Waltz With the Monsters

There were protests in the city today.

People gathered to save their earth. They all came together to write witty signs, and dance and make promises to each other and everyone watching. I was curious to see it all. I don't think it was entirely what it should have been. People took out their iphones and took pictures of the revolution, to make their own news. April fools. Everything seemed to be waiting when I got there, and I read the word war too many times. The only person who tried to cover it up was Yellow. He was ashamed of that red tape with "Capitalism means war" on it. He said it's fine; everyone's a hypocrite, because everyone has to eat and work.

Our needs make us equal and they betray our causes.
Just like with the anarchists, who try to give back the laws they say they are not their own. But a society is not something you can join like a club. It's something you are forced into by truncheons and shields. I never felt more part of mine than today.


I had a nightmare a few weeks ago about being trapped on a bridge with thousands of anxious protesting faces all around me, but I didn't know any of them. Then out of nowhere disease descended upon the crowd. We were sent plagues and diseases instead of bullets to put us down and keep us down. I was petrified in my dream, just as I was today when the riot police came out of their walls and orders and trapped everyone in "their" street. This is called catteling, and they didn't care whether you were a hypocrite or someone who liked to throw stones from far behind the front lines for what you believe in, or whether you believed in anything at all. Every single one of them seemed angry, and their faces were set in the war that read on every sign and sticker. I think I would have liked myself to be braver and not have found gap in the wall to scarper through like a rat. Maybe one day I'll go back with the right kind of clothes and the right kind of attitude and really be a change in something. But getting that last part right just seems too difficult.

And it's funny how a self protecting mechanism caused me this cowardice; it's not a mechanism that usually works with me. But there's something in being reminded of my nightmares in broad daylight and being frightened of things I didn't even know existed for me until today. It made me feel really young; it made me feel really normal.

There are many things that are going wrong for me. I seem to tide myself over on my blackboard in white chalk, and I have my hand hovering over too much these days, ready to wipe it all off. I retract, and regroup. I make the riots, and I chant "new start, new me" at myself in the street, but I'm still missing the attitude. I deliberately refuse to know myself better and teach myself better. It makes me worry about everything all the time.

There are the exams, and a looming future, friends and families and and the fact that I kind of like to start in the middle and end at the beginning of everything. To be honest, I think I just prefer seeing life from over my shoulder.