It’s been trending for more than a decade now, so cosplay isn’t just something that nerds do when they go to a convention. It’s one of those full-blown career paths, like gaming and influencing, that I never could have imagined as a career when I was young. People don’t just dress up for Halloween, they Halloween all year, and call it a career. They dress as their favorite characters in movies, TV shows, books and comic books and get paid enough to do it full time.

That blows me away. I respect a person that can make a living looking foolish and wearing sweaty, uncomfortable costumes all the time. I just know for a fact that I could never do it. First reason why: I’m not artistic and there’s no way I could craft a costume that looked anything like a real character. The best I ever did was attempting to be the Nutty Professor by stuffing a pillow inside my shirt and wearing a suit. Second reason: I crave anti-attention, and as a cosplayer, you’re practically begging people to notice you, so they will talk to you, ask how your costume was made, talk about the lore of the character and ask for a picture. The last and biggest reason why I could never be a cosplayer is that ever since I was a baby, I’ve always dressed for comfort. Style took a backseat when my mom was my hairstylist and my hair looked like Thor used his Mjolnir to rain static electricity down upon my hair.

It also didn’t help that I grew up in the 70’s, the blackest hole of fashion the world has ever seen. Bellbottoms, obnoxious, non-matching plaid leisure suits, and polyester shirts with oversized collars were the best our fashionistas could come up with. My mom dressed me as if she wanted me to be a pimp at the tender age of 6. To this day, people still walk to the other side of the street to avoid me, even though they don’t know it’s because I was dressed as a pimp in an earlier life. When I was finally allowed to pick my own wardrobe, I decided I was going to dress for comfort and not for style. To this day, I wear T-shirts, jeans, and hoodies. My wife keeps telling me that I have enough hoodies, but I keep telling her that I don’t have 365 of them yet.

If people ever ask me if I like Halloween, I say, yes, I love candy. But if they ask me if I like dressing up, that is a whole bags of nopes. I stopped back in the early 2010’s when my wife kept finding progressively more uncomfortable Disney costumes online and made me to wear them to work. The final straw was when she got me the Beast costume, which PTSD’s me back to my earlier pimping days. It felt like wearing the thickest, hottest, pimpiest fur coat with a heated lining. From that moment forward I would not wear a costume again, because it went against my only fashion rule of not wearing uncomfortable clothes.

About 10 years ago, without even realizing it, I thought I accidentally put on an invisibility hoodie. Before those 10 years, I would go to work, and people would say “Hi. What did you do this weekend?” Then when I was done with work, I would go home, and my kids would tackle me, and say, “Dad, you’re home!” and my wife would ask me how my day was. Then, about 10 years ago, I started noticing that co-workers didn’t acknowledge me at work. But I thought to myself, they just see my with my headphones on. But then I started noticing my kids didn’t tackle me when I got home and they didn’t even raise their heads when I got home. I’m a little slow, so at that time, I just figured they were growing up and didn’t care about me anymore.

But when I saw Six Sense, it all started to make Sixth Sense. My kids, wife and co-workers aren’t ignoring me and looking bitter when I enter the room, because I put on an invisibility hoodie. It’s because I’m dead. It started to make sense why my blog was hugely popular, until…it suddenly dropped off. I lost access to it, and it wasn’t because my email was discontinued. It was because I was discontinued.

As we see in the Sixth Sense, some people can see the dead, and that explains why I can still talk to a few people and why they always look so horrified when I talk to them. It also explains why only a few people like, comment, share and subscribe to my blog. It’s why people are haunted by my bitter words and it probably freaks them out when I respond back, knowing that a ghost is responding to them.

It probably explains why I’m always so cold too, because my body is probably buried six feet under somewhere cold. As a ghost, I’m supposed to be busy haunting someone, or figuring out what was “missing” in my life before I can crossover to my next phase in death. But as I said before, I don’t dress for style, I dress for comfort. Even as a ghost, I’m all about the comfort, so I’m going to stay safely in my bitter ghostly comfort zone, until somebody forces me out of my purgatory state. I’m good in limbo for now. Besides, I can finally fulfill my dream of becoming a ghost writer.

While you are sufficiently creeped out by the fact that you are reading a ghost written blog, you can forget all your worries and ease your fears by viewing this weeks very spooky Bitter Friday Giftures…

When I was young…

Even though I was too late…

I still never could have been a cosplayer…

The second reason….

And third, since I was a kid…

Do I like Halloween? Yes…

But my career as a Halloween Cosplayer…

My biggest costume switch came…

My co-workers stopped noticing…

And my kids…

I thought I might have accidentally put on…

But then I saw Sixth Sense…

Yeah, a few people can see me…

Once I figured out that I was dead…

ARRRRGGGGHHHHHH

Bitter I Be Dead People Ben