a september remembered

NEVER FORGET. This is what many people say about September 11th, 2001. I say it, too. Though I’m not sure I mean it in the same way. Herein is a tale, including diary entries made from NYC during the WTC explosions, of the changes that those horrifically violent and altogether terrifying events inspired in me. They changed me forever, and in some ways, I would be unrecognizable to you now, had they not occurred.

A note: for those in no mood to relive any memories from 9/11, better skip this one.

FROM AN OLD JOURNAL I kept, the year after I first began what would come to be known as “blogging.” And there is a point in what I’m sharing with you, so know that as you make it through some of this uncomfortable prose. Warning: I was cursing a whole lot during this time as my writing and feelings were very, very raw.

The day before:

September 10, 2001 at 10:08 AM

SO MUCH FOR ALL THAT SEEYA AROUND STUFF

i was out this morn and walking behind this fella (he was about thirty feet in front of me? forty? fifty?) and a lady right in front of him, the sun is in it’s yawning stages, the land is rufflng and turning over with strong fresh wind i am watching the silver tinted leaves ripple and endlessly bloom in the wind i am walking in the wake of these fresh showered people and i smell something very nice in the air i think it’s tommy cologne by tommy hilfiger and standing there like a surfer riding a glorious peak i realized a couple things a few things very sweet things

one, i have got to get out today at some point, two, that it is good now, i don’t know what will happen next, but i am good now, and okay and excited and three, i’ve got to pick up some tommy immediately, man.

 
the next day:

Sep. 11th, 2001 at 10:54 AM

BOOM

madness. nothing quite like the smell of burning cinderblock in the air. nothing quite like the sound of newscasters who actually don’t know what to say. people are shaken. people are snapping pictures as they weep. the city is sealed off. you can’t get in and you can’t get out.

save your pictures and posters, save that skyline. it’s been changed forever. they blew up the world trade center.

but i’m okay, in case you’re wondering. except i don’t feel very safe, somehow. shit. i wonder if aaron is allright. hold on. 

kay. cell phone is knocked out. not working. the city is a mess, of course. people are freaked out. the nation is at defcon 5. 

the funny thing is, i was completely oblivious, working on my music, working on my artwork, ha! and then i got a phone call. shit, man. this is no good. 

thousands dead. thousands.

when fucking people think they can bomb new york city, and bomb the fucking pentagon, it is time to do some shit. i don’t know what, but this is fucked up shit, man. 

this is some fucked up shit.

later

Sep. 11th, 2001 at 9:31 PM

I LOVED NEW YORK

it just doesn’t seem real somehow. this is insanity. the chief of police and his deputy and 250 firemen and 80 cops are all dead dead dead. they are shutting down the city from 14th street on down. won’t even guess how many are underneath the ash and rubble. can’t go crosstown. can’t take the subway. the mayor has asked new yorkers to stay home if possible tomorrow. i just walked down to 60th street, past the red cross where everyone is giving blood. they are asking people to come back tomorrow because “we are overwhelmed right now,” and the city turned away people who wanted to help because they had 7, 000 people show up as volunteers.                

the fucking WORLD TRADE CENTER IS GONE.

and you know what? people are out in full force, embracing life. watch in nine months, big baby boom. people out holding hands, kissing, you can sense everyone actually pulling away from all the death which is clouding the air like the ashy debris still falling from the sky, even now, at 10:29 pm.

Mood:indescribable

holeee shiiiiiiit. man.   

a fucking plane or something just flew over nyc and man. it scared the shit outta me. i’m still listening very verry carefully as it makes its tooo gradual way into the night, fading, fading….IS IT? or is it…coming back? 

i don’t think so…

ok. fuck. man. that went so damn slow. are planes back up? i guess so. 

fuck. man. i flung open my front door, as if it would be right up there, sailing out of the sky, just just just just like that one one one one plane plane plane plane on the tv the one that crashed crashed swooped smashed sailed failed freakin dropped down and sliced flew smashed smashed smashed into the side of that building smashed into the side of that building swooped into smashed into that building. that one on the tv. that one on the front page.

wait. those buildings, not the ones on the tv or on the cover of time, i mean the buildings outside, the ones downtown i mean the ones that used to be downtown the ones that used to loom high up in the air the ones that you would use to navigate your way around the financial district, seaport area. like a compass in the sky.

i flung open the door and tilted my head up to see the superquick billionpound flying box of death sail out of the sky but i couldn’t see it there couldn’t see anything but night

i can still hear it, though. damn. 

i’m afraid to sleep. what kinda shit is gonna go down while i’m asleep?

