Slog

The Southern delegation were nodding their well-trimmed heads to Sammy Hagar last night at a party in downtown Minneapolis. (Press wasn’t invited, but a nice doorman from New Orleans, who happened to hate the crowd that night, slipped me in.)

Sammy Hagar was wearing pink Crocs. That’s all you need to know.

Then this poor guy, who is also from New Orleans, got up and tried to auction off a guitar for a hurricane relief fund:

Maybe Sammy played it that night. Maybe he signed it that night. It was kind of hard to hear because the Southern delegation was drunk, yapping, and wouldn’t pay attention. These guys—I swear to you—were discussing golf. It was like a cartoon:

“C’mon all you people who make a lot of money in Washington,” the auctioneer said. “Can I please have your attention?”

He could not.

Protestors were a couple of miles away, getting lashed up at Pi Bar and having some kind of queer-carnival event.

(I swung the hammer; I hit the bell.)

The next morning, a few protestors from Seattle got up from the couches in the apartment where they were staying, rubbed their eyes, and wrote the number of a legal-defense fund on their bodies with Sharpies, assuming they’d be arrested today.

Their plan is to lock down the streets to prevent the delegates from meeting today (as they must, for convention protocol.) Teams from different cities are taking different sectors around the Xcel Center. They wouldn’t share their plan of attack.

“Meet you at the barricades!” one said as I rode off on my bicycle. “I’ve always wanted to say that.”