Slowly walking

I got my laptop back from Castro Computer Services in tip-top shape. They installed a new 20GB hard drive and copied the contents of my old one onto the new one. No more annoying clunking noise, random crashes, or glacial behavior.

Courtesy of RandomWalks, here are lots of pics of the big peace demo in S.F. on Saturday. Of course, the local paper also covered the event. My estimate of the crowd: 100-150K.

I got down there at 11:10, stood for 90 minutes on Spear St. with a bunch of Episcopalians and Quakers, then finally found my friends from St. Francis Lutheran. The morning was unusually cold, and the chill lasted as long as the shadows. We stood near a thrown-together "Brass Liberation Orchestra" that played disorganized versions of hymns, folk songs and just about everything *except* marching band music. Sometime around 12:30 we finally started moving. The folks from my church quickly left me behind; I didn't want to just stream through the crowd, so I just went as fast as the people in front of me, reading the protest signs and just sort of chilling out. After a while I decided to walk kinhin style, and found this not only made it easier to walk but it centered me and kept me from being too impatient and irritable in the crowd. After a couple of hours, I got really tired and hungry, and as we were near the Walgreen's between 4th and 5th Sts. by then, I ducked inside for some ibuprofen and chocolate. After that, it was hard for me to get back into the meditative state of mind, but I stuck with the march until it turned off Market St. I never planned on going to the rally, having decided long ago that I was in no mood to have some speaker, even if it was Martin Sheen, tell me what I already knew. When we got to 8th St. I bailed out, footsore and now warm from the sun. I ducked into the Civic Center station to get away, but everyone else had the same idea, and I wound up walking several blocks until I could get on a bus going down Mission St.

Update: Here are a lot of photos of the march (v. large page with lots of photos).

That night I went to the Berkeley Symphony. There's nothing like a big concert of classic music or opera to make me feel like civilization is worth preserving.