This is an important passage. And I should note here that even over a year later, I would find myself cringing when a plane flew overhead, flinging my head back to make sure it wasn’t coming down on top of me. So for me, and in a very real experiential and emotional sense, this is not an event that was over on 9/12/01. Or on 9/12/02. Or on 9/12/03.

Following this, you may be shocked by some of the content in that it may sound particularly un-Nezua-like. But that is actually the point of this post. Not just to dredge up bad memories. But to show you what I have to be grateful for; what glittering feathers have grown out of a rotted-out charcoal burn. To illustrate what the disaster of September 11th provoked in myself.

Our government may have chuckled since then, many times, thinking they had in their oily palms the perfect weapon to control us, the perfect fear-doser, the modern US Reichstag fire. But I wonder if they counted on reactions like mine. Reactions that shook me loose of a typical Murkan Mindset and set me flying, flying to read, to learn, to know more, to grow. To seek out the roots of the destruction, to suss out a path toward understanding, one that led me right back home.

This is all from my (now-private) online journal written in NYC during September, 2001.

This part was in response to a male friend in the UK who was coolly examining political angles/statements on the 11th and 12 of September that took me a couple years to get to:

 you think you’re so smart. you think you’re a big fucking deal with your anti-american statements. with your cold global anti-imperialist view or whatthefuckever. 

well. all i can say is easy to talk all kinds of bullshit when it wasn’t your back yard blown to smithereens. and it’s easy to talk all this shit when you have no empathy in your soul. and fuck that, even. it’s easy to say this shit from where you are. joining the war, are you? come here, bitch. stand in front of me and say this shit. know why? i’m not feeling rational. and i don’t give a fuck. i’ll beat your ass silly and rest in between blows so you have a chance to spew your intellectual political snot. you can even win, how ’bout that? you can be right. you can be objective and cold and unsympathetic and correct, even!

and then when you’re done, ima crack you again. bleed, you fuck. feel me now, do ya?

It’s tough to take these statements out of context. We were living—especially NYC people—in an alien world. Honestly, alien to anything I’d ever experienced in my entire life. Some NYC residents were more levelheaded than me (“levelheaded” has always been my strength , or more educated in the ways of US foreign policy than me. But you have to understand, I mostly didn’t pay attention to news or history before 9/11. Just skimmed it. I might have had the phrase “Tonkin Bay” in my mind’s echo memory; I may have known about Vietnam, but I didn’t know about South America or our casual methods of manipulating the public, our casual toppling of governments, our funding terrorists to meet our own goals, our vampiric and greedy and often blundering and ignorant foreign policy actions done over and over again. So I want you to note the words about “anti-imperialist.” That was no joke. And it gets better:

i’m an american, born and bred. and i’m proud of my big-mouthed, strong, powerful and wealthy country. so fucking what. go take a flying leap at a skyscraper if’n you don’t like it. with or against us. 

see, im getting all kinds of insane shit. like “oh, if america weren’t around, we’d all live in peace.” well, we always need a scapegoat. [...]

countries — if you’re even gonna bother having them — are defined by borders. THAT is what makes a country a country, foo’. and wars and terrorist acts are about borders. and maybe we can discuss sex, food, health, hobbies, travel, religion (no thanks), or literature. but just because the internet spans the globe does not mean we can be together on everything. 

because the bottom line is you are not an american. and that means, in this particular case, that you are not sitting on this side of the bleachers WITH BLOOD AND GLASS IN YOUR STREETS and tears on the phone and smoke in the air and fear fear fear in the streets. 

That’s something, hunh? The talk of countries being defined by borders. That was me, no lie. And that was me, echoing George W. Bush’s words “with us or against us.” I was exactly the kind of emotional reaction combined with ignorance that our malicious government hoped to take advantage of. 

And I am a fighter still today, so my back was up and I was not in Nuance mode whatsoever. I was thinking another building could blow up any minute. We were not even allowed to use the bridges or leave the island, remember.

Ironically, those who are repulsed by my stances today about land/ownership/borders…they can blame US policy. Because I was running on a bunch of defaults before 9/11. It was 9/11 that made me investigate US foreign policy a lot closer than I ever had. It was a smack in the face. It made me spit out my steak. 9/11 and our government’s use of it led directly to my new views on the world.

