MORE JUGGALO MAMMARIES, I MEAN MEMORIES

It’s kind of hard to impart just how out in the sticks Cave-In-Rock is, but I think this gas station note does a pretty solid job of capturing it. If you can’t read the writing, it says “Debit don’t work on this pump. Credit = Yep.”

The ferry into Illinois, taken at approx 9:45 PM. The nearest town on the Kentucky side is about five miles back, so you’re literally driving through corn fields and then the road just stops. Slight horror vibe.

My first ninja sighting. It was never less than 90 degrees the whole time I was there. Dude was suffering for his Clown Love.

United States of Juggalodom.

A lot of the campsites had a similar “state pride” theme with professionally done signs that were invariably very fucked-with by the end of the weekend. Print-makers must make some pretty good scratch in the Gathering lead-up every year.

This was in one of the campsites in the drug grove. Doesn’t it make you regret not buying like a busted up hearse or a schoolbus when you were in high school? Man did you ever blow it.

Couldn’t stop thinking about that scene in Wet Hot American Summer.

Also wrecked by day three.

www.myspace.com/kryptikmurdarap

Every morning this guy ripped all the pictures off his poster and glued a fresh batch on from a seemingly bottomless stack of Hustlers. Just wandering around the campsites you’d occasionally find yourself walking through a patch of his cast-off ladies. Brad Troemel said he reminded him of a pornographic Johnny Appleseed.

Here he is in action. I believe his name was Titty-Man or something close. He had some pretty cogent ideas on body issues in teen and 20something American girls.

The Love Train, aka Juggalo Mass Transit.

This guy was selling homemade coathanger hatchet men. I feel like there are some reproductive/feminist connotations to this that I’m not quite fully processing.

Canadian Faygo Man.

“Lake Hepatitis.”

Here’s what it looked like on the shallow end. Hope you aren’t into eating.

This was at one of the “artist seminars,” which were basically like little press conferences for all the different Psychopathic guys’ fans. Not trying to be a dick, but it was kind of amazing seeing guys who were pelting each other with trash hours earlier sitting in such rapt attention. It reminds me of that thing where everybody claims the average American is stupid but if you listen to a sports call-in show most of the callers display a college-level understanding of mathematics and historical recall with regard to baseball stats. Who was the guy who said that? Oh crap, please don’t let it be Michael Moore. Dammit.

Rave-alos.

There were about 15-20 of these guys in matching butcher gear. Nobody could remember where the aprons came from.

This was during Mushroomhead’s set. That backdrop totally would have scared the crap out of me when I was 10.

Same with this. I have no clue how all those tweens can be into stuff like this and Slipknot. Even Maiden gave me the “creeps.”

I think I said something snide to this guy about wearing a kitana with jeans, but for some reason my memory’s a little fuzzy on what happened after that.

This is the very next thing I remember. According to my phone almost an hour had gone by. What the hell happened?

Club Chaos is this weird private dance club a bunch of Juggalos from Florida set up every year. It’s sort of like one of those suburban haunted houses they set up around Halloween, but more grindy.

The Land Raper posse were directly across from my tent. They’d driven for two days to get to the Gathering.

The other side said something to the effect of “ICP.” I have no clue how they made it through West Virginia without getting pulled over.

The crew of the Land Raper. The guy seated on the right told me a story involving anal sex and acid that was so mind-boggling my brain has completely blotted out all the details.

This girl was Miss Juggalette 2006. Actually I guess she still is.

The Land Rapers are the ones who took me to the rope swing in the video up top. It looked like fun, but I poon’d out on doing it myself. (Sorry.)

This was the punkiest guy I saw at the whole gathering. He even legally had a crazy punk name like “Crash” or “Slam.” I took a picture of his driver’s license so I could remember/confirm it after the fact, but out of the 3-400 odd pictures I took that one file ended up corrupted. It was like Lorna Doone.

What the hell is up with the Midwest and their monster bugs. I swear it’s got to be some sort of entomological retribution for the Trail of Tears or something. This thing was the size of my goddamn fist.

Here are a few more pages from the Morton’s List book. It’s kind of weird how little the people in these illustrations look like Juggalos.

One of the maybe four entrants in the day-three car show.

Can’t tell if it’s supposed to be pronounced “scraped” or “scrapped.”

This guy set up shop a good 12 hours before ICP were supposed to go on. Honestly though, I bet it was completely worth it.

These kids told me about all the drugs they’d taken like it was no thing (it was an insane amount) then showed me where I could score some acid which, again, I poon’d on. They were extremely psyched that my last name was Morton.

I only saw this nordic-y Black Metal-alo once the entire weekend. Right as I was walking over to talk to him one of my Juggalo hosts came over to tell me something and when I looked back up he was nowhere to be seen. He is basically my Techno Viking.

The Juggalo elite playing The Quest for Shangri-La, ICP’s role-playing board game. Counter-clockwise from top left: Guy I don’t know; guy I don’t know; guy I don’t know; arm of guy I don’t know; guy I don’t know; My Welsh Juggalo safari guide Daff; and the guy who taught me about Morton’s List.

This guy helps head up the Juggalos Against Drunk Driving coalition.

The role-players had to clear out of the pavilion for the mid-afternoon magic show. The tricks were pretty much basic magician stuff.

Until he made this dude’s nipple disappear!

Crap, this is another low-blow, but whatever I guess. When in Juggalo Rome…

This was the carny in charge of running the tilt-a-whirl that was in the video from yesterday’s post. As you may be able to surmise, it was a pretty relaxed operation.

Something about “like father like son.”

Something about “it’s a family affair.”

These guys were taking turns throwing one of those little spiked litter picker-upper sticks at each other like a spear. Click here for a video of the return shot.

After the magic show they had this Juggalo version of the Dating Game hosted by Blaze Ya Dead Homie. Some of the female contestants weren’t feeling the saucier elements of his running commentary.

Nor was the winner especially psyched to find out she’d just scored a date with one of ICP’s roadies.

Blissed out.

I sadly have very few pictures of ICP performing themselves as my body was being subjected to all six degrees of freedom at any given time.

Even after I cleared the exit chute it took me a while to regain my bearings.

The infamous backward double-bird. This was from earlier in the night when Ying Yang Twins were on. I didn’t see nobody giving ICP nothing but MMFCL. (Look it up.)

These soda jerk-alos brought a whole palette’s worth of canned Faygo to the Gathering which they were selling for cheap. I never bothered with verifying this, but according to them and a lot of other people I talked to there are a whole bunch of counties and towns in Kentucky and Ohio that have banned the sale of Faygo as a way of combatting Juggalo activity in their areas. This would have triggered more skepticism on my part if I hadn’t grown up a metro area where it’s illegal to buy Jolt cola.

This is the only clear picture I was able to get of my final-night host and charter member of the Midnight Wanderers, Pyro T. Blaziac.

Here’s the tent he helped dispose of for a fellow ninja. Sorry to keep sending you to youtube, but click here for the ‘after’ clip.

The single nicest thing anybody has ever written into the dust of a rental car for me. It may have had a little to do with the fact that I was railing broken-open yellow jackets in an attempt to counteract the four or five full cups of vodka I’d been given that night before starting my three-hour drive to the airport right before I found this, but it actually choked me up. Thank you sincerely anonymous Juggalo-dubber, whoever you were.