Black Memories Fade Hard

A stiff shot of Yukon Jack, for medicinal purposes (remember, Oscar?), a cold Augsburger Golden, and Frank Zappa's Waka/Jawaka--not a bad way to start out a Wednesday night, all in all. At least enough to lift me out of the perpetual swirl of weirdness that is Our World, God love it. Or is it? Where were you when the crazy shit started to go down? As I recall, I was safely installed in my efficiency apartment" (aka: a closet with kitchenette and head) on Kane St., Milwaukee, reading Henry Miller's Black Spring. It was a glorious morning, as I remember. The kind that moves poets to verse. I was lounging about, drinking my second cup of Irish Breakfast tea, when for some reason now lost to time, I had to call up my parents. Little did I realize when making that phone call that not only would my world never be the same, but no other Americans' as well. My father answered, and proceeded to tell me that a commercial airliner had ripped through one of the Twin Towers.

"Dear Jesus in Heaven," I thought, "could this be real?" But I knew my father to be a reliable source, since he is an amateur pilot. And I somehow doubted that any broadcast news station would be sick enough to play a joke like that, even though I found myself hoping that it were nothing more than that.

Since I had no television at that time, I raced over to the student union at the U of W, Milwaukee to find a television and make some sort of sense out of the bare bones details that my father had given to me. I arrived just in time to see the second tower hit, then the Pentagon. It looked like some bad Hollywood action movie, but I knew it was real. Many around me gaped at the screen in utter disbelief, but all I felt was a rising tide of fury, all the more so because of the sense of futility that accompanied it. I had never felt so goddamn helpless, and that's what really infuriated me.

We all know what happened from there on out. And yet, I still have not come to terms with the grim realities that were unleashed on that black day in September. If anything, that day only seemed to confirm my darkest suspicions of the human nature, that in the millions of years that have passed since we first took that bold step from the primordial slim, we have developed little beyond our pack animal simian beginnings. Still sequestered within our prides, still eyeing the others of our species with glances fraught with suspicion, still in blind competition for the mastodon.

I am not entirely certain what I had intended to accomplish when I began this screed, but it became what it was meant to be, I am certain of that much. And you will not blame me if my mind so quickly clouded with memories of that vicious day in 2001, for the dust and smoke lifted into the air on that day has yet to settle, and it will be a long time coming before it finally does. I think in many ways it was a doorway leading to a maze, and the only way out of that maze is to come together, not in any narrow nationalistic sense, but as one people, if that will ever be possible. We are all groping about in the dark and we will continue to do so as long as we are filled with such irrational loathing for each other.

I have no answers, no secret maps to get us out of this corner. I'm not sure what can be done as long as men continue to kill in the name of God--how can you reason with that? But even though 9/11 was a doorway leading into a maze, it was really just an extension of the maze humanity had been stumbling about in since time immemorial. To see beyond the maze, I think, is the trick. Perhaps even the key. To see beyond its walls while working within them. That's the best I can do at this time. Sorry I don't have more.

And don't forget that we are spinning around in a vast void on a little speck of space. That should put anyone who thinks that are the golden apple of God's eye in their place. We are one or two steps away from the ant--dig yourself.

OK--that'll do it for now.