by RAF KATIGBAK

I am in complete and utter agony. The clock is slowly advancing and each subtle “tick” of the second hand is like a sledgehammer delivering a crushing blow that echoes in my soul; it is October 19 and I don’t have a plan for a Halloween costume. “What’s the big deal,” you may ask? “Why not just keep it simple, throw a sheet over your head, cut two holes, and go as the nebulous amorphous mass of mainstream North American corporate capitalism? Or just throw on an orange jumpsuit and vacuum cleaner and go as Wedge Antilles the Corellian X-wing pilot who is the only person in the galaxy to survive both Star Wars Death Star runs?” Well, I wish it were that simple.

In fact, I long for those effortless days of youth. Those carefree elementary school times when everyone would just don a white cardboard box, draw two black circles on it, and go as a Noakes’ 1979 300-baud acoustically-coupled modem. Or when a kid would just rock a charcoal handlebar moustache, slicked back hair, a button up tuxedo shirt and join all the other toddlers who wanted to be Mihailo Petrovic, the influential Serbian mathematician and inventor. But no, not in these complicated post-modern higgledy-piggledy times, and especially not in this city.

There are two problems with dressing up for Halloween in Montreal. The first is that at this time of year, our Halloween climate brings a whole new meaning to “cold as a witch’s tit.” Given the autumn chill that follows All Hallow’s Eve, parents across the province must subsequently ruin their offspring’s lovingly assembled costumes by adding so much insulation that any spooky detail is lost under layers of fleece, down, scarves, gloves and tuques. For most kids, this is about as cool as showing up to school in full headgear and trying to trade your hotdog-pita “souvlaki” for your classmate’s Mr. Big chocolate bar. For me, as a child whose youthful passion for horror movies could be considered to have bordered on unhealthy, going trick-or-treating as an evil undead brain-devouring zombie sounded cool, but an evil undead brain-devouring zombie in a purple parka did not.

The other problem with Halloween in Montreal is the unhealthy surplus of creative types with waaaayyy too much time on their hands. In a town where most 20-somethings’ idea of “career change” is moving from Mile End’s Café Olympico to Club Social, the bar on crazy costumes is so high that unless you’ve spent the last three months carefully handcrafting your costume out of organic fabric and written a full-length dissertation on the origins of your character, you might as well just go naked. “I’m going to be an exact molecular replica of the avian flu!” “I can’t wait for the paint to dry on my handcrafted Elton John platform Doc Marten Pinball Wizard stilts!” are only a few things I’ve heard from random, artistically inclined new-bohemians and trustafarians recently.

For someone like me, trying to juggle four jobs while attempting to retain some sort of sanity and human relationships, the choices are few. Unfortunately, being a male, I can’t opt for the tried and true female fall-back costumes—sexy cat, sexy witch, sexy prisoner or sexy hardcover copy of The Colour Purple—and so I have two options:

1) Go for something simple, yet topical. Maybe dress all in blue and then rub chocolate pudding all over myself and go as a Montreal city pool.

2) Play the race card. For those of us of the non-honky persuasion, the fact is we’ll never ever really look like Tom Cruise from Top Gun, or Sherlock Holmes. I’m Asian, so why fight it? In fact, Halloween is a time to own it, a time to take back my shared heritage from all the cheap-ass white-boy ninjas that have ever wrapped a black scarf around their head and awkwardly spun a broomstick. I’m even considering dusting off the old salt n’ pepper/black bob wig and resurrecting my classic 2002 gender-bending half-Mitsumi Takahashi/half-David Suzuki get-up. Perhaps I could even carry a VHS copy of Swamp Sex Robots (you know, the porn that Yick Yu stole from his bro in Degrassi) just to bump it up that extra Cancon notch.

Riff-Raff@sympatico.ca

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