Strange Days

When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. - Doctor Hunter S. Thompson
In many ways, this was never more true than it was in Boulder, Colorado in the mid-eighties. This was back when Newsweek called my hometown the place where "the hip meet to trip." This was also back when Newsweek was called a magazine, instead of a website called "The Daily Beast," but that's a topic for another time. And that time is also in the past. So much about what happens in my life has an element of looking back.
Back to the weird: It was in this hazy time called the 1980's that a great many people descended on that cozy mountain enclave where I grew up, seeking out a guilt-free, hedonistic plot of land to live their lives in the way they chose. This was decades before the legalization of marijuana, but that wouldn't have really been an issue. Smoking pot on the streets of Boulder might have amounted to an annoyance ticket back in those days: an annoyance for the cop who had to stop and take the time to write out the citation as much as the extra hassle for the person getting a buzz on.
Or at least that's what we were lead to believe by the media and pop culture mavens of the time. It became somewhat of a self-perpetuating legacy as this college town became a "wretched hive of scum and villainy," to borrow a sobriquet from a galaxy far, far away. But not as far away as people were traveling to get to the annual Halloween Mall Crawl.
Mall Crawl? It aptly described the way pedestrian traffic was forced to move once thousands of cavorting tourists and attendant looky-loos descended on the famous Pearl Street Mall. There were lots of arrests. There were plenty of accidents. And there were some very memorable moments. Ultimately, however, some measure of sanity prevailed and rather than continuing to allow their city to be overrun year after year by drunken zombies from out of town, the powers that be began to divert traffic coming into town. If you want to have a dazed and confused riot, have it somewhere else.
By the time I left, things had returned to some semblance of order. Halloween had returned to the Fun-Size Snickers bar that it had once been. Kids in costume regained more of the focus, and the holiday that once rivaled Mile High Mardi Gras was once again a relatively ordinary autumn night. That didn't keep people from trying to start it up again. Who wouldn't want a place to live out their nasty little fantasies, hanging from lamp posts, urinating in the streets? Over the past few years, there has been some mild efforts to return to those thrilling, chilling days of yesteryear. Thus far, the past remains in the past, and memories of all that sordid hooliganism remains in the memories of those who can barely remember it.
Maybe that's why they invited the Republicans to Boulder to debate. When the going gets weird...