In which Din Din goes hoarse.

I'll fill you in on the details later. With my voice has gone my ability to write.

Resist! Stand up! This war will end when the people rise up!

Later...

So I haven't a voice now because it was already near gone and i just had to tell 4 different people the whole story about the Iraq War/Iran War/Fuck Bush protest.

Let's see if I can write it all down for you.

So I get to Grand Central at like 9-9:30ish (late I know) and walk NE. At like 2nd Avenue and 40 something I see people in a mock-funeral procession and decide to follow them in their twisty route back to the protest. Once there they set down the coffins, someone gives me an orange plastic tie thing that you see marking trees and stuff and I put in on my wrist (I had given up on wearing my weirdish terracotta colored tank and had gone with purple). Not long after my oh so active standing and listening, a girl in an orange jumpsuit hands me a world can't wait sign and I take it, feeling I should make up further for my non-orangeyness.

At this point, people start photographing me and I oblige, hoping to look reminiscent of that Klimt piece with that goddess-esque woman (Athena! thats it) in a helmet and holding up a standard/spear/thing.

Then the daring folk dressed up as (Guantanamo/Abu Ghraib/various secret prisons...) prisoners (in orange jumpsuits and black hoods and bound in chains) decide to be civilly disobedient and jump the pen.

They are arrested, as predicted, for violating the protest permit.

Being the good protesters we are, we stay within the confines of the pen and yell at the pigs.

I hold my sign up for the news cameras.

Apparently, pigs are adverse to insults being hurled at them so they supposedly DRAGGED PEOPLE OUT OF THE PEN AND ARRESTED THEM. I am short. I did not witness this BUT there was a shift from yelling uselessly about people who went out of their way to get arrested to people yelling very angry-like while very anxiously looking for means of escape. But I have it from less reactionary sources that people were actually pulled from the confines of the pen.

So we all got shifty. People were getting spooked. I was nervous a riot was about to start. It didn't, thank Merlin, but I put my sign down for a while, ready to drop it and run (I have a fuzz phobia, k?).

The organization of the stationary protest died down with the continued attentions on the behaviour of the pigs, so I took the opportunity to find myself the orange bandana that you see here. I wore it as an armband and I, automatically, became mega-badass.

With my new badassness, the permit ran out and we mobilized near the entrance to gather for our march on the city.

The cops, like, wouldn't let us leave at first.

And we were all, like, ummmmm.

But then they let us go and they stalked us with a multitude of CHiPs wannabes (pigs on hogs, haha) as we "obediently" (yeah right) stuck to the sidewalks.


So I walk by these two cops (they all manage to have that douche bag look about them) and there are some old hippies by me and they start off a chant. "Freaks," says one of the cops, VERY audibly. I glare at him pointedly (not having laser beams for eyes, I sufficed to give him the most disgusted face I could manage) and he gives me this smug, douche-y smirk back, as if daring me to do something about it.

Prick.

TBC