dusty_pictures unhinged i woke up planning to be thoughtful for once and turn on the weather channel to plan what i should wear. it had been hot lately and i hated walking around campus over dressed when it was still summery out. i hated the summer. i hated sweat. i woke up just in time to get to my classes. no time for a shower. i stumbled out into the hallway towards the common area to check the t.v. and she was sitting on the couch and while i was still rubbing the sleep out of my eyes, she looked at me and i knew. "look...look what's on the t.v. they flew airplanes into the world trade center and the pentagon." i couldn't say anything. i turned around and went into the bathroom to brush my teeth and wash my face. all i could think was 'how am i supposed to have a violin lesson now? i can't have a violin lesson now...' i got dressed and stumbled to class. i fumbled around for my cigarettes once i got outside. i crossed the street in the normal place and a black man walked up to me "excuse me miss, do you have an extra cigarette? why god bless you. have you seen the t.v.s this morning miss? have you seen the t.v.s?" i don't remember what i said to him. but it was the desparate bonding of our mutual addiction and the shocked look on his face that i knew was on mine too. i walked into bliss hall and it was too quiet. it was the ten 'o' clock hour...wind ensemble always rehearsed on tuesdays at ten. i walked past the rehearsal room and it was empty. it hit me then. there was no music. just quiet. i walked down the hall to my locker and took out my violin. how was i supposed to have a violin lesson today. i walked up the stairs to the third floor and they were all huddled at the end of the hallway around the t.v. i didn't want to watch. i knew the look on my face mirrored the looks on their faces. we tried not to look at each other. northeastern ohioans didn't like to let each other see each other cry. i had to walk by the t.v. to get to my violin lesson. the first collapse had just happened. how was i supposed to have a violin lesson? i knocked on the door and he opened it and he looked even more morose than usual. he was talking with the freshman about what had happened. what it meant that airplanes had crashed into the world trade centers. "i just hope that they don't fall down." i looked at him "one already did." "oh shit..." he looked at me "i'm sorry; i shouldn't talk like that" i looked at him and i didn't say anything but i knew the look on my face mirrored the look on his face. the freshman finally left and he shut the door and said "so what are we going to do today?" i shrugged. i still couldn't talk. "do you want to play?" i nodded my head. "ok...let's play." he sighed. there were no jokes when we tuned up. we didn't look at each other. i pulled out my flesch book and we played a scale. i don't remember what key it was anymore. "you are getting much better at that." i looked at him; he looked at me with the grudging smile he always gave us in approval. at least that felt almost normal. i pulled out my etude. i can't remember what book it was anymore. i started to play and in the middle of it the telephone rang. we both flinched; somehow telephone calls could not be good on a day like today. i spaced out while he talked and i could hear the phone ringing in the offices all around his. it was dr. perkins. they were closing the university in a half hour. i had to leave right now. i packed up my violin and we didn't say anything to each other. i walked outside and felt the panic everywhere. there was a traffic jam outside because everyone was frantically leaving at once. the word was a plane had crashed in pennsylvania and it had flown right over the university before it turned around to crash in the woods in pa. everyone was looking up at the sky as they walked. i walked with my violin on my back, glad that i had it with me. i was nearing the student center/dorm and i saw my suitemate and we stopped to talk. "i feel like this is a horrible day of infamy abigail. i just have this horrible feeling that this is far from the worst of it." we were talking and someone screamed out a dorm room window "HEY COLEY, i'm coming down to get you" she came down and we stood outside smoking cigarettes. a guy in his mid-twenties stopped "can i please have a cigarette? i normally don't bum cigarettes but i just..." i had a cigarette in his hand before he could finish the sentence. "i know...it's okay, you don't have to say another word about it." i felt like today passing out cigarettes was the only small thing i could do to at least help one person in the country feel better. i still couldn't talk very well. "well at least i don't have to go to modal counterpoint today...i didn't finish my homework." i heard all kinds of rude, stupid, ignornant conversations sitting on the stoop of the dorm smoking cigarettes with her. we both looked at each other as the snippets of conversations floated past on their ways to other places. but the one thing that numbed me was the mass fear. everyone was scared. we didn't want anymore cigarettes so we went upstairs to her room. we sat there watching the t.v. cnn wouldn't stop flashing little stock-market type runner things at the bottom of the screen and then i thought of home. sitting on the floor outside her room trying to escape the horrible news on the t.v. i thought of home. what about my