Feast of Fools

1972-2021

 

Me, I am not much one for April Fool’s Day falderal.  April Fool’s jokes can range from innocuous and oft not funny Dad jokes to lame puns to elaborate and sometimes just downright damn malicious set-ups.  Really it isn’t that I lack the fun gene, I just don’t like it when people get embarrassed or shamed in the name of “fun”. As individuals we have enough mortification arising from stuff we purposefully do on our own behalf that we don’t need to have it added to by tricksters to provide cheap laughter for others.

 

No, I am not anti-fun. Of all the pranks over the years the ones I enjoyed the most were literary coming from a magazine called “Audio”.  Their April edition would come out in mid-March.  Invariably it would include a review from their special assignment’s editor Sloof Lirpa.  I vaguely remember one article touting a turntable mounted on a half-ton of volcanic rock to reduce vibrations in the playback experience. The article would include charts and graphs and purported lab tests showing the value of a half-ton of rock being placed in a living room in making sure a Ramone’s record sounded accurate.  Well, I thought it was funny and benign.

 

Ah the Feast of Fools thing. In April 1972 I was bouncing around Europe with my high school class mates sneaking beers in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Unbeknownst to me the Good Old’ Grateful Dead was trekking the continent bringing anarchy to country after country. If our paths had crossed my life might have very different.  In their booklet accompanying the three LP set chronicling that mysterious adventure of Jerry, Bob and the band they referred to the first as the Feast of Fools.  I liked it.  Each April Fool’s Day I am drawn to remember both of those points of reference.  The trip and the Grateful Dead were both transformative elements in my life. (Oh, the Feast of Fools was a real thing, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feast_of_Fools ).

 

This morning I am remembering rolling into some German city on the tour bus that smelled like diesel fuel after a rain.  Out the window of the bus was a rainbow that just kind of said this was day something special. That streaming blend of colors lifted my spirits immensely and refreshed my desire to experience all I could on that quick jaunt to a foreign world. To this day I can remember the clean smell of the air as we disembarked from the bus.  The whole world seemed new.  The whole world seemed possible.

 

In this the start of the second year of the plague I am hoping as I hear reports of increased positivity rates and increased hospitalizations that this our collective bus will turn a corner and we will see a rainbow. My hope is that we move into a place where we are doing the right things, getting the jab and continuing to wear the masks until we see the curves of infection and hospitalization dive toward zero. We can do it.  I know we can and I believe we will. This is not a time for fools.  This is not a time for jokes.

 

Today the April Fool’s joke came by way of mother nature.  Last week we were in the high 60s and even touched 70 on one day.  Today there are both temperatures in the 20s and snow on the ground.  April is a very cruel month.

 

Here is your moment of musical clarity.  China Cat Sunflower just bursts with transformative rainbow power.