Monks, a Pug, the Presidio & a Slow Speed Chase

On Wednesday earlier this week, I went over to the Office of the Red Chair while Alice walked across the Golden Gate Bridge for the first time in her life. A pug and a big tall dog walked, too. Monks led the march. Everything was very peaceful and beautiful, Alice said. The cops all looked supremely bored.
On 'tother side of town many people got all hot and bothered about a "torch". Alice decided to go cherry blossom viewing in the Presidio instead. Here are some blooming trees near the Yoda statue. Yoda was a kind of monk imagined by a Mr. Lucas. Alice liked to think what Yoda would have done had he been in San Francisco that day... For starters, he would have been marching on the bridge with the other monks. Approve of people yelling in the streets? No, approve he would not.
On her drive home, Alice listened to the CBS newsradio. Many reporters were trying to figure out where the torch with its "Olympic" fame was headed. Quite a lot of confusion. The reporters were out of breath from running. Some on bicycles. It popped up on Van Ness Avenue. Went north. With a WWII duck truck! Would it go on the Bay aboard the duck? It turned left along the Marina! Would it cross the Golden Gate?
Alice fervently hoped it would not. The bridge should be only for peacful things today she thought and some people were getting very "interesting" such as the ones who lay down on the street trying to stop the torch and who were "cleared off" by the cops in less than 30 seconds flat.
Alice got home and watched the unmarked torch-bus process to San Francisco Airport. A slow-speed-chase ala O.J. Simpson. (One can only imagine the new slow-speed chase costumes for this year's Bay to Breakers run... If people can dress up as Jeannies, they can dress up as torch runners, "protectors",cops and yelling protestors.)
A colleague of Alice's was at the send-off dinner for the torch at the airport as a former Olympian. She reports there was a nice spread of food at the United Airlines VIP lounge and that the blue and white torch "protectors" are actually very nice. They are under orders not to smile in public or interact with them. Sorta makes them look like thugs, Alice thinks. The sort who would never smile at a dog and ask to pat one. The SFPD cops on the bridge smiled a lot and chatted quietly amoung themselves.
I could not be more bored with this fiasco of silly humans following a torch. I was deep in dog ESP meditation with all the dogs of the world, the Dalai Lama, and even the spirit of Yoda, himself.
Some things matter. Some things simply do not.