sunday 10.28.2001 i went to guavaween last night in tampa. it's a normal street, kind of like a wider landsdowne, clubs on both sides, side streets fenced off for the paid party. big drunk mardi gras open-container style disaster. 1 a.m. we were so packed in moving 4 or 5 blocks that every side of me was another human body. some nasty old dude had his hip in my ass for a minute, but otherwise we were ok. l saw chicks getting groped, a fight, someone down on the street possibly being trampled. i was totally calm, like a bull moving towards the slaughter house. it took 30 minutes to get free--there was no other way to go, the side streets were blocked. i know what a soccer match in south america feels like, except here everyone moved different directions. earlier that night, we had seen effigies of osama bin laden dragged behind the parade floats, his head on a platter, there were lots of army dudes and schmucks in military gear--i truly felt like a refugee herded to an unknown fate, felt the multitude of human flesh moving against each other all around me and around the world. like a peaceful beery holocaust. It was sometimes very quiet, just the swish of clothes brushing against each other, scattered cries of "titties!", some moshing on the right. warning calls: "there's a girl having a bad trip on the right!" "there's a fight on the left!" 10,000 drunk faces. you could not see the street beneath you or around you. at one point, above on the new orleans style balconies of the bars were chicks flashing the crowd below, and of course suddenly there was a dead stop that creeped us out. there could have been a riot or a rape and no one could or would have prevented it, despite the flashing of hundreds of cameras for "girls gone wild 13". surreal. lynda found a nice tall guy walking backwards, parting the crowd for us like a snowplow. she followed him like he was a trip god; for in this horror of a situation, we were both.  finally we escaped into air; she was shaken up very badly and i was completely calm. we walked down the train tracks to the car.  more about it travel