Obligatory Sept 11th post:
Where was I? What was I doing? What was I doing the night before? I don't know. I was asleep. I was between jobs. I was woken up at 10am or perhaps 11 by an excited phone call. I had a good television with crappy rabbit-ears. I watched the news services playing the crash footage on a film loop. I didn't know anyone on the east coast, nor had I ever been to New York at the time, so the whole thing seemed rather unreal to me–like a movie about a fictitious place or a far-off land. I watched it with an excited (albeit morbid) fascination — the same sort of feeling you get when watching a car chase on TV or (presumably…I don't know for certain as I've never watched) cars spinning and flipping and crashing during a Nascar race. You know it's wrong. You know people will probably be (or already have been) hurt. Yet, there's still a certain thrill and excitement to it. The proverbial “train wreck” that you just have to watch, even if you know you shouldn't, even though you know you're getting entirely too much entertainment value from other peoples' losses. Re-reading that, it sounds rather callous. I'm sure my thoughts would have been entirely different if I had a closer connection to the city or the people in it. Everything on that day went by in a blur of grainy television images and NPR reports. It took several days for the magnitude of it all to really sink in.
So what was I doing that morning? Here's the LJ entry. In keeping with the unreal feeling of the morning, it was theorizing meta attacks–a War of the Worlds scenario where terrorists don't actually attack anything, but present fictional news stories of attack as real news on television in order to bring about terror, fear, and dread. So yep, that's pretty much denial.
What was I doing the previous evening? Apparently, reading the short story Memento was based from and pontificating about Gandhi.
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