B

ig Fun is a community that resulted essentially as an accident. It started as a quasi-utopian idea among the Malvern Girls: Sara Poiron, Jessika Flint and Peggy Farley, girls from the Philadelphia suburbs who, as young adults, had decided to live in the Charlottesville, Virginia area. They'd had the experiences necessary to know the drawbacks to living within Charlottesville proper. People are forever coming over to visit, bringing their friends, staying up late, making noises and messes, breaking things, and spending the night. Such people might be wonderful and interesting, but they distract from the important business of finally settling into adulthood and accomplishing all the myriad goals casually set through the years. So, after a wide search for a house, they decided upon a remote big yellow farmhouse on the north end of Fairview Farms, a few miles north of Scottsville, Virginia on Virginia State Route 20. Soon after arranging the house to their liking, they chose to include Josh Smith (with whom they'd been house guests) and Zachary Firkly as rent-paying residents living in extra rooms in their house. This had the desired effect of lowering rent and utility bills for everyone, but the increase in population resulted in decreased control over the environment. Things gravitated increasingly towards anarchy.

There were those in Charlottesville who found the Malvern Girls to be a breath of fresh air in an otherwise predictable and comfortable social scene. So refreshing were they that they began to serve as the core of an increasingly larger snowball of like minds. Coinciding with their appearance in Charlottesville had been the emergence of the Gus as an artist from a checkered past of decadence, controversy and mayhem in northern Ohio. The Gus was given to making frequent trips to Charlottesville as part of his responsibilities in the bozART Gallery, and whenever he was in town, he found himself seeking the companionship of the Girls; they were the people who reminded him most of the people with whom he had related best in his considerable past. While distracting him from his art, they had the positive effect of inspiring his writing, resulting in works such as this one. Farrell, a more fixed resident of Charlottesville, viewed the Girls as both exhilarating and oddly alluring. Their lack of restraint seemed to awaken old creative forces. He viewed them rather as a gardener regards a grapevine; it may not bear fruits for some years, and it may need protection from the onslaught of insects, but if it is properly watered, fertilized, and exposed to sunlight, one day it will result in everything from raisins to vino. Morgan Anarchy, with his strangely inspirational punk rock attitude, discovered that among the Malvern Girls, he could be appreciated with greater depth and honesty than ever before. Much like the Gus, Matthew Hart had spent his adolescence in Redneckistan. But his attitude was thoroughly compatible with that of the Malvern Girls. In addition, he had his own circle of interesting friends that easily adhered to the growing mass of intimates. Rapidly, the Malvern Girls were sweeping up and absorbing the most fascinating people in Central Virginia. Big Fun (as it came to be called) started to emerge as every bit the very social scene the avoidance of which had been its founding tenet!

With the emergence of Big Fun as a social scene full of fascinating people came a casual attitude towards mundane things like bill-paying and tidiness. What with the frozen water pipes, power and telephone disconnections, and untimely and insufficiently delivered heat, living conditions occasionally verged on the horrifying. Still, the community was expanded to include Matthew Hart, Shira, and even Ray Snabley for a time.

True to their experimental natures, the people of Big Fun moved from relatively soft drugs like vino and tussin DM to hard alcohol and Ritalin and from no sex at all to an epidemic of pairing-off. The result was many Melrose Place-type incidents of bruised emotions and even violence, and this in turn led to temporary bouts of alienation for the Gus, Matthew Hart, and others. But such things did far more damage to a water sign such as Ray; he came to feel as though he was driven from the scene.

Despite its nearly-unlivable conditions and constant social tension, Big Fun is a place unlike any in the world. Big Fun people are full of ambition and interesting ideas, but for now they are distracted by the fragrance of life. So they stroll along for now, enjoying the considerable fun that the greater Charlottesville area has to offer. They can always buckle down and begin life in earnest when they have worked out whatever it is that is joyfully blocking them. Perhaps, as is the case for this glossary, a great creative force can be tapped from the unconventional decadence that surrounds them.

T

he purpose of this glossary is to give the reader an idea of state-of-the art youth hedonism as it exists in Central Virginia in the late 1990s. Thrown in with all of this is a big helping of the personal philosophy of the Gus. This document is not designed to be read as a conventional novel is read; this is a post-modern work whose design encourages jumping around and even accidentally missing parts. Whenever one reads anything, one zones-out and misses parts, so missing parts of this literature is not something to lose sleep over. For the most part, this is a work of non-fiction. But occasionally the truth is so irritating to tell that fiction has to be substituted in its place.