(this was posted on September 11, 2019 but back-dated for historic purposes. There was no editing but his is a journal entry I wrote while at WVTF Public Radio. They needed someone to work overnight because the automation system wasn't sophisticated enough yet to handle doing all news. It was the only time I worked the board there)
2:30
Two thirty in the morning and I've watched the coverage now for most of my wakened day. At some points here I've had three or four streams of information assaulting me, new leads, new information. I've just read from an AP story that the executive producer of the television show Frasier was
aboard one of the planes, and what to do with this new piece of information, which comes to me as I see a man fall to his death, arms and legs flailing through the air before the inevitable impact against the pavement. The camera doesn't cover it, but the imagination speculates that the remains of his body would soon be covered by the debris showering down as the building he leapt from followed him behind. Where else would he go? Where else could the building go?
All day I've had fantasies that a superhero with a cape could come flying along to help, but of course, there are no superheroes. There are only men like New York's Fire Chief, his deputy, his chaplain, and an untold number of other brave men and women who perished in an attempt to save those who
could not be saved, feared they could not be saved, so they leapt from the buildings, and part of me thinks that the television cameras were right to show the men and women jumping, because at this moment, we need that horror to make the other images, stripped of humanity, real.
This is not a movie, and we know that now, because we're waking up all over America right now realizing it wasn't a long dream, realizing it wasn't just a series of images that could be controlled by the click of a few buttons. But, I still hope that some powerful force could come along to lift the rubble up instantly to save all of those lives still trapped, still penned in, the faces we'll never see, and I almost want the television cameras to capture that horror, to make it real in a way that I don't want to be real,
but feel must be made real, so that this is not sanitized, because the next stage of this surely comes with more carnage, and we won't see any of those victims falling from the sky because they will be in foreign countries and foreign lands where we don't understand the people, don't understand, don't
understand, don't understand.
I am calm at the moment. I am far from the scene and feel a need now to remain calm, to remain at the scene. I am tired of listening to trite comments from my president, comments that were clearly written for him and he's clearly reading them from a teleprompter, and I know he doesn't mean to sound so wooden, but he does. I know he cares, I know he is as shaken up about this as the rest of us, but it bothers me that at 10:21 the signal that he had gone to bed was given by the Secret Service, "Trailblazer, Second Floor of the Residence" because I'm up, concerned, and the reporters are still up, and they're clicking their buttons and I'm clicking my buttons, and I know for real that the person who is supposed to be in charge isn't in charge, and you know damned well that means that the people in
charge are going to remain faceless, the people who did this will not remain
faceless, and, and, and... I admire New York Mayor Giuliani today, saying what he said about respecting all people, about not letting hatred get to us... I fear hatred is going to get us.
Tens of thousands of people is the number they're giving, and they don't know, it's all speculation, and someone on the radio says that even if the death toll is about 3,000, that's more than the combined death toll in all of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. That's not to lessen that horrible, meaningless war, but it is to say that with this attack today, something massive is going to have to be done in order to assuage the world that the United States is still the power to be reckoned, even though a reckoning against the United States was enacted today.
The television sounds in the studio air the same squawking sirens emanating from Manhattan, but I can't watch the television anymore. Until the morning, at least, I don't want to see the plane fly into the building from the seven or eight angles people managed to capture. I will want to see it, not for a
sense of assuaging a need to consume the gruesome, but for a need to make this real, for whatever intellectual or psychological reason I'll need to use those images for in the future.
---
3:00
I am drinking what could be the worst cup of tea.
---
3:40
I just washed my hands and I was struck by the light in the bathroom. I had just come back from having a cigarette outside. Even though I was clearly poisoning myself, I looked up at the sky and saw the stars and remembered a line from a Modern Lovers, a snippet really, "the stars, I thought we'd lost them" and of course, we can never lose the stars, only our ability to see them.
Sad music pumping over National Public Radio and I remember when they went to their new scheme of music. They played snippets of what they would play if something really went wrong, and I've been listening to it all night along with everyone else who has been listening to the coverage on the radio.
