Those of you following my stories, know I have a fairly predictable pattern of sharing them. You also likely know I am a sucker for habits. I have not ever sat around and thought to myself, “I ought to write about that.” I know extreme events have often served as triggers for my writing, but I never had the feeling I’d better to do this now.
Well, I am and I want you to know why. I am pretty good about following days and dates each month. You’re probably saying to yourselves, “Big fucken deal.” There was a time when it was a lot harder to cheat, because it wasn’t on your phone or a computer screen and there were no machines to ask. While we’re at it, you had to manually add up columns of numbers, or subtract or divide or multiply.
I don’t know why the fuck I got off on that tangent, but I am not going to delete it and pretend I never wrote it. I really thought hard, real hard about the title for the book I wrote for my grandson. The second line I used is about this awful way I write. It is, Diary of a Mind. So, I not only decided to write the way I speak, I also include my mind in our conversations with each other.
I hadn’t thought about this September 11th at all. It shocked me that it could have just slipped on by. It’s almost like the number is getting neutered over time. Anyone 22 and under was born after that 9/11. Like everything, living something or reading something are eons apart.
I remember everything about that day, 22 years ago. I was living in this wonderfully, funky hodge-podge of adobe and containers. It was really out there, just north of Santa Fe and marvelously isolated. I was working from home, selling Gospel music video on television, a very long story.
My friend, Michael, called and told me to turn on the TV. It was extremely early in the unfolding of the disaster. I was stunned and hot wired to the television like most of the world. They did this to my city, where I lived for over forty years. I had been up to the Windows on the World, the rotating restaurant at the top of The Towers. The lobbies were gigantic and so were the elevator doors.
Our pain memories are not very good and I can certainly see why that’s a healthy mechanism, most of the time. It was gut wrenching for me. I love New York City, I almost forgot the fucken date this time.
I am saddened that so many innocent lives were lost on that day and we have learned nothing. Each year, it is remembered as some isolated event, when it was not and is not. Violence breeds more violence and it is now epidemic. We have always been doing this shit to each other, but we keep getting better and better at it.
In one of the meanest tricks ever played on humanity, 9/11 validated our propensity for using violence to suffocate violence. Twenty two years ago, we lost a rare opportunity to call a halt to our mistreatment of each other, because we don’t know how to do it.
Movie theaters and hospitals are hit by missiles everyday in Ukraine and it’s okay, just another headline, fading into the next murder of innocent people. All over the world, this goes on every day and the reasons are irrelevant.
At Ground Zero, we could have built a monument to peace, not as a symbol to rally our perverse patriotism. I guess I almost forgot about it, because it has no meaning, because we gave it none.
So, what do I do? I write a story that a handful of people may read and then it is business as usual. Maybe, on this day, if everyone, all over the world, said one kind thing to one person, those 2,977 deaths will not have been for naught. In that one horrific moment, we had the power to call a halt to the madness, instead we created the Department of Homeland Security.
I am sorry that I am left with feeling nothing, but emptiness and sadness, but no anger. The heart of my City was ripped wide open on that day and the blood of all our souls flooded the streets. It is a fading memory, when it could have been a turning point for us all, maybe the last one.
Be kind. Be kind.