Day 198– October 24, 2014

The San Francisco Halloween season starts tonight and runs for the next ten days, finishing on November 2 with Dias de Los Muertos. During this span, I’m attending at least six parties so I soon glue my Halloween costume to me. The usually warm Bay Area fall weather coupled with the city’s fascination with make believe make San Francisco perhaps the best city in the country to celebrate Halloween. Even the local porn armory hosts an erotic haunted house.

This year, I channel my inner invertebrate into the seahorse, a giant orange and white light-up seahorse. On the one hand, my costume is simple: just an orange hoodie. On the other hand, my costume has horns, an embedded backpack, a whorled tail, and 48 LEDs.

I do not especially love seahorses, although male seahorses do help gestate their young. They can swim backwards while I can barely swim forwards.

The seahorse form combines three ideas from other costumes into my most ambitious wearable. I stole the shape of a raven’s long bill to make an elongated plastic insert and white horns in the seahorse’s head. The long hat does look unfortunately like a camel. I transformed the turtle-shell backpack into an orange back piece stoked with fourteen light-up, white bricks. A former furry white tail has transformed into a curved seahorse tail.

The final seahorse outfit is heavier than I would like, causing the hat to crush down on the head. Internal shoulder straps relieve some of the weight. The curled tail bangs against the back of my legs when I walk, so I elevated the tail by safety pinning two sections together. The whole costume may get trashed during the six times I wear it, so I made the lights easy to remove so I can launder the fabric.

In a fit of madness, I decided that each of the five Platonic Solids requires a companion creature of the same color. The green dinosaur pairs with the green cube. Now an orange seahorse tends the orange dodecahedron. I just need to make three more hoodies for the tetrahedron, octahedron, and icosahedron.

I’m off to buy a soap-bubble gun. This may be a long Halloween season.