neighbor that had just moved to maryland maybe not more than a year ago because he got a job at the pentagon...army division. the part that the plan crashed into...what about his kids. i used to babysit his kids. no....that made things too real. i wanted to call home but i couldn't because i was too lazy to walk almost off campus to get my pin number for long distance calls. she had hers and she called using her phone card. i talked to my mom. she was out of breath because she had run in the house to answer the phone. i sat out in the hallway wanting to cry at the sound of my mother's voice. "no mom, i'm okay. i don't need to come home right this minute. besides, the freeways will be a mess. i really want to come home this weekend. i love you too mom. i will. i will see you soon." the dorm had cleared out and it was quiet. people had found other places to go. we sat in her room watching cnn. they showed pakistani children burning american flags and cheering. it was late afternoon and i hadn't had a thing to eat all day. "i cannot watch THAT." "well maybe we should go somewhere to eat...definitely not christman. maybe chinese?" "i don't feel so much like chinese. i don't feel so much like eating at all but i guess i should. let's drive over on belmont and see what we see." we got into her pick-up truck and we got to the corner of belmont and gypsy and i said "you know i definitely don't feel like chinese, i feel like a nice chunk of cow. there's a steakhouse up the street. let's go there for lunch." she laughed at me. we drove up the street and the parking lot was empty. it was open, but quiet. "smoking or non?" "smoking please." the first thing we did when we sat down was light up cigarettes. our server came over to get our drinks. i don't remember her name but her canned intro speech was tinged with plane crashes. they had cnn on the bar tvs and i wanted to scream. no news, no t.v., no goddamn media. and then the president of the united states came on t.v. and said the most moronic idiotic things i had ever heard about terrorist attacks and 'vengenance' and we looked at each other and i had the overwhelming feeling of my last meal brewing in my stomach. i ordered steak and shrimp. my dad had taught me one thing: never spare a dime for food. today was a day that needed expensive food. she ordered the same. our cigarettes burned dirty incense over our salads and we bitched about our government loud enough to make the people sitting at the table right next to us and the bar cringe. the food came and it tasted like dirt. my mouth tasted like white dust. i looked at her and i knew the look on my face mirrored the look on her face. we paid for our $20 lunches and went next door to buy cigarettes. she wanted cloves. i waited in the car. she came back and told me cloves were on sale for $2.50 a pack. my favorite brand no less. a bitter smile came to my lips. my death was on sale today; thousands of people were dead and my death was on sale. we drove back to the dorm and sat outside smoking black cigarettes. we went back upstairs but i couldn't watch anymore of the goddamn tv so she took me to my dorm. i was very happy to have my violin with me and went in the basement and practiced. i read through the second movement of the bruch concerto and i felt like it was the most beautiful reqiuem mass and i cried while i played. i couldn't stop crying. they kept showing the pictures on tv over and over. i had seen them one hundred times in one day. and i played for all those people in a little room in a basement far away and i saw all the pictures one more time. it was too much. i called her up and they picked me up and we sat on her porch and got high. my expensive dinner/lunch, my black cigarettes, smoking a bowl on her parents' porch...it felt like the titanic was sinking and where was nothing else i could do but watch it go down and numb myself. 020310 ... MollyCule Hollee and I had been planning to go apartment hunting later that day so I had my alarm set for 11. My mom called from work before it ever had a chance to go off. The phone woke me up but I couldn't find the energy to get out of bed so the answering machine recorded her voice telling me to wake up and turn on the TV, that the world was burning down. I would have laughed at her melodrama like usual if she hadn't been crying. I flipped on CNN and saw that she was half right. At that point, both planes had already hit. A minute later, the first tower fell. I called Jeremy at his work. You have the TV on? Yeah, I'll call you later. Ok. I love you. I love you. I stared at the TV until Holleee called. She came and got me and we drove to Boardman with AM 570 on the radio. On Market Street in y_town the kid in the car next to us was a very nervous looking Muslim YSU student. I was hoping for him that he wouldn't get a lot of shit from people but in redneck ohio i'm pretty sure he did. We found the place the apartment was. Everything seemed extremely unreal and I couldn't believe that there were thousands of people dying right then while we were talking about carpeting and stoves and stuff. After that we went to wash Hollee's car. She was doing the scrubbing and stuff and I was standing outside looking at the total absence of anything in the sky. When you live this close to an air base you expect planes to go roaring overhead so loudly you can't speak to someone right next