The shit blog of Paul Chris Jones

Dear Diary. Halloween. The day of pumpkins, scary clowns, trick-or-treating, and children lost in corn mazes while being stalked by insane hillbillies wielding knives and wearing their grandmothers's faces as masks. This year we skipped the crazed hillbilly part and just did the trick-or-treating instead.

I live in Spain where people don't celebrate Halloween, but every year, a bunch of moms and dads from my son's class organise a trick-or-treat trail where the kids visit each other's houses. My apartment was number two on the trail. When the kids arrived, I made them follow me down a spooky corridor.

"There's a ghost in this corridor," I told them.

The kids all fell silent.

"The ghost likes to change the colour of the lights," I said. "Ghost, change the colour of the lights."

The lights changed from red to green. The kids gasped in amazement.

"Ghost, change the colour to yellow," I said.

The lights changed from green to yellow.

"Hey, you're doing that!" said a six-year-old girl.

Everyone was now looking at the controller in my hand that changed the lights.

"Who wants sweets?" I said.

The kids cheered.

After my house, I went around with the kids to the rest of the houses. The moms and dads put in a lot of effort. There were paper bats stuck to the walls, orange and black bunting, and plastic pumpkins. I felt like a kid again. Except this was even better than when I was a kid, because unlike normal trick-or-treating back in England, where the transactions are performed on doorsteps, the parents here let us into their homes, where the candy was waiting for us on the dining room table, separated into different dishes. I never thought about doing trick-or-treating like that. It's way better. At least because you get to see inside other people's houses.

After trick-or-treating I ran home and changed into my zombie costume for the annual zombie walk. My zombie costume is a Ghostbusters costume I made for Comic-Con but covered liberally in fake blood.

Today I also bought some zombie contact lenses. These contact lenses make your irises black. They were the only zombie contact lenses they had in the shop and the man assured me they were "very scary".

The only problem was that I'd never worn contact lenses before. So I was in front of the bathroom mirror, holding my eye open with one hand and trying to put the contact lens in with the other hand, but I kept dropping the contact lens into the sink. And the whole time, I knew I had to get them in soon or risk being late for the zombie walk. Just when I was about to give up, I eventually got the contact lenses in. I looked in the mirror. My irises were black! Cool!

On the way to the zombie walk, I realised there was a hole in my pocket and my keys had fallen out somewhere. I went back to look for them when I heard, "Paul, have you lost your keys?" It was my girlfriend's aunt. She was on her way to the zombie walk and had picked up my keys from the street. She knew they were my keys because my keys have a tag with the words PAUL CHRIS JONES written on it. I made that tag just in case anything like this were to happen.

Her teenage grandson-in-law was there too, dressed like a zombie.

"Do you want some fake blood?" I asked him.

"Sure," he said.

I handed him a bottle of fake blood, which I was carrying around in my pocket. He squirted a few dribbles on his chin.

"I prefer to do it like this," I said, taking the bottle back and squeezing it hard all over my overalls.

"Doesn't the zombie walk start now?" my girlfriend's aunt said.

She was right. So I ran the rest of the way. I arrived at the zombie walk just as it was starting. I could see zombies walking past a crowd. I pushed through the crowd of spectators and joined the shambling hoard of the undead. Then it was just a matter of acting like a zombie for the next hour.

Highlights of the zombie walk this year included: a car getting stuck in the middle of the zombie horde, with zombies pressing their faces against the car windows to peer in at the people inside; people wanting to take my picture; announcing "I need more blood" midway through the zombie walk, taking the bottle of fake blood out of my pocket and squirting blood onto my cheeks, hair, and mouth, making the other zombies laugh; explaining to a four-year-old boy that I'm a man who catches ghosts who was bitten by a zombie.

"Oh, I get it," he said. "So now you're a zombie too."

"That's right," I said. He got it.

Finally, I reached the end of the zombie walk. This was the part where a SWAT team should have been waiting to pulverize the zombies with high-impact bullets. But there was no SWAT team, only an announcement of the winners of the zombie costume contest. Since I didn't enter the contest, I went home. By the way, I could have won that contest. Next year I'm definitely entering it.

At home, I showed Girlfriend my zombie eye lenses.

"Your eyes look the same," she said.

I looked in the mirror. I suppose they did look the same. At most, I looked like I'd taken an illicit drug that had made my pupils dilate.

I took a shower to rinse off the fake blood. Then came the moment I'd been dreading: touching my eyeball to pick the lenses out. I'd never touched my eyeball before. But surprisingly it wasn't so bad. My eyeball felt squishy but it wasn't painful. And I got the lenses out.

Finally, Halloween was over. Girlfriend put 1-year-old to bed. I read 5-year-old a comic before putting him to bed too. Then Girlfriend went out to have dinner with her friends, leaving me alone.

I'd have to call this one a good Halloween. After all, I did use contact lenses for the first time. And the contact lenses didn't even get stuck behind my eyeballs.