Pride Schedules of the Bourgeois and Overcommitted

• 6 AM: Wake up, throw on grungies, walk dog
• 6:30 AM: Clean Safeway out of bags of ice and preordered sandwiches
• 7 AM: Arrive at home of volunteer leader at agreed-upon previous time, find volunteer leader barely awake and begging for revival formula infusion from Starbucks
• 8 AM: Set up booth at Civic Center, dodging and watching dance/smelling people who are still lit/stoned/whatever from previous night and who have been so busy entertaining themselves, they forgot to bathe
• 9 AM: Find parking spot reasonably close to teardown entrance (five blocks), run down to Muni (six blocks), run uphill from Muni to where car is parked (six blocks), step on it.
• 10 AM: Freshly showered, shaved, reclothed in aforementioned kilt and hat, making mad dash down hill to BART station
• 10:45 AM: Arrive at float fifteen minutes after start of parade, following SRO (Sardine Room Only) BART ride
• 12:45 PM: Float begins to move (yes, two hours later.)
• 1:15 PM: Finish mad dash down Market from Beale to Eighth Street (a distance of 1.35 miles) while pushing handcart loaded with beads, making air-to-air refueling stops with people handing down buckets of beads from float, and dodging Muni tracks, Muni grates, and assorted drunks not associated with Muni.
• 1:30 PM: Fight way through crowd to booth
• 4 PM: Leave booth to run friends back to house to get luggage
• 5:30 PM: Return to booth. (To put that in perspective, approximately 15 minutes of that gap was actually devoted to time in house and eating. Such is the beauty of Muni scheduling and the fact that a half-million people basically had no other way to get around San Francisco yesterday -- the latter seeming to have zero effect on the former).
• 5:31 PM: Can of sugar-free Red Bull consumed. Later determined to be 7th of 9 for the day.
• 6 PM: Tear down booth
• 7:15 PM: Load up booth -- after hour-plus spent guarding booth contents in collapsing festival that looks like a live performance of West Side Story without music, dancing, or Leonard Bernstein, but with far more intoxication, screaming, and threatening gestures than the original
• 7:45 PM: Finish unloading booth into storage
• 9 PM: Arrive home, thanks to kind friend who notices that bus drivers traversing the Castro are all on simultaneous 45-minute coffee breaks
• 9:15 PM: Walk four blocks down- and uphill to get takeout
• 10 PM: Collapse

Why, you ask?

Because, at the end of the day, we brought joy and happiness to several, eye candy to most, and raised somewhere in the neighborhood of $2,000 for people with HIV/AIDS.

That's why.