Irish Bars Near Me

A No Kings Report From the Rollercoasters of Washington

“The Irish know how to be miserable,” had been my logic when I Mapquested my way barward on foot from the protest. I figured I’m part Irish, and I’m all miserable. The white-moms-now-shamans back home in Marin might call this pilgrimage a form of “seeking Ancestral wisdom.” Not wise yet, I first asked for an English pub ale. In an Irish bar. By the time the bartender and I patched things up, I was one Guinness and two of his best Irish whiskeys down. This was new and experimental imbibing, the whiskey, and I liked it. I thought “if I could just stay on this barstool in this jolly old place until the future’s over…”

It was enough just staring there on my stool, no phone, like a half-stunned steer. I sat glad for the cold and hunger I came in with, because these at least were problems cash could fix. The corned beef sandwich I ordered showed up larger than three of me could eat, so I offered the guy next to me half. The bartender handed him an extra plate, and Ol’ Bill the Judge told me good, poignant judge stories as we chomped. By the time the beer and the beef were gone, Bill and I had figured out how to share playlists, and I had even warned him about a crazy long eyebrow hair he should tend to, ahead of his special lecture event by Zoom the next day.

Now, Bill warmly gone, I was on to tearing up with my new barstool buddy, Mason. Mason was a young Air Force veteran who had also been at the protest. He was telling me of his MAGA parents and how they did not believe their own son’s eyewitness account of January 6^th. “I called and told them what I saw with my own eyes,” he said. “They refused to believe it.” He said he also lost his very best childhood friend to MAGA. But my own wet eyes didn’t happen until Mason said of his fellow servicemen and women in this chaos, “all they need to do is hold to their oaths. I think enough of them will.”

As I listened to Mason, I remembered protest words I heard earlier that day by the Capitol Reflecting Pool. Yes it was over a typically crap sound system, from a New Jersey union lead who talked so long his own security folks were leaving, and it was double-booked against another rally on the other side of the Pool. So nothing new as protests go, there. But he said, “we need to take an oath of allegiance to each other.” He said too many words and poorly heard, but I heard those. We need to take an oath of allegiance to each other.

Before the bar and the whiskey and Mason’s talk of oaths, I had been eyeing trashcans with my big gorgeous protest signs. I wanted to crush and disappear them. Our protest looked like a craft show to me, or show-and-tell. “Here’s my sign, what’s yours?” I caught myself looking at a glittery border and thinking, “oh GLITTER next time, that’s a yes!” We were many but so unscary no police nor MAGA even showed. The streets of Washington around us were empty. People were lined along the Capitol Reflecting Pool with all of their smart, pissed off signs at the ready, seated, waiting for some signal that it was time to rage.

Fortunately, I had been inspired by a cranky, seasoned woman in a pink hat who showed up with her own rolling sound system, brash music and a harassing bullhorn at the first Tesla protest a few days earlier. The music changed everything. A good showing of federal workers and the scrappy rest of us dominated the blocks and honks for ages, and only began to fold when the rain started up and the music left, long after scheduled.

My pink hat compatriot told me she couldn’t make it to No Kings Day at the Reflecting Pool with her sound system, so I had walked all over purchasing a portable speaker and a nylon knapsack, and stayed up late making a rowdy playlist. I blasted Social Distortion, The Clash, No Doubt, Childish Gambino’s This is America, Beyonce’s This Ain’t Texas, some Stones, some Lead Belly, some marching Saints, and dance-walked back and forth along that quiet crowd seated along the Pool with my On Your Feet, America and F’ These F’g GUYS Already signs high overhead. It felt foolish and eccentric in that tidy, waiting air. But there were lots of answering stand ups, dances, grins and nodding heads.

