Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Weird Halloween
Not what I’d call my first choice for Halloween. Only decent stuff I could find at the viddy store: Evil Dead, Reanimator 2, and Ringu. And what does Jake want to watch tonight? To Kill a Mockingbird.
Um . . . not scary?
Maybe I’m in a bad mood because I’m using my kickass new gas range/oven and the house smells like natural gas. That’s not right, right?
At least I figured out how to use my kickass new dishwasher.
Halloween never used to be my favorite holiday. That would be Hannukah, for obvious reasons; second favorite, July 4th. Call me a revolutionary at heart. That, or a pyromaniac. What is it with me and incomplete sentences today? I seem to be hung up. On them.
Maybe I’m gearing up for a month of crappy speed-writing.
Here’s what I remember about childhood Halloween: almost nothing. My only costumes were cheapy store-bought rigs with simple gowns, masks held in place with rubber bands that always broke way too early. If I have my goody sack in one hand and I’m holding my mask to my face with the other, how do I knock? With my foot, naturally. Some neighbors objected to my door-kicking technique.
I watched the Charlie Brown Halloween Special every year. I don’t know why; I hated every aspect of that show, from Charlie Brown’s pathetic “I got a rock,” to idiotic Linus’s Great Pumpkin religion, to Snoopy, who nowadays makes me think those dog-eating cultures have the right idea.
I carved unimaginative pumpkins, mostly for the seeds. Yum. Soak in brine, rub off most (not all!) of the stringy orange guts, then roast in the oven until crispy. Chew up whole. Your colon will thank you for the fiber load.
No, I had to hit adulthood to fall in love with Halloween.
My favorite Halloween: second year of med school, Karen and I held a Reanimator Halloween party. We played a video of Reanimator for our friends, who were told to bring food shaped like body parts. Our friend Dean brought a chocolate cake shaped like feet. Karen carved out a watermelon, made it look like a head (pumpkin-style), filled the shell with fruit salad, and stuck a bunch of yellow Gatorade-filled hypodermic needles into the watermelon rind.
I have to finish cooking dinner. Nothing fun, unfortunately: pork chops, yams, and broccoli.
D.
Technorati tag: Halloween
My intent on Hollow Bean was to put The Nightmare Before Christmas into the VCR and pipe its sound through my stereo. Instead a friend of mine came over, bearing DVDs — Land of the Dead (which was better than I expected) and The Prophecy: Revulsion or something like that (about what I expected, but with more arty/pretentious camera trickery). We were intermittently interrupted by the doorbell as trick-or-treaters found my house. All in all, a good evening.