As May Day approached, I bid farewell to my roots in the dirty dirty south. But not before attending a show in Mobile where this blues guitarist Blind something-or-other accompanied his music by stomping in a box of broken glass. I also took a detour to northern AL to visit my other set of g-ps, and managed to visit the Ave Maria Grotto. It was like a Rat-style shrine, over 150 buildings made out of trash. Broken glass, shells, dishes, toilet floats, most any broken material. I also checked out this home-made inclined rail that some old guy had built into the canyon he owned. It was a wooden box of benches, like picnic benches, and probably sat six. The two cars were counterweighted on either end of the hill and they rode the same tracks and passed in the middle. He charged $2 to go down there and have a picnic or whatever, and told me, "Lotta ladies take a look at my train and say, 'I ain't ridin that'... but nine times outta ten they'll ring that bell when it's time to come back up the mountain."

I found out my uncle has an automatic submachine gun. My grandma shot it. My grandma, shooting an automatic weapon!

My grandpa loooves to shoot things. He took me out on the Back 40 with a shotgun looking for something to shoot. I don't want to kill anything for sport, but he desperately wanted me to, the ethical dilemma was solved by the slim odds of me actually hitting anything. I did shoot up some Rat Patrol: Rat Music mix CD covers, to hand out in Minihopeless.

I experienced my first earthquake, a 4.9-er. It happened early in the morning, so I woke up and, in a zombie-like state, looked at the junk shaking on the bedside table and thought, "Oh, it's just an earthquake" and went back to bed.

After a grueling total of 18 hours on the bus, I spent the night wandering around the French Quarter. Some zydeco band offered washboards and spoons to their audience so I played with them for a while.

In the bleak morning, the sun rose and the puke-glazed cesspool that is the Quarter was revealed through the flimsy sense of revelry smeared across it like shaky lipstick on an old whore's face, I boarded the train for a peaceful and pleasant ride home. Not one crazy person talked to me.

After a brief stop in Chicago to set plans in motion, I hopped in a car with Matt the Rat and two choppers bound for mpls and the May Day parade. The Minneapolis Scallywags and the Black Label Bike Club had well-represented themselves at our Critical Mass and St. Ratrick's Day, so I wanted to help assert our territory by staking a claim in the parade.

On the way up, we took a detour to the place where they make all those giant fiberglass sculptures in front of businesses all over the midwest. They had a graveyard, and we strolled among the giant cows, frogs, dinosaurs, Big Boys, and just about anything else you could imagine. We went down the road and checked out another grotto.

As soon as we pulled into town, we headed to the Hard Times Cafe, and sure enough there were twenty tallbikes parked out front. But the pile was just in preparation for the next day's activities. As Matt and I rode up on our choppers, we saw some colors and said hello. Into the cafe we were rushed, but despite the pile of bikes out front (including the Tallest Bike in the World, it's four-frame little brother, and three or four trip-highs) there was only one bike club member there. He told us that just around the corner at the Weinery they were doing some desperate last-minute chopping.

The Weinery was closed and its grounds converted over to an emergency chopping center. The junkyard where they usually chopped was being paved over by Imminent Domain, so they had to make do with what they could. We said hello all around helped them chop a bit, test-riding the various bikes they had laying around. Then I went to a sleepover with a bunch of Scallywags, where we watched Beyond the Thunderdome to fire up for the parade. While I slept, I dreamt of Rat Patrollers and Scallywags riding bikes in the Thunderdome: "Two gangs enter! One gang leaves!"

Politics had separated the two bike clubs in the parade. For the first time, the organizers allowed the BLBC to ride in front of the parade, instead of just having it forced upon them like in the previous seven parades. But the aging hippies who put it on deemed that colors that said, "Jesus is Lord" belonged in the free speech section at the end of the parade. Though they felt slighted, they had a secret weapon, and would end up ruling the parade.

We did the usual pre-parade thumb-sitting and then things got rolling. Strange headed the parade on the Tallest Bike. There were probably fifty bike-club members up front, and the neighborhood streets were packed with cheering paradegoers. They seemed to cheer for every passing bike. Matt and I rode side-by-side on our choppers, calmly scurrying along as tallbikers whipped past, did tricks, and hooted and hollered. I was in full battle armor, a stark contrast to the peace-loving rest of the parade, dressed as doves, swans, and ladybugs. But my bike launched no missles, only bubbles from the Pollution Emission Emulation Unit, proving that even things that look tough can be fragile on the inside... *sniff*