beware the ides of march march

well, i guess you don't really have to worry about it again for just shy of a year. yesterday was fairly eventful, but in those small times i was unbearably bored. i guess i have to do something, but i wish that was not going back to law school. maybe spend my time doing something where i make money instead of just spend it. but law school it is for now, hopefully i will be more eager to cram my life full of it than before the break, but i kind of doubt it. i re-read whatever i have for tomorrow; it came back pretty quick.
i didn't do a lot of law school stuff over the break because i managed to fill a lot of my time with actual things to do, for good or ill. as i mentioned, yesterday opened with a trip to beautiful, historic lancaster pa. i am not being sarcastic, although the billing the original noting gave the town (same thing) came off a little tongue-in-cheek. really nice place, really peaceful event, really helpful officer of the law. dude was a classic good cop. had a motorcycle. pissed that he is being forced into mandatory retirement in a couple months. i guarantee i wouldn't fuck with the guy even ten years from now. rode by the brewery but couldn't find it back on the way out of town, unfortunately. but our trip took us through or past many of the more notoriously named municipalities of the state: blue ball, intercourse, wagontown (stopped for a beer there after a long search for one) and of course bird-in-hand.
the trip actually got off on a bit of a bad foot, as the driver managed to get a ticket during the thirty seconds we checked the inside of a building for latecomers. parked at 901, ticked marked 903. the attendant truly showed up out of nowhere. after all, we were too people who were on our way to act in an exclusively observant manner.
when we were almost back to the city, my phone rang, a friend asking me something about some sort of parade. i was supposed to meet some people in a strange walkway between a movie theater/restaurant/bar and a rotunda (the rotunda, in fact). it was on my way back home from where i got dropped off. en route, ben saw me and after a few moments of confusion i figured out someone had indeed just yelled my name at me. so we got there a little early; only one other person was already there.
i had no idea what to expect. we all talked for a while, but not a whole lot of information had come to light on what was exactly going to go down. i had heard talk for a few weeks, something about a banner, a parade, and an assassination of julius caeser. i wasn't clear on whether it was related to saint patrick's day (thankfully, far from it, although there were three rollerbladers with segments of a snake like a split up version resembling one of those chinese dragons in parades) or how big it was supposed to be.
when everyone was assembled, we numbered about twenty, including a couple of people shooting still and video. almost everybody was dressed in some striking manner, a lot of face paint (i saw a lot of painted faces that day between the march and the protest which included a small troupe of leftist clowns from some university). the variety and particularities of everything are quite difficult to describe, but the good news is that i'm sure pictures and perhaps even film will show up on the the interwebs and duly linked from here. enough people looking and behaving strangely enough to attract attention, but not so many as to cause an offensive/possibly illegal disturbance. there was already enough going on in the area we were in: some "irish" bars get together and literally bus people around to different bars all day. i think if i found out how much bud lite (not marked!) was consumed, i would literally vomit on the the information source. rampant douchebaggery.
made the whole thing subversive in a different way. the occasion was the ides of march, and it was a march, see. the ides of march... march. so we chanted "beware the ides of march march" for most of the time while we wandered along our ten or so block amble. also "no explanation!" at some points. the journey took us through some clusters of green t-shirt and bead folks who were alternately hostile, excitable, or so hammered they were too busy doing their own thing.
unfortunately, i was not dressed silly, because i was coming back from lancaster, and i had not been there as either a liberal (the one who got mike time remarked he had "had it up to my big red nose this war and this administration!") or any other sort of clown. i just got a little bit of the surprisingly adequate arsenal of weaponry. at the end of the line, caeser was indeed stabbed, and that was that. good times, look forward to the pictures.
the march itself and the ides of march both provided an independent good-as-any reason for a party. it was a lot of fun. knew a lot of people, met a lot of people, good mix, good music. for a while a band played, mandolin, guitar (acoustic), squeezebox and flute is their usual lineup. but this time my friend played fiddle with them, to fantastic results. unfortunately there was also an accident wherein my face was damaged. i'll be alright; could have been much worse. really close to an eye, which is a weird place to get scraped up. overall, though, a good time. friendly argument with some guy whose phone number, despite my vocal skepticism, really did only contain three digits through the whole sequence of ten. met some fellow dinosaur comics afficianados. someone had a bottle of everclear. i did not involve myself with that. and yet, i still somehow have minor scrapings in strange places. life isn't all bad, really.