Council Chamberpot

I believe in us.

Getting arrested yesterday might have been the best thing that’s happened to me all year. And I know that statement is loaded. I don’t take this lightly. My dad’s arrest changed his life forever.

Don’t worry he’s fine. I’m just sayin, don’t come at me.

Yesterday was a mere civic infraction for disordering a city council meeting. Forty demonstrators letting city leaders know how we feel about the Sixers Arena blowing through Philadelphia’s Chinatown.

Don’t worry we’re fine. I’m just sayin, don’t come at us.

—

As you can see: the way I feel talking about getting arrested feels like what it was like to prepare for direct action. I feel a little defensive and smug.

So let me tell you about the action.

I’ve come to realize that the feelings leading up to A THING are wholly unrelated to the feelings of the THING itself. They’re all important feelings—to borrow from my therapist—but they are wildly different. In coming up on the event, I found myself rationalizing dramatic hypotheses to no end. The anxiety in me surfaced as extreme body odor. I vainly calmed myself down seriously only so I wouldn’t embarrass myself amidst seasoned rabble rousers who smelled just fine; nice even. While standing cheek to jowl outside waiting to be let into city hall, we faced the physically foreboding corpus of counter-protesters. Mostly construction trades people in what I’d call workmen’s fetish regalia—loose Timberlands, XXL Carhartt jackets, hands the size of baseball mitts, crisp new Sixers hats. Hurling their low booming voices at us with schoolyard insults—some were really terribly mean, but my favorite was the simple “go home you fucking losers” because no lie, yes I wanna go home right now but don’t we all?—I panicked they would make me cry. I worried we might start fist fighting and that two months of “beginner muay thai” group classes would not fantastically materialize a heroic KO out of me when a building foreman spit in my face, as I’d imagined I might. While running scenes ripped out of Yu-gi-oh, I tried to replace them with another kind of scene; a coping mechanism I learned while editing gay porn:

I fantasized them fucking each other.

(Wistful sigh) I’ll let you fantasize about that too.

Anyway, the doors finally opened to city hall. Moving indoors and into the council chambers did not calm me down. Now I was pretty sure I needed to poo again. And we were all in even closer proximity—pro and anti arena folks alike—plus we had police officers to think about. I fantasized about pooping on anyone who physically came up on me.

At a certain point we knew. We started moving in to the chamber floor.

It felt like dancing.

There was a moment inside, inside the cacophony of screaming voices and whistles, bodies squeezed together in identical apparel, arms linked in the center of the chamber floor as we stood inches from council members and their staff. A moment of sublime that would make German philosophers proud. When you take away the antagonism of those whose respectability politics deride the whole concept of a public forum, the syncopation of a loud resistance is not at all unlike church.

—

I was asked recently who comes to mind when I envision a “protector” and the longer I sat with the question the closer I got to god. Meaning, I both found that the answer was god, and that sitting with the question brought me closer to the notion of it. For fifteen minutes inside this disruption at city hall, the action that would otherwise be described as smug and entitled, defensive and pointless, an overwrought fantasy, was actually just another sitting practice, a meditation, Chitkara. All of us, in making such a commotion, I am sure, fell into the trance I felt. And I know that this is protection, I thought. I know this is god.

When the police officer picked me up from the floor and put handcuffs on me I snapped into a new thought process. Wow, these guys are gigantic. It was the metal cuffs though. Wow, I’m not designed for this shit. But again, we started yelling a chant in unison as we filed out, as we walked away escorted from public square to our police bus, and I realized what my five year old already knows: yelling in song is a great way to dissociate from physical discomfort and anxiety.

I don’t mean to overplay this scene, to glory in being a nuisance, or to brag about virtuous service. I mean that is exactly what I’m doing LOL but I don’t meant to do just those things. I mean to tell you that I woke up this morning feeling better than I have in a long time. I am bordering on declaring myself out of the nuclear blast zone of a catatonic depression, now safely in the DMZ where Purpose meets Cause, and I feel chill. I daresay I have what it takes to face the misery of holidays even. Because I’d forgotten what it felt like to commune with the world of people as governed by notions of thinking together, of moving together, of singing together, of being together. I mean to tell you that the arrest confirms we did succeed and this was the plot all along, guys: we were not going to prevent the vote for the arena but we knew being here together, letting everybody know we are here, mattered.