gwax's rumblings

As some of you may be aware, today was Halloween and in my cul­ture we dress up on Halloween. We often dress as mon­sters, grotesques, clowns, heroes, other phan­tasms and fan­tasies. In fol­low­ing with the theme that is pre­scribed by my cul­tural under­stand­ing, I had but one log­i­cal option, I went as Phineas Gage. The strange tale of Phineas Gage is a truly amaz­ing one; as a rail­way fore­man in 1848, a tap­ping iron was shot through his skull, destroy­ing a sub­stan­tial por­tion of his frontal lobe. Miraculously, Gage sur­vived the hole in his brain largely unchanged save for some per­son­al­ity alter­ations. It was a fun cos­tume to make and it got me more than a few com­ments and funny looks on the BART to and from work today. I think that I’ll try for some­thing even fancier next year.