The last weekend of September is always fun in SF

[gordonzola]

As if further proof was needed of the sectarian left being out of touch with The People, ANSWER organized a "troops out!" demo on Sunday on the same day as the Folsom St Fair Predictably, only about 5000 people showed up to the demo which is a pretty dismal showing in SF for a "mass" Sunday afternoon protest. I think there were that many people a few years ago for the joke "Legalize PCP!"* rally someone called to make fun of the NORML folks.

Emma Goldman might not have agreed in her historical time period, but this definitely fell in the frame of that fake "If I can’t dance to it, it’s not my revolution" quote attributed to her every five minutes or so.* Folsom St. is one of SF’s big weekends, smaller in size than Pride and Halloween, but equal in prep time and looking-forwardism.

If the Leftoids ever got out of the house and had fun they might have realized that it was a bad idea to "restart" the anti-war movement on a day where they were competing with SF’s pervy population, truly the soul of the city, as well as the SF Blues Fest. We’ll leave out the Niners game ‘cuz they’re sucking so badly this year. Here’s a pic from the demo *** and here are two crowd shots of Folsom St. last year. Good or bad organizing? You be the judge.

Even though I was deathly ill all week, I knew I had to roll out of bed for Folsom. First off, vestalvixen had come all the way from Boston for it and I was already being a whiney and terrible host, second, I was scheduled to work a booth for my workplace and third, I always have fun at Folsom even though I’m not usually a dress-up kinda boy.

Thankfully, I woke up feeling good so I dressed to show off my cheese tattoo and headed down to our booth to hand out licorice whips and fruit leather. Everything was free, we consider it community outreach**** since our store is a block away from the fair, but people were wary and skeptical. "Do I have to give my e-mail address?", "Is the prize free after my free spin?", "What if I don’t like my prize?" Sheeesh. Of course, every time I guaranteed someone there was "no catch", they’d spin the wheel and land on the tiny little square that read, "We whip you with a licorice whip!" But it was just one smack and then they got to eat the licorice, so no one seemed upset. My RSI arm is my smacking arm so I just handed stuff out.

I know you all were giving me sympathy yesterday, but I felt good enough on Sunday to drink the beer that we smuggled in, check out The Shocker (with Jennifer Finch from L7), and make out a little with a hott LJ babe***** (not my houseguest). My favorite line of the day was one I ran into an acquaintance who was complaining that none of her freak friends wanted to go this year. She continued, "I told ‘em, if you’re not gonna go to Folsom, you might as well just move somewhere with cheap rent. It’s why we’re here."

vestalvixen seemed impressed by the whole thing. I’d run into someone, say hi, then someone else would come up from behind and my friend and they would start fooling around or go underneath the stage together. VV kept saying, "I love your city!". Yep, VV, it’s like this every weekend here.

I only have one question and I need to ask one of my bear friends but I’ll post it here anyway. Do bears roll around on the carpet, building up static electricity to get their body hair to stand that far off their bodies? Do they have to recharge after awhile? Do they have little pieces of carpet tucked away along the route for this purpose? Are their bear fashion mags that teach their tricks?



*"New studies show that PCP is as safe and beneficial as blue-green algae."

**The Chron had an exceptional recent butchering of this fake quote (can you butcher a fake quote?) but the search feature on their archive is so bad that I gave up trying to find it. It was something like, "If I can’t have fun, I won’t join your social movement".

***There was an overhead shot on the SF Indymedia website, but since it seems to be down again I subbed the Chron one.

****There is some irony to our (almost) vegetarian store hanging out at the leather event, but NOT ONE person pointed that out.

*****Name not mentioned because it was a bit of a pity makeout on her part. I was still a little exhausted from all the not-eating last week. It was like I was a little birdy who wasn’t strong enough to go gather my own food.

******If you can’t get enough Folsom, here’s last year’s entry.

Comments

[epanastatis.livejournal.com]

Just to play devil's advocate (OK, WWP's advocate--they're Latter-Day-Stalinists, so close enough), it's not as though the decision to hold the protest was specifically geared to San Francisco. It was supposed to be an international day of protest, and so the decision was just as much down to such entities as the Stop the War Coalition in Britain as to ANSWER.

Of course, the convenient thing about such "international" actions is that the failings of the various local events can always be chalked up to local mitigating circumstances--street festival in SF, cold rainy day in NYC, etc., thus giving the organizers convenient excuses. But that doesn't explain the disappointments in places where there are no such mitigating circumstances, such as LA or London.

[gordonzola.livejournal.com]

before the war they actually had to postpone an international day of action demo because it conflicted with Chineses New Year and people were totally outraged. sometimes though, I think the Left has fallen in love with its own image of being comprised of over-serious losers.

but it's not like ANSWER would admit that many of those fetishy people would have been at the demo anyway so I don't know how convenient an excuse it is.