I think I may have given myself a concussion today.  I was so stoked about the beautiful weather that I went home on my lunch break to open the windows.  I live in an old building, so some of those windows swing inwards to open like big doors.  The window above the front stairs is an example.  If you’re not careful, you can brain yourself pretty handily by sprinting up the stairs and forgetting to duck.

Which is exactly what I did.  The windowframe took out a chunk of hair, gave me a nice little divot, and is making me worry about being coherent enough to WebMD concussion symptoms.

No matter how many poor decisions I make or how stupid I feel, I will be forever grateful that a very large group of people out there is not only dumber than I, but majorly, colossally so: the Juggalos.

Just before moving from my old blog, I posted a video of the Gathering of the Juggalos (it’s below, so only jump if you want to read some of my old timey awesomeness).  It’s amusing because it’s almost unbelievably stupid.  It’s almost as if a secret plot to irradiate the country’s most moronic 2% is in place, and if we could only get the bomber jet above the festivities, we wouldn’t have to worry about idiot overpopulation ever again.  I’ve watched the video a few times since then and I am never not simultaneously entertained and horrified.  Entertained because these people are almost amoebic in their intellectual complexity (or, as Vice says, “endearing in their dumbness,“ or something like that), and horrified because jesus christ most of them have drivers licenses.  It’s a weird paradox of stupidity so profound it must be harmless, and stupidity so supported by its practitioners that it must be dangerous.  Also the music is terrible, which leads me to my story about how I first became really aware of ICP.

I say “really aware” because obviously I knew who ICP was before I heard them.  If you were an American pre-teen who spent any time at the mall between 1993 and 1998, odds are you spent a considerable amount of time in front of the poster rack at Spencer’s Gifts.  Having no sense of style or decent Internet to tell you any better, you thought it would be really badass to own that Houses of the Holy blacklight poster if your mom would ever be cool enough to give you $25 for it.  You also noticed the evilly grinning clown posters on the rack, and had determined that the logo was related to a band called the Insane Clown Posse.

Well, okay.

Because I was neither a boy nor a stoner, I had no interest in learning if the Insane Clown Posse were any good or not.  In general, I felt I could live happily without owning any music created by a band who decided to call themselves the Insane Clown Posse.  I wasn’t into Christian music or anything weird like that, I just thought they sounded stupid.

Then, one day during what was probably my sophomore year, I was driving around with Becky and Adrian.  I guess they were dating at the time, because I was in the backseat and therefore had no say over the music selection.  We were stopped at Laclede Station and Watson when my cheekbones started to ache.  The music was relentless – harsh, jarring, not at all melodic or even remotely artistic, and jamming its incessant crappiness into my skull.  Also, it was angry.  As I looked out over the scene at the stoplight, I thought, “Man, this music makes me want to get out of here and go jump on that car.”  And I wasn’t thinking about jumping on the car, I was thinking about clambering onto its roof and stomping on it.  I wanted to thrash around and dent the metal and scare the shit out of the driver.  I have never been so prone to violence before, and this thought freaked me the fuck out.

“Um, what is this?” I asked Adrian.

“ICP!” he said.

Oh dear god.  Not only had I been listening to something that inspired inexplicable urges of violence, but I was stuck in a car at a busy intersection while it blared out the open windows.  Everyone at the stoplight would surely think I enjoyed ICP and yearned to indulge in its message of destruction.  I sank further down in what I remember to be an early-90s model Honda Civic.  I didn’t know anything about Juggalos at the time, but just thinking that someone may have thought of me then like I think of these idiots now is enough to make me want to sterilize myself until I die.