THE theme of this week's column is costume safety.
With Halloween just around the corner, our community's anti-fun / pro-not-dying types - police, teachers, parents and so on - will be issuing their annual list of safety tips for trick-or-treaters: Wear bright clothing; go with an adult; and given that, as I learnt from my mother, Halloween candy is mostly razorblades by weight (just as our neighbourhood was mostly kidnappers by weight) always check your candy for holes before eating it anyway.
I would add to that list this: ensure you have stereoscopic vision. To make clear my reasons, and to stretch them to 800 words, I have to tell you a story.
When I was little, I was very much onboard with the traditional focus of Halloween: fear.
Like any elementary school student, I knew Halloween had been invented in the mid-tolate-Olden Days by pagans or somebody like pagans, who believed that on Oct. 31, the veil that separates us from the world of the dead is lifted. To drive off the resulting ghoulish invasion, these more-or-less pagan people turned to the things they knew would be most frightening to the spawn of hell, such as children in costumes and carved gourds.
This didn't make as much sense as it could have, admittedly, but then in a world where the birth of god incarnate was marked by putting toys in a sock and his death by pretending a rabbit had hidden chocolate in the living room, I figured it didn't need to.
I bought in big time. Halloween, at its core, was about being scary. So as a child, I shunned the Spiderman and Transformer outfits in favour of the truly frightening: ghosts, two-headed monsters, killer robots and the like.
I wasn't convinced that as a monster I invoked paralytic terror in onlookers - real monsters had an advantage over me in that they weren't accompanied by my mother or marked with reflective tape - but whatever.
Sadly, at some point near the transition from childhood to early adolescence, the focus of costumes shifted, and irony quietly entered the picture. I'm not sure why this happens. Possibly because the things that are actually scary to adults - fading looks, unhappy marriages, mortgage payments - are hard to dress as. And, when it comes down to it, they're not especially chilling rendered literally in costume form
"What are you?' "I'm your older self. Are you scared?'
"Not really. I thought you were Paul Giamatti"
"Look at the size of this heating bill!"
"Still no."
Anyway, I missed the memo. Here we get to the story. When I was 13, my school - my high school I should underscore here - threw a Halloween party. In selecting my outfit, I erred, as I had to that point in my life, on the side of scary. It's not entirely obvious what I was trying to be, but it involved torn, bloody clothing and green hair and, oddly, a hunchback. Was I a zombie? Was I Igor? Was I an Igor-zombie meta-monster? I don't know.
Importantly, the costume also featured a bandage over one eye and a jury-rigged pingpong-ball-cum-dangly-eyeball.
I'm not sure, either, what my 13yearold self was trying to accomplish by frightening my peers, especially given that costumes at that point were clearly trending toward at-most moderately frightening subjects, such as a newly bankrupt MC Hammer or the cast of Saved by the Bell. Maybe it was to teach them some kind of lesson about friendship - or scare them straight in some way.
Friend 1: "Holy crap! Is that an Igor-zombie?"
Friend 2: "I don't know. Let's not do drugs!"
It turns out it didn't really matter a lot until the end of the evening when the organizers started giving out prizes for best costume. Sparing no expense, my school had selected as its giveaways a bunch of free books that the local store hadn't been able to unload on paying customers. The Grade 12s tasked with distributing the unpopular booty soon got bored, and decided to accelerate the process by tossing books directly to participants they found interesting. One of them spotted me.
"Accident victim. You win." With a look of vindication at my stubbornly unterrified friends, I stepped out from the crowd. The prize giver chose as my reward the Encyclopedia of World Sailing which, with some effort, he hurled from the stage.
Here a lesson in biology. Human ancestors developed stereoscopic vision - vision where you can see things with two eyes at the same time - to give us depth perception, so we could catch branches for instance, or, later in a our evolution, hardback books. It turns out this ability is compromised when one covers one eye with a bloody bandage and spine-tingling, fake eyeball.
I don't know if you've ever read the Encyclopedia of World Sailing - if you have, I assume you wrote it - but it turns out there's a lot more information out there on the subject than a normal, non-incredibly-boring person might guess.
With only one eye to work with, I swatted at the approaching book a good second too early, and then took it full force in my centre of gravity, located at the time in my head. As a nearly six-foottall 13-year-old who weighed slightly less than a comprehensive hardback sailing reference, I was launched off my feet like a noodle from a trebuchet.
Those of you who have been knocked flat by an encyclopedia in front of a large group of adolescents will know it doesn't generally advance one's social standing. Or, for a while anyway, even let you remember what day it is.
I was some way into my first year of high school before I was known to most of the student body as something other than "the kid who almost died from the book."
I don't have a particularly good reason for telling this story, but in recognition of column convention, I'll add this tacked-on lesson: Parents, this Halloween, ensure your kids' eyes are both uncovered. They're unlikely to suffer serious consequence if you don't, but their pride might not last the night.
Fair warning.
