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crazy day in the free world
Tuesday, September 11 2001
10:30am (Near the corner of Prospect Park West and President Street, Park Slope, Brooklyn, New York)
It was a cool, beautiful sunny morning. Instead of going directly to the subway, I walked with Gretchen down to 7th Avenue. She had to go vote in the mayoral primary and I had to deposit checks into my Astoria bank account. As I walked back up to Grand Army Plaza, I overheard a radio broadcast saying smoke was pouring out of Manhattan. That sounded kind of strange, so I wondered if the subway would be delayed. Perhaps a gas main had exploded; such things happen periodically in a city the size of New York. Down in the Grand Army Plaza subway station I heard something incomprehensible being announced loudly over the badly distorted PA system. I got on the next Red Line train bound for Manhattan, but we only made it as far as the Bergen Street station before the subway was stopped and an announcement was made that all trains into Manhattan had been stopped. Sirens could be heard racing by on Flatbush Avenue overhead.
Walking back home down Flatbush, it looked like martial law had been declared. Flatbush had been closed and unmarked police cars and fire department volunteers were whizzing by with sirens blaring. People massed on street corners with mouths agape. Looking towards Manhattan, I could see huge billowing grey, white and cream-colored clouds. I ducked into a laundromat and saw on a television what had happened. Several planes had been hijacked and crashed into the World Trade Center and one of the towers had collapsed. It was as if I was having a particularly fucked-up dream. Skyscrapers aren't supposed to collapse.
When I got home, I turned on the news and saw the second World Trade tower collapse live. Gretchen came home from voting and we watched the mayhem together on teevee. The web was barely working, cellphone networks were clogged, but AOL IM was working just fine. It was weirder than nuclear war.
Talk About It
 Vodkatea
Seethru
ThreeWayAction
11:30am
Gretchen has gone to give blood and I'm here to answer phones and say we are alive. I emailed my parents and they were greatly relieved, particularly my father, who had raced back from a botanical survey in the mountains upon hearing the news.
I don't want to hear our chimplike President talking about this in that surly inarticulate voice of his. I find his "moment of silence" irritating. It seems to trivialize the gravity of what just happened. But, truth be told, Bush is doing about as good as he is capable of doing in this situation.
But how did this happen? I thought hijacking airplanes was a hard thing to do! I'm dismayed that the FBI was locking up computer programmers and making surprise visits to satirists while the people who plotted this thing did so undetected. But the worst casualty of this insanity, after all is said and done, will be Freedom itself. This country will never be the same again. I doubt we'll be out of de facto martial law for some time to come.
12:20pm
The wind just changed direction and now I know what a burning city smells like. It has the smell of burning plastic. It comes with acrid brown skies with jet fighters flying above them. The stuff I'm seeing on teevee is like some sort of bad Japanese Godzilla movie, with less convincing special effects. Then I'm outside, seeing it with my naked eyes.
1:50pm
Manhattan, viewed today at 1:50pm from the roof of Gretchen's brownstone.
Here are some big pictures:
1 |
2 |
3
3:20pm
Hitler couldn't do this to America in World War II. This is an entirely different sort of war.
5:00pm
I'm thinking about putting a towel around my head and riding a camel pogo stick throughout Brooklyn to see what happens.
6:05pm
The bombing of Afghanistan has begun. Earlier today the backward mountain mullahs who run that landlocked nation had pleaded that they are a peaceful nation and that they had nothing to do with the attack on American cities. They never addressed the fact that they harbor wealthy terrorists who might well have done such a thing, but simply implied that the only blowing up of things they do targets massive Buddhist statues. I read all of James Michener's Caravan about a month ago, and though it wasn't a great book, I learned much about Afghanistan. From the way Michener described the place in 1949, it sounded much the same back then as it is today.
7:05pm
Okay, the explosions in Kabul are just those crazy mullahs beating up on one another, or so we're told. Meanwhile, though, I'm wondering what will be built in place of the World Trade Center. Whatever it is, it'll probably provide a great number of jobs. Former dotcommers might soon be trading in their laptops for hardhats. Then we'll go from this:
to something like this:
Maybe then we'd have a World Trade Center worthy of extremist Muslim respect.
7:55pm
Every now and then I have dreams about things like this happening: planes falling out of the air or crashing into mountains. I never thought I'd live to see something like this.
Gretchen and I walked Sally in the Vale of Cashmere late this afternoon. The smoke was still pouring out of Manhattan unabated. Every conversation we could overhear was about the attack on the World Trade Center. The only one uninterested in this subject was Sally, whose only concern was squirrels. The gay male cruisers of Prospect Park were strolling down the trails as usual, but I wondered if they could successfully buttfuck in the woods without constantly lapsing into conversations about the mayhem.
The smell of burning downtown Manhattan has changed slightly. It has more of the fragrance of dry wall, and it's giving me a trace of a headache.
8:22pm
One of the few benefits of this sort of massive setback to the American psyche is that it puts some things in perspective. It's the kind of perspective that is common in Europe but unknown in this country. Why, for example, are we spending billions of dollars in the war on drugs when drugs never play a role in the explosion of civilian airliners and the collapse of skyscrapers? Perhaps some of those drug sniffing dogs can be sent back to sniffing school and learn how to smell terrorism, suicidal religious zeal, and knives. It's unbelievable that those planes were hijacked by terrorists wielding knives, but that's the latest story.
9:43pm
They had fricken box cutters! Those crazy terrorists used box cutters! And no one overpowered them! There must have been a bunch of them on each of those planes. Not to be racist or anything, but if I ever get on a plane and see a bunch of Middle Eastern types (I don't care if they're wearing Orthodox Jewish garb or Abercrombie & Fitch), I'm turning right around and getting off.
10:10pm
I hate Giuliani as much as the next guy, but his leadership skills really put George W. Bush's to shame. I'm watching him on CNN and his sentences make sense and his emotions seem real. He doesn't look like an overwhelmed frat boy.
11:15pm
eyewitness accounts, reactions etc:
observing the Pentagon hit by a plane - Bermanation
watching the teevee, sending email - Dragon Vocalese
smoke in Manhattan - Hannah Beth
compulsive posts - Black
Pearl Harbor comparison - Random Notes
crashes heard 'round the world - Submerged
has friends in New York and DC - some citrus theme
view from Williamsburg, Brooklyn - Bathtubgirl.com
view from the East Village - whatever-whenever.net
view from New Jersey - S.A.A.B.
I'm glad we live in Brooklyn, the Canada of New York.
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