Children of the Sea

King Poseidon here had a beard, and the beard has a story. I was too cheap and annoyed to buy an actual Halloween beard for a baby who probably wouldn't even wear it, so when we were at Value World the other day digging through the piles of sticky, grimy toys, I found an old stuffed goat with mangy hair. It was 80 cents. I bought it thinking I could remove the goat fur and turn it into a beard.

When we got home, I put Gram down for a nap and got a scalpel to remove the fur, placing the goat ceremoniously on the living room floor. Juniper---curious---sat next to me. First I cut a slit across the goat's neck, then cut one long incision down his abdomen. It was exactly how I'd seen a group of Greek peasants butcher a goat in the streets of Arachova at Orthodox Easter. Out poured a gooey concoction of wet yellow foam stuffing and Styrofoam pellets (I had sent the goat through the wash before the surgery). The guts spilled out onto the floor. It was totally Old Testament. Juniper started to cry: "But the goat is still going to be alive, right?" Then she asked me where his head was, and I held up the flopping appendage with some enthusiasm. She cried harder. After much comforting while it took another trip through the washer and dryer, the goatskin was ready to become a coiffure of the gods, the filaments of heaven:

It had a mustache originally, but there was no way he would go for it. Next year he can be Jehovah, because once styled he became an extremely angry god. This was the kind of god Jonathan Edwards used to preach about. Today he was the god that sent Ulysses and his crew tumbling out of the wreckage of their ships and into turbulent, winedark seas.

And a god who liked to poke his sister with his trident.

All I did was make her shell crown. My wife fixed the pathetic shell necklace I originally put together. She also worked several nights on those mermaid tails, trying to figure out a way to keep the fish-look while still allowing her to walk. They are really cool and I'll probably post some shots of the tails alone to flickr later to show how much work she put into them. She made the shirt as well (the color was chosen by you know who).

We went to Belle Isle this morning for these photographs. After three years of doing this, I've learned that trying to take good pictures on Halloween night is nearly impossible.

The beach was covered in goose shit, but all those swans made it kind of magical.