It was the Irish poet Yeats who said something about the world falling apart and "the center cannot hold".
I’ll get back to Yeats’ center in a moment but let me do a Geography lesson first. Staten Island is really on the Jersey side of New York Bay. In fact two rich English Lords had a boat race over two hundred and fifty years ago in England to settle the dispute of which colony, New Jersey or New York had proper legal title to this land. And of course there is the old school child's joke about a Dutch sailor naming the island. The story goes something like this. The Dutch sailor with a thick vaudeville accent is coming on deck of Henry Hudson’s ship and he points and says to old Henry "Is stat an island Captain?" "An excellent name for the place sailor. Etc."
There is an old sailors' retirement home on eighty acres on the north shore. It sits right on the river on Richmond Terrace and looks across the river to huge petroleum storage tanks over in Jersey. The view is a mess but the old home is now home to Museums and Art Workshops, a wedding chapel, cafe, catering hall, botanical gardens, a reproduction of an ancient Chinese scholar’s home and garden etc. I was married in the wedding chapel, now called Veteran's Hall, some odd decade or two ago. The building was built in 1855. Most of the grand Greek Revival structures in front have their tall granite columns and blend in with the other structures on the grounds that are mainly Victoria, Gothic and brick. With fountains and duck ponds and the perennial need for much upkeep of a very old complex, there is a grand southern ante-bellum air of shabby eloquence to the place. They even have Jazz concerts on the back acreage in the summer.
One of new attractions in the back of this complex is something called a Healing Garden. It goes down a zig zag path from one elevation to another. Some of the rough rustic looking timber cut benches along the way are supposed to be used to meditate and to heal. The Garden is for the loved ones of 267 Staten Islanders (civilians as well as those on duty) who died on 9/11. Seventy-eight of the 343 firemen killed on that infamous day made their home in Staten Island. With five boroughs that make up New York City, Staten Island had the largest per capita loss of life of firemen in the city. http://www.sibg.org/tour/GardenOfHealing.html
The north shore is the oldest and most populated area of Staten Island. Many generations of firefighters mostly Irish, Italian and Catholic have come from the same families. It not unusual to have fathers and sons and brothers, cousins to all be active as New York City Firemen. And let’s not forget grandpop getting his fireman’s pension. I know of such a Staten Island family.
It is most fitting that here on Staten Island and in the peaceful nature setting of Snug Harbor Cultural Center that there is a place for Staten Island families and friends to come together or be alone and pray and or remember those lost on Septemeber 11, 2001.
Healing does take time.
I hope that I do not take away from the name of this healing garden to hope that it is also in spirit dedicated to peace.
In a world gone mad with greed, religious fervor and military might, one quiet spot is dedicated to nature and the memory of some of the few lost on September 11, 2001. The center in the outside world may not be holding, but here at Snug Harbor the center of family and memory and respect for the dead stills holds. God Bless this Land.
Rest in Peace.
Sunday, September 10, 2006
Dey-Cortlandt Square
They recently unveiled designs for three very expensive and very ugly modern money making boxes of architecture for the new World Trade Center. Did anybody else notice anybody giving at least one decent emotion or reaction to this modern look alike metal and glass trash - with a yawn and maybe even a belch?
Words like a rising Phoenix do not fit as a proper cliché for the ongoing task of rebuilding of the beginning of what I think is an ongoing metamorphosis of the old World Trade Center.
They are always going to call it the World Trade Center. What I think is appropriate is to distance the once overly grand twin towers from the now proposed hodge podge of trailer trash skyscrapers crowding out the valuable square footage under shoe. I think we should offer another name of this expensive new neighborhood.
I know of many an American slum that gets gentrified and the old neighborhood goes to hell and too expensive to live in anymore. The first sign of upscale change is usually the little add on to every street sign that proclaim this emerging slum as "historic district".
I think that since the new alternate name for the new hodge podge creation should be Dey-Cortlandt Square. Dey and Cortlandt Streets are the two streets that used to lead into the WTC complex. Part of these streets were of course wiped off the map to accommodate the building of the old WTC.
Don’t you just want to rent or buy an expensive condo at Dey-Cortlandt Square, the most exclusive expensive place currently on the Manhattan real estate map. World Trade Center has such a connotation of "possible active target".
Of course there will be the WTC memorial within Dey-Cortlandt Square. Can’t forget that. Time to move on New York City. It’s time to move on.
Words like a rising Phoenix do not fit as a proper cliché for the ongoing task of rebuilding of the beginning of what I think is an ongoing metamorphosis of the old World Trade Center.
They are always going to call it the World Trade Center. What I think is appropriate is to distance the once overly grand twin towers from the now proposed hodge podge of trailer trash skyscrapers crowding out the valuable square footage under shoe. I think we should offer another name of this expensive new neighborhood.
I know of many an American slum that gets gentrified and the old neighborhood goes to hell and too expensive to live in anymore. The first sign of upscale change is usually the little add on to every street sign that proclaim this emerging slum as "historic district".
I think that since the new alternate name for the new hodge podge creation should be Dey-Cortlandt Square. Dey and Cortlandt Streets are the two streets that used to lead into the WTC complex. Part of these streets were of course wiped off the map to accommodate the building of the old WTC.
Don’t you just want to rent or buy an expensive condo at Dey-Cortlandt Square, the most exclusive expensive place currently on the Manhattan real estate map. World Trade Center has such a connotation of "possible active target".
Of course there will be the WTC memorial within Dey-Cortlandt Square. Can’t forget that. Time to move on New York City. It’s time to move on.
Sunday, August 06, 2006
Fresh Kills and Loose Change
The kill part of Fresh Kills is Dutch for river.
From a journal:
"September 16, 2001
We briefly went to the Staten Island Mall yesterday morning, to the doctor’s office (for my son) to get his allergy shots. I waited outside and sat on a bench and looked over to the Fresh Kills dump rising up in the distance, all landscapes and green. The green mound of the dump is where they are burying the "bones" of the towers and of course bits and pieces of human beings hopelessly intertwined with the debris because of – the tragedy…
…dumping in a most uncivilized manner, unceremoniously discharged out of the back of dump truck fresh on a journey from the WTC site. In a time of war, it is sometimes impossible to observe the peacetime niceties for the burial of the dead from a battlefield of that war.
