The Hohl d'Mayo
I have been reminded again of an underground newspaper that I distributed at my high school during my senior year.
Like most of the great ideas I have had, I stole it from someone else. While I was working at a bookstore in Kent, there were a couple people who were doing a sort of alternative Christian rag called "The NonConformist." They wrote short little "articles" all facing different directions on a double-sided piece of tabloid-sized paper - then photocopied that a thousand times - and left copies at locations all over Summit and Portage Counties.
THEN, my friend Matt Coffman, a student at Garfield High School in Akron, put a one-pager of his own together called "The Gambleputti Expresso," made 20 or so copies of it, and gave them out at his school.
That did it. I soon started up my own. I went under the name Kaiser Bunn and called the rag The Hohl d'Mayo.
It would serve me well at this point to give a little snapshot of my state of mind during this period. I took a Myers-Briggs test at the time and came up an INFP. Do a websearch of "INFP support group" and you'll be astounded at how fragile and needy these people are. A typical INFP looks distant and detached on the outside, but inside is a simmering pot of worry and concern for everyone around them. Sympathy and empathy on amphetamines. So take that personality type, add religious fervor and extreme shyness, and you'll have a pretty good idea of what my head was like in those days.
So here you see the genius of doing an "underground newspaper." Here is a platform for me to say whatever I wanted to say and have people read it without having to interact with anyone. I had two major goals with this thing: 1). To convince everyone that read it to "Accept Jesus" and 2). To get some girl to like me. Worked like gangbusters as you can imagine.
I did 20 or so issues over the course of the school year. Lots of jokes. Lots of Bible verses and religious grandstanding. I typically made about 150 copies of each one and gave them out around the school. I eventually got in trouble with the school administration over it and was ordered to stop. The final issue ("The Hohl d'Mayo Classified Ads") was never distributed.
Interestingly, what I was REALLY doing (though I did not realize it) was indulging some guilty pleasures -- specifically the joy of playing with text and the joy of naming things. Every issue had a distinct style that separated it from other issues, accompanied by a well-branded name for each issue. The first issue was called "Issue Fish," for example Later in the spring I did one called "The Hohl d;Mayo In Stereo" where all the content was presented twice in a side-by-side spread. This love of text and layout has blossomed into my current career as a graphic designer. And as far as the love of naming things goes, take a gander at the source code for any of the websites I have created and enjoy the Freudian romp through the names I have given for all the elements emebedded therein.
What I also did not realize at the time was that my need to evangelize was more a symptom of doubt than of actual passion for the Christian message. I had the sinking suspicion that the whole thing was phony - and that scared the hell out of me. I responded to that by becoming a guerilla evangelist. But it's tough for a closeted atheist to keep the act going; I didn’t last much longer.
Some people have told me they still have many of the old issues.
Epilogue:
1). I kept all the originals for The Hohl d'Mayo for many years, but they were all permanently damaged when my basement flooded in 2004.
2). I am skeptical of the usefulness of the Myers-Briggs scale, but that is probably because I have drifted from "F" to "T" in the intervening years - and as everyone knows, INTP's are the kind of people who mistrust Myers-Briggs.
3). From my start in "Print Journalism," I have since been a DJ on a college radio station, fronted a band, set up my own personal website (seven or eight years before the advent of MySpace), and hosted a podcast. Plus I started a blog - which you (whoever you are) happen to be reading. I apparently still have the media bug.
Like most of the great ideas I have had, I stole it from someone else. While I was working at a bookstore in Kent, there were a couple people who were doing a sort of alternative Christian rag called "The NonConformist." They wrote short little "articles" all facing different directions on a double-sided piece of tabloid-sized paper - then photocopied that a thousand times - and left copies at locations all over Summit and Portage Counties.
THEN, my friend Matt Coffman, a student at Garfield High School in Akron, put a one-pager of his own together called "The Gambleputti Expresso," made 20 or so copies of it, and gave them out at his school.
That did it. I soon started up my own. I went under the name Kaiser Bunn and called the rag The Hohl d'Mayo.
It would serve me well at this point to give a little snapshot of my state of mind during this period. I took a Myers-Briggs test at the time and came up an INFP. Do a websearch of "INFP support group" and you'll be astounded at how fragile and needy these people are. A typical INFP looks distant and detached on the outside, but inside is a simmering pot of worry and concern for everyone around them. Sympathy and empathy on amphetamines. So take that personality type, add religious fervor and extreme shyness, and you'll have a pretty good idea of what my head was like in those days.
So here you see the genius of doing an "underground newspaper." Here is a platform for me to say whatever I wanted to say and have people read it without having to interact with anyone. I had two major goals with this thing: 1). To convince everyone that read it to "Accept Jesus" and 2). To get some girl to like me. Worked like gangbusters as you can imagine.
I did 20 or so issues over the course of the school year. Lots of jokes. Lots of Bible verses and religious grandstanding. I typically made about 150 copies of each one and gave them out around the school. I eventually got in trouble with the school administration over it and was ordered to stop. The final issue ("The Hohl d'Mayo Classified Ads") was never distributed.
Interestingly, what I was REALLY doing (though I did not realize it) was indulging some guilty pleasures -- specifically the joy of playing with text and the joy of naming things. Every issue had a distinct style that separated it from other issues, accompanied by a well-branded name for each issue. The first issue was called "Issue Fish," for example Later in the spring I did one called "The Hohl d;Mayo In Stereo" where all the content was presented twice in a side-by-side spread. This love of text and layout has blossomed into my current career as a graphic designer. And as far as the love of naming things goes, take a gander at the source code for any of the websites I have created and enjoy the Freudian romp through the names I have given for all the elements emebedded therein.
What I also did not realize at the time was that my need to evangelize was more a symptom of doubt than of actual passion for the Christian message. I had the sinking suspicion that the whole thing was phony - and that scared the hell out of me. I responded to that by becoming a guerilla evangelist. But it's tough for a closeted atheist to keep the act going; I didn’t last much longer.
Some people have told me they still have many of the old issues.
Epilogue:
1). I kept all the originals for The Hohl d'Mayo for many years, but they were all permanently damaged when my basement flooded in 2004.
2). I am skeptical of the usefulness of the Myers-Briggs scale, but that is probably because I have drifted from "F" to "T" in the intervening years - and as everyone knows, INTP's are the kind of people who mistrust Myers-Briggs.
3). From my start in "Print Journalism," I have since been a DJ on a college radio station, fronted a band, set up my own personal website (seven or eight years before the advent of MySpace), and hosted a podcast. Plus I started a blog - which you (whoever you are) happen to be reading. I apparently still have the media bug.
Mark Allender
email: zzz@uu.cx
web: http://uu.cx/
skype: mark.allender
posted by Mark Allender at
8:31 AM
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