I can’t see New York.

My latest piece of flash fiction to be featured on 365tomorrows.com is now up. It’s called The Mad Man and you can read it here. In regards to A Life Transparent, the latest proof arrived on Friday and it was messed up. This didn’t surprise me. I’ve come to expect. So Erica and I went back over the damn thing, along with our Lulu-provided template guides (which contradict one another, by the way), and, with a little deductive reasoning and comparisons with previous messed up proofs, determined that the cause of the problem was roughly an 1/8 of an inch. Yeah. The main issue is with the cover image, in that it’s either too far to the right or too far to the left. It isn’t center. All I did was space it over in relation to that 1/8″ “safety area” as one buried Lulu template refers to it. Another proof ordered. Another $15. Let’s hope this is the last.

We didn’t clean as planned. After being sick all week, neither one of us had the “umph” to tackle the apartment and so Sunday became another lazy day of watching Twin Peaks and reading issues of Transmetropolitan.

I just looked at the calendar and realized today is September 11th. A couple of journals have popped up on deviantART about the subject, and thinking about the significance of the day always takes me back to the day itself, what I was doing, where I was at the time and so on. I wonder if anyone else has noticed that today’s a Tuesday? The first 9/11 happened on a Tuesday. I know this because I was in my freshman English class at the University of Kentucky. It was happening while I was getting ready for class that morning, but I didn’t even turn on the TV. By the time class was over, the second plan had struck. The towers had yet to collapse. I remember walking into my dorm. My roommate, Andy, was still asleep. I went to my computer and found several instant messages from my friend Danny. He told me to turn on the TV. Rather than wake Andy, I went first to CNN.com (which was under such heavy traffic that it simply wouldn’t load), and then to Fark. I saw my dad sign online from work, and I remember messaging him, asking what was happening. He said it looked like a plane crashed into the World Trade Center.

That’s when I turned on the TV.

That day, you couldn’t put on a single channel without seeing it. I woke Andy and told him he needed to see this. I couldn’t really tell you what I felt during the next few hours, watching the repeated footage of the planes. Confusion, maybe, or even a little fear. My mom, being the worrisome mother that she is, called to make sure I was okay, as if someone had flown a plane into my dorm (which, by the way, was a 23 floor tower–my room number also happened to be 911). My friends and I, in the following days, we made jokes about it. It was in very poor taste and disrespect, but we didn’t mean any harm by it. It was a way to cope. Rather to laugh than cry and whatnot. Sitting there in my bed, curled up in my blankets, I remember getting the worse case of shivers, and when the President came on TV to ask for a moment of silence, Andy and I both grew teary-eyed and silent.

“We’re going to war,” he said.

I wasn’t a political person. In fact, I swore I’d never vote because, to my cocky 18 year-old mind, it was a rigged game. Why vote when two sides were equally corrupt? Back then I couldn’t tell you the difference between a democrat or a republican, liberalism or conservatism. All I could tell you was what I saw on TV.

Walking to class that night, I remember being freaked out by the fact that there were absolutely no plans in the sky. On any given day, you can look up and see the trail of smoke behind a jet, but that night, the sky belonged to the stars and nothing else. When I got to the classroom building, I found class was cancelled. Campus was, for the most part, empty, and on my walk back I passed a tiny candlelight vigil outside one of the dorms.

That day changed everything, for myself and for this country. Now I keep up on politics. Now I pay attention.

There’s no point to this blog, other than for my own introspection and nostalgia. That day, in comparison to all my days so far, was actually uneventful, but it still stays with me. You may say it haunts me and I can’t help but wonder if it haunts other people too. I wonder if I’ll still feel the same in 12 years, or even 24?

I’m not a patriotic person, because I don’t believe this country is what it once was. As someone with a lot of friends who live outside this country, you might even say I’m embarassed to be here, but today it’s not about borders or affiliations or sides.

I could go on right now about right and wrong and who I think is responsible and so on, but I won’t. Today it’s not about that. Today it’s about who–and what–was lost.

Today it’s about remembering.

So, remember.

I’ll catch you later, folks. I’ve got cleaning to do.

Best,

{mospagebreak}