Columbus, Ohio USA
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Gonzo and Loathing in the Heart of America
The 36th Somehow-Annual Doo Dah Parade

by Allex Spires
zero.oskul@yahoo.com
September/October 2019 Issue

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Last year, but close enough. Allex marching to a different drummer. 2018
© Michael Gruber

Thursday the Fourth day of July in the Hundred-Score-and-Nine-and-Tenth year since B.C.(E.)

On this particular Thursday, under an overcast that was clearing to scattered cloudy skies, I rode a bus 5 west on Whittier and then High coming into downtown, telling the driver about Doo Dah and what my presentation was all about. I carried an upside-down Old Glory at half-mast to express distress and mourning for our apparently foundering nation. A hyperdimensional mask I’d wear (while carrying and modulating the structure of a transformational hypercube I built) was to show people that we can do more, think more, and be more despite the limitations of just being human.

On Front Street, the bus wound up behind a red pickup truck, its bed loaded with young men dressed as hippies. Its emergency blinkers flashing. Its speed: about 20 mph. Its purpose: to guide a large blue float. I’d later learn it was supposed to promote the Freak Power Party. But I also ran into a Hunter S. Thompson look-alike and his attorney, Oscar Acosta, better-known as Raul Duke and Dr. Gonzo, and they told me the Freak Power people had no idea who or what Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing, or even Gonzo were all about. As it made its way to the parade lineup, my bus took a right turn on Nationwide, so we didn’t follow them in.

I got off at High Street and Bollinger Place and walked back through the urban festival throngs of hot people out being hot on a hot day in sweat-drenched light clothing, partying, eating mostly bar food, drinking soft and hard drinks and plenty of water, and awaiting the most perfect demonstration of free speech and free expression America has ever produced: Columbus, Ohio’s official Fourth of July Parade known as Doo Dah!

On the other side of the street, where Bollinger becomes Buttles Avenue, I found my buddy DJ who was prepared to start filming the spectacle as soon as it started. But before that, as the start-time was fast-approaching, we found ourselves somehow, beyond comprehension, in the very center of Goodale Park being forced to smoke hashish through a bicycle pump by a hellion band of roving droogies who were all gone on korova milk before we were able to wrestle ourselves free and get back to the parade lineup just in time for me to wait in line for a port-a-john and get out just as the National Anthem was ending. There's a kneel for ya.

DJ stood at Park and Buttles facing the front of the parade, and I made my way to the very back and marched as the final entry but somewhere around Dennison I oscillated to become the second-to-last entry, and then last, again.

The parade started slow and it ran slow. Ahead of me were a bunch of real estate roughians on Vespa-styled motorscooters with tags for Urfuct Realty on the backs. Ahead of them was a couple that got married about eight times during the whole parade. Beyond my vantage point, lively crowds of ogling onlookers with eyes agog, all trying to get each other to look where they were looking, pointed all around.

They watched blood drenched zombie ghouls of all shapes and sizes and kinds, as costumes, dolls, puppets, and animatronics with gruesome grins and glares for spectators large and small. Intersticed among the risen dead, a costumed Columbus murder history troup marched along dripping gore from across eras.

There were Ghostbusters who marched alongside variations on the Ecto-1... if only that mood slime were real and we could blast Trumpty Dumbty with some positively charged ectoplasm like Ray and Yanosh.

People pointed at the ChillBilly Daluxe transgender waterslide on a tractor trailer. The fanciest man in the world holding a parasol while wearing mauve tails and a stovepipe top hat and riding on a modified vintage Schwinn DX pedaled past, catching everyone's gaze. Then eyes followed the Fishnet Mafia Rocky Horror Picture Show crew in bad drag and doing The Time Warp, again and again.

A lady who buys her toilet paper on Etsy made sure everyone saw the sign she carried stating that she buys her toilet paper on Etsy. A crew of freaks (“Being a freak is the best” on the front of their Jeep) celebrating their own 15 years in Doo Dah all dressed freakishly in doll drag and lo-fi sci-fi costumes had a large and important sign showing the alphabet. A photographer marched photographing any photographer who focused on him.

I was the last thing in the parade. The cops who were keeping up the rear apparently had a drag race and drove past me as the parade ended, in essence discounting the end of the parade and denying me my right to free expression.

My own objective in wearing my hyperdimensional getup was specifically to get kids to recognize that we live in a higher-dimensional reality than what we presume by basic sensory observation, and a few kids did look at me grinning with eyes agog, many others did, too, but I really hoped to give some minute inspiration to the people who will be the clueless ones ruining the world in 15 years and give them the idea that maybe there’s more than what we plainly perceive and understand and that our minds are big enough and our imaginations capable enough to go beyond what has been the idealized course of civilization. Your life is just the time between birth and death, what you do with it is up to you.

www.doodahparade.com
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