I went to my first protest since before leaving for Tobago. We returned from our trip July 25, and I fully planned to jump right into my pre-vacation schedule of protests, zoom calls, and writing to powerful people’s minions hoping for someone to listen (a.k.a. emailing my representatives).

I didn’t take into consideration that three weeks of international travel (including that giant hill that I joyfully marched up and down multiple times a day, every day), followed by three nights of camping the next weekend, was going to crank up my body’s inflammation level to an 11/10.

I’m still flaring, but I’ve been able to divert a few spoons away from my joints being on fire all the time back to activism.

I brought my new sign. I made it before vacation and hadn’t taken it out of the house yet. One of the ways I’ve been working out my feelings over the past months is making beautiful protest art, and after I left my favorite sign in D.C. at a protest (oops), I made a new one in the same spirit but with a different look. I really wanted to just recreate the old one, but for some reason had a block against duplicating an original piece of art, albeit a lost one. The new sign was inspired by traditional Palestinian tatreez.I made it using a tatreez pattern I found online and modified, and paint pens. It took a long time. I had to paint over all my mistakes and redo the sections that didn’t turn out right…. which was a lot of them. I lost the forest for the trees several times, but it turned out well at the end.

The group at this standing protest includes people who have been meeting up at the same corner to advocate for peace for twenty years or so, plus the new, younger folk that have been brought out by the exacerbation in current events. The reception at this weekly protest tends to be kind of hostile, from the older woman staring straight ahead from the driver’s seat of her car, shaking her head angrily as she drives past, to the guy who shouted “FUCKIN LOSERS” at us (I hope that made you feel better, sir).

The protesters brought hand drums, which they played enthusiastically. The musicians eventually put on revolutionary music from the 60’s, which they shout sang to, then had a rowdy discussion with another protester, a Boomer who argued the Beatles were never anti-war, all they cared about was sex and drugs. A man walked around with a little container of fresh cherry tomatoes from his garden. “They grew themselves,” he said, when asked. “I just picked them.” Another man came by and told me the story of his sign, which made a subtle reference to an American literary great.

A friend I haven’t seen in a while came over and we talked. We have very different frames of reference, but also have a lot in common. It’s always interesting to compare notes.One protester had brought their dog, who wore a little jacket.

It was, as someone in Tobago once said about a serendipitous meeting of minds, vibesy.I’m committed to showing up at a zoom for my local group tonight, and an event tomorrow. I have made myself visible again. I’m afraid of my body’s inflammation level staying on the ceiling. But resting isn’t helping and there is an unjust world that needs to be made to feel uncomfortable until it is willing to change.

The feature pic is the watermelon from last week’s farm share. I don’t actually like watermelon… but I think it’s that I don’t like supermarket watermelon, because this one tasted pretty good. It was also very pretty.