
Seven Creative Ways to Make a Blockade
Look at these hay bales doing being totally out of control!
I wake, bleary-eyed, to a recording of chirping birds. I groan, turn it off, and roll back to doze. I sleep till I’m late, visions of the work week crowding out whatever dreams I had: staring endlessly into a computer monitor; being sexually harassed by my clients; faking excitement and joy in conversations with my boss and coworkers.
When I finally make it out of my bed I race to get out the door and to the train. On the way I smudge my eyeliner, force down some fruit and yogurt, and pull on clothes that I wore the day before. I may be ragged but I’m still running.
The train is so crowded that I drop my purse to my feet and wedge myself between the wall of the car and some man’s armpit. From the window I can glimpse the San Francisco skyline and, laid out before it, cars shuffling ever toward the city on a twisted mess of highways. I'm pressed against a mass of workers making their way to shitty jobs but each person is mute, lost in their phone.
The doors burst open at my stop and I push out, jogging ahead of the crowd to make it up the stairs and into the light. As I approach the turnstile I think, for just an instant, of freezing in place just to hold up the machine for a few minutes. On the street, I pass unattended police barricades and I imagine them on the tracks below. I dodge construction workers and skirt around scaffolding, eyeing boards and pipes and fences that could be piled in the street and set alight.
I see all of these things ... and then I get to work.
Here are seven blockades that I look to for inspiration on days like these.