The Halloween Landscape (Landscare?)

October 17, 2010 – Halloween is kind of an opposite day, where things polite society normally frowns on are instead encouraged…candy from strangers, movies about psychos, door-to-door soliciting, fascination with the macabre, searching out frights, and temporarily lowering the resale value of one’s property by festooning it with cotton cobwebs, populating it with animatronic monsters, and seeding it with polystyrene tombstones. On Halloween, uninviting is inviting.

Despite the thick coat of Halloween I always lay down inside my house, I’ve so far not been able to decorate the exterior in like manner. So I channel the resulting self-loathing I feel into extra amounts of love and respect for whoever does hang up plastic skeletons from their porch or plant inflatable anthropomorphic pumpkins in their front lawn. In fact, this year, we made a special trip just to see them.

The original plan for yesterday morning was to just drive around and see how many lawn displays we could find at random, and then take pictures and post them in an article I was going to call “Halloween Lawnscare,” while figuring out the invasion of privacy ramifications later. However, we soon found out that Halloween was not just confined to front yard decorations. It was everywhere, in parking lots, at grocery stores, in random fields. Even nature itself seemed to be getting in on the act, covering its acres in crows and blowing leaves into piles just so-so.

I was seeing my town and the surrounding areas in a new way, where pumpkins and ghouls made me notices houses and stores and restaurants and other places that had hitherto only existed in the giant blind spot our species has evolved in order to be able to operate in a world of overwhelming sensory input. Holidays are good for that, I guess. And candy.

Anyway, it was a good morning, and below are the rotten fruits of it…a compliment on Halloween.



This thing is like 25 feet tall and is celebrating its 20th Fall.
Sometimes the world is so cool I can't stand it.

If a site like this doesn't get you excited, then you must be a Fourth of July kind of person.

That's not exhaust steaming from it. Looks like they hooked up afog machine to it.
I'm not the type impressed by cars, but I will be if you do that to it.

We got hungry, and McDonald's kept us in the Halloween spirit.

The local spookhouse, getting ready for the upcoming night of business.

I will shop at your store if you do stuff like this.