quislibet | Walking around Boston, part 2

Yesterday I strolled around the general vicinity of the DNC with a camera. See my post from earlier for the beginning.

I have to say that the Triumph the Insult Comic Dog guy was not being very cooperative for photography. Except for that one kind of blurry picture I posted in the earlier post, every other attempt at taking his picture resulted in his turning deliberately to block my view of the puppet.

Oh well.

Soon a helicopter came to hover over the cage again, and so they cranked the PA system, and it was just too loud to stand in there. There being no reason for doing so, we exited.

From the street just in front of the cage one can, indeed, see the Fleet Center itself, site of all the speechifyin', not far off:

I like the decaying mural on the side of the train platform. Note also the MPs at the top:

Is that a spear and shield, or a bazooka, or what?

J. was just one of many idle legal observers, and so, as a volunteer anyway, saw no obstacle to removing the ugly t-shirt and going to sit at one of the sidewalk tables of the Beer Works, which commanded a view of most of the street as well as allowing access to stout and sweet-potato fries. Naturally, as soon as she sat down, some guy started waving a flag around and shouting about something (outside the protest zone; otherwise, he couldn't have been carrying an enormous flagpole). Police converged on the scene. J. went to go find out what was up, and returned shortly; apparently, the police were bored, too, and had simply gone to watch.

Soon, however, a parade arrived. Anarchists! They stopped in the street outside the cage, and began doing some sort of performance art drama thing that was mostly unintelligible, as well as impossible to see. We paid for our snack and went to go look. It was still hard to make out what was going on.

I failed to get a good picture of the Jesus guy trying to save anarchists' souls while they protested, or of the black midget in an enormous cowboy hat running after someone, with a cameraman chasing behind; soon they all returned and shook hands. I don't know what that was about.

I also didn't react in time to take a picture of the two young muscular men J. pointed out to me whose "yeah, we're, uh, anarchists, that's right, anarchists" outfits were belied by their little Secret Service earpieces. But maybe they wouldn't have appreciated being photographed.

There being the thrilling combination of anarchists and bored police all mingling together to occupy J.'s attention, I left and began walking my way back to Park Street by a scenic route. A block away, Triumph was interviewing an old man decked out in Bush-Cheney flair; the interview didn't seem to be going well, but I couldn't get close enough.

On Cambridge Street I heard some sort of tinny music and turned to see a Religious-Right-Mobile:

"Somebody's going to slit his tires," said a conversational voice, and I turned to see a sheriff's deputy grinning at me. "He's been by here a hundred times." He shook his head and walked on.

I walked past a "Veterans Against Kerry" demonstration in a little park. There was a banner with unflattering caricatures of Kerry and Jane Fonda.

Back at Fanueil Hall, whatever was going to be happening there seemed, in fact, to be doing so. A large cheering crowd was clustered around the MSNBC pavilion; I got closer and had my second celebrity sighting of the day:

The "Hardball" guy was interviewing Howard Dean. (Well, with both of them, I guess that's two more celebrities.) He was trying to get Dean to say something bitter about losing the nomination, among other things, but without success. When asked if he'd consider running again, Dean said something like, "Not until 2012, when the Kerry administration ends!"

It was, of course, hard to see what was going on, and even harder because some guy in front of me was holding up a t-shirt that I think he desperately wanted Governor Dean to see, and the press of the crowd moved me away from the speakers so I couldn't really hear, either, and so eventually I moved on.

I saw some horsies:

Not much else happened of note. At Park Street I was able to get on a train right away, and was thinking of sending the MBTA a backhanded compliment about how unusually acceptable the service was this week. But then at Davis Square, tired of walking, I decided to take a bus to the house where we've been staying this week, and had to wait for considerably longer than it would have taken to walk.

When the bus finally came, it went what was, according to my travel needs, the wrong direction; I had been fooled by the fact that from that spot I had boarded one going the right direction just the night before.

The End.