Protesting the State-wide smoking-ban at the "Lance Armstrong Press Conference"

As your awareness and knowledge lumps and clusters in your mind, so you must stack your thoughts in balanced order so you may ascend to a newer plane of thinking.

Perhaps I am alone when I feel the people around me begin to shift. Old opinions are being forgotten, and it seems like everyone is swimming chaotically in search of the next wave. And yet everyone maintains a certain composure to ward off the life force they contain--the life force that is screaming from within, the life force that, if given authority, would enable the human bearer a master conviction to produce conceptualized utopias with boundless energy, fervor, and might.

Yet everyone seems so busy watching everyone else.


What you saw today at the capitol was in all respects, a press conference, where the spotlight catered to the select few. I made my statement known without disrupting the special Armstrong parade. I hung out on the side steps with my bicycle, and I was decked out in red, white, and blue. I had a sign and I wore the Constitution too.

I watched the people ignore me. At a press conference, the crowd is only there to gawk at the speakers and outnumber the nay-sayers. This should not be a surprise, and I was not at all surprised. The officers in brown went so far as to quarantine the other protesters with caution tape.

I looked out at the Austin skyline and imagined a smoke-free state. I thought of all the filthy dens of outcast society I've ran into in my life, and I tried really hard to imagine them all disappear by simply writing a law. I thought of the scruffy dirty scoundrels I saw on the ride to the capitol only 20 minutes before, and tried to see them really giving a damn about a law prohibiting smoking. I'm still trying really hard to imagine people caring at all about their fellow man.


What you saw on the steps of the TX Capitol was ordinary every-day motion.