell me who makes the better jack-o-lantern: me, or the gourd? I rest my case.

#2: Hello, Nurse!


Another tandem costume, and also Sarah's idea, I think. I'm the mad surgeon, she's the psycho nurse. You can't see it here, but she had torn fishnets to go with that sultry, dangerous-looking, incredibly sexy outfit. I had bought the fake scrubs and put a bloody handprint and splashes on them, using Caro syrup and food coloring. If I ever host a Friday Night Frights style public access cable show, this is gonna be the look, with foaming beakers and electrical doohickeys in the background. And the Psycho Nurse as my cohort, naturally.

#1: The Hunchback of the Morgue



Okay, so at this time I didn't know about the incredible Paul Naschy and his film of the above-mentioned title, but this is nostalgia so that doesn't matter. This is my favorite costume EVER. I mean, just look at me. Just look at this freakin' costume, see how freakin' awesome I am. Very simple--one of my dad's shirts, a pillow strapped to my 8 or 9 year old torso with a couple of belts, hair teased out, Mom's blue eye shadow and some other makeup, and some plastic fangs. As soon as I looked in the mirror, I BECAME THE HUNCHBACK. I was SO into this costume, when my cousin Amber showed up to go trick-or-treating with us in our neighborhood, I came bounding out of the house like Quasimodo right at her, and she panicked and ran back to her Mom and Dad's Blazer, cowering in the back and screaming at the top of her little lungs. Thinking of the horror in that little fairy princess's eyes as she looked upon my grotesque visage, I can honestly say I don't know that I've ever been prouder of myself.

So there you have it, a little look into the psyche of a psycho. So tell me, anyone who's reading this: what are some of YOUR favorite Halloween costumes past?

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Blog-Type Thing: Top 5

You may have noticed, if you come here at all, that I haven't been writing much. I'd like to assure my concerned readers reader that I'm not just resting on the laurels I received courtesy FlamesRising.com and the esteemed Dr. Pus.

No, I AM in fact writing, just not on this blog. I may give more details on that as it becomes appropriate or feasible, but I find that too much talk about an ongoing project usually saps my will to continue it, so the less said there, the better. In fact, I may already have said too much. So hush.

Anyhow, I thought that since I have this space anyway, and as nature hates a void so does a blogger hate not posting or being posted to, I would turn this into an actual blog-type thing and try some impromptu irrelevant but hopefully entertaining auto-verbal hornswagglery.

In the absence of real inspiration, I'm stealing a page from John Cusack circa Hi Fidelity (Hi Yourself!) and doing a top 5 list. So here it is, a hopefully educational exploration for all the ladies out there who've wondered what it's like on the other side of the ceramic tile divider.

TOP 5 THINGS THAT BUG ME ABOUT PUBLIC MEN'S RESTROOMS

(Hint: Cleanliness isn't one of them. I'm a dude.)

5. The Urinal Slump of Despair

Women are lucky they don't have to deal with urinals. I know, they have other challenges to overcome that men are likewise spared, but really: standing in open space with your hose in your hand, expected to excrete in front of anyone who walks in, with (if you're lucky) only a square of metal half the size of your torso bolted to the wall to shield your unmentionables from sight. I guess it goes back to peeing against the back wall of the barn with the other field hands, or writing in the snow with your friends, two things everyone assumes happens but that I personally have never seen done. Why guys are expected to be willing, able, and even cheerful about pissing in front of each other is beyond me.

Anyway, every now and then you'll walk in on someone in this posture, which is simultaneously depressing and disgusting. The Slumper has both hands about his business, but has leaned forward over the urinal so that his forehead is almost (and on some occasions is actually) touching the wall in front of him, just over the flushing mechanism. Like he's just given up hope, overwhelmed by existential despair and enuii, a crumpled shell of a man trickling weakly into an uncaring bowl.

Really, whenever I see this, it brings me down for the whole day. Especially since such a slumper never, but NEVER straightens in the presence of others. So great is his despair. Sigh.

4. The Samson Stance

This is similar to the USoD. While perhaps stronger and more defiant, it's no less disgusting.

The Stander takes a similar posture to the Slumper, staring down at his junk while the magic happens, but keeps himself more or less upright by putting one palm flat against the tile by the flusher and pushing off. Like Samson trying to push down the walls of the Philistine Temple. While taking a leak.

I suspect that the area above the flusher is more sanitary than the area to the side of the bowl and below (though as the father of a seven-year-old boy, I can't be entirely sure), but I still think the best practice is to touch as little as possible while peeing in public. And really, do you need that extra support to keep you from toppling forward into the urinal? Is your balance so bad that the slightest tip forward will send you sprawling? Is it really that much trouble just to stand there?