(the tragedy) parts of it in pieces, symbols and perhaps there is a spiritual pain is being born – there on the top of the hill – on the temporarily reopened landfill.
It was chilly – Autumn in the air – Winter about to descend soon after – I hear in my head some of the last lines of James Joyce’s The Dead about snow falling on the both the living and the dead… a small eulogy and some soul’s minute body parts are getting some sort of decent burial if only in Fresh Kills landfill.
"-The Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island in New York City, was formerly the largest landfill in the world and was New York City's principal landfill in the second half of the 20th century. The name 'Fresh Kills' refers to its location along the banks of the Fresh Kills estuary in western Staten Island.
"Opened in 1948, it became one of the largest refuse heaps in human history. It also achieved the status as the highest man-made hill directly on the East Coast of the United States. Under local pressure and with support of the United States Environmental Protection Agency, the landfill site was slated to close on March 22, 2001. However, after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, the landfill was temporarily reopened in order to receive and process most of the debris from the destruction. Most of the debris was later removed and sold for scrap…" ** (an old WikiP. article)
I do hope that they erect a monolithic memorial at Fresh Kills one day to consider the small pieces of the dead not sold with the scrape metal on this now sacred ground. I hope that monument is one that can be seen from the nearby highway.
I received a blackened U.S. case quarter over a year later as change from the deli in the lobby of the building where I work near Rockefeller Center in NYC. It wasn’t one of those quarters painted in nail polish that children sometimes have a tendency to do in their spare time. I did not notice the object until after I left the store. I looked at it. It had shrunk and it had obviously been subject to intense heat. It had probably reached a red-hot stage and then cooled. The quarter is not perfectly round. There are two straight lines on the coin where it had rested somewhere against something cooler on a ninety degree angle. The coin had been issued to commemorate Vermont’s statehood. I could make out the date "2001".
The most striking image on the back of the coin are the two thick maple syrup trees. Now shrunk and blackened, the two tall tree trunks remind me of an image symbolic of the twin Towers of the World Trade center.
I do not know if this loose piece of change is in fact a souvenir of the WTC tragedy. If in fact it were a bona fide artifact of that tragic day, I would be breaking the law. I have no direct knowledge of the coin’s provenance. I did show it to people on occasion. I fancy it a piece of history and since it was issued as a coin in early August 2001, it could very well be a genuine relic of that day on 911.
I have since put the coin away. The fifth anniversary of the tragedy is upon us and I hope that the dead are resting in peace considering the untimeliness and circumstances of their demise. The prayers of millions have hopefully cleared a path for the dead to that someplace or somewhere in whatever happens to us on the other side of death. I do believe there is an other side of life and I hope the living of New York City can put away the past and start in earnest to build, build, build the future in downtown Manhattan.
From a journal:
"September 16, 2001
We briefly went to the Staten Island Mall yesterday morning, to the doctor’s office (for my son) to get his allergy shots. I waited outside and sat on a bench and looked over to the Fresh Kills dump rising up in the distance, all landscapes and green. The green mound of the dump is where they are burying the "bones" of the towers and of course bits and pieces of human beings hopelessly intertwined with the debris because of – the tragedy…
…dumping in a most uncivilized manner, unceremoniously discharged out of the back of dump truck fresh on a journey from the WTC site. In a time of war, it is sometimes impossible to observe the peacetime niceties for the burial of the dead from a battlefield of that war.
(the tragedy) parts of it in pieces, symbols and perhaps there is a spiritual pain is being born – there on the top of the hill – on the temporarily reopened landfill.
It was chilly – Autumn in the air – Winter about to descend soon after – I hear in my head some of the last lines of James Joyce’s The Dead about snow falling on the both the living and the dead… a small eulogy and some soul’s minute body parts are getting some sort of decent burial if only in Fresh Kills landfill.
"-The Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island in New York City, was formerly the largest landfill in the world and was New York City's principal landfill in the second half of the 20th century. The name 'Fresh Kills' refers to its location along the banks of the Fresh Kills estuary in western Staten Island.
"Opened in 1948, it became one of the largest refuse heaps in human history. It also achieved the status as the highest man-made hill directly on the East Coast of the United States. Under local pressure and with support of the United States Environmental Protection Agency, the landfill site was slated to close on March 22, 2001. However, after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, the landfill was temporarily reopened in order to receive and process most of the debris from the destruction. Most of the debris was later removed and sold for scrap…" ** (an old WikiP. article)
I do hope that they erect a monolithic memorial at Fresh Kills one day to consider the small pieces of the dead not sold with the scrape metal on this now sacred ground. I hope that monument is one that can be seen from the nearby highway.
I received a blackened U.S. case quarter over a year later as change from the deli in the lobby of the building where I work near Rockefeller Center in NYC. It wasn’t one of those quarters painted in nail polish that children sometimes have a tendency to do in their spare time. I did not notice the object until after I left the store. I looked at it. It had shrunk and it had obviously been subject to intense heat. It had probably reached a red-hot stage and then cooled. The quarter is not perfectly round. There are two straight lines on the coin where it had rested somewhere against something cooler on a ninety degree angle. The coin had been issued to commemorate Vermont’s statehood. I could make out the date "2001".
The most striking image on the back of the coin are the two thick maple syrup trees. Now shrunk and blackened, the two tall tree trunks remind me of an image symbolic of the twin Towers of the World Trade center.
I do not know if this loose piece of change is in fact a souvenir of the WTC tragedy. If in fact it were a bona fide artifact of that tragic day, I would be breaking the law. I have no direct knowledge of the coin’s provenance. I did show it to people on occasion. I fancy it a piece of history and since it was issued as a coin in early August 2001, it could very well be a genuine relic of that day on 911.
I have since put the coin away. The fifth anniversary of the tragedy is upon us and I hope that the dead are resting in peace considering the untimeliness and circumstances of their demise. The prayers of millions have hopefully cleared a path for the dead to that someplace or somewhere in whatever happens to us on the other side of death. I do believe there is an other side of life and I hope the living of New York City can put away the past and start in earnest to build, build, build the future in downtown Manhattan.
Sunday, July 23, 2006
Dia De La WTC
There are all sorts of politics going on with the half billion dollar budget for a memorial for victims of 911. I do not know of any official memorial being planned for the undocumented workers who died that day on 911 at the World Trade Center. They were forgotten and not seen in life; the same in death.
