This is a stupid little rant about dressing up in costumes. The gist of it is: costumes bore me. The fascination that my city and my peers have with dressing up in costumes is inordinate. It wasn't very intriguing before coming here in my early twenties but living in San Francisco has aggravated my disinterest into rebelliousness. The Number One Holiday in San Francisco is Halloween. Nothing else comes close. They make a big deal about Christmas on TV but that's only for the advertising. Halloween is the explosion of all the extrovert tendencies that plague most of the citizens here.

Oh sure, I reap the benefits from it -- freakwatching is one of my favorite sports and there's a pretty reliable supply of street fashion to be had. You could say that any of the other 364 days in San Francisco would rival the One Hallowed Eve of many other towns in America for weirdness. I love the diversity. But nobody seems to notice the point where our diversity turns into orthodoxy.

I think I finally witnessed my share of costumery at Burning Man. I went for the first time this year and was surprised at the focus being so much on putting on funny clothes and taking X and going dancing in the dirt. A costume rave? This was what was supposed to change your life? It seemed especially ironic to me when I realized that the people who where there were already so weird and the situation was so extreme. I mean, goddamn it, we were doin' it. It's enough to be out there. Dressing up was just providing a little extra eye candy for the folks. No need to feel selfish if you weren't doing it. You didn't build a gigantic sectional bus that looked like a dragon and had a DJ in the tail either. And besides, who you tryin to impress by wearing a feather boa in the desert?

Was the dress-up just following? I couldn't tell but I had a hunch that some of the old-school "core" BM people had indirectly, coercively, in a high-schoolish kind of way, imposed their specific brand of freakiness on the whole thing. I think I know who they are and I can see their trademark. This is getting off the subject of costumes a little bit, but I took issue with the whole "burning man aesthetic". (I later found out from a woman I met named Maya (a bitchin graffiti artist) that her art (big donuts with pink paint-icing dripping down) had been censored by the curators committee because it didn't conform to this aesthetic.)

I was an instant critic. It wasn't a whole new unique world to me. It was a transplant of every art-futuro-punk party I've ever been to in SF. I've been to a lot of those because I like them. I like the spectacle, I like the cybergeek smashup derby carnival a lot. But at Burning Man, the whole "there are no spectators" nazi crap makes everyone nervously strap on a dildo or put on a cowboy hat so they won't look like spectators. "Oh no, we're not RV spectator trash tryin to peep some titties, we're real burners, dude." Ok, so it started to look conformist instead of expressive to me. That's what bugged me. Burning Man is essentially the same thing as Halloween: both big parties with San Francisco-style dress codes.

So with so many people dressing up for Halloween (and the adults here only get dressed up to go to parties) I feel like saying "Fuck that. I'm wearing what I usually wear to parties. If I feel like dressing up, I'll have plenty of chances to do it at one of the other 50 parties I go to in a year." Better to wait till you have a real costume idea and some real spunk to make it work than force yourself to half-ass some "well, at least I didn't come in my street clothes" excuse for a costume. I mean, come on.

Sounds like sour grapes, right? Like I'd be telling all the little kiddies about Santa Clause if I had the chance, right? Like I'm just complaining because I didn't have any good (realizable) costume ideas this year. Fuckit. I like Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July. Halloween is just on the other side of the calendar from St. Patrick's day. It's amateur night. Get on the fake trolley, get belligerent, try to get laid with your (cat suit if you're a girl) (vampire getup if you're a guy) boring costume and go back to your office job. I hate you.