Posting About... I Forget What

Well, I had something in mind last night (Or was it the night before? Or maybe the daytime today?) that I had wanted to kinda just toss up in this little spot of mine, but I entirely forgot what it was. So, I guess I'm just posting about my own forgetfulness. Bummer, I guess.

Oh, and I guess to follow everyone else's fashion I should probably post something about yesterday having been 9/11. Sounds pretty apathetic, doesn't it? Although it may not be not the greatest thing for me to say (or be) on the subject, but that's kinda how I feel. Don't quite know how to (or if I can) explain why, but that's the way it is. For some reason, for the past three years, whenever 9/11 has rolled around all I could think of is "Oh yay, everyone's going to get all sappy-sobby, and the nation will probably be keeping their eyes peeled for copycat criminals or something like that."

This is not to say that I'm not understanding of what happened on that day, or the loss of life, or damage to a handful of the most significant buildings in the hub of the big-business capitol of America. It's just that I've never quite seemed to have the emotional pull from it that everyone else has. Maybe it's something to do with the fact that for most of my life (and still often times now) my emotions have been largely supressed. Even when I'm angry beyond measure inside, I rarely express - or even feel - it.

Maybe it also has to do with my memory of the day, and the week to follow. Yeah, I'm going to psycho-analyze myself a little here. Might wanna step back, it could get ugly.

In middle-to-late August of '01, I'd flown to Illinois to see my wife (fiancee at the time) and meet her family, with the intent of staying for about a month. If I recall, this would have had me there for a few weeks or so ahead of her birthday (9/13), plus another week or two. So, having already been there awhile and overcome any sense of jet-lag there may have been, at zero-whatever-hundred hours it whas when the first crash hit the news, we were doing what any sensible young adults would be doing after staying awake past 2 in the morning: sleeping. In fact, knowing myself, I probably hadn't gotten to bed until more like 4 or 6, while she (being the more sensible one) was an hour or two ahead of me. So I'd only had a couple hours of sleep on a very hard double-size mattress (which really didn't fit the both of us together real well) at my grandmother-in-law's (yeah, called 'em the "in-laws" long before the paperwork was ever done) house, when her mother yells out "Get up, get up! We're at war!"

So, what was my first thought? "Damnit Mom, the sun's still in the east, let me go back to sleep!" Of course I had enough sense not to actually say that... I think. In any case, I did at some point (probably a half-hour later) drag myself out of bed just in time to see a couple replays of the disaster. And while the whole "Do you realize how many people there were in that plane/those buildings? thought process was somewhere in the back of my mind, the front of my mind could only say "Wow... that is some pretty cool demolition." when the towers went down. Seriously, if you were to take that out of real life history, and put it in a movie, what would the response from (probably) 90% of Americans be? In fact, if I'm not mistaken, I'd heard that after 9/11 the release of MIB II was delayed because the original storyline consisted of blowing up the twin towers. Kind of a bummer since I know those would have been some great effects! Heck, I wonder what they would have done to ID4 (Independence Day) if the Empire State Building or the White House had just been blown up while the film was nearing completion?

Not long after this moment of the experience did we get a phone call telling us to haul it to the gas station and fill up since prices were changing while people waited in line. So, there's another good chunk of that day with my fiancee and her family blown. (Gas lines were worse there at that time than I've ever seen them down here during the preparation and recovery days surrounding Charley or Frances.) Then, the day after, I get told that my stay was going to be cut short. Since I was on a "buddy pass" through a cousin-in-law, I was ordered to make my return flight in 3 days or my ticket would be cancelled. And yet, aside from the barely noticable military presence, security at the airport was still a laughable joke.

So, what were my feelings on 9/11 at the time? All I can remember is being tired, cranky, and pissed off that hours (and later weeks) were taken away from time with family that I had barely gotten to know just because of some lunatics a thousand miles away that got a little pissed off at us for no particular reason. And I wanted to sleep. Bad. Or at least be able to zone out and let my body pretend it was sleeping while my mind occupied itself with something of lesser concern. Oh, and the job market absolutely sucked when I got home. (I had been unemployed during my vacation, with no job yet reserved for my return.)

So, apathetic? Yes I am. Do I feel bad about it? Probably should. Then again, when you almost don't know your feelings, it's hard to know if you really do feel bad about something in a deeper sense like that. So, what do I know that I feel? Not much except that America needs to suck it up and move on. Roll with the punches. Dust yourselves off and get back up and running again. Seriously, people, you act like this is the most catastrophic event that could have taken place within such a short time span. Maybe it ranks up there a little bit, but open your eyes to the really big stuff that's happened in the past. Like Hiroshima. Yeah, Pearl Harbor was pretty bad, but what about Nagasaki, too? The world is never going to be at peace, and throwing more crap at each other and whining about it forever isn't going to make things any better. So cry your river, build a bridge, and get over it.

I should correct myself on that. The world will be (for the most part) at peace for some time in the future before its end. But when that time comes, the end will also be near. Read the book of Revelation if you don't know what I'm talking about.

- Iszi