My Wisconsin Odyssey (II of IV or so): Me.

So, for the protest, I stayed with my one friend from high school who lives in Madison... She had been up there a few times during the past couple weeks, and she was glad to go again.

After I came in by bus, I met her at a bar downtown (grill behind the counter, tons of microbrews, a foosball machine-like thing made of hockey players), and then we dropped off my crap at her house, and then we were going to go to this one bar near her house where she had free drink tokens from the last time she went there (some guy gave them to her), but she's afraid to go because every few months there's gunfire or someone hitting out the TVs with a baseball bat.

As we went by, the place was obviously closed, so she was like, "Well, I guess they lost their liquor license."

So, instead we went to this other bar she was interested in going to but never had been in, which was on the other side of the Oscar Mayer weiner factory, across from the Meat Cutters Union Hall.

We went in - it was like 12:15am on a Friday - and there were 3 old (white) guys in there, all in baseball caps and drinking PBR or Bud, and watching "No Country For Old Men" on television.

We ordered a couple Leinies, and the one guy was like, "Hey, don't drink up all the good stuff, we only got a few cases of that !", joking with us nicely, though he was serious with us about its being the good stuff.

We talked a bit with the guys during commercial breaks, but mostly we watched the movie (we were drunk and kind of tired). One of the guys had been up to the protests a couple weekends ago, and was thinking of going again.

At one point, we ordered nuts from the "LITTLE NUT HUT", a plastic house of cashews and mixed nuts heated up by a high-wattage lightbulb, where they'd get you a little paper cupful for a buck.

By the one wall was a sign, "IN CASE OF TORNADO TAKE COVER BY THE MEN'S URINAL, IT HASN'T BEEN HIT IN YEARS", and next to it was a much photo-copied cartoon labelled "RE: CHANGES TO OSCAR-MAYER HEALTH PLAN", where this nurse is talking to a guy in the hospital bed and like, "I'm sorry, but your health plan doesn't cover enemas any more, so I'm going to have to slap the shit out of you."

Later, before we left, I noticed there was a picture of Scott Walker up on the dartboard, with a couple darts sticking out of it.

The next day, when we were driving by interesting-looking bars and I was saying we should go there, my one friend from high school told me that I reminded her of John Waters, "not because you're weird or anything, no, you're just interested in that kind of side of life that other people normally aren't", she was like.

She added that she had read John Waters's "Role Models" a few weeks ago.