Please, Fuck Off: 2020 Adult Halloween
Cancel it. Incinerate it. Trap it in a box lined with knives and wrap it up in chains and padlocks and throw it in the bottom of the lake.
I love Halloween and all things spooky season. As a Scorpio and an October Birthday Have-r, it is in my very nature. From my childhood Halloween-themed birthday parties, to the cliché DIY costume ragers in college, I have enjoyed it all.
And any other year I would want all people to enjoy the excitement and morbidity of the season.
But instead, I write with a clear conscience to implore you, dear reader, to join me in a call to action: that now, more than ever, the season of "Adult Halloween" needs to pack up its kitschy decorations and fuck all the way off.
Please, heed my message as you prepare for this weekend's bar crawls and frat parties. The world doesn't need your offensive Notorious ACB costumes (and Notorious RBG costumes, while we're being honest!) or your Mike Pence debate fly wigs. Just take your sexy cop costumes, and your corny party playlists, and your hard pumpkin ciders, and get the fuck out of here. Don't go somewhere else with them! Just go the fuck home, and stay there!
I don't give a shit if your party is on the patio, or on the lawn, or on a fucking rented hotel courtyard. If you're having a party that's conducive to the Adult Halloween party crowd — not your boring "pod" of six, or whatever, but the dressed-up drunkards whose catchphrases include "I'm here for a good time not a long time" — then no amount of open space is going to help you stop these folks from willingly huffing each others' air.
It does not pain me to write this. Not in the slightest, really. Because though I am someone who takes joy in, perhaps, the worst of the worst forced and oft-offensive adult holidays (I am looking at you, Cinco de Mayo and St. Patrick's Day), I know that few people, if anyone, really need this.
They don't need to go downtown and bar hop through throngs of unmasked Marvel characters. They don't need to put together a last minute costume consisting of a plastic tiara and a few shrub branches and a bedsheet because they didn't have anything to wear. They don't need to tag along to a roommate's boyfriend's friend's apartment party where you know like two and a half of the 28 people there. Adult Halloween and the pandemic are already two separate forms of nightmare fuel. Combined, it could, quite literally, get deadly.
I cannot stress just how unnecessary participating in the phenomenon that is Adult Halloween has become this year. I know people are tired of social distancing and not seeing their friends and loved ones and missing out on life and having to figure out more sustainable social situations. But imagine getting diagnosed with coronavirus, or, christ, giving it to someone else, because you couldn't miss out on a night of making small talk about how hard the past 10 months have been for you while "Monster Mash" loops on in the background.
Even the most "fun" night — what, getting drunk in a hot, crowded room of strangers and being hungover the next day? — isn't worth it. None of this is worth it. Which is why Adult Halloween, again, must politely pack its bags and fuck off into the next year (or, at the rate things are going, two).
This is not to say that we should cancel Halloween altogether. I've still strung up orange and purple lights around our home and bought two large adult pumpkins to carve in the next day or so (they'll sit on the porch and quickly decompose in the Texas sun). And though I'm of the mind that Kid Halloween should probably get reined in as well, I'm sure that, given the strictly-outdoor nature of trick-or-treating, and the fact that kids have been socialized to mask up over the past few months at school, it's considerably far safer than trolling your city's tourist trap of a nightlife district to "people watch."
Kid Halloween may stay (I am not a parent, though I encourage Rafi to leave his opinion down below in the comments) but Adult Halloween is out of the question. Cancel it. Incinerate it. Trap it in a box lined with knives and wrap it up in chains and padlocks and throw it in the bottom of the lake.
Do not come out to the bars for Adult Halloween. Do not throw yourself an Adult Halloween party where you encourage your acquaintances to bring their acquaintances, and so on and so forth. Do not put yourself in a situation where you will be responsible for a super spreader event amid a third coronavirus wave that could potentially kill people. Just don't fucking do it! And if you do, I encourage you to fuck the fuck off, too!!
In the pic: The 'Mean Girls' Halloween scene but with Cady Haron as a 'coronavirus bride,' Gretchen Wieners as the 'Mike Pence fly,' and Karen Smith as a slutty 'Notorious Ruth Bader Ginsburg.'
