I was in some town that was kind of a generic mid-sized central california town. it had a main drag and was large enough to have a bad part.

if you went up the main drag towards the highway, you eventually got the the bad part. off to the right. if you were on foot you would soon be asked to buy crack; you couldn't avoid the dealers. I was walking through there for some reason and toyed with the idea. if you were white you would get hassled.

in the middle of this area was a building with no air conditioning and some serious security. turns out this was the building where they were having the Earth First! trial for Judi Bari and Daryl Cherney. I was involved somehow but even in my dream I couldn't tell if I was working with the cops or against them. it was all confusing. I think I was part of, or working with, some coalition group of moderate officers and NOAA and I can't tell what their goals were. my friend Jenn was also working with them.

my brain played out a sequence of what would happen if I bought some crack, stuck it in my sock, tried to get into the trial past the security, and had been seen sticking something in my sock by some paranoid cop. I decided not to.

the group of white folks - security and white activist environmentalists - outside the building, really stood out in the neighbourhood they were in.

once inside, I found the trial was really getting held in something like a community center or church assembly hall. the only light was from windows to the outside. people were on those big kind of klunky wood tables that those kinds of places have (you know, just one up from folding tables). one of the lawyers for the FBI side was Dave Cowings from my work. there was some witness on the "stand" (really on a chair behind one of these tables) and Dave started arguing with him over how operations was going to be hindered. I said to the judge, this is more like a debate than a trial. the judge agreed and brought the argument to a halt, and adjourned the session.

a lot of people had come up from southern california for this trial. they stood out from the northern californians because they all had bad egyptian-like eye makeup. as people were leaving, I wanted to have a private conversation with the group I was working with, like 3 people who weren't cops, except Jenn was okay too (I guess in my dream she was a cop). Dave pointed out that the area was heavily bugged so if I wanted to have a conversation that the cops didn't hear, I should go outside. he stuck a t-pin in one of the bugs, which was like a flat black plastic cover for a telephone speaker.

I went outside and it was late afternoon. the streets were really crowded now, with a lot of foot traffic on the street part. the crowd was pretty heterogeneous in terms of race; there were enough people that the white folks no longer stood out. it turns out it was passover and there was a large street celebration taking place. I ran into this woman Viri (short for viridian) who had the really bad eye makeup, and glasses that covered half her face. her glasses were weird; if you looked at her straight on it made her face look like it was covered in blue bad eye makeup. she had dishwater blonde hair that was permed and teased into sort of a big bad 70's 'do. she told me she was going to go play EMT.

I asked her to clarify and realized she was drunk. she explained all the people she liked and she was going to practice mouth-to-mouth. I wondered (silently) about that as between the eye makeup, the glasses, and the hair she certainly didn't look like anyone whose face I wanted near mine. then she wandered off to act on what she was planning.

I wandered around for a little while, but didn't know anyone. then my housemate woke me up and that is the end.