9-11

Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness.

Because I was there that day, and so were you.

In some mystical way, Lenny seemed to ennoble work more than anyone I had ever met"Also in "Stories and Scripts:an Anthology

My brother was on his wayto a dental appointmentwhen the second plane hitfour stories below the officewhere he worked. He__ neversaid anything about the guywho took football bets, howhe liked to watch his secretarywalk, the friends he ate lunch with,all the funerals. Maybe, shamedby his luck, he keeps quiet,afraid someone might guesshow good he feels, breathing.

One thinks of the failure of representation since 9/11, the proliferation of novels, the media glut, the surfeit of images that somehow slide too easily into a banal repertoire, commodified shock.

How many of us suffered to death?How many of them gained more wealth?How many of us mourned?How many of them earned?How many times we suffered such a pain?How many times they will do this again?They are Cruelbut_We don__ have to be.

I__ see the arrow. I__ think about attitude and perception. Maybe the green arrow on the ceiling is to Muslims as the KJV in the Motel 6 nightstand is to Christians.

As long as you know 'to let' means to rent and not a place to pee, you__e all set to travel in the UK. The lifts and the boots and everything else don__ really matter.

The night skyline was stunning. I could see the Monas and Istiqlal Mosque bathed in brilliant white lights and a dozen other places of cultural and historical significance. It__ an amazing, beautiful world we live in _ despite Uncle Google__ abysmal view of American schools, the security checkpoints and vehicle inspections that seem to be everywhere, and the need to be vigilant because of the things we do to each other.

Even the smallest act of service, the simplest act of kindness, is a way to honor those we lost; a way to reclaim that spirit of unity that followed 9/11.

The digging continues ... Ground Zero it looks more and more like a construction site. Too much of the horror is gone. No fire. No smoke ... What was war becomes peace, becomes peaceful. But in the coil of my testicles there's an angry residue and in places I can't even name, places inside my throat and behind my chest, I'm sad, and sometimes worse than sad, less than sad, a cavity of empty.

Death wins nothing here,gnawing wings that amputate___hen spread, lift up, fly.

To fuel yet another war this time against Iraq by cynically manipulating people's grief, by packaging it for TVspecials sponsored by corporations selling detergent and running shoes, is to cheapen and devalue grief, to drain itof meaning. What we are seeing now is a vulgar display of the business of grief, the commerce of grief, the pillagingof even the most private human feelings for political purpose. It is a terrible, violent thing for a State to do to itspeople.

I__e seen a lot of stuff_ maybe I__e seen too much. I see most humans in a bad light because I__e seen what they can do, how evil they can be_ I__e seen the Holocaust and I__e seen Jonestown, I__e seen the Vietnam War and I__e seen Hiroshima_ I__e seen the Chernobyl disaster_ I__e seen the World Trade Center attack_ I__e been alive too long, over a hundred years is a long time to be alive,_ Alecto sighed, staring at the cigarette he was holding.

It wasn__ you, it wasn__ me,Up there, two thousand feet aboveA New York street. We__e safe and free,A little while, to live and love,Imagining what might have been __he phone-call from the blazing tower,A last farewell on the machine,While someone sleeps another hour,Or worse, perhaps, to say goodbyeAnd listen to each other__ pain,Send helpless love across the sky,Knowing we__l never meet again,Or jump together, hand in hand,To certain death. Spared all of thisFor now, how well I understandThat love is all, is all there is.

instead of mourning, instead of a moment of silence or a hateful, islamophobic message, how about today we make the world a little brighter?be kinder. be a little gentler, with yourself and others. take more pictures. tell more jokes. be a better human.today is a lot more than a tragedy. today is a birthday. a day of suicide awareness. a wedding. a birth. a new job. today is a kiss and someone on a tarred over warehouse roof whispering about the day the earth stood still and the day it began spinning again.be kind. just be kind. it's time we took this day back for the wild ones, for the fiery eyes, for the happy and the brave and the new. no more mourning. let it just be a sunday.

To be a Christian without prayer is no more possible than to be alive without breathing.

As if somehow irony,_ she recaps for Maxine, __s practiced by a giggling mincing fifth column, actually brought on the events of 11 September, by keeping the country insufficiently serious _ weakening its grip on __eality._ So all kinds of make-believe__orget the delusional state the country__ in already__ust suffer as well. Everything has to be literal now.___eah, the kids are even getting it at school._ Ms. Cheung, an English teacher who if Kugelblitz were a town would be the neighborhood scold, has announced that there shall be no more fictional reading assignments. Otis is terrified, Ziggy less so. Maxine will walk in on them watching Rugrats or reruns of Rocko__ Modern Life, and they holler by reflex, __on__ tell Ms. Cheung!___ou notice,_ Heidi continues, __ow __eality_ programming is suddenly all over the cable, like dog shit? Of course, it__ so producers shouldn__ have to pay real actors scale. But wait! There__ more! Somebody needs this nation of starers believing they__e all wised up at last, hardened and hip to the human condition, freed from the fictions that led them so astray, as if paying attention to made-up lives was some form of evil drug abuse that the collapse of the towers cured by scaring everybody straight again.