92 days, 2208, 132480 minutes until Halloween.

Ok, it is time to get it right you posers. Today I saw a dead leaf on the sidewalk and I knew the time would soon be upon us again, Hallo-fucking-ween. And I swear on all that is holy that if I see one more group of people in half assed pirate costumes I’m going to track down their saviour, Johnny Depp, and beat him cold with an accordion, not sure why, his girlish shrieks harmonized to equally anguished music would just satisfy me is all.

If you are going to dress up as Pirate you should at least do it right, this is Halloween goddamit, a time you can be impervious to social norms and it’s time to get serious. If I go out for Halloween as a pirate I’m not going to just tie a bandana on my head and wear a Pittsburgh P’s jersey open to accentuate my ample breasts, no, I am going for the real effect. As such I present to you my regiment to fully transform myself, or anyone into a true Pirate by the eve of Halloween 2008.

August 1^st – First things first, I cut all the vitamin C out of my diet three months before hand. Dedication people, to truly become a pirate you must embrace not just their triumphs but also their plight. Come Halloween I will have no need for makeup or any of that smelly fake blood for I will have succumb to the ravages of scurvy, I’ll be ripe with it: sunken soulless eyes, a pale vaporous face, irritable hysteria, bleeding from all orifices, tooth decay…I also start drinking a quart of rum with every meal, baby steps.

September 1^st – I stop bathing, period.

September 15^th - I go to the bank and empty all my accounts and convert my savings into sacks of Spanish Doubloons. I then trade all my worldly possessions for rum and sell my enfeebled relatives into slave labour for spice. I up the rum intake to two quarts with each meal.

October 1^st – After a couple weeks in the gutter it is time I dress like a pirate. I pillage museums and disinter cemeteries to find authentic era attire and then hit the brothel, I don’t leave for weeks.

October 15^th – I swagger into a bar fight and lose my left eye to a cork screw, I get a badass eye patch.

October 20^th – I begin looting marinas and waterfront homes for silver or anything remotely shiny. I bury my spoils in your backyard. I poop on your deck.

October 25^th – I drink three gallons of sea water and buy two pistols and a parrot.

October 28^th – I bang the mayor’s wife and take her as my bride. A bounty is placed on my head. I am now more rum than man.

October 30^th – I steal a tank from a military base and fill it with all my plunder. I am so drunk a godless massacre in the name of candy and sweets seems laughable, nay, doable.

Halloween – “Trick ARRRR treat!” becomes my two and a half word vocabulary as I rampage through the streets and living rooms of the nation in my armoured platted vessel of doom.

That’s how a real pirate does it. They are murderous psychopaths, and they don’t spend six hours in makeup.

Maybe Hollywood should make a real pirate movie, one where the pirates aren’t just a group of quirky glamorized misfits juggling buried treasure and sexual apprehension as gracefully and comically as a ninth grader juggles his binders and, well, sexual apprehension. Maybe Hollywood should make something a bit more relevant or accurate. I would love to see a fucking hardcore Blackbeard biopic with two hours of total carnage. None of this, “oh we have taken your ship but now let’s be friends and work together to make the antagonist realize the errors of his ways”, fuck that, wouldn’t happen. A bullet in each brain is what would happen. And none of this drawn out love story where it takes a man and woman THREE movies before they finally consummate their true love and verify that what we were just watching was indeed sexual chemistry and not two cousins failing to repress the memories of when they were bathed together as children. No, none of that, sexual norms did not exist, you either put out or got raped, and that goes for both men and women.

If there is one thing I hate it is decent movies (Pirates of the Caribbean 1) bled out into a soulless franchise. It’s ironic how the most gruesome and pirate like conduct probably occurred off screen when Jerry Bruckheimer personally slit the throats of the original writers. You also got to love how Disney has so blatantly associated itself with murder, rape, theft and terrorism yet has been able to simply mask it with A list actors, cute storytelling, CGI effects and then were able to pull off the lucrative PG13 rating. Those real pirates out in the waters off Somalia must feel like celebrities themselves, they are the noble hero’s of the top grossing films in the world. They probably even have the Jack Sparrow lunch boxes that they tore out of the hands of some little girl on a commandeered leisure cruise while her dad was having his arms broke and her mother was being violated. The only way I will have an interest to see the next Pirates of the Caribbean movie, I’m just assuming they are milking a fourth, is if I hear the movie opens with Jack Sparrow sticking each and every one of his co stars, thus proving himself a true pirate, a merciless merchant of death, a true badass.

For the record I have nothing personal against John Depp, he is a fine actor, but he is not Jesus. James Caviezel is Jesus.