I'm proud to be here, even though my input has been limited. Four mouse clicks and several cuts pulled for the newscast tomorrow morning. I'm wondering if I'll be here tomorrow night to do something similar to this, because I wouldn't be surprised if we stick with news and information at least until Thursday morning.
As I washed my hands, I tried to capture the moment, thinking of every sensation, the warm water pouring onto my hands, lubricated by the pink soap, the water gurgling into the same sink where I've seen many silverfish use as a passageway between their world and our world. Earlier I watched as
some bug or another marched around my feet as I used the urinal. This bug was scoping me out, and I tried to imagine what it would be like if this bug somehow wanted to take me down.
Every time I see the footage of the assembled members of Congress singing "God Bless America" my eyes well up with tears. They sound so somber, so cheery, so steadfast against whatever it is we're up against here. Today this does feel like my country, because I remember singing that song when I was in elementary school, and I'm transported back to being a little kid believing that everyone else would help to take care of me. And, I've been taken care of in life, and this is my country. I'm scared that my country will do something awful, but something awful has been done to my country today. Civilians died, thousands of them. They all woke up yesterday to a beautiful day, and I hope that many of them had at least the chance to say goodbye to their loved ones, even if they didn't know it was for the last
time.
I don't think I am scared to die. I don't want to be scared to die. I want to live life as if I could die at any moment, and I think I have tried to do that as much as I can. That's why I'm here, in a way, listening to all of this coverage, watching it on television, trying to download the BBC to see what they're saying, looking for anything I can find that's new to report. I've already decided that I want to change the show this week. I want to do something on the bombing, the human attempts to reconcile this, to reconcile
this event that cannot be explained unless we open ourselves up to the horror in order to experience it, in order to go on in memory of those who have died, to those who remain trapped under the rubble. We cannot expect a superhero, a character in a novel, a talented filmmaker, to come and save those people. But, we want to, we want to do something and we will, I know, because.... That's what we have to do.
I am proud of this country, even though I am not proud of what this country has done. I keep hoping the people of this country would learn to think past themselves, to think of the other person, to think of the consequences of their action.
4:15
It's almost time for me to go home. I won't even pretend to wrap this up.
Two thirty in the morning and I've watched the coverage now for most of my wakened day. At some points here I've had three or four streams of information assaulting me, new leads, new information. I've just read from an AP story that the executive producer of the television show Frasier was
aboard one of the planes, and what to do with this new piece of information, which comes to me as I see a man fall to his death, arms and legs flailing through the air before the inevitable impact against the pavement. The camera doesn't cover it, but the imagination speculates that the remains of his body would soon be covered by the debris showering down as the building he leapt from followed him behind. Where else would he go? Where else could the building go?
All day I've had fantasies that a superhero with a cape could come flying along to help, but of course, there are no superheroes. There are only men like New York's Fire Chief, his deputy, his chaplain, and an untold number of other brave men and women who perished in an attempt to save those who
could not be saved, feared they could not be saved, so they leapt from the buildings, and part of me thinks that the television cameras were right to show the men and women jumping, because at this moment, we need that horror to make the other images, stripped of humanity, real.
This is not a movie, and we know that now, because we're waking up all over America right now realizing it wasn't a long dream, realizing it wasn't just a series of images that could be controlled by the click of a few buttons. But, I still hope that some powerful force could come along to lift the rubble up instantly to save all of those lives still trapped, still penned in, the faces we'll never see, and I almost want the television cameras to capture that horror, to make it real in a way that I don't want to be real,
but feel must be made real, so that this is not sanitized, because the next stage of this surely comes with more carnage, and we won't see any of those victims falling from the sky because they will be in foreign countries and foreign lands where we don't understand the people, don't understand, don't
understand, don't understand.
