I went down to DC to see a couple friends, and admittedly to see the protests, maybe raise my fists once or twice and yell "hey hey" and "no way" and "fuck" and all that. I moseyed on downtown from Virginia sometime in the morning, just naturally after I woke up and got some caffeine in my veins. I grabbed my camera, made sure I didn't have any brand-name clothing on...see, I'm not what you would call a big conscious kinda guy. It takes a lot of work to pull non-brand-name clothes from my warddrobe.

It's not so much that I don't have a conscience, or don't realize what's going on. It's more that the brands are working. They work every day to dull your senses, kill brain cells, offer you less choices. The capitalists are working, and their plans work. They compete against not only each other, but against you, against all the you's out there in the world. Against the world itself. Between the media and the marketers--and who can really tell them apart?--there is no time to think for yourself, to be by yourself, or to even listen to yourself. Or even to nothing.

So even if I had the opportunity to have a choice, which would be a lot of work to locate anyway, to even muster the will to take it would be an effort of huge proportions. When I need caffeine bad...let's just take that one for example, because when I need it I need it or I will suffer in all areas, let's face it...when I need coffee like a need a breath of air, and all that I can see is Star-fucking-bucks, then star-fucking-bucks it is going to be, child labor in Latin America be damned. And as the green mindmeld of medusa takes hold, as that first bittersweet rich warm fluid runs over my tongue, I can even be known to have the thought, "What kid wouldn't like to be outdoors enjoying the warm sun and puffy white clouds, anyway?"

It's not that I'm ignorant. It's just that when I can't find that one-out-of-one-thousand pair of jeans that wasn't made by $10/week preteen Asians, I end up with the gawd dawn cheap ass Gap copies from the outlet store. BESIDES, with my fucking McJob, I can't afford any better.

So I made it down on foot and the Metro in my unbranded threads to the area where things were supposed to be happening. There were a bunch of homeless-gutter-punk looking kids...oh wait! those are the activists! Right. Let's see what's shakin'.

Already, before I saw the gutter-punks-I-mean-protesters, I had noticed the unusual number of cops. Now cops can make a straight guy nervous, but I've been known to break a law or two in my day--I mean, this isn't my first time in jail--and to be frank, I hate fucking pigs. I hate to generalize, but most of them are power-hungry-small-dick-big-truck-big-gun-blonde-girl-all-fucking-American-or-at-least-they-think-so-especially-after-they-bought-a-flag-sticker-for-said-big-fucking-truck-on-September-TWELVE-2001-for-God's-sake assholes. Most of them. Like I said I hate to generalize. Some of them are the black-I-mean-African-American equivilant of the same.

So the cops were makin' me a bit nervous to begin with.

And the fringe anarchists at the edge of this mass of protesters didn't help either. They looked like the permently pissed off kind. Drunk off utopian philosophy, druggies on their intelectual superiority.

And not to change the subject, but isn't it crazy how ever since Freud, there's been three generations, so it is actually possible to inherit an oral fixation from your grandfather, anal retentiveness from your father, and have major phallic concerns all your own.