Dia De La Muerta, Day of the Dead, is an important national, cultural and historical ritual day in the Republic of Mexico to honor the dead.
Over here in Mexico Town in Staten Island, word is that as many as 500 amigos disappeared that day. And I know from history that numbers get changed over time. If you think of two hundred floors and tasks ranging from cleaning people to wait staff in fast food cubbie holes all over the WTC, that the number five hundred does not sound too out of line with a real statistical figure regarding this matter.
Of course, the Anglo world and the Anglo press and most important of all the Anglo bureaucrats with five hundred million US dollars to spend on fountains and plaques - I know of no plaque that is being planned for undocumented aliens who died anonymously in that tragic murderous killing field by Saudi citizens on that infamous day.
This is of course a minor historic foot note mentioning what they say over in Mexico Town in Staten Island. The truth is out there somewhere as they used to say onthe X files.
Come November, the departed amigos and amigas will once again be dutifully remembered in MexTown S.I.NY if no place else.
Dia De La Muerta, Day of the Dead, is an important national, cultural and historical ritual day in the Republic of Mexico to honor the dead.
Over here in Mexico Town in Staten Island, word is that as many as 500 amigos disappeared that day. And I know from history that numbers get changed over time. If you think of two hundred floors and tasks ranging from cleaning people to wait staff in fast food cubbie holes all over the WTC, that the number five hundred does not sound too out of line with a real statistical figure regarding this matter.
Of course, the Anglo world and the Anglo press and most important of all the Anglo bureaucrats with five hundred million US dollars to spend on fountains and plaques - I know of no plaque that is being planned for undocumented aliens who died anonymously in that tragic murderous killing field by Saudi citizens on that infamous day.
This is of course a minor historic foot note mentioning what they say over in Mexico Town in Staten Island. The truth is out there somewhere as they used to say onthe X files.
Come November, the departed amigos and amigas will once again be dutifully remembered in MexTown S.I.NY if no place else.
Sunday, July 09, 2006
No Guarantee of a Tomorrow
I used to take the MTA Express bus in from Staten Island in order to get to work on time at 7 A.M. in Manhattan. The Ferry schedules that early and the transition from the night schedules to the day’s rush hour schedules did not quite gel with me and my particular needs. I do not like to get to work with two minutes to spare or run over by five minutes. I am from the old school of workers and work ethics. I want to get in and enjoy a cup of coffee and quietly in my mind arrange the priorities of the day ahead. So I took the express to get to work at least a half an hour ahead of time.
That September morning was not much different. The bus driver said his usual hello to me and since I was the first passenger on his route, he shared some of his personals with me: what highly regarded technical highschool his son was going to Brooklyn, where he shopped at on the south shore, his large home equity loan payments etc. And I shared some of my life stuff in five minutes of private time before the bus started to fill with passengers along the way.
Some of the regulars stand out even now. A woman with a thick German accent was always complaining about having missed his bus by seconds the day before or something similar before the chubby middle aged blond woman, who was always looking at her watch, would wonder aloud why she was late every day to her downtown HMO clerical job which started at 6:00 A.M.
The bus never got through the battery tunnel before 6:05 A.M. and her complaints to her usual seating companion never seemed to take responsibility for her own lateness. It was the bus and the bus driver on the first run of the day that was always late. There was one interesting guy in his early seventies still working for the sack of health benefits for his wife who had apparently been in Hiroshima after the war and one incredible story seemed to get told several times and me an avid listener to history loved hearing the story every time of the grunt GIs having to empty out an underground bunker of mummified Japanese soldiers’ bodies a year after the bomb hit. Etc.
The bus was unusually early that day. Good traffic over the Verrazano Bridge and a swift trip, no accidents, on the Brooklyn highway from the bridge to the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel into downtown Manhattan. New York is a series of islands and waterways that have to be gotten around. Everyday is a goulish traffic situation on any day at any time and without rush hour traffic to complicate things on the rusty potholed infrastructure. Only St. Louis had more pot holes on its ring highways I would often ponder to myself remembering my cross country road trip from Arizona to New York some two odd years before.
Early. Too early. Wanted to kill time. Those in a rush to get uptown would discharge at the R train Rector St. subway entrance and take advantage of the free transfer option. The German lady and the middled aged blond always got off at Dey Street and if there was a red light, I would see them cross the street and walk toward the giant World Trade Center complex of buildings. I decided to kill some time. I would get off at the WTC stop and walk across the street to buy donuts for the office from that fancy Atlanta donut franchise. I would then take the R train uptown and be on time for work.
I found the transformation of Manhattan quite strange when I had arrived back in New York some two years earlier and having spent eight years in Arizona in the hiatus. The city had changed dramatically. You could no longer go into office buildings without a guard asking you your business, every cheap bar that had seemed to be on every corner of downtown seemed to have been replaced by that Seattle coffee franchise. The once blue-collar nature of people working in warehouses all through and around downtown was gone. The warehouses were now living lofts and many former office buildings had converted to this condo trend. So it was that the Krispy Kreme was now located in what used to be a major Hong Kong banking concern. This was in one of the lower buildings that wrapped itself around the sterile plaza in front of number One and Two WTC.
Had stopped off maybe a year before on a Saturday and I got a donut and a cup of coffee and sat in that sterile plaza. They had added loose chairs and tables about the plaza to give it some organic flow but it never was a warm place to sit and meditate. Not enough green or nature I suppose.
The strangest thing happened to me when I was about to get off the bus around 6:05 A.M. I had changed my mind. I would buy donuts tomorrow. I stayed on the bus and would do another time killing exercise further uptown.
(A year later I would tell this story to the COO of my company in the conference room where the first anniversary ceremonies were being show on the large TV screen. I told the story about how I was going to get off the bus at the World Trade Center that fateful day and buy Krispy Kreme donuts and decided to do it tomorrow instead. The moral of the story is that tomorrow is not guaranteed to anybody. )
I got off the bus around twenty first street before the bus would turn on twenty third and go over to Madison before going north again. I would transfer to the local M6 bus and ride to the front door of my office building near Rockefeller Center. I stood and waited.
