oZnog Excerpt 1

The following is a (short) working piece from my upcoming book, 'oZnog: Occupy Wall Street and the Odyssey of an Outlaw Pen,' so let me know what you think!

Less than twelve hours ago I was standing alone under a soft evening rain in Liberty Plaza, staring at a framed political map of the United States, my mind infected with one simple idea.

 

The map arrived near September’s end, anonymously propped up on a stone bench adjacent to the park’s northern wall. Over the birthplace of Occupy Wall Street, here in New York City, someone had drawn a red Sharpie star. A night passed, maybe two, before new stars began appearing, first over Boston and Chicago. Then Philadelphia; Atlanta; Washington; Los Angeles and Madison �" where a hundred thousand people had already been “occupying” since February. Eventually hundreds of these tiny red stars popped up, covering nearly the entire country. It was as if America started tucking itself to sleep beneath the blanket of an Occupied space.

 

Still, it wasn’t until the turn into October that the “professional” media really came crashing down on Zuccotti. Maybe they finally realized the protesters weren’t disseminating, but multiplying. Suddenly you couldn’t walk two feet down there without running into a behind-the-curve reporter from Eyewitness News, CNN or the Guardian. All of them desperate for stories, scavenging, one camera crew positioning on top of the next, ferociously looking to suck the place dry after weeks of instituted ignorance.

 

This new layer of activity buzzed around the Movement while I just stared at that map. I couldn’t stop imagining the stories living under all those other constellations. Three stars over Tennessee -- What made people in Chattanooga want to Occupy?

So, I became obsessed with this one simple thought:

 

“Someone should be out there…”