More from the Nezua of Nine-Eleven:

 

i don’t want any more discourse from fucking foreign armchair generals. i don’t care if you find a “hole” in my logic. i am not here to argue it with you. this is not logic i am putting out, but sentiment. and how can you really share it? if you do, then welcome. grab a biscuit and a box of ammo. 

if not, then just go away. this is no time for dissidents, deserters, or wishy-wash. this is MY country in dire need. we have no fucking time for your anti-american sentiment. 

Biscuit and a box of ammo. I was seriously considering joining the Marines. I polled my readers. No joke.

aaron has not answered his phone since day before yesterday. he lives at broadway and lispenard. this is about fifteen blocks south of where the barricades are today. he lives in the part of the city now closed off. to civilians.

In NYC we were worried about our friends and family being dead. It was not a TV event. And the city was occupied by military with guns. But with less visible police and soldier forces than I saw in St. Paul. Think about it.

hmmm. 

what would i talk about, were there not smoke in the air out my front door? what would occupy the mind, were there not thousands of crushed bodies and smoldering concrete and glass chips outside?

hmmm.

In a lot of my entries from the time, I make jokes. I don’t think I need to explain it to you. That’s the kind of thing one does when the mail is piling up outside the door because one is afraid to touch the possibly-poisoned letters, and when one can smell burnt bodies everytime s/he walks out the front door.

i feel shitty about some of us tonight. americans. man i thought we were better than that. fucking idiots. inspiring fear in the hearts of dark-skinned, turban-wearing americans. threatening them. maybe it wasn’t all widespread, but even one time…c’mon, people! we’re smarter than that!

ugh. fear.

At least you know I wasn’t a wholly different person then. Just ignorant in a few ways and scared and angry and in need of education. 

tomorrow i’m going down toward ground zero and i’ma find out if what i can volunteer to do. if i am going to jail (here we go again! hahaha), then i am not going to miss out on getting my hands in the ash. i need to touch this destruction. it just doesn’t seem real.

I did. They didn’t need help or blood. It made me proud of New York to see how we were pulling together. Of course the government was lying about the dangers. When people say “NEVER FORGET!!” this is one of the things I remember. The government cares not for me. Never forget.

and listen. if you care: bin-laden is a brilliant, dedicated, intelligent, charismatic, loquacious leader. he possesses vast energy and ambition. a brilliant, dedicated, intelligent, charismatic, loquacious leader whose sole goal is to use his vast resources to fund his very articulate, insightful, incisive personal hatefest deathwish killlust for AMERICA. and yeah, he’s probably not alone. what about those videotapes? what about his very vocal crusade? what about his ideas?

the man mocks us — not to say storm off in anger after him ’cause “oooh he mocks us” but he is being smarter then us and thus far has the right to mock us. and that hurts. we should not be so ignorant and flower picking.

we are complete assholes for knowing all we have and letting him run around getting strong and ready. i wouldn’t have. i know the schoolyard. i lost my cherry there. i got my scars there. i learned the nine faces there. i grew old and died there. i learned to dance there. 

if we did “begin things” by our stance with israel (and don’t you have friends whom you gain from and who you would stick up for? no? mannequin.) then it was stupid, as per schoolyard rules, to only swat him and turn our back. and in that sense, we “deserve” some shit. but i can’t say that because i reject the concept of deserve. so i will say that we should have hit a lot harder. we just blew up some of his friggin toys. and he’s so damn cocky and irreverent and effective, and now we say oh, duh….i din’t think he was actually gonna stick me with that ex-acto knife he was waving around

so now it’s time to end it. it’s time to crush this with finality. no more land of the free ride on the big dick. bust loose on this muhfucker. act as if he is dangerous and devoted to eliminating us. see this attack as a failed attempt oh his part. see the attempt not over. see the spider bloated and grinning and spinning his web in YOUR house. 

he is learning from things if he is a smart boy. and he is a smart boy. and he is determined. we must be more determined. we must, effectively and with finality and when the time is right – put our foot down. crush this fucking flea. and find the rest of the infection. sear it to the ground. 

and then, love your neighbor. and sleep well.