The morning form was calm. There was no touch of autumn in the air yet. It wasn’t humid. No breeze. Then I noticed something rare in Manhattan on anything but an early Sunday morning.
Where was the usual traffic? I had done this routine in the past and the density and frequency of traffic was always busy even at six A.M. on a weekday morning. I waited a few minutes. The morning traffic reminded me of those days when there was a public school holiday. I got onto the arriving local bus and went to work.
Work was no different. I work in a closed off secured area behind glass. The security is to handle checks and securities for this small brokerage firm.
About nine o’clock, there were phone calls. People where moving about outside the glass panels. Then the news hit us about a plane hitting one of the World Trade Center. I scrambled to try and get CNN on the Internet. No response. I kept trying and then a hit. Surprisingly there was a picture of the wounded tower and a few unconfirmed lines of news. Not much to go on but at least it was something of a confirmation of the verbal rumors.
I wanted to call my wife working downtown but had to wait in line at what we called the single"jailhouse" phone for external employee use. I finally got through to her. She was standing at a 32nd floor window looking north three blocks to the smoking tower. All sorts of stories and rumors seemed to abound at that very moment. In my mind and in memory, it seems something of a blur until the main story laid itself out. I remember a lot of things now through the prism of the official party line about that day five years ago.
We could go into the main conference room and watch events on an eight feet movie projector screen. I looked briefly and went back to my desk. I guess that I was waiting for some sort of definitive orders or gameplan. The supervisor instead of huddling with the managers and supervisors outside the room began to lock up the express mail deliveries and then unlock and redistribute them.
The second tower was hit and nobody seemed to be quite sure what to do. Rumors of Rockefeller Center being the next logical target from this now evident terrorist attack abounded. I got through to my wife again on the phone. She saw the second hit outside her window. Her company was evacuating their premises. With at least the knowledge that my wife was on her way home, the only thing was for myself to figure how I was going to get home. The subways were shutdown for fear of explosions or gas in some wider plot.
People said that the tower had collapsed. I didn’t want to see that. My imagination pictured it falling into a horizontal position and hitting other building etc. I finally went into the conference room and sat down for a replay of the destruction. To my shock the collapse of the first tower looked like an implosion. I stated so aloud. Others in the room said nothing. They either did not hear me or were absorbed in their own little shock bubbles. Down it went like a house of cards. I went back to my desk.
Finally after the second collapse, it was announced that we were to leave the building and make our way home, most of us on foot, and that would be a lot of miles for some of us. They opened up the cafeteria for a free lunch, carb up, and we were on our individual ways. You’re on your own.
I had been strangely calm through this whole scenario. Innately, I knew that I was not going to die that day. I could stand by and witness the events so much so like I had done all my life in front of a TV.
I decided to walk down Sixth Avenue also awkwardly known and renamed as Avenue of the Americas.
I could see smoke in the distance. It was so much less smoke than if I had decided to walk down Fifth Avenue. Parts of the Twin Towers were once visible directly in line of sight down that avenue. No doubt to avoid more stress than the moment could produce I walked slowly in the crowds down Sixth Avenue.
The narrow bottom of Manhattan, the downtown area, the old Dutch town, spreads out into a wider area about Canal Street. Trinity Place behind Trinity Church on Wall Street, changes to Church Street, feeds into the beginning of Sixth Avenue at Canal Street. As I walked there were some displays of emotion. Some young man in a yarmulke was wrapped in an Israeli Flag. There was somebody yelling from across the street. A fight developed between this yelling man who crossed over the street and the fight was with companions of the young man in the flag.
Below Fourteenth Street I pushed over a street or two toward Fifth Avenue. The crowds were getting thicker as we approached Canal Street and I still did not know how I was going to get to the safety of home and my family.
I began to notice a crowd mixed with office workers on their way home and curiosity seekers. I got behind two or three people discussing how to get some sellable film footage on a large TV type video camera one of them was carrying. And the price of one hundred dollars was promised by the would be producer and organizer of this trek downtown. "How are we going to get in? The radio says everything below Canal Street is closed and off limits. Only police, rescue workers and national guard allowed into what is now being called a war zone…" Without a radio I heard a sliver of this and a inkling of that. The old verbal communications network was alive without means of total dependence on any electricity.
Curiously enough, all the outdoor cafes that I passed in Greenwich Village were doing a brisk business. I had no way of gauging the mentality of the people sipping on wine and eating linguini. I just didn’t know or really care as much as mentally plotting an escape route from the city.
I got down to Canal Street and sure enough there were road blocks and police everywhere. I kept moving east. At Broadway, I asked a cop how could I get to the Staten Island Ferry. Even if I walked over one of the bridges to Brooklyn and over Brooklyn, there was no foot traffic allowed over the Verazano Bridge connecting Brooklyn with Staten Island. Well anyway, like most NYC cops, they're human too, and this one told me that he didn’t know if the ferries were still working but I could walk downtown under the FDR Drive all the way over by the East River. If nothing else, I could probably walk over the Brooklyn Bridge. I was familiar with Brooklyn from there all the way to Bay Ridge where if nothing else I might share a cab ride to Staten Island. Anyway, it was a game plan. I was on my own in a war zone. New York had changed that day. America had changed too as well.
The crowds on the sidewalks were thick making their way to the Manhattan Bridge just off Chinatown. It was hot and then I remembered that I did not have enough cash to take a cab should I find one. Had to find an ATM. I think that one or two banks were off line and I could not get any money. The third bank, one of the biggest in the city was still operational.
I got my cash and began to realize how all those pictures of years past from a Yugoslavia in civil war were no longer distant, how close even New York City could descend into chaos at any given moment. As a student of history, I knew that it was the loss of the aqueducts that turned ancient Rome into a ghost town for over a thousand years. How fragile civilization is and totally interconnected we are these days. It is this concept of interdependence in a shrinking world of land and resources that butts up against chosen and regional life styles that was one of the remote cause this day of this attack on the world’s premier global city.
I separated from the crowd and started to make my way down along and under FDR drive. The sky downtown was filled with a mixture of smoke and a gritty gray stuff blowing in the air. The ground had at least an inch of this gray stuff and it was piled up higher in places like small snowdrifts. I had to wet a paper towel and hold it to my nose most of the way of my walk. Emergency vehicles passing by stirred up the gray stuff and the darkness under the highway structure only added to the gloom of the day.
