The air smells of halal food and doughnuts from a fortress of vendors surrounding Zuccotti Park.  It’s cloudy and cold, and men are hanging Christmas lights.  My best friend and I sit on one of the granite walls winding through the park as someone from Occupy Wall Street tells a group of people behind us to step off the mounds of mud these walls protect to avoid risking another eviction from the police or any further demonization in the press.  My friend and I begin to talk; it’s a continuation of a talk that went on for hours last night — he’s visiting from Vermont with his boyfriend for the sole purpose of visiting OWS — and it’s a talk about any number of issues pertaining to the occupation, any number of the reasons people are here at this very moment.

“I know who I’ll call!” he says, and opens a video chat program in his iPhone, hoping to connect to  a mutual friend of ours, a documentary filmmaker currently in Istanbul.  While he does this, a girl offers me a four-page survey, requesting that I fill it out completely.  As she searches for a pen and mutters an explanation, I read the first question: Do you think the world treats people fairly?  0 = strongly disagree, 10= strongly agree.  She hands me a pen, but I’m frozen with confusion; the pen doesn’t touch the paper.  The world?  As in, what, God?  Government?  Fate?  Bloomberg?  I have no idea.  As someone who’s increasingly depressed by the fact that dreams come true, just not for everybody, and paralyzed not so much by a fear of death as I am of reincarnation, astonishingly I’ve never really thought to blame the world.  I feel sorry for the world.  Maybe I have everything wrong…

And as I sink into this quicksand, an older man approaches my friend, who’s still attempting to connect to Turkey, and asks him where he acquired the silkscreened poster resting on his lap, the ink still drying.  ”Just over there,” my friend points out, looking up from his phone.  ”They’re a dollar.  You should get one!”

The man chuckles to himself, though it seems mostly to be at the expense of my friend, whose only crime was to answer his question.  ”No no…” he says.  ”I am one.”  And he saunters away, chest out like a rooster.

“He wins!” I say, still involved with my quandary, marking 2s next to almost every question because the girl is watching me, waiting, and I’m feeling self-conscious.  ”He is one.  And all you have is a stupid poster…”

“I know,” my friend says in mock despair.  ”I don’t even want this poster now!”

“A dollar wasted!  Maybe you should donate it for a cigarette.”  I gesture toward a guy a few meters from us hunched before a makeshift table rolling cigarettes for a suggested donation.  

“I got him!”  Our filmmaker friend’s face appears on the iPhone screen, and my friend starts showing him a view of Zuccotti Park by orbiting the phone around our heads and narrating everything that’s happening.  ”In a minute there will be a meeting of the elders…”

Across the way someone is handing out supermarket cake, carrots, and nuts, while another girl staggers by, begging for water.  One guy is perched on a wall eating granola out of a Ziploc bag.  I feel myself falling victim to a kind of Fox News syndrome, imagining the bank account sums of nearly everyone I see, especially the elders who are now marching up to the newly-constructed podium.  I’m imagining their home offices, looking for their electronic devices, picking up on words like “email” and “car” and “apartment.”  Even the Ziploc bag that the guy is eating granola out of — I’m transfixed by it — but what do I expect him to eat granola out of?

Someone tosses us a pamphlet about 9/11 — 9/11 was a 1% Job — and behind him, as if waiting in line, a high-school age kid approaches carrying a small cardboard box, the kind people sell candy bars out of on the subway — in fact, that’s what I expect to see when I look inside — but instead, there’s only cash.  Pleading, he asks for a donation “to benefit the troops” and we greet him with a chorus of apologies.

“I should probably disconnect,” my friend says.  ”It might look a little awkward video chatting with you during the revolution.”  I laugh, probably out of sheer glee, as I’m just now approaching the fourth and final page of my survey, a section where I’m asked to rate, on a scale of 1 to 10, how much I “like” everyone from Mexicans to obese people to homosexuals to African Americans.  

“What you say?”  A guy whose face is covered with a black bandana, holding a sign that reads REVOLUTION appears in front of us.  He pulls down his bandana to reveal a young, tan, pockmarked face, and he bobs and sways as he speaks, as if we’re all about to have a fight.  ”What did you say?  The revolution is awkward?!”

“Oh, no no…I’m chatting with a friend in Istanbul,” my friend says.

“Ah, ‘cause I heard you say something like ‘the revolution is awkward’ and then he…” the guy points to me, “laughed, like…” and then he does an impression of my laugh, which now makes me feel kind of deflated and embarrassed, like I’m back in high school again, which is only natural since this guy probably is in high school.  He retreats, finds an ally, and they both start talking and pointing at my friend and me on our granite wall, as if we’re the biggest threat to OWS.

The meeting of the elders begins.  ”Mic check!” shouts a young priest standing in front, and so begins the call-and-response that haltingly takes us through a series of introductions, speeches, and rally cries.  I like this.  Listening, shouting, participating, and though I’m not learning anything, the speeches are encouragements to a movement that, perhaps exhausted from a midnight eviction and Thursday’s giant rally, seems a little sleepy this weekend.  I’m also glad we’re sitting, because it’s getting crowded and the people standing seem to be getting pushy.  I can’t tell if what I’m seeing is a constantly-shifting exchange of power between strangers or a politeness competition.  I’m tense, but for all the wrong reasons.  The cops, on the other hand, look bored.

My best friend dabs his index finger into his poster to check on the wet ink, and now the tip of his finger is black like the nose of a beagle.  Once again, we laugh, but this time looking for potential new assailants.  

At last, I finish my survey — I gave everyone a 5 — and I notice that another sound has begun to compete with our meeting of the elders, the sound of people having their own “mic check” across the park, and then drums, and then singing, and then music.  Also, it sounds like someone’s fighting, one group against another — could it be the conspiracist faction against the transgendered faction?  Or the Bloomberg assassination enthusiasts versus the Quakers?  I stand to look, and apparently at the center of it all is the same masked revolutionary who approached us minutes before, who knew absolutely and positively in his heart-of-hearts that my best friend had to have been talking about him and OWS when he overheard the words “awkward” and “revolution” in the same sentence.  I actually wish this had been the case.  I couldn’t have said it better myself.