Suffice to say, after last year’s catastrophe, I will no longer be dressing up like Saddam Hussein. Also, the thrill is gone. Since his capture, I have realized he is a poor man’s Hitler, and not just because he no longer has any money. His system of genocide against his own people didn’t appear to be race-based, although they did all happen to be Iraqi. Well, enough of my political soapbox. Let’s just say Saddam isn’t scary anymore, and I don’t want to be apprehended by a wayward team of National Guard soldiers, so I’m packing up the wax mustache and Iraqi military uniform.

Which leaves me with a very short amount of time, good people, to come up with the perfect Halloween costume before the commune’s bi-annual Halloween party. Now I love a challenge as much as the next person, but considering I’m near flat-busted since I invested all that money in the World Series (Yankees all the way this year!), this is one challenge I’m not up for.

The children’s Halloween costumes at my local Wal-Mart fit reasonably well, although they clearly weren’t planning on children having shoulders as broad as mine. But still, the fit I can manage. But who are these damned characters they expect me to dress up as? I am familiar with Snoopy dog, but not Snoop Dogg. What the hell is a Shrek? Where are the Hogan’s Heroes costumes I had hoped for? Does no one else want to dress up as President Ulysses S. Grant? I know who Martha Stewart is, but I’m not dressing up as a girl. Not for free.

That leaves me no other choice than the old reliable home-made costume. I am no slouch when it comes to making creative things out of whatever’s left lying around the house. One year, I wore my ex-wife Arvelyn around my shoulders and went as some sort of bizarre alien bourgeois widow, with a human stole. True, it wasn’t all that impressive to look at, and I did supreme damage to my back and lost a good half a foot in height, and I had to spend all night explaining the elaborate premise of my costume, but… no, it was a bad idea. No defense there.

I have before, on short notice, annexed Camembert’s wheelchair and gone as Franklin Delano Roosevelt as a child, but this year Camembert’s bruiser Elvis girlfriend is watching for me to make my move. I’m better off not trying anything. By the way, Camembert is going as a handicapped robot and Girl Elvis will be wearing her usual Halloween costume, Buddy Holly.

I’m left with very little, and no imagination, to pull this one out of the fire, friends. Even my calls to Arvelyn have gone unanswered. If only I had a woman who would let me wear her around her neck, I would have something!

Perhaps nude body painting is the answer… then again, my mother might have been right when she told me nude body painting was not the answer to everything.

A quick rummaging of my house has revealed next to nothing to use for a costume, but it is all I’ve got. I’m tempted to stick a spatula between the crack of my buttocks and go as a fried egg. But the last thing I need is another costume with a lengthy explanation.

So here are my choices: I can put on a diaper and go as a giant baby; I can put on the diaper and go as a small geriatric man; or I can put on the diaper and go as a man totally out of his mind. Which is your favorite?

Hmm. No time to do that phone poll I had hoped for. Maybe I’ll just go with the diaper on and let people guess what I am. Winner receives… I don’t know. A spatula.