#she looks so old here which nails her intended look perfectly bc she always looked older than she is in my head

[procyo9]

[clarenecessities]

so. today. i was trying to keep from physical altercations (mostly to stave off the nagging of certain parties, Mom) but that wasn’t always an option.

i showed up a few hours early & joined the protest--someone (whose name i didn’t catch despite teaming up for like 90 minutes) gave me their spare megaphone bc i was “good at heckling” so that passed some time until the rally started & we moved onto noise tactics

the cops apparently learned from their failures on the 3rd, bc the plaza, instead of being roped off, was double-blockaded w traffic barriers. they had one fence between them and PeePee & one (+street) between them and us. so there were no physical altercations (baring one guy in a hawaiian shirt who just walked down the line trying to pick a fight, to baffled laughter) until the marching started

and the shit hit the fan

they got to go in the street, which is bullshit because not only had the cops been playing the same recording for 40 minutes telling us to get out of the street, but on the 3rd they had to stay on the sidewalk. i guess their whole cage set-up didn’t allow them to walk on the sidewalk, but traffic was still going on, you know? anyway, they got perhaps thirty feet & started to turn down an adjacent street, coming within feet of us, so naturally things escalated. people started throwing shit (mostly water bottles) on both sides, there was yelling, scuffling--i was hanging back, but i had a good view of the front line and it was... rough.

so the cops let this go on for about a minute, then start firing something at us with their not-guns. i thought at first it was rubber bullets, because they were clearly aiming to hit us (and when has a cop ever used a rubber bullet properly?) and i got nailed in the foot--my good foot! still mad--and it hurt like hell, but then i heard some coughing. it occurred to me i hadn’t inhaled in a while, so i took an experimental whiff & promptly had to book it because turns out i’d been shot with a pepperball! .... honestly, compared to the bear mace it’s kind of a walk in the park (pun intended). my shoe is super spicy now though :(

so we were forced down a block by the pepper cloud. i helped get a woman with a head injury to a couple of medics, but it was just a cut so i gave a concerned party some of my nitrile gloves & kept going.

a block up, PeePee was starting to come back up towards us. the initial plan was to block off the street, but that didn’t work very well because almost immediately, they charged us. well--the military LARPers did, anyway. if you’ve never been rushed by a bunch of forty year olds in flak vests and american flag capes, i recommend it. shit’s kind of hilarious.

i was still trying to avoid fights, mostly kept to people’s flanks to provide support as we moved down the street. cops set off a whole mess of flashbangs. what the fuck is the tactical point of a flashbang? all it does is get people frenzied. if you’re storming like, someone’s house, sure, but trying to get people not to attack anything? c’mon. anyway. i was watching someone’s back, didn’t actually engage, when this old guy comes up and just shoves me? no preamble, no gesture, just--shove. so i sort of stared at him incredulously for a second, like, are you fucking kidding me?

and uh. i may have. blacked out. a little bit

next thing i knew, i had his flak vest in one hand and his jaw in the other. no conscious memory of moving. i was kind of shocked/bewildered so i didn’t really resist when one of his buddies scooped me off and tossed me down the street. scraped my elbow & my knee but those are my worst injuries of the day so like hey! could definitely be worse.

i’m not gonna lie y’all i’m kinda freaked out about that part. what’s the point of training and shit if my gd PTSD is gonna take over whenever it can? why the fuck did lizard-brain!clare think it was a good idea to just grab a man’s jaw??? might have to avoid combat situations in general instead of just hanging back..... guess my shitty fuckin’ brain didn’t get the memo.

anyway. someone helped me up (by the bag again; why do people think hauling me up by the bag is a good idea?), the cops eventually separated us, and PeePee was forced back down the street, so they moved up another block.

now here, fate smiled upon us. the thing about this area is, there’s a lot of construction. and what do they have at construction scaffolds? barriers! do you see where this is going bc they sure didn’t. we built a barricade. it was amazing. victor hugo’s ghost shed a single tear.

well, so they turned on down and went up another block. some folks in black bloc grabbed a construction cordon and carried it up.

they went up a fourth block. they were moving pretty slowly between the cops and the flag-waving, so we beat them there. we blocked off the street. people threw some more shit--including a recycling bin? like the kind you leave out on your curb? it was incredible. so there were some more flashbangs, some more pepperspray (though fortunately i was across the street from it this time). that’s when the cops declared it a riot, and we were ordered to vacate the area.

