StandardDeviant's Journal: 9/11/01

I guess the thing to do on days like this, after the fact, is to maybe try to write about what you were doing when the thing (whatever the thing was) happened. I was driving to work... late, as usual. I think it was about 9:15 my time, and I was cruising along westpark rd to work. I was worried by being late and thinking about what I had to code that day, so I hadn't turned on the radio. Subliminally I noticed less traffic, and no air contrails in the sky (Houston gets lots of air traffic). I turned on the radio, tuned to KLOL (101.1fm), the local alternarock station. Instead of music, I heard Dan Rather talking about combat air patrols over new york and DC. I had no clue what the hell was going on. For a second I thought maybe it was some sort of War of the Worlds parody. When I got to work, I came in still not having heard what was happening in NYC. Everybody was clustered around one of the big moniters watching a realmedia stream from someplace. CNN and most other news sites were hosed, I think this stream must have been coming off a local affiliate station's site or something. The footage... what can I say, it looked like a bad Jerry Bruckheimer movie. Unbelievable, sickening. We all went home after an hour or two becuase nobody could think straight to work. That night my roommate and I sat next to each other on her piano stool, iirc, and searched for what we could find on the web. I thought at the time "I never thought I would be alive during a time in which my country declared war, real war, not War on {Poverty|Drugs|etc}." It was a sensation of almost complete doom, terrible inertia carrying me (us) towards an unpleasant and suddenly unpredictable future. The past year sometimes feels like a bad dream, terrible but ludicrous, laughable even with the current administration's buffonery on the world stage. Like you'd wake up the next morning and wonder what you'd eaten that gave you such silly dreams...