I had not seen the sun since Canal Street. Then, there it was fully in view just as I passed the Brooklyn Bridge, the steaming caldron of what was left of the World Trade Center. The verbal chatter on the street from the radio or the TV news said that the immediate rescue workers and fireman trying to put out the fire, they were calling it "The Pit". And indeed passing by and occasionally looking at it I half imagined some sci-fi movie and lightning bolts emanating from the smoke and fire illuminated on the smoke rising up to a godless heaven.
As I analyzed a few of the facts or rumors already presenting themselves as fact, I looked at The Pit from a safe but close distance and could not imagine how many people were lost so far, I calculated thousands, much more the true factual number. I looked at the distant horror and although I thought myself modern and thought that the concept of Satan was a medieval myth, on that day and on that spot, I knew that Satan was a very real entity whether of one source or of all the uncaring, evil persons in the world would could turn their back on members of their own species in such a Godless manner.
How lucky we Americans have been for so long, hiding amongst our laws, and being spared so many raw aspects of the terrible reality of man’s human nature.
I suppose there was a smell of the fire but I do not remember it. The fire in the pit would burn another three months of so. I only remember the dust.
I passed a few individuals coming and going. Saw one man in civilian dress in a very properly fitted filter mask and wondered where he got it. The heat, and I now lacked water, was getting to me. It had been something like two and one half hours coming the seven or so miles from 50th Street down to the Battery.
There was a ferryboat docked at the terminal. I quickly walked the remaining distance not wanting to miss the boat. No sooner had I stepped on the boat, that they gated up and the old car boat was on its way. The car boats appeared to be being used to transport emergency vehicles and fire trucks back and forth. If it had not been for the vehicle transport, I do not think that the ferry would be taking on any passengers.
There were a couple of firemen on board, covering in grime; their faces blackened like coal miners. I heard them talking to a ferryboat deck hand. They had just been relieved. They were going over to Staten Island to clean up, get a few hours rest and would be back on duty in a matter of hours.
I stood briefly on the back deck of the boat and looked at the horrible site shrouded in smoke. The image began to shrink as we left the dock. I tried to remember from memory exactly where the two towers had stood. The whole thing was academic. It didn’t matter. The grand complex of buildings were gone and in total ruins and an eternal footnote in history.
I went to the concession stand in the hope of getting a bottle of water. The concession stand was empty of personnel. I heard someone tell me I could take water from the tap. I decided not to drink any water for the moment. As I walked toward the front of the boat, I realized that there were life preservers all scattered here and there on the floor.
My wife would tell me later of being on one of the last boats to leave Manhattan in the morning after her flight down thirty two flights of steps in the dark, electricity had failed in her building shortly after the second plane crash. The ferry was filled to capacity with passengers and was shoving off the dock when the first tower fell and the "black cloud" descended over everything. I could well imagine a scene out of Dante’s Inferno.
In the panic and confusion of things happening, people at the terminal and at the dock started to jump into the water as the boat was leaving. No doubt, this had been that same boat with so many life preservers scattered about. My wife could not give me any figure as to how many people jumped into the water and we never heard any follow up story on any of the Anglo speaking channels on TV that night. We did watch some of the Spanish speaking channels briefly. Their content was much more graphic and uncensored than mainstream media coverage. Like watching events earlier in the day at work on TV, a few minutes of gore and blood reality was more than I chose to view that night.
The ferry arrived on the other side. The bus that would take me home did not charge us refugees anything for the trip. The bus traveled up Victory Boulevard to where it crosses Forrest Avenue. This is a high spot along the waterfront toward Manhattan. From a distance the column of smoke from the former WTC looked so small. This was a spot where on some occasions, the water and optical illusion might bring the World Trade Towers close and up into your face with the illusion like a full moon much larger than life on the horizon than at any other time. Today it seemed good that everything looked so small and far away.
That night listening to TV, no images being allowed from downtown, we heard voices describe the collapse of number seven WTC and the possibility that the seventy story Liberty Plaza Building was in danger of collapse at well, which thank God, did not happen.
It was a dark world that night. No clarity or certainty coming from the magic box of TV that I had been watching for all my life. The ferryboats were suspended for the next three to four days. There were no phone calls from work as to what to do.
I did not go into work next day. The following day I managed to take two buses over to Brooklyn and make a connection on two subways that were operating outside of the war zone and got to work.
When the express bus was operating for the first time on Friday I did not opt to take it. I told the bus driver, not the regular guy, that I had changed my mind. I was too frightened to go through the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel into Manhattan. Claustrophobia and extreme anxiety overtook me, perhaps delayed stress of sorts. I took the regular buses to Brooklyn and the subways instead that day.
On Monday I bit the bullet, I took the express bus and it snagged this way and that way along unfamiliar streets toward the FDR Drive, the quickest way out of the war zone after the Battery Tunnel. Electricity was only partially available downtown. The New York Stock Exchange was going to make it appearance that day having been shut down for four days the previous week. As the express bus took this street or that to connect to the FDR Drive, one could see the distant column of smoke still burning.
On every street corner there were military vehicles and soldiers with gas masks at the ready and weapons, weapons, weapons. The Stock Market was going to open that day and do business no matter what.
The regular express bus driver had returned in the next few days. Some of the regular passengers like the German lady or the blonde lady no longer got on that bus. I only hoped that they had made it out of the World Trade Center that day and were merely collecting unemployment and were not dead.
It was maybe two weeks later when I took a few days off from work, that I began to make phone calls to distant relatives and also to friends in Arizona. I guess, like a lot of New Yorkers, I had been shell-shocked.
I judged what was most important in the interim. What was most important was going home straight from work to the illusion of safety in one’s home and with one’s family. No overtime please, the important things in life are far, far away from work.
That September morning was not much different. The bus driver said his usual hello to me and since I was the first passenger on his route, he shared some of his personals with me: what highly regarded technical highschool his son was going to Brooklyn, where he shopped at on the south shore, his large home equity loan payments etc. And I shared some of my life stuff in five minutes of private time before the bus started to fill with passengers along the way.
Some of the regulars stand out even now. A woman with a thick German accent was always complaining about having missed his bus by seconds the day before or something similar before the chubby middle aged blond woman, who was always looking at her watch, would wonder aloud why she was late every day to her downtown HMO clerical job which started at 6:00 A.M.