I am calm at the moment. I am far from the scene and feel a need now to remain calm, to remain at the scene. I am tired of listening to trite comments from my president, comments that were clearly written for him and he's clearly reading them from a teleprompter, and I know he doesn't mean to sound so wooden, but he does. I know he cares, I know he is as shaken up about this as the rest of us, but it bothers me that at 10:21 the signal that he had gone to bed was given by the Secret Service, "Trailblazer, Second Floor of the Residence" because I'm up, concerned, and the reporters are still up, and they're clicking their buttons and I'm clicking my buttons, and I know for real that the person who is supposed to be in charge isn't in charge, and you know damned well that means that the people in
charge are going to remain faceless, the people who did this will not remain
faceless, and, and, and... I admire New York Mayor Giuliani today, saying what he said about respecting all people, about not letting hatred get to us... I fear hatred is going to get us.
Tens of thousands of people is the number they're giving, and they don't know, it's all speculation, and someone on the radio says that even if the death toll is about 3,000, that's more than the combined death toll in all of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. That's not to lessen that horrible, meaningless war, but it is to say that with this attack today, something massive is going to have to be done in order to assuage the world that the United States is still the power to be reckoned, even though a reckoning against the United States was enacted today.
The television sounds in the studio air the same squawking sirens emanating from Manhattan, but I can't watch the television anymore. Until the morning, at least, I don't want to see the plane fly into the building from the seven or eight angles people managed to capture. I will want to see it, not for a
sense of assuaging a need to consume the gruesome, but for a need to make this real, for whatever intellectual or psychological reason I'll need to use those images for in the future.
---
3:00
I am drinking what could be the worst cup of tea.
---
3:40
I just washed my hands and I was struck by the light in the bathroom. I had just come back from having a cigarette outside. Even though I was clearly poisoning myself, I looked up at the sky and saw the stars and remembered a line from a Modern Lovers, a snippet really, "the stars, I thought we'd lost them" and of course, we can never lose the stars, only our ability to see them.
Sad music pumping over National Public Radio and I remember when they went to their new scheme of music. They played snippets of what they would play if something really went wrong, and I've been listening to it all night along with everyone else who has been listening to the coverage on the radio.
I'm proud to be here, even though my input has been limited. Four mouse clicks and several cuts pulled for the newscast tomorrow morning. I'm wondering if I'll be here tomorrow night to do something similar to this, because I wouldn't be surprised if we stick with news and information at least until Thursday morning.
As I washed my hands, I tried to capture the moment, thinking of every sensation, the warm water pouring onto my hands, lubricated by the pink soap, the water gurgling into the same sink where I've seen many silverfish use as a passageway between their world and our world. Earlier I watched as
some bug or another marched around my feet as I used the urinal. This bug was scoping me out, and I tried to imagine what it would be like if this bug somehow wanted to take me down.
Every time I see the footage of the assembled members of Congress singing "God Bless America" my eyes well up with tears. They sound so somber, so cheery, so steadfast against whatever it is we're up against here. Today this does feel like my country, because I remember singing that song when I was in elementary school, and I'm transported back to being a little kid believing that everyone else would help to take care of me. And, I've been taken care of in life, and this is my country. I'm scared that my country will do something awful, but something awful has been done to my country today. Civilians died, thousands of them. They all woke up yesterday to a beautiful day, and I hope that many of them had at least the chance to say goodbye to their loved ones, even if they didn't know it was for the last
time.
I don't think I am scared to die. I don't want to be scared to die. I want to live life as if I could die at any moment, and I think I have tried to do that as much as I can. That's why I'm here, in a way, listening to all of this coverage, watching it on television, trying to download the BBC to see what they're saying, looking for anything I can find that's new to report. I've already decided that I want to change the show this week. I want to do something on the bombing, the human attempts to reconcile this, to reconcile
this event that cannot be explained unless we open ourselves up to the horror in order to experience it, in order to go on in memory of those who have died, to those who remain trapped under the rubble. We cannot expect a superhero, a character in a novel, a talented filmmaker, to come and save those people. But, we want to, we want to do something and we will, I know, because.... That's what we have to do.
I am proud of this country, even though I am not proud of what this country has done. I keep hoping the people of this country would learn to think past themselves, to think of the other person, to think of the consequences of their action.
4:15
It's almost time for me to go home. I won't even pretend to wrap this up.
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