Turning Point UK counter-protests / Honor Oak Park / Defacement (RK)

Scratching things on surfaces is very important for me, or slapping stickers on top of things. Recently around Honor Oak Park there have been protests and counter-protests by Turning Point UK around some drag story readings in the grand tradition of pantos, and transphobic stickers cropping up on some lampposts and then replaced the next week. At the second demo around 2 weeks or so back, or 3, or 4, I can't tell time anymore, it really seemed to me when you counted the fascists and the cops there were more of them than us, but chants about "more of us than you" continued on our side, maybe even both sides, both sides claiming they were attacking fascists, both sides claiming they were protecting something. Some funny things happen when you're facing a group like that. I was there with someone who made some well-intentioned observations which fed into our own stereotypes, like: "look at those fascists, all white older men." Then young men turn up. "Look at them, they look like gamers, neckbeards." Then young women turn up and more attractive-looking men. "They're overwhelmingly white." Then more of them show up, many many more not-"white." It felt absurd, reality was being so didactic, like any fucking lesson-plan or training session, rubbing our face in something we should already know. There was something about facing them which brought out, and momentarily in me too, some kind of stupid need to describe them, but of course they changed with every description, because the only thing that distinguished them from us was definitely not appearance or even composition but happenstance and the resulting directions and dependencies in which they love and hate, e.g. for them to "love" children was to express violent hate to anything even vaguely queer-adjacent, even some wigs and make-up. If P then Q. That and no doubt some funding from some millionaires.

It's obvious, but it can be worth stating the obvious, or writing it out, for myself at least.

[…] I am feeling a kind of dizzying vertigo about the past and future, as if everything in my being is telling me that I am well past the mid-point of a journey. I call my parents most weeks, and memories of childhood keep coming back to me as well as premonitions and desires for the future, like a growing desire to have a kid. I often don't feel like I'm here or anywhere at all, like I don't even exist, like I have disappeared or gone out of view. […] Right now I feel like a palimpsest, like an accretion of alternating transphobic and anti-transphobic stickers, and those stickers are building up a charge like any battery we learnt about in school, and those stickers have grown to absurd thickness all over the lamppost, and though I'm not sure I know which way is up, I know what I love and who and its dependencies and I know that everything else will shift and get painted over and defaced again and again.