It is a strange thing to look out your back window and see hundreds of people. It’s a very strange thing to take out the compost and hear crowd

The line was like this for a good hour.

noises. You’d think I’d be used to it. I live in Bridgeport’s South End. Once a year thousands of hippies and deadheads camp out for the weekend at the end of my street. I once got stuck in a traffic jam almost completely made up of VW buses that were trying to get onto the camp grounds. And the Puerto Rican Day Parade completely fills up our neighborhood each July. But this is different. President Barack Obama is speaking at a rally that’s taking place up the block at the Harbor Yard arena, so we have lines of people who are hoping to get into the free event, very large red helicopters flying low over the house, roadblocks and all sorts of other exciting things happening.

We went out and checked out the line earlier, and it was cool – as it always is – to see lots and lots of people on a block can otherwise be pretty desolate.

Still, seeing strangers out my window, helicopters rattling my home and suspicions about just how tight security gets when the President comes to town has me feeling a mite paranoid.

Which is cool, because, as I said in my last post, that’s what we’re celebrating this weekend: Fear.