Halloween Anxiety

Dear Reader(s?),

I’d like to start by offering the observation that I think adults are meatier, wrinklier, and more repressed versions of children who spend most of their time and energy chaotically and loveably lurching around for validation. I think we all have a lot of work to do & a lot more kindness to give to ourselves. I hope to reflect more upon this as I move further into the meaty, wrinkled, repressed strata of the hominoid population. 

Relatedly: 

Recently, I’ve been spending a lot of energy trying to procure a beard. I’ve invested a lot of psychic effort in my Halloween costume idea (white-suited John Lennon a la Abbey Road/marriage to Yoko Ono), and it feels like some mind math equation has made it abundantly clear to me that the input energy and output, come Halloween, will prove to be wildly uneven. The fake beard market is paltry (and frankly embarrassing) and I’m not sure to whom to address my complaints, but complaints I have. For the first time in years, I used my Amazon account to order a mediocre-looking beard which arrived in my mailbox yesterday. It’s shriveled, wispy thin, and much more on the Viking-red part of the color spectrum. It attaches to my face, without a lick of nuance, via a black elastic band which goes around my head. I’m already feeling sensitive about the non-prescription glasses that I bought; the circles are much too wide in circumference. After scouring a baker’s dozen of stores: Savers, Plato’s Closet, Goodwill, TJ Maxx, plus making the rounds on Buy Nothing and Facebook marketplace, I finally found a 70’s-era white suit from a local vintage shop. There are precious few white suits in the wild! This one is possibly more of the Boogie-nights/Staying Alive ilk and is disconcertingly curve-hugging when I’m trying to go for casual and lanky. I cringe in advance, imagining being mistaken for John Travolta or Elvis. My friend Gabe is also dressing like John Lennon (the cheeky version wearing a New York shirt and denim) and while he (Gabe) is bald and thus at a fairly large disadvantage, his northern-English accent is *chef’s kiss*, whereas all I can say is “roight, roight,” in an ambiguous and quickly shifting accent that meanders somewhere near Sean Connery before plateauing grotesquely and confusingly into an altogether new land to where no one will ever willingly travel.  All I have, in the end, is my hair (which, may I add, has been waiting decades for this moment to shine), and a fervent wish in my heart. I simply wish to be a serviceable John Lennon, for reasons largely unexamined. May the cosmos prove to be in balance; may my frantic efforts bear serviceable fruit. 

What I ask of you, reader(s?), is that, if you come across me some dusk evening around Hallow’s Eve, whether I be bedecked sheepishly in an ill-fitting white suit or, with resignation, in my civilian clothing, that you extend a little extra kindness my way. I will do the same towards you, not knowing what swirling anxieties, outsized preoccupations, or other existential injuries are lighting up your neurons. 

Please stay posted!