J:
What began as a project to foment massive, society-changing revolution across America became an unauthorized parade through a small town in the Midwest.
Such was the trajectory of the Have Fun Club, a group founded with at least a semi-serious desire to change the world, and which basically fell apart after the Festival of Fools Parade.
At least it made for a good TV show.
I can still vaguely remember some of this, though it's fading fast into the jumbled memories of my drug-addled life in the early-to-mid-90s. As I recall — and I'm probably wrong — Editor B and I had this great idea that we could help jumpstart a nationwide revolution. Nothing violent, mind you. More like a coming-out party for Generation X, where the freaks and slackers and pot-smokers would all stand up, declare their independence from the bullshit shallow conservativism of Reagan and Bush, and .... well, I'm not sure where it went from there.
I probably have notes somewhere, scribbled in excited scrawl, cataloguing all the great ideas we had for this revolution.
But those notes got buried somewhere along with the naivette that spawned them.
That probably sounds far more severe than was, or is, actually the case. I still consider myself naive and idealistic, after all.
But you've gotta understand, at the time, I really somehow thought that we could, from our little town in the Midwest, tip some kind of massive scale that was on the verge of tipping itself anyway. We — or, at least, I — thought that the Nation Was Ready for another Sixties-Style Freakout.
And that was just wrong. Bloomington was ready, maybe, kinda. But Bloomington represented about 1/8,000th of America's population. And, frankly, most of the rest of that population wasn't nearly so hip to radical ideals as the population of Bloomington.
Ah well. At least we had a really fun parade. No matter that few of our friends showed up (easily half of the people who participated joined the parade on the spur of the moment when we stopped by Dunn Meadow, where an anarchists' barbeque was coincidentally happening).
We had a blast anyway. And I have no regrets. I can laugh at my naivette, and still be very glad that there was a time in my life when I believed, truly, that America could turn into a really cool place, simply by the efforts of a few people.
