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Sep. 11th, 2005 11:34 amMy sister had flown out on the 10th to her first professorship so our main worry was her boyfriend who worked in the Woolworth Building, right outside the nimbus. He was safe, and even took pictures that I haven't dared look at, mostly ash and smoke one presumes. My best friend's girlfriend lost her roommate to one of the crashes, I believe Pennsylvania's.
I saw it later than most, around noon, in now-destroyed Larkins Hall at OSU. I wasn't a student but small donations got you courtesy membership at the gym and the library, and I came in to swim frequently. At the top of the stairs, near the locker room, was a square pillar with monitors on each side playing terrible music videos nonstop. Today's video had thousand-foot high columns of white smoke and an astonishing amount of urban debris. My last verbalized thought, entering amygdala mode, was "how expensive." My next, an hour later, sitting on a bench against the wall, was that this was not just the beginning of more waves of death, but the end of all I'd hoped for, peace and shared wealth and a genuinely human world culture and whatever else. Bush's pseudoelection had been a setback but I'd somehow still felt it was coming. Remember the rain the day he was inaugurated? The sky joined us in mocking him and his tawdry, meaningless interval.
I fell in love with the poems of Dickinson and Frost over that winter, excellent guides for living in a dark if beautiful world; fell in love with Julie in the summer.
Analytically, obvious exceptions aside, most of us, most places, most times, are and will probably remain okay. But it doesn't feel that way. People withdraw love when it hurts too much, they say. A year and a half of waiting for our war machine--machine--to murder Iraq, based on the most absurd and lie-soaked pretexts...I've never believed in activism, unless locally, or if you're a celebrity. As with voting the numbers just don't add up. Lucky you that you disagree.
I saw it later than most, around noon, in now-destroyed Larkins Hall at OSU. I wasn't a student but small donations got you courtesy membership at the gym and the library, and I came in to swim frequently. At the top of the stairs, near the locker room, was a square pillar with monitors on each side playing terrible music videos nonstop. Today's video had thousand-foot high columns of white smoke and an astonishing amount of urban debris. My last verbalized thought, entering amygdala mode, was "how expensive." My next, an hour later, sitting on a bench against the wall, was that this was not just the beginning of more waves of death, but the end of all I'd hoped for, peace and shared wealth and a genuinely human world culture and whatever else. Bush's pseudoelection had been a setback but I'd somehow still felt it was coming. Remember the rain the day he was inaugurated? The sky joined us in mocking him and his tawdry, meaningless interval.
I fell in love with the poems of Dickinson and Frost over that winter, excellent guides for living in a dark if beautiful world; fell in love with Julie in the summer.
Analytically, obvious exceptions aside, most of us, most places, most times, are and will probably remain okay. But it doesn't feel that way. People withdraw love when it hurts too much, they say. A year and a half of waiting for our war machine--machine--to murder Iraq, based on the most absurd and lie-soaked pretexts...I've never believed in activism, unless locally, or if you're a celebrity. As with voting the numbers just don't add up. Lucky you that you disagree.
