YATA

Yet Another Tuesday Again. The acronymic titling just keeps on coming.

Today I spent a few hours at the prison listening to the gang intelligence unit. Some interesting stuff and some stuff that leaves you scratching your head and going huh? Probably pretty normal for a non-gang person listening to stuff about gangs and gang members. They covered the gamut from bloods to crips to seranos to nortes to kkk to war ... Colorado is interesting in that the prisons don't segregate by gang like California and some other states do. They practice a zero tolerance "you are all prisoners" strategy and isolate only trouble makers. Doesn't make some of the gang members real happy.

The gang that was the strangest to me was the Juggalos. The key for membership seems to be a liking of the Insane Clown Posse, often acronymized as ICP in signs and tattoos, and a preference for hatchet or ice pick violence, and/or a liking in general for the music akin to ICP like Dark Lotus, Twiztid, Anybody Killa, Jumpsteady, Psychopathic Rydas, etc. They are one of the rare gangs that accept all religions and races and even allow concurrent membership in other gangs amongst their members. What makes them troubling is that they are a small subset (est. 15%) of all the people who follow ICP in a manner similar to the Deadheads that followed the Grateful Dead. That 15% subset is the actual violent gang, the rest are just somewhat demented music followers. It is also troubling that they are one of the fastest growing gangs in Colorado and in the prison population. The gang logo is a dread locked running hatchet wielding man, often stylized with dripping blood, etc. The iconic image of hatchetman looks like this

This gang is also troubling in that it has a strong middle school  following. The members like to dress in black, wear hatchetman regalia, have tattoos of ICP and the hatchman, and wear clown makeup. Not exactly an inconspicuous crew.

The city council meeting was of the normal variety.  We went through the agenda in a business like manner, had a brief discussion on a couple of upcoming topics, and adjourned. I did try to convince the reporter for the weekly news paper who arrived after the meeting was over that she missed the wildest meeting of the year. I told her that the entire council had stripped naked and danced the can-can on the council bench. She didn't believe me. She just said that she was really happy she missed it and proceeded to quiz me about the agenda items one by one. Oh well. Maybe I just need better lying skills.