Mayday is a holiday primarily celebrated by hippies. I really don’t have the patience to research it (re: look it up on wikipedia) but I’m sure that, like any other pagan holiday, mayday is about screwing and maypoles are a phallic symbol.

Let's hold hands and dance around the dick!

In fact, I didn’t even know that Mayday was a holiday until three years ago. When Jena and I had been dating for about 7 months she asked me if I wanted to go to the Mayday parade at Powderhorn Park. The parade is put on (or sponsored by or partnered with) Heart of the Beast Puppet Theater so there’s always these huge paper mâché puppets marching down the street. Pretty cool stuff.

We got to the parade early to get a good seat and got to witness the unofficial-yet-tolerated “parade before the parade” which was a bunch of gutter punks riding around on their homemade bikes.

See, gutter punks are like the drunk, deadbeat uncle of the hippie. They’re family so the hippie doesn’t say anything when the gutter punk show up to the Christmas party for the free meal and doesn’t bring gifts for anybody but they really wish Uncle Gutterpunk would just get his life together or at least shower before he showed up.

So the gutter punks are all riding around showing off their tall bikes and long bikes and wide bikes and bicicyles built for 5 etc. It’s like Dr. Seuss and Tom Waits had a homeless baby. Towards the end of the bike parade there was a pedal powered float. It looked like it was patched together from scraps from Fred Sanford’s junkyard. It was a two level slanted shanty. Inside on the first level were about 6 gutter punks pedaling away and drinking Black Label. About 8 feet off the ground on the roof there was a band playing with somebody steering.

As the band played and gutter punks biked and ran around the float, hopping in and out. One girl tries to jump on the front of the float. As it’s moving forward. This did not go well. The float runs her over and stops on top of her. People rush to help and start yelling “back up” to the driver but DIY multi pedal technology has yet to crack the code for “reverse”. Eventually everybody gets out and they lift the thing off of her. An ambulance arrives shortly and I’m secretly a little disappointed that it’s not pedal powered and covered in “This Bike is a Pipe Bomb” stickers.

I hope the girl is okay. I’m pretty sure she didn’t die. In fact, in the middle of writing this I thought to google it and there’s a video on youtube of the whole incident. The comment section is full of conservatives saying this is why communism is bad. Frankly, I’m surprised Obama didn’t get blamed for it.

Several months later I was at the Guthrie theater for the MN Fringe wrap party. Jena had a show in the Fringe that year but I left the party early because I had to work the next morning. As I was about to get into my car, the slanty shanty rolled down the street with a few people on the roof. I flagged down a gutterpunk who was riding his bike alongside the float and asked “Didn’t that thing almost kill a girl at the Mayday parade?” He looked at me confused and said “Uh… I don’t… think so? Maybe you’re thinking of something else.”

“I’m not. That thing shouldn’t be on the road.”

“Don’t worry, man. We’re totally safe.” And then he rode off on his bike that he, a kid with no training in mechanics or welding, built himself.