The bus never got through the battery tunnel before 6:05 A.M. and her complaints to her usual seating companion never seemed to take responsibility for her own lateness. It was the bus and the bus driver on the first run of the day that was always late. There was one interesting guy in his early seventies still working for the sack of health benefits for his wife who had apparently been in Hiroshima after the war and one incredible story seemed to get told several times and me an avid listener to history loved hearing the story every time of the grunt GIs having to empty out an underground bunker of mummified Japanese soldiers’ bodies a year after the bomb hit. Etc.
The bus was unusually early that day. Good traffic over the Verrazano Bridge and a swift trip, no accidents, on the Brooklyn highway from the bridge to the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel into downtown Manhattan. New York is a series of islands and waterways that have to be gotten around. Everyday is a goulish traffic situation on any day at any time and without rush hour traffic to complicate things on the rusty potholed infrastructure. Only St. Louis had more pot holes on its ring highways I would often ponder to myself remembering my cross country road trip from Arizona to New York some two odd years before.
Early. Too early. Wanted to kill time. Those in a rush to get uptown would discharge at the R train Rector St. subway entrance and take advantage of the free transfer option. The German lady and the middled aged blond always got off at Dey Street and if there was a red light, I would see them cross the street and walk toward the giant World Trade Center complex of buildings. I decided to kill some time. I would get off at the WTC stop and walk across the street to buy donuts for the office from that fancy Atlanta donut franchise. I would then take the R train uptown and be on time for work.
I found the transformation of Manhattan quite strange when I had arrived back in New York some two years earlier and having spent eight years in Arizona in the hiatus. The city had changed dramatically. You could no longer go into office buildings without a guard asking you your business, every cheap bar that had seemed to be on every corner of downtown seemed to have been replaced by that Seattle coffee franchise. The once blue-collar nature of people working in warehouses all through and around downtown was gone. The warehouses were now living lofts and many former office buildings had converted to this condo trend. So it was that the Krispy Kreme was now located in what used to be a major Hong Kong banking concern. This was in one of the lower buildings that wrapped itself around the sterile plaza in front of number One and Two WTC.
Had stopped off maybe a year before on a Saturday and I got a donut and a cup of coffee and sat in that sterile plaza. They had added loose chairs and tables about the plaza to give it some organic flow but it never was a warm place to sit and meditate. Not enough green or nature I suppose.
The strangest thing happened to me when I was about to get off the bus around 6:05 A.M. I had changed my mind. I would buy donuts tomorrow. I stayed on the bus and would do another time killing exercise further uptown.
(A year later I would tell this story to the COO of my company in the conference room where the first anniversary ceremonies were being show on the large TV screen. I told the story about how I was going to get off the bus at the World Trade Center that fateful day and buy Krispy Kreme donuts and decided to do it tomorrow instead. The moral of the story is that tomorrow is not guaranteed to anybody. )
I got off the bus around twenty first street before the bus would turn on twenty third and go over to Madison before going north again. I would transfer to the local M6 bus and ride to the front door of my office building near Rockefeller Center. I stood and waited.
The morning form was calm. There was no touch of autumn in the air yet. It wasn’t humid. No breeze. Then I noticed something rare in Manhattan on anything but an early Sunday morning.
Where was the usual traffic? I had done this routine in the past and the density and frequency of traffic was always busy even at six A.M. on a weekday morning. I waited a few minutes. The morning traffic reminded me of those days when there was a public school holiday. I got onto the arriving local bus and went to work.
Work was no different. I work in a closed off secured area behind glass. The security is to handle checks and securities for this small brokerage firm.
About nine o’clock, there were phone calls. People where moving about outside the glass panels. Then the news hit us about a plane hitting one of the World Trade Center. I scrambled to try and get CNN on the Internet. No response. I kept trying and then a hit. Surprisingly there was a picture of the wounded tower and a few unconfirmed lines of news. Not much to go on but at least it was something of a confirmation of the verbal rumors.
I wanted to call my wife working downtown but had to wait in line at what we called the single"jailhouse" phone for external employee use. I finally got through to her. She was standing at a 32nd floor window looking north three blocks to the smoking tower. All sorts of stories and rumors seemed to abound at that very moment. In my mind and in memory, it seems something of a blur until the main story laid itself out. I remember a lot of things now through the prism of the official party line about that day five years ago.
We could go into the main conference room and watch events on an eight feet movie projector screen. I looked briefly and went back to my desk. I guess that I was waiting for some sort of definitive orders or gameplan. The supervisor instead of huddling with the managers and supervisors outside the room began to lock up the express mail deliveries and then unlock and redistribute them.
The second tower was hit and nobody seemed to be quite sure what to do. Rumors of Rockefeller Center being the next logical target from this now evident terrorist attack abounded. I got through to my wife again on the phone. She saw the second hit outside her window. Her company was evacuating their premises. With at least the knowledge that my wife was on her way home, the only thing was for myself to figure how I was going to get home. The subways were shutdown for fear of explosions or gas in some wider plot.
People said that the tower had collapsed. I didn’t want to see that. My imagination pictured it falling into a horizontal position and hitting other building etc. I finally went into the conference room and sat down for a replay of the destruction. To my shock the collapse of the first tower looked like an implosion. I stated so aloud. Others in the room said nothing. They either did not hear me or were absorbed in their own little shock bubbles. Down it went like a house of cards. I went back to my desk.
Finally after the second collapse, it was announced that we were to leave the building and make our way home, most of us on foot, and that would be a lot of miles for some of us. They opened up the cafeteria for a free lunch, carb up, and we were on our individual ways. You’re on your own.
I had been strangely calm through this whole scenario. Innately, I knew that I was not going to die that day. I could stand by and witness the events so much so like I had done all my life in front of a TV.
I decided to walk down Sixth Avenue also awkwardly known and renamed as Avenue of the Americas.
I could see smoke in the distance. It was so much less smoke than if I had decided to walk down Fifth Avenue. Parts of the Twin Towers were once visible directly in line of sight down that avenue. No doubt to avoid more stress than the moment could produce I walked slowly in the crowds down Sixth Avenue.
