Easley's Costume Shop. In Other Words: Fuck You, Spirit Halloween Stores.

I really need to squeeze this blog in before it's too late. Clearly, I've been milking the Halloween cow for the last month, hell-bent on filling up this blog as quickly as possible. It's an easy task when the local pharmacy is exploding with laughing witch dolls and Halloween themed Reese's Peanut Butter cups, always giving me something to write about. 'Cause writing about H-ween themed candy is one of my "things." So it's been a good month. I'll miss it. I'll give it my damndest to keep this rock and roll train on track, without the aid of blog material every which way I turn, but no promises. Don't cry for me, Argentina.

So the day after Halloween, I've got one last blog I can file under the Halloween unbrella. Did that even make sense?

I really wanted to somehow incorporate Spirit Halloween stores into my blog realm before the season was dead and gone, but it never quite worked out that way. Between writing a full length article on it and only having close to two and a half pictures to accompany it (my camera phone died during the trek) it just never panned out. It essentially turned out to be an ode to my love/hate relationship with the place, teetering on madness and money loss. But the blog is on the backburner, and it really does suck to just let it disappear into the abyss of December, so maybe I'll post it online one of these days. I'll use my weak Paintshop skills and extensive, Google Image searches to fill in the blanks. But for now, we go a little more local with the costume shops and bins of rubbery body parts:

Easley's Fun Shop! A fantastic voyage into dollar store magic tricks and imagining that this is the store Pee-Wee shops at for X-Ray glasses and massive, oversized heads. Easley's caters to those looking to rent a costume, those who really need a bleeding-face-mouth mask and those who really want guts on a stick. Hey, I don't judge!

Basically, it's a ma and pop store that's open year round, with goodies and treats and stage make-up and all sorts of fun stuff you won't find anywhere else. It's like Spirit, if Spirit wasn't secretly a Wal-Mart that had 90 percent of their store dedicated to selling you clown crap. No one likes the clown crap. God, I hate the clown crap.

During the time I went, it was a week before the big day, so it was pretty packed with last-minute shoppers and the one group of people that just have to try on every hat the store owns. As I perused the asiles, I quickly realized I needed to buy something. The place was picked over pretty badly, but that didn't stop my quest to spend. I'm really into masks, or at least displaying masks all around my place, like a weird, creepy Jeffrey Dahmer-esque scenario. So far, this year has been pretty bland when it comes to masks, probably because I hate spending more than twenty bucks, and everything is way over sixty. Oh well, I still had my hopes set high that I'd finally finally FINALLY get myself a gorilla mask. Yeah, I really want a mask of a gorilla. The Planet of the Apes and comic book lover come out in full force with that one. It's kinda the "it" mask for Halloween, too. Like a viking helmet, pilot hat or 50's football jersey, it's the ideal "80's party outfit" you'd see in any of the decade's films. I'm pretty sure at least seventy percent of all 80's, teen comedies had a guy in a viking helmet somewhere in the film. Either hanging out in the background or spiking the punch while kicking a nerd in the nuts. Think about it. Just think about it.

Anyways, I was in the animal section (furry jokes, anyone?) and I got a goat head. Oh, man, now that sounded bad.

It's really cool, or at least semi-cool. Made of a hard plastic, it's pretty rad for under ten bucks. I've always wanted something like this, where it easily crosses over into "Rosemary's Baby" territory, giving me another reason to someday slap this on my face and dance in the woods naked. Probably to Duran-Duran. That's some Goddamn dancey music right there!

It's hard to tell if it's evil enough for my evil tastes, but I figure I can douse it in blood, hang it on the wall and perform my Satanic rituals without the fear of owning a non-evil goat head mask. It's the little things in life, ya know?

Oh, and one more thing! I didn't wanna overload myself with too much chocolatey treats this month, so I only allowed myself to put my body into a sugar coma with the best of the best. Twizzlers and Whoppers during "Nightmare on Elm Street" marathons aside, I found these:

I don't really like Dots. The fact that "Dots" makes me think of the tiny, button like candy that comes glued to a strip of paper (which is a candy I'm not sure I can get behind) and the time spent picking this fruit-jubilee-crap outta your teeth, it makes for a really shitty choice of candy. I'm more of a Sour Skittles man, with a heathly supply of soursploding Warheads. Anything that causes pain when I eat it, really. Dots are like, the blandest candy I can think of. Even Necco Wafers have a more extensive, reformed taste than Dots, and they're made of fruity chalk. But Dots represented to look like ghosts? YES. The box kinda promises that each, individual Dot is painted to look like a floating entity, which would be cool 'cause eating a ghost is one of my top priorities, but that's not quite the case. Pretty bland in ghosty features, you're left with a few blobs of the most wonderful colored candy I've ever seen:

Such a magnificent hue! It's like ectoplasm mixed with jellyfish. You get the impression that they're gonna glow, and in fact, I gleefully made sure to see if they did. When I realized I might be eating something that fucking glowed, I started questioning my eating habits.





Oh, and they taste pretty good, too. Happy November 1st!