One time, I was a hippie.
Not really, of course. I hate hippies. What I mean by that is not that I took drugs and complained uselessly, but that, in high school, I was a member of the school’s Earth Club. To this day I have no idea why, but it’s about to provide some interesting copy, so I suppose it wasn’t a total loss.
In theory, Earth Club was all about planting trees and picking up garbage — Earth Day stuff. In reality, it was mostly about padding college applications (my girlfriend was a Vice President, and actually put it down) and screwing around.
For example: one day, we got permission to show up at the school on a Saturday to plant flowers in a grassy area in the middle of the building that no one ever went to. We actually did get a fair number of flowers — where the money came from, I know not — and stuck them in the ground. Trouble was, no one knew shit about flowers, and they mostly got planted in the shade under windowsills and trees. They were all dead within a week.
The flower planting took about half an hour, after which we had pizza and a water balloon and hose fight. This shows the true character of Earth Club. Once all the water balloons were gone, the person with the hose pretty much dominated and it quit being fun, so we had hand-truck races through the empty hallways. In a stroke of luck, no one was killed. If you consider that the flowers all died, that we wasted at least a thousand gallons of water, and that we polluted the air with cigarette smoke and car exhaust all afternoon, it was probably a net loss for mother Earth, but you can’t deny that it totally kicked ass.
The people who were in Earth Club weren’t really hippies, either. Even if you count out the normal people who were there just to put one more club down on their Stanford applications, the best we had were the suburban-type hippies, with $300 faded tie-dye clothes and long yet suspiciously well-kept hair, who were really only into being hippies to put their pot smoking and slacking off in some sort of historical context. 99% of so-called hippies fall into this category. Jerry Garcia, on the other hand, was a real hippie. When he died, they pulled 20-some species of bug out of his hair, which is awesome.
The epitome of the suburban hippie was Earth Club’s President, Cashelle Crawley. She was behind the most pitiful thing the club ever did — the Earth Day Blatnick Park Cleanup Extravaganza.
It’s original source time, boys and girls. Here’s the flyer that I found while I was cleaning a couple weeks ago:
“EARTH CLUB NEEDS YOUR HELP
“Earth Day is April 22nd. We are sponsoring a clean-up at Blatnic (sic) Park for Earth Day on April 21st from 11 am to 5 pm. We would love for you to come! We also are having a meeting on Wednesday, March 20th after school in C215. PLEASE COME AND BRING YOUR FRIENDS.”
Now, right off the bat, I can spot a few problems with this.
a. The city already pays a man to go around and clean up Blatnick Park from time to time.
b. For those of you who hail from points South, April in upstate New York is still pretty much winter. In April of 1994, we lost an entire week of school due to snow. It all melted by mid May, of course, but the point is that this wasn’t going to be the sort of event you could wear your swimsuit to.
c. Other than me, I don’t think anyone got one of these flyers.
April 21st dawned cloudy and cold. It wasn’t snowing, and was actually above freezing, but I wore a coat to Blatnick Park when I went over there to see what was going to happen.
Earth Club had, with or without permission, taken over a picnic pavilion in the park. Nick Palmer, who for some reason owned huge speakers, had brought his huge speakers, and they were blaring 60s rock music for the people in the nearby houses to listen to. There were maybe 15 people there, all members of Earth Club, and Cashelle had everything set up. The events included:
– Endangered Species Picture-Matching. This was a game played with two laminated cards on a table. On one card were the names of 16 endangered animals, and on the other, 16 pictures. The idea was to match them up. This was absurdly easy, given that the animals all had names like “Hobson’s Lesser Spot-Toothed Whale,” and the card had pictures of one whale and fifteen other non-whale animals. I won plenty of candy playing that game, my friends.
– Flower pot painting. Like it says. The flower pots all ended up with slogans like, “Why are we here?” painted on them.
– Litter scavenger hunt. This was by far the best game ever, since it consisted of actually deliberately spreading garbage throughout the park. In theory, all the guests, once they showed up, would go out to find the stuff and win prizes. Of course, in addition to being cold, it was windy, so all the garbage blew all over the place, making a huge mess that the city probably had to pay a man to clean up. Go, Planet!
– Litter baseball. This was not on the original list of events, but we made it up after we got bored and discovered a whiffle bat.
So, as you might expect, no one else showed up. One guy rode by on a bike, and we tried to chase him down, but he just rode faster. What did we do? Did we take a minute to try to clean up the park? No, said Cashelle, we need to wait for the guests to get here so they can help. I didn’t even try to reason with her, and instead got my friend and neighbor Katey (sic) Murphy to drive me home.
The fun wasn’t over, though. Instead of going straight home, we drove over to Nick Palmer’s house. Nick, a sometime boyfriend of Katey’s, was still at the park, guarding his speakers, and the house was empty. This was no concern of hers, because she was hot and bitchy and had pretty much pussy whipped him by that time. We walked straight in and took a bunch of Chinese food out of the oven, where it was warming up for his family to eat. We ate it all and left. No shit.
{democracy:16}