Hours of rowdy later, the thought that it was all weak and too late had me parked silent against the first of my trash cans. “We blew it, we just blew it,” I was thinking. “Our kids, ouch of all ouches.” We let all of the structures rot out into money, fear, selfishness and distraction. The press that would have covered these protests in the age-old reciprocity of spectacle and story, is owned or thrown broken to the winds. The electeds who would have felt the protests and flinched toward America not away, are now so hustled back behind Great Walls of money, gerrymander, and violence, they just deathmarch us forward.

A man approached me where I leaned quiet against my trashcan in this angry rash of thoughts, and said of my blasting antics back and forth through the crowd earlier that day, “I so appreciate your energy. It makes all the difference. Really.” I looked at him like a lifeboat. “You,” I said. “You have just helped me.” I reached out and we grasped hands. He smiled and walked away. I went to full volume and resumed my crazy lady loud marching, signs overhead.

When the crowd began to circle the Capitol Reflecting pool chanting the age old and f’g terrible dirge chants, like show me what democracy looks like, or hey hey ho ho, some f’g thing has got to go, you know the ones, I countermarched along their perimeter in the other direction, cheering them on and blasting good music over the dirgery. This was delightful and loud and very fun. What an unanchored rollercoaster we are on, or is it an underwater dive with shared oxygen, where when I’m low you give to me, and when I’m good for now, I give to the next?

Speaking of oxygen, these signs that kept flirting with trashcans are ones I had markered up in the friendliest of FedEx shops. The employees, two cheerful women and the store manager, had gathered around to troubleshoot the best way to get them double-sided, hand-lettered and laminated, given there was rain in the forecast. They figured this all out, I did my lettering, and then they made sure the inks were dry and edges sealed before they sent me off. The manager had even figured out with his employees, how to code it all into FedEx’s system to game the best cost. Some passing customers nodded and photographed It’s the $4T TAX GRAB, stupid and Hey Elon, you can’t dismantle THE PEOPLE. They shook their heads with eyebrows high, expressing the universal “Ooof, can you believe this” of it all. We were warm goodbyes and good lucks at the register. As I kept finding, the only time my rollercoaster calmed to earth was in the allegiance and company of these good strangers.

Alone and back to grim on my way to the bar after the protest, I resisted trashing these signs block by block like a 12-step program, one trashcan at a time. My husband and I have a marriage-long phrase we use when feeling especially tumbled or like naifs, and it’s paying rent to the ideal. As in you’ve got to pay rent to the ideal if you want to live there. I made it past the trashcans but as with everything in these unraveling days, I side-thought what a doomed luxury and anachronism is a public trashcan. Just as I anguished in side-thoughts over those last of the golden humans working at FedEx: how will we all stranger kiss each other back to life in a daily day, when this tech bro tsunami of self-serve kiosk bullshit and robots and warehouse commerce comes machining right over the people’s economy? The economy of just us?

That was the foul piece of too much thinking going on, when I came upon a whole murmuring street of shoulder-high open dumpsters in a construction zone, tempting me. “Dump ‘em here, those signs! Just tip ‘em over and you’re out, there you go,” said my dumpsters. Because really, being a noisy citizen is such an embarrassment of public hope and flimsy tactics. I could retreat back from the bad chants and the posterboard pleas, to the sturdy and silent confidence of the American consumer. “Do something? Me? I work, and I pay for things.”

Well in a fit of faith the signs did survive the dumpsters gauntlet too, but I did change my flight to leave for home the next day. I was pretty rumpled, soul-wise. I had imagined Washington would be one long stretch of federal workers protesting, easily found, and went thinking “who am I not to support them with my body?” I almost bought a one-way ticket. I did get three good days of showing up in, between Tesla and some solo’ing and then 50501’s No Kings rally by the Capitol, where a woman said to me at parting, “It’s a start.”

But one result of the DOGE-y blitzkrieg of firings and decimation is, there is no way to choose one building over another! Do you rush to stand outside USAID or the VA as they’re chopped? CFPB or CDC as that news hits? NPS or IRS or DoD? The brilliant Tesla Takedown is a no-brainer, as you just get your noisy body to any dealership, and people are posting these like crazy. In Washington though, it was still a chase through empty streets, and the online organizing was just catching up.

