A Pit Bull Named Chaos

It was his idea, my compatriot.  Call him Ewan.  He wanted to visit the Occupy DC camps in downtown Washington, and just...hang out, meet and greet, feel around for the funny lumps and angles of the whole "Occupy" idea.  He wanted to pass out cigars and hand-warmers, by way of both ingratiation and condolence.  He said he didn't want to provoke, and I know what he meant, and I believe him, but you have to know him; next to "twinkle" in the dictionary, there's a picture of Ewan's left eye.

In any case, we went.  We stood in the cold, first on K St., at McPherson Square, and then in Freedom Plaza, across from City Hall, where the respective Occupy camps are sprawled, with their uproar of tarpaulins, cardboard, and sad artwork, their predictable air of grimy disorientation.  We did hand out cigars.  Or, rather, Ewan handed out cigars; in the traditional manner of socially baffled writers everywhere, I smoked my own and listened as Ewan endeavored to draw out the various protestors.  Few were reticent, though some were incoherent.  One became unresponsive in the process of attempting to, it seemed, devour his gifted cigar.  I don't know how to explain this better; he appeared crazed by something--hunger, cold, boredom, heroin, indifference, something--and simply seized on the tobacco.  We left him to his deepening inscrutability.

We talked to a shaggy portraitist who told us he'd volunteered to leave his apartment so as to spare his landlady the sad business of evicting him.  This was not ironic.  She was kindly, and he didn't want her to suffer the misery of legal proceedings against him.  He, flat busted, didn't want her to suffer on his account.

We heard from another occupier that somewhere on site there was a pit bull named Chaos.  Chaos lived, apparently, in "Camp Chaos", his own little fiefdom within the larger assembly, and was helping the roving cats and sanitation committee members chase off rats.  We looked for Chaos, but to no avail.

Through all this, not surprisingly, perhaps, words swam at me.  Descriptive words which nonetheless remained discrete, refused to coalesce into any sort of explanatory narration.  There was, simultaneously, too much and not enough to report on.  Leaving me to fall back on the few fragments that suggested themselves: decency, futility, inchoate rage, debasement, waste, betrayal, helplessness.  The same fragments experienced and embodied by the protesters themselves, I suppose, even if most of the protestors don't have names for them.