to you several times a day. There was some local worrying that the university or the air base would be targeted. We drove around eating Burger King and feeling much less than infinite with talk radio still on. They were at that point estimating the dead at 8000. When I got home I turned off everything in my house - no TV, no radio, nothing - and sat on the floor and hyperventilated and thought about it until i couldn't think about it anymore and I put in a Jeff_Buckley CD and cried. Jeremy came over and made me stop crying and then Nicole called and we drove to Y_Town and picked her up and we all smoked up on my parent's front porch. She spoke of her father and how he was a firefighter and how she hoped he wouldn't get called in to help. After a while we took her home and Jeremy went home and I sat in my porch in the mellow midnight air and did the thing I never do - I prayed. For the dead and dying and the people who would always be missing them and for the daughters of firefighters who would always be the daughters of heroes, wherther or not they were there. 020426 ... silentbob i think since my class was early, i woke up around the time it happened and got ready and walked to school. the first hour of class was boring. then my teacher walked in from being gone for a moment and said, "Ladies and gentlemen, our nation is under attack." i was thinking she was going to go on to say that dyslexia is a growing problem in our nation today and blah blah blah because that's how she sounded. but she turned on the tv, and there was a very tall building with smoke coming out of it. she explained that the taliban were a terrorist group that wanted their own land and have been making demands for a number of years and for years it has been american policy to ignore them. since we ignored them, they got revenge. throughout the day i heard people saying, "...but they killed thousands of innocent people. what does it matter if we go 'Over There' and kill thousdands of 'their' innocent people?" as if that would be payment. and then all over blather. for days. i dare you to go look at any blathe with the number 010911 i double dare you. 020426 ... continuous ache my mother woke me that day, crying. said something to the effect of us being at war. i was still half asleep and sort of laughed at her. thought it was a joke i guess. i got up, and she explained what happened before going back to work. i sat on my couch in the living room and watched the coverage for four or five straight hours. just watched the planes slam into those towers over and over again. i must have gotten up right before the first one fell. i was scared. i'm used to being so desensitized to everything, but not this. i cried the entire time i was watching. later i would hear people bitching about how it was all that was on TV. heartless. they were sick of hearing about it. who cares, they'd say. who cares?! are you fucking kidding me? and the empty sky was eery. i felt that too. it was almost heavy, pressing down on the earth. so weird. i didn't even realize it at first. it was like being in The Stand or something. it felt like we were isolated, cut off. it made me sick. thinking about the whole thing still makes me sick. the pictures and the stories still make me scared, still make me cry. and most people feel the same. i'm glad though. better that than those few pricks who were bitching because they missed wrestling or something equally silly. better to feel too much than nothing at all. 020508 ... Laura I was in Ap English and class had just started. The teacher was talking and channel on was on. Channel one was shown through the whole school because it always had stupid events they though us HIGH school children would love. But not that day. That day the show was interrupted by a picture of a burning tower. The class of jocks, goths, thespians, lesbians and everyone not included in those groups fell silent. We watched the screen as we took a test not realizing the magnitude of what had happened. The teacher turned off the tv for the test and we all whined. But then a boy who was not taking the test came back from the media center where the tv was on. "Hey a plane just crashed into the pentagon." "Garrett are you serious? Tell us you are joking." "No, I am very serious, he walked over and turned on the tv, Look for yourselves." I watched before I spoke, "The world is burning down." My mother had chosen that week to take her first vacation in over 6 years. I wanted my mother. Flashbacks of her train route were in my head as the tv reported spoke of what really was going on. My mother was going through Washington, DC Is she alright? What if she had time before the train left and toured around the pentagon or white house? Is my mother-------- the second tower was hit!!!!! People in my class were crying. Jocks, goths, thespians, lesbians and everyone not included in those groups cried the same color tears. I think that scared me too. I am sixteen. I am without my Mom. I don't want to stay that way. I checked myself out of school. I came home. I went to my room and went directly on the phone. My sister gave the okay for me to check out. She called. "Laura are you okay? You drove home safely?" "Yeah. Tara I am so worried about Mom. What is happening out there?" I heard my sister weeping and that scared me because she is so strong. "Mom is fine, OKAY!?!" I think she was reassuring herself as much as me. "I am on my way home I'll be there in 30 minutes!" "Okay I love you drive carefully." "Love you bye bye." I sat and watched tv. I watched the towers fall. I watched the world burn because we don't understand how to have peace, not just Americans but everyone. I saw the world burn. I talked to my boyfriend and tried calling my Mom in Washington on her cellphone. AT&T had too many calls to process. I cried. I watched tv for hours. Finally that night we spoke to my Mom. She's okay. They were routing her differently because they were not allowed off the train in DC She's okay. I will never forget anyone in my AP English class because of that day. Our test was over, but a bigger one had just begun. 