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nothing a little alcohol can't fix
Monday, September 17 2001
I think I'm actually more traumatized today than I had been previously. I didn't feel this fragile even after my abortive attempt to go to work on Tuesday, when I walked home slackjawed beneath billowing smoke and past screaming sirens. This morning I was walking from Union Square to my workplace (since that's now the easiest commute) and I passed a shuttered fire station festooned with candles, flowers, and crayon drawings made by schoolchildren. How can you walk past such a thing and not be immediately affected? Everyone I saw who had allowed themselves to look had tears in their eyes. It didn't seem to help that it was yet another beautiful clear-skied sunny day, with air flavored by a little of the essence of autumn.
For me, the easiest way to cope this week has been to somehow find a way to avoid listening to the news while simultaneously doing deeply engrossing work. At work today I added some very power features to some publishing tools I've been working on. In my single-minded focus, the amount of attention I was able to direct into subtle details was highly satisfying.
After work I met up with Jami at a place called "The Beauty Bar" between 2nd and 3rd Avenue on 14th Street. It's a repurposed old beauty salon, complete with 50's era chair-mounted stainless steel hair dryers. We sat at the bar drinking beers and taking occasional shots of Jack Daniels, trying to keep the conversation light. Terrorism glumness has us all down but it's nothing a little alcohol can't fix. The evening had become eclectic: on the bar's sound system, an entire CD of Steely Dan was immediately followed by one of Sleater-Kinney. For whatever reason, the bartenders were being extremely generous to us, giving us some drinks explicitly or failing to collect money for others.
Later Jami and I walked a block or so to her apartment and looked out at the site of the World Trade Center (two miles away) from the roof. Smoke was still wafting towards us with that now-familiar fragrance of charred plastic and plaster.
Has anyone noticed the emotional flatness demanded of Americans in the aftermath of the World Trade Center attacks? No one wants to laugh, so no one is going out to comedy clubs or even watching comedy on television. But at the same time death and destruction are also taboo. For example, Bathtubgirl has been laid off from her day job as a sales manager at a company that sells coffin-shaped guitar cases and body-bag-style guitar covers to morbidity-positive musicians. Death used to be cool, a suitable but harmless way to rebel against stuffy old Mom and Dad. Now it's just bad taste.
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