Category Archives: september 11

what?

Last week, a century ago, my old friend TV and I had a bit of a spat. We tried a temporary separation. We weren’t exactly headed to divorce court, but we needed some space. After sitting (okay, laying on the couch drooling) through the back-to-back premiers of “Lost” and “The Amazing Race” I needed a break.

This week’s tragedy dragged me kicking and screaming back to the TV. But TV still isn’t my friend. As you may have noticed, the wall-to-wall coverage of the terrorist attacks is making me a little crazy. This morning, during the extremely emotional coverage of the first funeral services in New York, the network chose to leave the news crawl on at the bottom of the screen. Not especially respectful.

We tried to find some sanity by channel surfing. Instead, we found Timbersports on ESPN2. Timbersports. Just like it sounds. Big brawny men cutting up wood in front of a capacity crowd at Dollywood, Dolly Parton’s theme park in Tennessee.

Over on TNN, the duck hunting action was heating up. Bass fishing also beckoned, as did a buck hunting show.

Over on MTV, Carson Daly was now on the phone with P. Diddy and Justin Timberlake, who were trying to make sense of this awful tragedy for us. It was enough to send me fleeing back to TNN, just in time for a commercial for mysterious products designed to cover my scent in the woods and bring the big game running to me, just begging to get their heads blown off. Products with names like “acorn frenzy” and “sexy cow.” In fact, there was a whole line of “sexy” fragrances, including my favorite, “sexy mule.”

on and on

Tuesday we had the TV on. It was weird and unreal, something to be digested later.

Then the plane came down on the Pentagon. That was very real to me. Real, life-size confusion and chaos and fire. Downtown was being evacuated. People were pouring from the Pentagon. It was real. I could see it, smell it, hear it.

The rest of the day I watched TV, avoiding shots of the Pentagon. I wasn’t ready to see it again. Finally, it became unavoidable.

The more I saw on the TV, the more numbing it became. It became less and less real. More abstract. In small soundbites, with flashy logos and slogans. Compartimentalized. I found the footage stomach-turning, 100 times more-so when we found we knew someone on one of those planes. But the more I watched of the coverage, the less real it became. I had to drive by the Pentagon to convince myself it really happened.

Tonight we turned the TV back on. Oliver North was talking crazy on FOX. More distraught family members were on ABC.

The US had been attacked, and on MTV Carson Daly was asking, “Moby, what should we do?” I start to feel like the whole world really is going insane. Moby is on the phone and he has advice! He explains that he found locking himself in his home studio and recording to be healing. I’m sure everyone watching was inspired, or at least everyone watching who had a million dollar recording studio in their home was inspired.

I flee back to the Networks, but by now they’ve become disturbing. The anchors are tired. Not tired like during a long, election night. I mean really tired. I know you’ve noticed it. They’re tired and these perpetually-composed men are coming completely unglued. Unravelling hour by hour right in front of us. I’m really not sure that this is helping. Yes, it shows that everyone is effected, but is this an effective way to bring us the news.

Hours of filler and repetition are making this less real, they aren’t driving the point home. The less you watch, the more disturbing it actually becomes. When you watch one of these anchors for a long stretch, you don’t notice how tired and weird they’re getting. But look away for part of the day and come back and the transformation is somewhat frightening. I know that no one wants to let go. Everyone wants answers. They want to process the horror. But it’s just too much.

I have to go online to find information about the punishing weather in Florida, and even then it’s hard to navigate around the incessant coverage. At least on line, the information is mediated in a different way. I do not have to watch reporters and anchors coming apart at the seams. It’s not great, but it’s better. We want to try to return to our routines, to try to re-establish some order in out lives, but is the very media telling us to do this actually doing it themselves? Where is the balance?

I’ve now completely lost my train of thought, I fear I’m becoming like Peter Jennings and company. Just rambling and rambling with no point, beginning/middle/end, just empty words that go on and on.

bomb threats

We have “American” in our name, so we’re a perennial favorite for bomb threats. Now, even more. We had two separate threats this morning. Thankfully they were just that, threats.

It was unnerving to find myself commuting in to work and suddenly have pedestrians pouring from what felt like all directions, and MPs shouting incomprehensible things at me. It was like Tuesday all over. But without the noise and the smoke, thankfully.

nothing

I have no words to describe yesterday’s events. I can’t even come up with catchy, media-savvy titles. After several showers, I can’t smell the smoke from the Pentagon anymore. The more TV I watch the less real it becomes. Sanitized, clean, lacking smells, sounds, and vibrations.

