"In the world which is upside down, the true is a moment of the false."
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| rock and roll means fuck "In the world which is upside down, the true is a moment of the false." |
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Thursday, September 11, 2003 i got a call from my mother a few minutes past 6am PST on 9.11.01. having lost my father in january and my grandfather in may, i was becoming a bit too accustomed to the early morning calls i rarely received before. calls from relatives at 6am mean bad freakin' news. my mom tells me that someone flew a plane into the world trade center and that someone "blew up" the pentagon. she was frantic and i had no idea of what she was talking about as i was still half asleep. i turned on the radio beside my bed and the morning edition folks were describing a calamity in nyc and had just starting to report about d.c. cradling the phone i stumbled towards the tv in the living room. the first image i saw was taken from midtown showing the empire state building in the foreground and the burning towers further south. it looked fake. it looked like some made for tv movie and, besides, the shadows were all wrong. then i woke up. i had just moved from nyc to socal three months previous. (i'm still trying to figure out exactly why.) when i first moved to the city the wtc and empire state building were the landmarks i had used to navigate manhattan south of 34 st. i had been in those buildings. i had eaten at windows on the world twice. the only i person i know for a fact that knew that died that day was a sous chef there. i had been through the subway/PATH station underneath it many, many times to go visit a colleague who lived in jersey city. hell, when i moved to nyc, i took an amtrak train from tallahassee fl. my first glimpse of the city when i moved was of the towers in the fog somewhere in northern new jersey. let's just say that i had a rather concrete appreciation for just how massive those buildings were. as i cleared the sleep from my eyes my first thought was, "shit. they're gonna have to tear those buildings down. you can't repair damage like that." i never, not once, not for an instant thought that those buildings would fall of their own accord. the possibility just never occurred to me. ( i really don't think those countless FDNY, NYPD, EMT folks thought so either.) later i watched live with the rest of the world as the south tower collapsed. i absolutely could not process what i was seeing. it was so far removed from the realm of what i thought possible that could just could not fathom it at all. i was dumbfounded. then i completely lost my shit, so to speak. i was a blubbering, bumbling idiot. then the north tower. by that time i was quite literally pinching myself hoping that i could just wake up to the world that i knew when i went to sleep. alas, as we all know, that was not to be. anyway, i don't know where i am trying to go with this. two years later i still don't know what any of this really means. in many ways, personal, political, professional and otherwise 9.11.01 has changed my life in ways that i never thought possible. the next two years of my life will be indelibly affected and shaped by that day. rem: "voice of harold" " and suddenly you know.. they're real. they mean it. " posted by downtown | 11:40 PM |
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Cost of the War in Iraq
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