I have--but only once--seen a variation of this stance wherein the Stander pushed BOTH palms to the wall, presumably more afraid of structural collapse than side-spatter. But he was a professor of writing, and thus required to be eccentric. I guess.

3. Cell Phone Chatter

This is happening more and more often as hands-free technology advances, and thus is becoming more and more irritating. Sometimes it's those little Star-Trek things on people's ears, like Urinating Uhurus. More often it's phone call line one, penis line two.

Again: is it seriously so difficult to wait until one of the two calls (call of phone vs. call of nature) is answered before attending to the other? I think in this situation, one of the two callers should be asked to hold.

Of course that's nothing compared to those who chatter away in the stalls--opening a jar, as David Sedaris might say--which is so embarassing I can't even stay in the room when it's happening. I imagine being both the caller and the callee, and either way it's awful.

I need a bumper sticker: Hang Up and Shit.


2. The Maleficent Miasma of Doom

Sometimes you walk in, and you just want to flee. It's like a solid wall of scent, so foul and thick you can literally taste it.

Ugh.

I feel like shouting at the closed stalls, "Jesus Christ! What are you people EATING that makes you SMELL LIKE THAT?" But of course to do that I'd have to take a deep breath, which is not happening unless I'm really about to asphyxiate. Anyway, whatever diet causes this mustard-gas level toxicant, it can't be healthy. I'm thinking Fast Food Nation missed an opportunity here to exploit an area everyone would relate to.

In fact, the whole public poop thing is problematic. I mean, I understand that people get caught short. I understand that sometimes the only option is to go into one of the three stalls and TCB. But again, I don't understand how or even why people expect others to be able to do this in front of an audience, however well concealed. If I'm in that kind of emergency, and find one or more of the stalls closed--well, I go back and suffer in silence until such time as I can get some privacy. And when I walk in and all THREE are occupied, and the air is besmudged with odor most foul, it's all I can do to retain consciousness long enough to turn and dash to the water fountain. How do they do it, and why? Dear God, WHY?


1. Small Talk

Dude. DUDE. Listen to me very carefully, for I shall say this only once:

I. DO. NOT. WANT. TO. TALK. RIGHT. NOW.

I'M. BUSY.

Does this ever happen to you, ladies? Does anyone ever try to strike up conversation while you're both going tinkle? Well in men's rooms it happens ALL THE TIME. I have a hard enough time in public as it is; I don't need the extra pressure of holding up one side of a discussion while draining the main vein.

As with most things that bug me, I can express my feelings toward this best in verse. From the Sonnet Project, #16, May 9, 2006:

Why do you have to talk to me while I
am standing at the urinal trying to pee?
I think unspoken bathroom courtesy
demands your silence, and averted eye.

Can this not wait? What urgent piece of news
could overrule such common etiquette?
Good Lord, man, concentrate! Or else you'll wet
your shirt tail, to say nothing of your shoes.

I do not mean offense--what I mean is,
Give me some peace! Look only toward your feet.
I do not wish to speak while I excrete!
I do not talk while holding my penis!

I cannot think of any situation
In which I'd mix my piss and conversation.

And there you have it. Feel free to discuss and list your own top 5 bathroom problems.

Or tell me to shut up and go back to posting only poetry. I'm good either way. I'm just glad I got this off my chest. :)

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Another Undead review...

And another rave!

Dr. Pus, the eccentric host of the zombie-centric podcast Library of the Living Dead, has been doing story-by-story reviews of the zombie anthologies, and this week in episode 29 he looked at my story, "Till the Lord Comes," from The Undead vol. 2: Skin & Bones.

The podcast is rather large--okay, HUGE, 111MB--but if you're interested and have broadband, he talks about my story at around the 31:47 mark and has some very nice things to say about my protagonist Timothy, the plot ("just an incredible take on the zombie genre...a creepy-as-hell tale"), and my madd writing skillz ("Standridge is absolutely wonderful...just a riveting story").

I could transcribe more, but I'm too modest. :)

Anyway, you can stream the 2-hour podcast at the above link, or download it and skip ahead to the 3-4 minutes about yours truly. Or you can send me an email and I'll burn you a cd.

Hey, if I don't promote myself, who will? :)

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I Know It's Wrong...

...but I find this absolutely frikkin' hilarious:

Peanuts, by Charles Bukowsi.

Good grief, indeed.

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