repurposed chair

or semi-repurposed: it's still, possibly, meant for sitting on.  Or possibly not.  It's at the top of a sharp incline on the far side of Silver Lake reservoir, and will have to serve, I guess, until someone installs a bench there, or removes it to add to a barricade.  We've been glued to TV coverage for a few hours now, first of legitimate protests against the Regime's appalling and deliberately provocative decision to call in the National Guard to LA, and to put the Marines on standby, but then the violence of a very small group of people who can only be called agitators, or for all I know who are deliberate provocateurs, whose actions - setting Waymos on fire, dropping electric scooters over overpasses onto police cars, throwing large firecrackers at police horses - seem to me to be playing straight into Trump's tiny hands.  (Mind you, I have a strong and possibly utterly irrational dislike of Waymos, and I have to confess that there was a tiny part of me that ...).  Of course, I completely hold Trump responsible for it all at some level: he loathes LA, and seems determined to punish it, first with concerted ICE raids, and now with causing protests that are culminating in events that will provoke him into punishing us - and California - even more.