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“Memory is a mirror that scandalously lies.” — Julio Cortazar
Halloween is fast approaching. F— you too! I am a half-chewed bone and it is a salivating hound running me down. It is a besotted pigeon and I’m a dry, dry breadcrumb. It is running my ass down. So I run, not away from it but to the grocery store for a pumpkin. On my mind is pumpkin pie and roasted pumpkin seeds and maybe a Jack-o-Lantern—perhaps a nice warm soup. Wafting off of this cerebral soup are the spirits and specters of the past, traipsing around, who I know nothing of and honestly don’t want to. They are schematized to my great phantasmagoric delight. Halloween is fast approaching!
It’s raining outside so a dry-dry breadcrumb must move quickly, splashing through quickly pooling water and stepping over gutters as it rushes and gushes and oozes away from me and the rest of us. The pumpkins aren’t hard to find, they’re right in front, plain and simple like a buck a pound, which they are (Jeez). I grab a nice one that’ll cost me eight crumpled sheets of crusty-dusty old paper. Then I’m going to procure a cosmic brownie and maybe a brain-booster juice—the recompense for walking out into the pouring rain which thank-the-flies will be gone tomorrow unless it rains again.
CANNED ORGANIC
Then I meet a can, a pumpkin can. Canned organic pumpkin, for exactly two slips of paper (one ninety-nine). It beckons me over, so I go check it out—after all it’s cheaper. And I was thinking about making a soup. We have a brief discussion in spite of a few communicational ambiguities that I overlook so well that this is no longer the truth, but it is. I’m convinced, I’ve ascertained the move and this is it: the can if I can, plus I would if I could and oh-surely I should—shall I? —done.
THE CHOICE IS PRE-MADE
I don’t know if I’d have eaten the pumpkin straight away anyways, or what quagmires might’ve materialized to keep me from eating it or carving it out or throwing it sideways. Throwing it aside—What?? A can is much wieldier. Cheaper too. The choice is pre-made. Was. Woah.
I re-greet the still untrammeled and inexhaustible rain. I thought myself rather debonair about the whole thing, but the rain confused me with its indifference and ridiculous plethoric salivation—ooh-kay.
I get home and it is Halloween and I forget about the self-deluded rain. The can spins a slow 360 and pops. I watch as the top flashes and Halloween transforms into a contained, cold liquid mush. All the soup makes me think of is the pumpkin I don’t have and the pumpkin pie I always loved. It throws me violently back into the pantry and it is full of cans and they are all falling off the shelves, that half-assed infrangible scaffolding.
1 + 1 = ???
It lied to me. There was no price differential between the two pumpkins because one wasn’t a pumpkin and the other was mortal. I didn’t pay 2 sheets but admittedly the disguise was clever enough. And even if they were both pumpkins—which I suppose they are—the organic one in the can was pumpkin-less.
I have purchased the idea of a pumpkin. The lie was that I was sold a perishable as a non-perishable, which yes, is a little fucked, a light moral tendonitis. But that isn’t the main issue, which is this: that pumpkin perished before it even entered the can. The can is a cultivar: an idea packaged and re-packaged and refined until finally some dry-dry breadcrumb such as yours truly for instance could walk up to it and buy a pre-perished post-expired pseudo-pumpkin.
Happy Halloween!
About the Article
A comparative look at choosing between pumpkin substances for Halloween.