020620 ... Dafremen LEAVES 030412 ... pipedream i pull out the old brown leather case with the ancient zipper, the leather gone hard with age and carefully take out sheaves od black and white photographs, none of them half as big as any of today's photographs...dusty pictures of houses, people, time long since past, relegated to memory and small images on this paper...bouffants and ghararas, children now old, smiling faces long since gone...faded memories of a lifetime i haven't been in 030413 ... unhinged . 080911 ... unhinged .. . 100911 ... unhinged things are different now. I don't eat chunks of cow anymore. even the thought of it sickens me. you can't let a cigarette burn dirty incense over your food in a restaurant in northeast ohio anymore. my father is retired from the life saving business now. but some things are still the same. people still walk down the street with that scared look in their eyes and i still give them cigarettes when they ask. that was my generations day of infamy. so many other things have exploded. but I still have food to eat, and a roof over my head, and intoxicants to dull the sting. last month my sisters' cousin died in afghanistan. bodies still falling from the sky. ten_years_ago and bodies still falling from the sky is anyone else pissed about that? 110911 ... unhinged . and_now syria 130911 ... unhinged . and_now iran they don't want our democracy. but dick cheney still wants MORE money. and all the stupid ignorant supporters of the GOP see no correlation between keeping rich people rich and refusing diplomacy with iran. it is time to stop_holding_america_hostage with the threat of nuclear arms. iran wouldn't need them if america stopped fucking around in the middle east. and yet...the conservative right, politicians and citizens, don't seem to put these two things together. and we become more and more polarized as a nation. no common sense, no common good. just fear anger and hate. all the things that made this country great. i had to sign a petition today begging congress to extend a bill designed to pay for the healthcare and other necessities of the first responders of 9/11 because more and more are dying of cancer everyday. because the fucking asshole 'no tax cut spending' republicans are actually considering letting these funds expire. because billionaires and corporate 'people' don't think they should have to pay these people for their heroics. cowards and greedy assholes every last one. my disdainful anger at the ineptitude and corruption of my government grows every single day. we wonder why the world hates us; when the ethics of capitalist government include letting the people that save lives struggle to get medical care so they can continue to get their pockets lined by the 'let me keep more money than i could ever need' lobby....fuck you. to anyone extends your rhetoric past the point of common decency and compassion, fuck you. you do not deserve my tax dollars. maybe, maybe we can let peace win this time. 150911 ... unhinged . (we are still at war from this. the empire is in decline because of all the damn war. who's winning right now exactly?) 170911 ... unhinged fifty three cents of every tax dollar are spent on the war on terror children in this country are starving at schools that don't have basic supplies like DESKS AND CHAIRS what the fuck is wrong with us? general mattis just admitted that this war will continue ad infinitum because there is no antiwar movement anymore (cause nixon successfully locked them all up with the war on drugs) keep checking your facebook america i woke up last week to ash from the wild fires caused by drought caused by our rapacious materialism swipe right for greed cause this shit is burning down end_times 170911 ... unhinged cinnamon girl: letters found inside a cereal box - juan felipe herrera 171014 ... unhinged ... (still at war seventeen years later and i still don't have healthcare...looks like the attacks worked america. the stupidity of our leaders has bankrupted the empire and over half of us are poor. i still remember laying in my bed in my dorm room pouring over the pictures in the 9/11 issue of time magazine and opening to the page where people were clearly jumping out of the burning buildings to their death. an unnamable flood of horror and grief made me start bawling. then relief that my father wasn't going to nyc. then guilt that i could be relieved when new yorkers and families of those people jumping out of that building were grieving. the suicide rates of soldiers that come back from the middle east are unspeakable...the ghosts are killing us still.) 180911 what's it to you? who go blather from