Of extra insult is that the stupid White House is still blocked and fenced away from protest with a shamble of lumber piles, forklifts and portapotties obscuring it. The nation’s seat is somehow waiting weeks for an unused Inauguration Viewing Stand to get dismantled, and is taking up half the park and all of the usual protest area. “My f’g FAMILY could break this down faster,” I said to another bemused visitor peering through the trash at their White House. It’s one handy way to keep the angry world a couple blocks back, a couple months longer, I noted before walking on.

On leaving day, I squashed everything back into a straining suitcase, and headed for Dulles via the Metro. I passed a Metro sign and wished the world could run on Metro signs, those simple, color-coded signposts of brilliance that show you exactly where your train is headed and which track you want. It’s another fading experience of a good public service from oldentimes that is still trying to serve, even as billiogarch axes fall on all sides. I got on the Silver Line with ease. It went many stops, and then broke. I waited trackside with a silent, wondering crowd for a time, but then surfaced like a blasted prairie dog up to a windy, empty street where Mercy the Uber driver picked me up.

We drove in silence for a while, toward Dulles, until I said with genuine feeling, “I’m so sorry you have to have Trump back in your city again. He should have been gone.” “Ohhhhhhhhhhh,” she groaned, and we were off and running. After all of the obvious horror-struck exchanges, and a tale of Mercy giving a new Cabinet member a ride (“He was really polite, but what an idiot!”), she had been reaching deeper.

Mercy was searching for good words to describe the injury-within-the-injury that is technology’s effect on our beings. Even as we scroll-learn the unbearable like a burst pipe, the two fo us agreed, we can feel the structures of our brains forgetting how to think. “I’m just worried about the technology,” she said. “I have three books I’m trying to read,” she said. “Me too! Stacked! Good ones!” I said with pain. “But I can’t stop looking,” she said. We talked further, like two pounded, baffled humans storm-dumped to shore, our faces pasted to the sand and the waves still pulling. Who she was tethered me back to the world again, and again.

This is weary, known ground, but the mayhem since February 3rd was the first time I could actually feel technology’s damage to my consciousness and cognition. I dreamt in packets and skittering flashes like in old movies when the projector is slipping. I thought in bits without synthesis. I returned from a day of protest to my hotel room and sat on the floor against the bed without removing coat or boots, and scrolled for in fact hours. I was searching for organizers’ information, and taking in the shock of the federal workers unfolding. But I ate whatever was thrown. I scrolled the disaster for so long that one bicep started to flicker and twitch. For healthy living, I switched to scroll with my left hand. Surely, this is no way to arrest a coup, or even to stay alive.

“But this is how you and I know all of the same things,” I said of the writhing paradox, to Mercy. “I’m connected to you on every detail and we’ve never met.”

“Yes it’s so true. But I’m trying. I got off Reddit yesterday,” she said.

“Ha, I just got ON Reddit yesterday, for the organizers,” I laughed. “This is impossible. Technology’s the only way I knew about the protests. And it’s the only way we can know they’ll get covered. And it is terrible and I can barely think of words to string together to you right now!”

We talked for a while and Mercy silenced us with, “It is dire, and I need to know that, but I have to walk outside and be alive too.”

We rode quiet in furrowed thought. The technology felt like a snake eating its tail, or like a love-hate Escher drawing. Are we the hand drawing the hand drawing the hand, while the bombs fall all around?

I looked out the window of her Uber in our struggling silence. “The sky is still blue,” I said. “I know that.” We were quiet. “And YOU are awesome, I know that too,“ I added with clutching warmth. I was searching for one small stone of the known in this fracturing cascade of distress and confusion, one small stone for us to hand each other. “You’re awesome too,” she answered. It was all we knew for sure, and it was a lot.