Wednesday, September 11, 2002
I woke about 7:30 this morning and lay in bed a while, staring out the window at the hazy Birmingham air. I think the air downtown here is actually getting chunky. I try not to think about what it's doing to our lungs. Anyway, I lay there, listening to a train passing by, and wondering if anything had happened. I suppose that's what everyone's going to be wondering all day long, Has anything happened?. I haven't even turned the television on. I don't intend to. I think, instead, I shall do a little more here, a little work, a little Farscape campaign stuff, and then go to the movies. Maybe do the Spiderman/Men in Black two-for-one thing. Wait the day out as best I can. There seems little point in anything else.
I can't remember if I've written here about the events of 9/11. It seems as though I must have, at some point, but my memory is for shit right now. Too little sleep, too much work, too much stress. So if I've been through all this before, forgive me. It's all in my head this morning and I'd rather write it out than keep it inside. This year at Dragon*Con I was on a panel, something like "the effects of 9/11 on dark fiction," I don't remember exactly, something like that. I mentioned it in a blog I made during the con. For many reasons, it was one of the worst panels I've ever had to endure in my career of enduring panels. One panelist finally, quietly, walked out; she was the smart one. At some point near the start, another panelist (I see no point in giving her name), loudly, brashly, stated that no one in the room, on the panel or in the audience, could possibly have any real, valid insight to the events of 9/11, unless they were in Manhattan when the WTC went down. She, of course, had been there, and we were, of course, privileged to her first-hand observations on the matter. I don't mean to sound so catty, but her attitude was pissy and I'm still angry about that whole absurd panel.
No, I wasn't in Manhattan that day. But nothing's been quite the same for me since. I had a lot of friends and colleagues who were there — just about everyone in publishing did — and it was days before I knew if they were all safe. I watched lower Manhattan vanish beneath what looked like the mushroom cloud of a small nuclear blast. Thanks to CNN, I was treated to endless replays of those jets plowing into the towers and the walls of ash and pulverized glass and concrete rushing through the streets, chasing down the people who were trying to escape. But I was not there. I was in Atlanta, waiting to see if there was an airliner cum missle hurtling towards the CDC or Hartsfield International. After about an hour of news, not long after the second tower went down, I packed Jennifer, Thryn, and a few, almost randomly chosen belongings into the van and headed for Birmingham. It made sense at the time. Who the hell's going to blow up anything in Birmingham, I thought. Besides, I have friends and family here. Most of downtown Atlanta had already been evacuated and the interstates were deserted. That, in and of itself, gets to the heart of how surreal that morning was. The interstates through Atlanta are rarely even passable, much less deserted. We drove beneath an overpass, one with a huge digital sign that usually reported traffic delays and wrecks and such. That morning it read simply, "National State of Emergency; Airport Closed." It was all the nuclear anxiety fears of my childhood (and adulthood) finally realized, like moving through a scene from The Stand or a George Romero zombie film, escaping the city for someplace that might be safe. We had no idea if it was over, when it might be over, how far things would go.
That night, and many nights thereafter, and for the first time in my life, the sky was empty of passenger planes.
But I wasn't in New York, or in Washington.
And I'm not today.
Birmingham didn't do its regular Wednesday morning 10 a.m. test of the civil defense sirens. What I've always referred to as the end of the world drill. I had a feeling they wouldn't. Sometimes, even Birmingham manages to grasp the inappropriate.
Wherever you are, I hope you're safe, and if you lost someone last year, I hope you're strong and have the support you need. That's about the best I can do for anyone, hope.
Which brings me back to something from the Farscape fiasco that David Kemper said on #Farscape irc last night. It seems to fit the occassion. He said, "'Hope' is a word you will find in all of my scripts. I give it to Crichton whenever I can. I always have hope." Myself, I often find hope in short supply, but I am trying.
With luck, Gothic.Net will let me upload this entry now. It's sluggish this morning, and I fear it's from all the hits that my essay and blogger are getting. Darren's being a great sport about the traffic situation. Then again, a lot of the people coming in to read my article are also subscribing, which makes him happy. Try it. Maybe it'll make you happy, too. Gothic.Net rocks. Anyway, I must go Do Things now.
|
|
