Carving

A little while ago, I carved a jack-o-lantern, along with some friends who each carved their own. It's a hell of a feeling to cut a whole in the top of one and rip out the guts. That's a neat tactile experience, and one which it's difficult to mess up. You pull out the easy stuff, then scrape until it's clean in there. That's the part leading up to the hard decisions, but so long as you're just engaged in this clean-up, it's easy fun.

My original plan was to make a jack-o-lantern whose sole decoration was an obscene written message. I went so far as to figure how easy it would be to render , and I determined that the lone difficult character would be an "O". I discarded the plan anyway, not because it would be difficult, but because I decided to be nice and to live up to the traditional values of the occasion. A consequence of this was a more difficult design, however.

I went with a pretty regular face. I put on a couple of eyes, a couple of inward-arched eyebrows, a sharp nose and a sort of wobbly mouth of the kind that Charlie Brown tended to have shortly before bursting into tears. It was a solid design- if rather simple- and I'm pleased to say that I executed it decently. If I had any flaw, it was that I could have scraped the inside of my pumpkin more thoroughly, to let the light shine through better.

The pumpkin did not last incredibly long. In fact, it failed by several days to even survive until Halloween itself. I don't know why, exactly. It stayed inside where I would assume it to have more hospitable conditions. It just got a lot of black fuzz inside and turned all soft. It was terribly unpleasant to toss out. I am sorry not to have it here on the big day, but I don't live in the sort of place where there are a lot of trick-or-treaters, and so I'm not likely to come in for any judgement. Maybe I'll carve another anyway.