September 11

We just closed all of the windows in the house. We’re close to the Pentagon and the air is thick with black smoke. It’s beginning to seep into the house. We sat outside with all of the neighbors for a while, but the air was turning our eyes red and making it hard to breath. It was time to come in.

Everyone smells the fuel. It’s not just my imagination. I’ve showered several times now. Washed my clothes again and again. I can’t get rid of the smell, I was no longer sure if it was real or my imagination. Everyone tell me it’s real, but for a while I wondered if they could be humoring me, pretending to smell it. It’s hard to know what the fuck to think.

We never turn on the TV in the mornings. Today, on a whim, Husband did, just as a plane hit the WTC. As they were showing the impact in replay they cut away. A second plane had crashed.

It was unthinkable. It was confusing. It was also New York, it wasn’t here.

I tore myself away and got in the car. I had a meeting, there would be hell to pay if I missed it. The Dean would never forgive me. I had a bad feeling but I went anyway.

As I drove in I surfed the radio stations looking for news. All music. No mention of NY. Traffic was bad on the highway. I had this delusional idea that I should take a shortcut. That it would be a safer route. I don’t do it often, since it’s easy to get tangled in a military convoy if you scoot through at the wrong time of day. It involves some access roads, the Pentagon parking lot, some back roads. It’s hard to know what I was thinking, but I’m pretty sure I felt like of all the potential targets in town, no one was dumb enough to hit the Pentagon. Plus, there wasn’t any news on the radio, so we had to be in the clear.

As I came up along the Pentagon I saw helicopters.

That’s not strange. It’s the Pentagon.

Then I saw the plane. There were only a few cars on the road, we all stopped. I know I wanted to believe that plane was making a low descent into National Airport, but it was nearly on the road. And it was headed straight for the building.

It made no sense.

It was there. A huge jet. Then it was gone.

A massive hole in the side of the Pentagon gushed smoke. The noise was beyond description. The smell seemed to singe the inside of my nose. The earth seemed to stop shaking for a second, but then sirens began and the ground seemed to shake again – this time from the incoming barrage of firetrucks, police cars. military vehicles.

People were pouring out of the building like ants. An MP checked on me. Made sure I hadn’t been hurt. No burning debris in the car, just smoke. Just me.

We had a conversation. I don’t remember it.

He tried to send me south, but traffic was pouring out of the city by now.

“Where do you work?”

I told him.

“Go there. Stay there.”

He cleared me to leave the grounds and sent me on my way. I felt like I’d been hypnotized. The man told me to drive north, so I drove north. It was the stupidest possible thing to do.

I called my boss. I had no memory of how to work my cellphone. I hit redial and his number came up. “Something hit the Pentagon. It must have been a helicopter.”

I knew that wasn’t right, but I heard myself say it. I heard myself believe it, if only for a minute.

“Buildings don’t eat planes. That plane, it just vanished. There should have been parts on the ground. It should have rained parts on my car. The airplane didn’t crash. Where are the parts?” That’s the conversation I had with myself on the way to work. It made sense this morning. I swear that it did.

When I got to work, no one could believe that the Pentagon had been hit. They were busy following reports that the State Department had been bombed. There’s not a lot of airflow in the media center, there in front of the monitors. After a few minutes or arguing with my coworkers, insisting the Pentagon had been hit, it came on the news. The images came on the news.

Up to that point I’d been ordered to attend that meeting I went in for in the first place. My somewhat sooty, smelly, shocked demeanor got me out of it.

Unfortunately, now there was no way to get home. The roads were jammed. There was no where to go.

I finally cleared my head enough to drive and spent hours getting home. I spent an eternity in my car. I couldn’t roll up the windows, the car smelled like the Inferno.

Eventually I got back home, back to the place I should have stayed in the first place.

There seems to be no footage of the crash, only the site. The gash in the building looks so small on TV. The massiveness of the structure lost in the tight shots of the fire. There was a plane. It didn’t go over the building. It went into the building. I want them to find it whole, wedged between floors or something. I know that isn’t going to happen, but right now I pretend.

I want to see footage of the crash.

I want to make it make sense. I want to know why there’s this gap in my memory, this gap that makes it seem as though the plane simply became invisible and banked up at the very last minute, but I don’t think that’s going to happen.

I don’t want to see footage of the crash.

It seems so unhealthy to see the planes in NY crash over and over. To see the building fall again and again. I saw it once, the Pentagon is shambles. I don’t know that I want to see the crash ever again. Even the pictures of the blaze are too much right now as the firefighters try to contain it. It’s weird to watch it on TV while the same smoke drifts by your windows.

I’ve showered and showered. Ultimately, I think I’m going to throw away my clothes. I don’t think the smell will ever come out.