My dad tries to drive a van down a narrow alley that goes through a cemetery. I sit in the passenger seat, a bit stressed at the tight fit, and we make it through one stone-walled entrance. We make a turn, stopping at a dead end where a black-clad woman stands over a grave. I get out of the van to help Dad navigate the van out of the old cemetery.
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A photo is worth 1,000 words. Protesters get arrested while dressed up in Gitmo jumpers and hoods. I saw one SFPD shaking his head in disbelief or disgust over having to stand there for the amazing photo op.
Who is the monster here? The Police State eating off of the Agro-Buisness Fast Food State? The War? The Bush Administration?
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6:20AM 3/19: Wow, five years ago I got up super early like I did today and headed down to Justin Herman Plaza on my bike with a group of friends. Still dark and cold right now. Oh well, big breakfast for me, pack my snacks, and get down to Sansome and Market
7:20AM: I arrive at Sansome Market to find a fairly large crowd milling about at the Direct Action to Stop the War (DASW) “Info Station.” Insane Reagan is across the street doing a McCain “Bomb Iran” spoof already. the BLO is there ready to play the marching beats. Dance Dance Insurrection has arrived. All bands are dressed in pink. DASW volunteers keep telling me to plug in, take the orientation session, etc. I go over to the orientation and don’t get much out of it except a flyer with the Lawyer’s Guild phone number on it. I’m antsy this morning. Calamity bums a light off of me and then complains that the DASW has no tactics about head on confrontation with the SFPD. Ah, it’s cold. Let’s get this Snake March started!
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Four more hours working on the photo credits and I have whittled it down from 3800 to 2400 words. Taking out the repetitive details seemed to be the easy part. Working it out so that it seemed intellectually logical, shall I say taxonomic, was the hard part. I still don’t know if I worked it out, but kept taking passes at the list to try to make it look the same. I set some rules for the entries, and then found that I had to break them on some instances. I learned many things in college, but creating a photo credits list wasn’t one of them! Also spent another four hours today going through the color printout looking for edits. All combined, Jennifer and I found about 67 for Justine to tackle this week. Most are for continuity (rectifying the TOC), a few photo edits came up, and lots of periods went missing in the Endnotes. The largest revision will be spreading the Chronology across two two-page spreads instead of four single pages. Justine is going to have to move all the text boxes to facilitate this, but Jennifer and I both think it’ll make her design look even better. My eyes are going blurry from staring at so much text today, so this is it for now. Hope to take a few more passes tomorrow and get this all out the door to get the final rev of the book. Then its off to press.
Good morning. I’m about to hit the sack because I need to get up early and make some pancakes for the CELLspace 12th Birthday Party Brunch. Just spent the last 4 hours reformatting the photo credits section of Stencil Nation. I met with Jennifer Friday afternoon over coffee, a muffin, and a fresh color copy of Justine’s second revision. We both agree that she’s done an excellent job on putting this book together with the meager resources we’ve given her. It all looks great and we chatted about it with excited oohs and aahs. Getting down to the page-to-page revisions, Jennifer has the sharpest eye for finding things that need to be fixed. She’s left me hanging with all the text, which I’ll read over this week for any final corrections, and caught things as we skimmed over the book. I wish she’d scan the copy since she’s so good at it. Everything seems small enough except for the chronology and photo credits. I grabbed the photo credits off of the PDF file and dove in tonight. It’s just too long in its current format, so I have been trying to make everything more concise. I have been deleting line returns, repetitive words and phrases, urls (which are going to the resources page), etc. But I’m stopping on page 105 and have only trimmed off about 400 words! I’m half way in the book but under half way through all the photos too (it is going to be 192 pages with over 500 photos now)! I hope to plow through it later today (Sunday), take a few more passes, and then have Jennifer look at it. ahhhhh! Also on my list are compiling the other revisions, reading through everything, fact checking when I doubt myself (which gets easier the more I look over the same things), and getting it all to Justine super soon. The book is almost done, and I am just now realizing how much of a living document it actually is. The first ed. will most likely end up having incorrect info in it, but that’s how it is. I love my baby no matter how it looks. Pancakes tomorrow at CELLspace if you’re reading this later in the morning.
3/11 DREAM
I give a talk on scorpions in a lecture hall. The presentation is based upon a paper I have written, which I have, but I am unprepared for the moment. I show a live scorpion to the audience and place it on the table with the paper, and it sits there as I stumble through my points. To cover myself, I keep referring to a video on scorpions, which said that “scorpions are more evolved than humans.” “Don’t you mean clams?” someone in the audience asks. “Clams have a large foot that they walk with,” I hastily reply.
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