I’m not 100% certain when I became worried for my dignity. It might have been the time my shorts split down the back one summer day when I was out playing handball with some neighborhood friends. Or it might have been the time an older kid asked me if I liked rock-n-roll and I said yes because I wanted to seem cool and he asked me to name my favorite band and I said Led Zeppelin because I’d recently heard the band mentioned somewhere and he asked me to name my favorite song and I burst into tears.
Or maybe it was the costumes.
Did You Not?
As anyone who has met me or read anything I’ve ever written knows, I am not and have never been cool. Or rad, or lit, or whatever. I’m a weird goofball with a surprisingly and totally unjustifiably high opinion of himself, and I long ago accepted my status as a completely uncool person. Recently, The Duchess and I were out walking in December and a young boy raced by wearing a police officer costume like every day was Halloween for him:
THE DUCHESS: How cute! When I was a kid I would have loved to wear a costume all the time!
ME: I used to wear a costume all the time, actually.
THE DUCHESS: Really?
ME: I had these Superman Underoos, so I got a pair of red knee socks and an old cape from a Halloween costume and I used to run around as Superman all the time.
THE DUCHESS: Oh. My.
ME: And then I went through a weird fascination with that old TV show Dallas. Remember ‘who shot J.R.?’ It was a big deal in my house, and for a while I wore a cowboy hat and made everyone call me J.D.
THE DUCHESS: … I’ve made a terrible mistake.
ME: What’s that?
THE DUCHESS: Nothing! So … you wore costumes a lot as a kid, huh?”
ME: … did you not?
This is a 100% true tragic story, unfortunately, though I’ll admit here and now that I very much enjoyed spending so much of my childhood in costumes, right up until I was 12 and everything went even more tragic for me.
The Halloween Miscalculation
I’m not a very bright man[1], and I wasn’t a very bright child. I knew, for example, that at the world-weary age of 12 wearing a costume for Halloween and going trick-or-treating was a perfect way to invite mockery into your life. Seventh Grade was a tumultuous time, very similar to your standard-issue Hunger Games or Battle Royales in the way we tore at each other like vicious animals. I wore glasses the size of the moon and won all the spelling bees. I knew I had to tread lightly or be attacked.
So, I didn’t buy a costume or make any plans. Until the day before, when suddenly the old urge to wear a costume returned and I decided, along with a friend of mine, to throw a costume together and head out. Why not! It would be fun! So I cobbled together some old sweats and a sheet and created an ersatz suit of chainmail with a tunic and a plastic sword. In my mind, I looked like this:
The reality was … less so.
To say I didn’t look anything like this is an understatement. Still, I was excited, and marched off to claim candy. Things went swimmingly, and at the local photo developing and framing place they were taking photos of all the kids, so I cheerfully posed.
Yeah. That was unwise. Yeah, that photo wound up being passed around Seventh Grade like the Zapruder Film. Yeah, I just remembered where and when my dignity vanished.
Still, living without dignity is freeing, in its way. I haven’t worried about what I’m wearing or what my hair looks like since I was 12, for example; what would be the point?
[1]For example, why am I writing a post about costumes with a reference to Halloween a month after Halloween? Because I am a professional writer who knows what he’s doing, self-promotion-wise. Or not.