The narrow bottom of Manhattan, the downtown area, the old Dutch town, spreads out into a wider area about Canal Street. Trinity Place behind Trinity Church on Wall Street, changes to Church Street, feeds into the beginning of Sixth Avenue at Canal Street. As I walked there were some displays of emotion. Some young man in a yarmulke was wrapped in an Israeli Flag. There was somebody yelling from across the street. A fight developed between this yelling man who crossed over the street and the fight was with companions of the young man in the flag.
Below Fourteenth Street I pushed over a street or two toward Fifth Avenue. The crowds were getting thicker as we approached Canal Street and I still did not know how I was going to get to the safety of home and my family.
I began to notice a crowd mixed with office workers on their way home and curiosity seekers. I got behind two or three people discussing how to get some sellable film footage on a large TV type video camera one of them was carrying. And the price of one hundred dollars was promised by the would be producer and organizer of this trek downtown. "How are we going to get in? The radio says everything below Canal Street is closed and off limits. Only police, rescue workers and national guard allowed into what is now being called a war zone…" Without a radio I heard a sliver of this and a inkling of that. The old verbal communications network was alive without means of total dependence on any electricity.
Curiously enough, all the outdoor cafes that I passed in Greenwich Village were doing a brisk business. I had no way of gauging the mentality of the people sipping on wine and eating linguini. I just didn’t know or really care as much as mentally plotting an escape route from the city.
I got down to Canal Street and sure enough there were road blocks and police everywhere. I kept moving east. At Broadway, I asked a cop how could I get to the Staten Island Ferry. Even if I walked over one of the bridges to Brooklyn and over Brooklyn, there was no foot traffic allowed over the Verazano Bridge connecting Brooklyn with Staten Island. Well anyway, like most NYC cops, they're human too, and this one told me that he didn’t know if the ferries were still working but I could walk downtown under the FDR Drive all the way over by the East River. If nothing else, I could probably walk over the Brooklyn Bridge. I was familiar with Brooklyn from there all the way to Bay Ridge where if nothing else I might share a cab ride to Staten Island. Anyway, it was a game plan. I was on my own in a war zone. New York had changed that day. America had changed too as well.
The crowds on the sidewalks were thick making their way to the Manhattan Bridge just off Chinatown. It was hot and then I remembered that I did not have enough cash to take a cab should I find one. Had to find an ATM. I think that one or two banks were off line and I could not get any money. The third bank, one of the biggest in the city was still operational.
I got my cash and began to realize how all those pictures of years past from a Yugoslavia in civil war were no longer distant, how close even New York City could descend into chaos at any given moment. As a student of history, I knew that it was the loss of the aqueducts that turned ancient Rome into a ghost town for over a thousand years. How fragile civilization is and totally interconnected we are these days. It is this concept of interdependence in a shrinking world of land and resources that butts up against chosen and regional life styles that was one of the remote cause this day of this attack on the world’s premier global city.
I separated from the crowd and started to make my way down along and under FDR drive. The sky downtown was filled with a mixture of smoke and a gritty gray stuff blowing in the air. The ground had at least an inch of this gray stuff and it was piled up higher in places like small snowdrifts. I had to wet a paper towel and hold it to my nose most of the way of my walk. Emergency vehicles passing by stirred up the gray stuff and the darkness under the highway structure only added to the gloom of the day.
I had not seen the sun since Canal Street. Then, there it was fully in view just as I passed the Brooklyn Bridge, the steaming caldron of what was left of the World Trade Center. The verbal chatter on the street from the radio or the TV news said that the immediate rescue workers and fireman trying to put out the fire, they were calling it "The Pit". And indeed passing by and occasionally looking at it I half imagined some sci-fi movie and lightning bolts emanating from the smoke and fire illuminated on the smoke rising up to a godless heaven.
As I analyzed a few of the facts or rumors already presenting themselves as fact, I looked at The Pit from a safe but close distance and could not imagine how many people were lost so far, I calculated thousands, much more the true factual number. I looked at the distant horror and although I thought myself modern and thought that the concept of Satan was a medieval myth, on that day and on that spot, I knew that Satan was a very real entity whether of one source or of all the uncaring, evil persons in the world would could turn their back on members of their own species in such a Godless manner.
How lucky we Americans have been for so long, hiding amongst our laws, and being spared so many raw aspects of the terrible reality of man’s human nature.
I suppose there was a smell of the fire but I do not remember it. The fire in the pit would burn another three months of so. I only remember the dust.
I passed a few individuals coming and going. Saw one man in civilian dress in a very properly fitted filter mask and wondered where he got it. The heat, and I now lacked water, was getting to me. It had been something like two and one half hours coming the seven or so miles from 50th Street down to the Battery.
There was a ferryboat docked at the terminal. I quickly walked the remaining distance not wanting to miss the boat. No sooner had I stepped on the boat, that they gated up and the old car boat was on its way. The car boats appeared to be being used to transport emergency vehicles and fire trucks back and forth. If it had not been for the vehicle transport, I do not think that the ferry would be taking on any passengers.
There were a couple of firemen on board, covering in grime; their faces blackened like coal miners. I heard them talking to a ferryboat deck hand. They had just been relieved. They were going over to Staten Island to clean up, get a few hours rest and would be back on duty in a matter of hours.
I stood briefly on the back deck of the boat and looked at the horrible site shrouded in smoke. The image began to shrink as we left the dock. I tried to remember from memory exactly where the two towers had stood. The whole thing was academic. It didn’t matter. The grand complex of buildings were gone and in total ruins and an eternal footnote in history.
I went to the concession stand in the hope of getting a bottle of water. The concession stand was empty of personnel. I heard someone tell me I could take water from the tap. I decided not to drink any water for the moment. As I walked toward the front of the boat, I realized that there were life preservers all scattered here and there on the floor.
My wife would tell me later of being on one of the last boats to leave Manhattan in the morning after her flight down thirty two flights of steps in the dark, electricity had failed in her building shortly after the second plane crash. The ferry was filled to capacity with passengers and was shoving off the dock when the first tower fell and the "black cloud" descended over everything. I could well imagine a scene out of Dante’s Inferno.