PeePee slunk back to the plaza and we regrouped in the restricted zone. We headed back up in a different direction than we’d come, and found that in the interim, the cops had closed the adjoining park.

so it now goes na/zis, barrier, cops, barrier, street, cops, entire park, cops, street, us.

it’s almost as if the cops don’t want the na.zis to get hurt?

kind of a terrible idea, anyway. they wouldn’t let us in the park, but we were still allowed on the sidewalk, so we just walked right by ‘em. PeePee was too scared to march again so there was more waiting around. A cop (Brillard, i believe) yelled at a native woman for conducting a smudging ceremony & told her to go back in the park... which we were banned from. she blessed his family.

eventually the PeePee rally was also declared a riot, and they were ordered to leave the plaza. why they weren’t declared a riot at the same time as the rest of us remains unclear, given that they were the aggressors in all cases of assault (well; battery. i did see a lot of our folks throwin’ shit) and kept trying to stab people with their flagpoles bc the cops had taken their weapons as condition for entry to the plaza. i for one quite like that condition, as it kept me from getting bear maced again (really cannot overemphasize how much i hate bear mace).

they moved to the sidewalk outside of the plaza and proceeded to talk for another forty minutes or so. during this time, our side was pepper sprayed again, for reasons i still don’t understand? we were standing across the street, perfectly peaceful--we literally had our hands in the air. anyway one tall fella was hit in the eye (he was wearing sunglasses, but like damn, that’s not a good place for a pepperball) and i was actually able to do something useful for once. so i helped him flush his eyes & then another person came up and poured straight-up antacid in there?? i just kind of looked at her like ‘hey, why?’ and she told me to rinse it with my water. i showed her where it said ‘L.A.W.’ but i don’t think she knows what L.A.W. is ‘cause i had to explain it wasn’t water. the dude was okay though, he filmed the whole process.

so i dunno maybe i’ll get some better training and focus more on street medic stuff? it did feel nice to help him, and i didn’t black out even a little.

eventually i moved up and around a few blocks to see what was going on--they’d been chanting Rufio (incorrectly) because one of their guys goes by Rufio for some ungodly, un-Basco-sanctioned reason. anyway i guess that guy got arrested.

they were starting to leave by the time i got up there, and there were so few of us that we were actually outnumbered by a couple people (as opposed to our 4:1 odds all day). the cops were standing by but didn’t intervene when PeePee came over to our side of the street and people started getting up in each other’s faces. I for one had an enchanting conversation with a man who doesn’t know how child support works and thinks abortions are worse than the ICE centers, despite his adamant claims that the children there are being r*ped? it was somewhat incoherent, i’m not gonna lie to you. he also tried to stare me down but kept fucking it up. anyway he got pulled away by a shepherding Proud .Boy and they continued to retreat up the block, with our contingency in leisurely pursuit and the cops having moved to the other side of the street.

there’s some speculation based on how they handled today that this was intentional on their part, and not merely incompetence. the two groups were very often put into situations that allowed for physical clashes--sometimes forced into them--and the cops waited an inordinately long time before intervening. if the new policy is “let them fight” i have to say i’m on board, because no fuckin’ way would those cowards show up.

anyway a Proud /Boy punched someone and they retaliated, knocking the PB over. It was just those two hits (followed by some yelling but nothing physical) and the cops swooped on in. well. their flashbang did. once again i’d like to complain that flashbangs are absolutely useless as a riot suppression tactic and in fact actively encourage people to riot? anyway i got hit with some shrapnel in my upper back but idt it broke the skin. i’m mostly just irritated.

the cops walked us down the street, yelling at us the whole time (”move back!” “turn around!” “pay attention!”) but there were only about six of ‘em and perhaps ten of us? so it felt a bit more conversational than usual. the person they were mostly yelling at asked if it was necessary to point a gun at him, and the cop insisted it wasn’t a gun (it was a pepperball “launcher” (cough: gun)) according to “terminology”. when i asked if the yelling was necessary and suggested he use his words, he maintained they were ‘very loud words’. so i gave him shit about terminology. one woman suggested they do their jobs better and a different cop flipped up his visor and yelled “YOU ARE AN ADULT” which was as bewildering as it was hilarious. i think he was trying to suggest we should protect ourselves from the na/zis, but like...... we always have? cops have never fucking protected us. they just sucked at protecting the na.zis today.

anyway they all got on their rented “CHOOL BUS” and puttered on back to vancouver at the end of the day, so a rather anticlimactic finish compared to the 3rd’s waterfront clash.

one guy tried to heckle my phone case? but like, very poorly? and when it didn’t work he started heckling my boobs? like sir... sir..... i don’t care what you think of my fucking boobs? why are you hanging out of a chool bus window to tell me this when you look to be about 57 years old??

all in all, a much more violent event, but i’m much less injured, owing primarily to the hands off approach the cops took. all my injuries this time were a result of my own hubris (and getting thrown down a street i guess, but if we’re being real that one’s on my hubris too) as opposed to being a pinata for a pissy porcine party like i was on the 3rd

i’m not even as sore this time since i’ve been actually exercising this month! i’m basically unstoppable now