but i go offline for 9/11
no tv, no radio, no internet. no newspapers.
because the media was so deathfully irritating to me that day, and the
follow-on of reality-conflation, opportunism and agenda-stoking stretched
the irritation out to its breaking point at which i no longer consume news
media but i continually question it.

that is not to say that i won’t think about it. i remember that ghastly
day. i remember the day itself but moreso the weeks and months
that followed, starting with the morning of september 12th, waking up to
the sodden sunrise of knowing something incomprehensible but awful
happened here, that heavy morning of dread that more attacks were on the
way, and that the future was to be very different from the past.

i still can not believe i said that, to my mother, the words
falling out of my face that morning when i called her, after
saying that i did not know what was happening here i whispered “we’re
being attacked. new york is being attacked.” though i don’t know if she
heard me — mother was never impressed by 9/11, even as it happened
she dubbed it feeble compared to the bombings of London during WWII.
she was soon scared to hell by the anthrax attacks closer to home
at the National Enquirer offices in Florida, but always considered the
attacks on new york and washington to be nothing more than daily news
stories from far away. i called her on the 6-month anniversary of 9/11,
crying, positively crying after my first trip to the world trade
center site since the towers were destroyed, describing the horrible
chasms that filled the spaces where the towers used to be, explaining
that what happened here was still impossible for me to comprehend. she
remained unimpressed, said nothing, I may have hung up on her, and
that was the last we spoke of 9/11.

after we got off the phone on the morning of 9/11 i did my best Dmitry
Kolesnikov. Kolesnikov was the sailor on the Russian submarine
Kursk who, knowing his death was imminent after the submarine had sunk
to the bottom of the sea, took to a pen and a pad of paper and wrote “I
am writing blind”, followed by logistica of the moment, and a note to his
wife. on 9/11 i sat at my corporate desk and rattled off angular screeds
of whatthefuck, then heard the rustle of 3 men running in and sitting
at the first desks they could find. they had just escaped the south tower.
i did not know until days later that these guys had just made it out of
there. i knew we had a room of web servers in the twin towers and that
those servers suddenly stopped working. the last time stamps sent from
those web servers lingered on our screens for weeks, at around 9:27am, as
i recall.

that weekend i sat on the couch and watched “Close Encounters of the Third
Kind.” i remember listening to Elton John CDs still in the CD player,
feeling like a lifetime had passed since i last heard these songs, though
i had last listened to them the night of Monday, September 10th.

this weekend i plan to wander new york city. i will buy a Sunday New York
Times and leave it in the park.