How’s that for change? I was advocating a “burn down the forest” to get the Terrorists stance. I was claiming that sticking up for Israel No Matter What was worth anything that came our way. And in other ways, I was buying up the government’s propaganda. I was in Fight or Flight mode. But as I said, I calmed down from that. And I began paying attention. And I began reading and watching and listening. 

got past the barricade at 14th. then met the second one at houston. (never say “hyoo-sten” it’s “how-sten”) smoke was really getting thick. i took pictures and video. the shit did what i wanted. it got real. my teeth and mouth were coated with an oily bitter dusting. my eyes were watering. my stomach got ill. i started lurching out, up town, jesus how do those fucking firefighters stay in the epicenter for over 24 hours with no sleep? fucking supermen.

its beautiful at union square. i’m going back tomorrow. but i will be tired. i can’t sleeep at all. CNN in da background. flag in mah winder. im hardcore, baby. american 1000%. 

Yeah. Well. It is true that I couldn’t sleep. And that I was glued to CNN for months after that. And for weeks, I was in front of the TV 24-7. I watched TV more than I ate. I found myself paralyzed. Not only could I not touch the mail, I could not go about my life anymore. I watched it slip away and out of my hands until one day I was on a bus headed out of NYC because I had nowhere to go anymore and nowhere to eat and no way to feed myself. I did try a few times to find work after I got laid off that same September, but it was as if my entire world was cracked in two and I just slipped in the chasm and fell.

In fact one day, one of these september 11ths, I will really go into just how much the WTC demolitions/anthrax scare fucked up (re-fucked up?) my nervous system. And how the government played into that with their fear-peddling and wiretapping (we’re watching you, they are out to get you, disaster is looming over you) In a way that is not done playing out. I’ve touched on it briefly and perhaps somewhat vaguely in past writings, and that is exactly because it is not done playing out in me and it’s very heavy stuff that ties into other parts of my life.

But the point I wanted to make today is that there is something to be grateful for in those violent acts and the subsequent acts also assisted by our government in the agenda of scaring us and sucking up our cashKEEPSHOPPINGand and our resources and enacting mass-control methods over all of us far more devious and purposeful than, for example, the daylight savings routine of having everyone move their clocks and hand over their mental frame when instructed.

For years I operated on the leftover attitudes of my parents, attitudes formed in revolutionary anti-establishment days. I distrusted the US government, and felt no need to fortify that with education. I knew it to be a worthy stance. And yet, I still carried with me USA exceptionalist bravado. You can see it in my writing here. Some of you could have met me then and been disgusted by this. In fact, I would meet the old me today and if I heard those attitudes, I, too, would be disgusted. I was proud of not having to know anything about other countries, while they knew about us. I was AMERICAN. Really. In too many ways.

But that began a change. Part of it was living through this kind of violence, and later war, while talking with citizens of other nations: the Internet. It was hard, but good, to hear views that were not formed through the USA lens. You hear me reacting to that new change in one of the paragraphs above. But anyone who makes it their business to shed skin knows that very often, it hurts. But what is the alternative? Living “comfortably” in a sagging, stinking shell that should be cast off if one is to grow. 

Today? Well. I don’t think I need to go into how much I’ve changed. And you know, I’m very grateful to be different, to have read up on a few things, to have examined the actions of my country. I am no longer a nationalist or a “Patriot®.” I am no longer reactionary, reacting without thinking. I now act and I have spent much time in thought. All the changes I have made since do not spring directly out of that event. And if you know me at all, you know I’m always changing and always shifting. This will not stop now, it did not begin then. It is not a direct and simplified causal line I draw. Things are always interweaving: lessons, events, thoughts, purpose. And pursuing that process is just who I am; committed to real life, to real moments, to the real me.

But that event did inspire and set into motion many changes that have had a direct consequence on my worldview.

I now think in more global terms. I now think in more sane terms. I am now better for the world and for people. My heart, previously (unwittingly) armored and protected by United States propaganda, has been skinned and has risen from the ashes of the WTC wreckage to buoy me above selfish, violent, nationalist concerns. And now I do not curse other nations or those who question the USA’s policies. My fight is with greed and ignorance, the kind our MSM and leaders sell to us US citizens every day. My fight is with elites deepening class divides, which is part of the American Dream: to be on top of the pile. My fight is with the Pile. My fight is with those who would instill the mind-blinding lessons I had soaked up. My fight is with those now using pre-war propaganda against Iran in the same way they flooded our TVs with anti-Afghanistan propaganda before bombing them. My fight is with those forces which initiate the kind of violence that has killed hundreds of thousands of people since 9/11 in our phony War on Terror. 

September 11th. Never forget.