Many many years ago, before Juggalos were a nationally well-known thing (probably over 20 years ago), my friends and I were driving across the country. This was before iPods and iPhones, and we stopped at a record store somewhere in the Juggalo heartland to buy more CDs, having gotten sick of the albums we’d brought, and we’re too tired and road weary to really pay attention to the worker in the record store parking lot waving his hands at us, trying to stop us and direct us elsewhere.

We exited the car and the record store worker starts saying something about an insane clown posse coming to the store, and right then, we see about a thousand people dressed as weird clowns on the other side of the parking lot start sprinting right to where we’re standing in front of the store.

We’re just three kids from the coast, standing in a parking lot, with about a thousand people dressed like crazy clowns sprinting straight at us, with absolutely no understanding of what the hell was happening. Not knowing any better, we assumed that this *crowd* was the posse of insane clowns the record store worker was talking about.

We dove back in the car and drove through the clown crowd as they pounded on the hood and roof screaming, and we’re just fighting to get the car out of the lot with all these wacko clowns everywhere just wondering why the fuck there’s weird groups of crazy clowns running around town storming local businesses.

It was very surreal and confusing.

Later we learned that Insane Clown Posse was a musical group and we’d just ran into some of their fans and made sense of it all.

When I first watched The Purge, I got flashbacks to that day.