everywhere i go from tokyo to spain i see juggalos dancing in a faygo rain!

Swine flu. Sounds cool, right? Sounds like a great band name. Or maybe just the somewhat crappy name of a great band. Swine Flu from where? Germany? Texas? Somewhere with huge beers, that’s for sure. Anyway, yeah, sounds cool, but as it turns out, it’s not cool at all. It’s killing Mexicans, people. It’s popping up in remote spots like New Zealand. That’s some 12 Monkeys shit, man.
If you’ve never seen 12 Monkeys, it’s a pretty great movie starring Bruce Willis doing a remarkably spot on Sean Nader impersonation. If you don’t know what that means, just watch 12 Monkeys and you’ll get an idea.
Anyway, we’re all gonna die. That’s what the swine flu is here to do. Purge the earth of us, right? Either that or SARS, Ebola, bird flu, what else? It’s amazing. Diseases roll out like new lines of cars or specialty sandwiches every year. And each time “the media at large” realizes it’s already gotten everyone worked up over the last potential pandemic, so they kind of up the ante. This morning I read an article about the swine flu that started out with this titillating little series of sentence fragments: “Millions dead. Hospitals overflowing. Trains and schools shut down. Economic recovery snuffed out.” The article went on to say that of course, that’s just one reporter’s idea of what COULD happen. Fuck. That’s the best you can do? If you’re going to just haphazardly terrorize motherfuckers with your imagination, why don’t you go for it? “Swine flu! Total Devestation! State of Emergency declared. Roving gangs of mutant pedophiles terrorizing all major cities. Gunfire in churches. CHUDS have surfaced! Homosexual marriage! There’s a black president!’ Shit like that, you know? “Dicks falling right off bodies as a result of the new, mutated airborne version of the swine flu!”
That would send some panic, right?
Okay, I think I’m buying into swine flu a little bit, just based on proximity. It sounds like that shit’s right around here, and actually, aside from the article I was talking about above, lots of the shit I’ve read about swine flu seems to be stressing all the good stuff, which, let’s be honest, is much scarier. With Ebola, there was one guy in Africa who had it, pretty much no chance it would grow and become a serious threat and the news went apeshit. “DEADLY DISEASE! AIRBORNE VIRUS! NO CURE! KILLS IN MINUTES! YOU BLEED TO DEATH RIGHT INSIDE YOUR FUCKING SKIN! DOOM ASSURED!” But that’s just spin. With the swine flu, they’re kind of saying “ah, no no no no. Nothing to be alarmed about.” Which to me, sounds a lot like some smoky room government types whispering to each other “just let them live these last few moments free from terror. They’ll all be dead soon, after all.”
I didn’t buy SARS. It all seemed too funny to me. Especially the “Hong Kong will take your breath away!” ad campaign for international travel that just happened to get launched right at the height of the deadly respiratory disease’s scariness. That’s synergy, man. I can’t wait for the 2010 disease. It better have an awesome name and a can’t miss set of symptoms. I’d like to propose “dick flu” or ‘goblin fever’. Let’s go with airborne, but it also travels through the mail, and it makes you die, but first you go crazy and eat your own skin. How’s that sound? Pretty good. Okay. There you go media/government global fear conspiracy. Don’t say I never did anything for you.
Up next is the next installment of my continuing series of defining everyone on the earth. Today, as per popular demand-Juggalos.

Juggalos are, as a rule, fat people. These are no ordinary fat people, however. Juggalos paint their faces with clown paint, spray soda on each other and talk about cutting people up with hatchets all while listening to the musical stylings of the Insane Clown Posse. The Insane Clown Posse is a duo of the grossest white trash hillbillies Michigan ever shat out who paint their faces like clowns, rap about cutting people up with hatchets and spray soda on each other. This, regrettably is true. What’s also true? These two guys are fucking Bazillionaires thanks to the dedication of their ‘Juggalo family,’ which is their made up little word for their fans.
Juggalos are men. Almost no women are stupid enough to want anything to do with this tubby, sticky scene, but the few who do get involved are not juggalos. They are Juggalettes. Again. This is all true.
Okay, I don’t know where to begin, really. This is such a ripe topic. Okay, side story. My friend dealt with the talent hospitality at a large outside bandshell in Wisconsin and she once told me that when Ozzy comes through, they need to have buckets of water everywhere on stage, and super soakers all over the place, because Ozzy dumps water on himself and shoots the crowd and does the whole show soaking wet. Why? Because he’s incontinent and he can’t be wearing diapers on the stage, so he just stays wet and he can let shit flow whenever he needs to. THIS is a good reason for drenching yourself on stage.
The Juggalos have no such reason. They take this soda called Faygo, a generic Michigan brand, and just dump it on each other. Why? I don’t know. It has something to do with the dudes in the band being self proclaimed ‘scrubs’ and Faygo being the official beverage of the tubby Michigan scrub scene but that’s about as specific as anyone really gets.
Once, the Insane Clown Posse played a show around the corner from my apartment (an apartment in Uptown in a building called the Lawrence Arms) and I went down with a sixpack of beer and sat across the street from the line of roly poly, painted up, soda spraying juggalos and watched them for hours. It was like being in one of those sanctuaries where hippos approach your car.
They would all chant ICP songs. They would all dance and run in circles and spray soda on each other (yes…as a preshow ritual. These pre-diabetics were walking up armed with up to six two liters a piece) and the few times that a juggalette approached, the whole line (and again, I’m not shitting you people) about 3 thousand strong by 430, began chanting “show your tits”. I only heard this chant about forty times that day. That’s a pretty high juggalo to juggalette ratio. Ladies, if you like fat pimply sticky guys with spiked hair, bad teeth and clown paint all over them and you can bear listening to the worst music ever recorded, well, you may just have a future as a juggalette.
Okay, the neighborhood smelled like cotton candy for a week after the show, and the street by the venue was pink for a few days. The whole thing was fucked up beyond belief.
One final thing…I read an interview with the fat one from ICP, uh, violent J maybe, and he told a story about how he had just banged some juggalette and she had, when all was said and done, eaten his, ahem, jugalizz out of the rubber. G R O S S!!!!! He just volunteered that in an interview. Classy dude.
They have a ‘gathering’ every year in Peoria Illinois. That’s the kind of people Juggalos are. People who could plan an event anywhere in the world, and they decide that they’re all gonna load up the wagon with faygo and drive to Peoria. Soooooweeeeee!
Oh, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that there’s this thing on the internet. It’s sad. And funny, but it’s so sad that it’s funny. It’s a juggalo funeral. Just look it up. I can’t even talk about it here because the conflicting emotions involved are too much for me, but man, let’s just say that it’s for a little kid, and the parents not only wrote the whole funeral prayer or whatever about the juggalo family, they painted their faces and wore ICP hoodies and shit to the funeral. The poor grandparents in the pictures, man.
OH! Juggalos call each other “Ninja.” It’s sort of like “nigga” but with less of a chance of getting your tubby white ass punched out (did I mention, or did I need to mention that Juggalos are all white?) and at the top of the handout at this juggalo baby’s funeral, it says “Ninja Down”. So fucking goofy.
Um…that’s all for today. I’m feeling a real pang of remorse for humanity.