AROUND TOWN. After a long day at work I went over to see how the protests were going. The City wasn't making it easy to reach the intake point of the ANSWER march at 31st and 8th. I went down 8th Avenue to 34th, where I was blocked; cut down 9th, and found no access at 31st. On to 10th Avenue. People carrying signs, looking around. People on cell phones: "They're making us walk down. Probably to 23rd Street." Guys lounging in front of the Verizon building. One yelled, "If y'all stood up in 2000, you coulda got ridda the motherfucker then." Tons of cops, cop cars, cop bikes, cop motorbikes, cop scooters, cop trucks, and undercover cops (and something I'd never seen -- an AMTRAK police van).

Finally at 10th and 26th Street I got to turn with a bunch of people with signs ("You on strike?" asked some neighborhood kids) onto 8th, where I could see about 300 protestors massed five blocks uptown, hooting and waving signs and listening to a recording of "War (What Is It Good For)," and a huge maze of police gates lining and clogging the streets behind them. It looked like a trap.

Next stop Union Square. Most of the police were massed on surrounding blocks; the 50 or 60 cops on the scene were hanging loose. It reminded me of a cross between the old Avenue C thieves' market and the old Tompkins Square. The south end was mobbed -- at least as many bodies as I saw uptown, in a much smaller space -- mostly with youngsters, chatting and chanting, surrounded by merch tables with anti-Bush stickers and T-shirts (a simple Bush-face-with-"no"-logo was the most popular item; others employed swastikas to make their point). Near a little carpet of abandoned signs ("I am marching for my grandmother and she is PISSED"), a fellow sitting in a lawn chair held a sign commemorating Jesus A. Suarez del Solar, killed in Iraq. The man said Jesus was his son, and he was there waiting for Bush to tell him when the troops were coming home.

On the other side of 14th Street, hundreds of people were milling, eyes on the Square, waiting to see what came next. One guy was practicing break-dance moves on the sidewalk.

A little further north on the Square people lounged at picnic tables, and strolled under the trees. A boy and girl in ratty denims sat cross-legged and very close together on the pavement against a low wall, out of the light, talking softly. All around, bars and restaurants did a brisk trade, and streams of passers-by headed home from work.