I don't know about you, but I can't wait for "It's Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers" to show up in my Facebook feed. Maybe my seventy-two year old aunt will e-mail it to me again, for the third year in a row. That shit is how I know fall is here. I'm about to turn on my laptop, so I better prepare myself for the one time a year all my old professors, and my high school librarian, find it acceptable to share some motherfucking profanity on social media. Check out how edgy and hip everyone is, reading fucking McSweeney's and cussing and shit.
I'm not criticizing people for posting "It's Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers" all over the internet for the fifth year in a row. I get it. I understand why, as summer ends and the leaves die, we come together to share Colin Nissan's article. We seed these posts in the hopes that laughter will take root, as though we could harvest our friends' and followers' pleasure, eat it and burn it during the coming storms, stay fat and warm with happiness when the power's out and the roads are closed. Like Colin says, "You're either ready to reap this freaky-assed harvest or you're not."
But then comes the bit where Colin talks about that Diff'rent Strokes episode and sexual molestation. Can we still laugh about that? I mean, with all the fucking MRAs, and the rapes and rape threats, this ain't 2009 no more. We didn't know what Jerry Sandusky was doing when he was doing it in 2009. Maybe that shit finally is too real. But maybe it doesn't matter. I don't think my high school librarian would find molestation jokes funny, but she still shared this article yesterday. Maybe she never read that far, or maybe she forgot about that part since she hasn't read "It's Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers" again in a couple years. Not that she has to, not that anyone has to read it again before they retweet the link. We take pleasure in being reminded of the joy we first felt upon discovering "It's Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers," and the thrill when we clicked "share" and let our coworkers and cousins know we were not afraid of a little cussing now and then. This season is not about remembering every little detail.
I know that I'd totally forgotten about the part where Colin says he's going to do blow with a hooker. See, sometime between 2009 and now I wound up at an after-hours club in the back room of a donut shop not far from the Sunset Strip, where I did blow with a stripper and some bartenders. That was not a happy place, or a happy moment. Five AM, the night growing impossibly long in that hot, shitty room lit by a few strings of blue Christmas lights and a single neon sign, doing blow off a broken Ikea coffee table that had probably been picked up from the street and, judging by how the only people who seemed to work at that club looked like exactly what you would imagine if I asked you to imagine Thai gangsters, had never, ever been wiped down.
Doing blow with a stripper isn't the same as doing blow with a hooker, and we can't be sure if Colin ever actually did blow with a hooker, but my own experience wasn't funny, or happy, or even remotely seasonal. Maybe I'd feel differently if I'd done the blow off a decorative gourd, but I think if I tried to bring a decorative gourd into that club the Thai gangsters would have taken it away from me. Or beat me up. Or both.
But that doesn't really matter. "It's Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers" season isn't about me, or my high school librarian, or coke or molestation or anything like that. "It's Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers" season is about remembering ourselves, not "It's Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers." It's about taking a moment to reaffirm that what made you happy five years ago still has the power to make you happy today. It's about laughing in the face of the dying leaves. But most of all, it's about reminding your family and Facebook friends that you're still the hippest, edgiest person they know.
Welcome to "It's Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers" season, fuckheads!
Share This Article
