By now, you've probably seen the 2009 McSweeney's classic, "It's Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers" by Colin Nissan:
I don't know about you, but I can't wait to get my hands on some fucking gourds and arrange them in a horn-shaped basket on my dining room table. That shit is going to look so seasonal. I'm about to head up to the attic right now to find that wicker fucker, dust it off, and jam it with an insanely ornate assortment of shellacked vegetables. When my guests come over it's gonna be like, BLAMMO! Check out my shellacked decorative vegetables, assholes. Guess what season it is — fucking fall. There's a nip in the air and my house is full of mutant fucking squash.
For the last decade, it's been about as ubiquitous in the fall as, well, decorative gourds. So ubiquitous, in fact, that writer Will Kaufman decided to re-write the entire thing, but about his own, erm, excitement for the inevitable social media sharing of, "It's Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers," in a piece appropriately titled, "It's 'It's Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers' Season, Motherfuckers."
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."
Will was also my classmate at the 2013 Clarion Writer's Workshop, where he wrote my actual favorite autumn read, "October's Son," about a man and the pumpkin that killed his wife when she gave birth to it. Yes, really. I vividly remember reading the first draft of this story and having no idea what the fuck kind of surrealist horror I'd just read, but crying by the end of it anyway.
I'd recommend you read "October's Son" this month, instead of anything about decorative gourds. But needs must, I suppose.
"October's Son" [Will Kaufman / Lightspeed Magazine]
It's Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers [Colin Nissan / McSweeney's]
It's 'It's Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers' Season, Motherfuckers [Will Kaufman / Buzzfeed Community]
Image: Public Domain via Needpix