In the panic and confusion of things happening, people at the terminal and at the dock started to jump into the water as the boat was leaving. No doubt, this had been that same boat with so many life preservers scattered about. My wife could not give me any figure as to how many people jumped into the water and we never heard any follow up story on any of the Anglo speaking channels on TV that night. We did watch some of the Spanish speaking channels briefly. Their content was much more graphic and uncensored than mainstream media coverage. Like watching events earlier in the day at work on TV, a few minutes of gore and blood reality was more than I chose to view that night.
The ferry arrived on the other side. The bus that would take me home did not charge us refugees anything for the trip. The bus traveled up Victory Boulevard to where it crosses Forrest Avenue. This is a high spot along the waterfront toward Manhattan. From a distance the column of smoke from the former WTC looked so small. This was a spot where on some occasions, the water and optical illusion might bring the World Trade Towers close and up into your face with the illusion like a full moon much larger than life on the horizon than at any other time. Today it seemed good that everything looked so small and far away.
That night listening to TV, no images being allowed from downtown, we heard voices describe the collapse of number seven WTC and the possibility that the seventy story Liberty Plaza Building was in danger of collapse at well, which thank God, did not happen.
It was a dark world that night. No clarity or certainty coming from the magic box of TV that I had been watching for all my life. The ferryboats were suspended for the next three to four days. There were no phone calls from work as to what to do.
I did not go into work next day. The following day I managed to take two buses over to Brooklyn and make a connection on two subways that were operating outside of the war zone and got to work.
When the express bus was operating for the first time on Friday I did not opt to take it. I told the bus driver, not the regular guy, that I had changed my mind. I was too frightened to go through the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel into Manhattan. Claustrophobia and extreme anxiety overtook me, perhaps delayed stress of sorts. I took the regular buses to Brooklyn and the subways instead that day.
On Monday I bit the bullet, I took the express bus and it snagged this way and that way along unfamiliar streets toward the FDR Drive, the quickest way out of the war zone after the Battery Tunnel. Electricity was only partially available downtown. The New York Stock Exchange was going to make it appearance that day having been shut down for four days the previous week. As the express bus took this street or that to connect to the FDR Drive, one could see the distant column of smoke still burning.
On every street corner there were military vehicles and soldiers with gas masks at the ready and weapons, weapons, weapons. The Stock Market was going to open that day and do business no matter what.
The regular express bus driver had returned in the next few days. Some of the regular passengers like the German lady or the blonde lady no longer got on that bus. I only hoped that they had made it out of the World Trade Center that day and were merely collecting unemployment and were not dead.
It was maybe two weeks later when I took a few days off from work, that I began to make phone calls to distant relatives and also to friends in Arizona. I guess, like a lot of New Yorkers, I had been shell-shocked.
I judged what was most important in the interim. What was most important was going home straight from work to the illusion of safety in one’s home and with one’s family. No overtime please, the important things in life are far, far away from work.
Opede
In Memorial
(Dedicated to the lives and souls and glory of our Republic – World Trade Center 2001)
OPEDE
In silhouette full future stands,
Hollow, rooted deep,
In human grief.
Hollow, rooted deep,
In human grief.
Here lay tomorrow,
Fragile as the unborn soul
Within each person waiting.
Fragile as the unborn soul
Within each person waiting.
Tradition,
Life’s certain repetition,
There in pieces
Forming shadows past,
Ready to build once more
With your spirit Opede –
An ashen bird rising
At dawn to day,
A fragment of love
Sometimes whole,
Chained to final link
present.
Life’s certain repetition,
There in pieces
Forming shadows past,
Ready to build once more
With your spirit Opede –
An ashen bird rising
At dawn to day,
A fragment of love
Sometimes whole,
Chained to final link
present.
(Opede, I was once told, is a town in France destroyed in World War II. The town was later reinhabited and rebuilt by refugees.)
Sunday, June 25, 2006
RandomThoughts
I live in Staten Island, New York.
Some few weeks afterthe 911 disaster I stood on the outside of one of the old car boat ferrys. All the people were fixed in gaze straight ahead toward the St. George Ferry Terminal. I could not help but notice that the sun was setting over Jersey in a brilliant multi-colored Arizona sunset. And nobody but me seemed to notice.
It was at that point that I realized that too much was being devoted to the dead of 911. Oh, they deserved their memorial services. But there comes a point when mourning is too much. It is to be expected to be shell shocked or take our individual time to recuperate from trauma, but the experience of life is to be living.
In fact, the reason I was on the boat that day was because the umteenth Fireman's memorial Service was being held at St. Patrick's Cathedral and traffic was banned from Fifth Avenue and my Express Bus was somewhere, not there, and I took the Subway to the Ferry Boat.
And now they are fighting over putting a $500 million dollar spending limit on World Trade Center Memorial to the dead. I feel that Bloomy dropped the human ball in 2002 when newly elected when he did not condemn the land and sow grass seeds. Hallowed ground is hallowed ground nomatter how much you connive to make a "God" almighty buck in real estate.
By the time that this real estate fiasco is built, so many will have forgotten why we honor the people who died there. We honor them because they are victims of an American/Saudi energy war for global domination. And the money the specualtors have squeezed out of $70 dollar a barrel petroleum could be reduced tomorrow by $20 a barrel if the U.S. Justice Department went after the corporate speculators who want to turn everything in America into a parking lot or a hole in the ground like the former World Trade Center.
I do not want to make this blog too political but the balance of fairness in this once great land is tipped in favor of those that already have and against those who have to pay $3.50 a gallon at the pump for gasoline. And from this end of the spectrum it hurts. And who wants to hear multi-million dollar media mouthpieces tell us nothing anymore.
No matter where I turn in this city I keep running in to the ghosts of common people whose lives directly or indirectly were changed on that great day of American Defeat, that day we could not or would not defend our skys. I give partial blame to it all on Ronald Reagan and his trashing of the air controller's union a decade and a half before. All the senior guys or all the guys who may have had the backbone to push the Defense Department's buttons to scramble jets to New York's defense on 911, many of them were handed a pink slip, a Republican victory over labor unions. And the wusses that stayed on and those who stand there now know that there is no point in trying to do a stellar job of protecting our skys when management, the U.S. government only wants mediocrity.
That's what killed do many on 911. Lack of leadership in government, no backbone and a "it's good enough for government work" attitude of non-excellance rating of all things it touches. And all the Kings horses and all the Kings men could not prevent 911 or give a helping hand after Katrina.
In the name and memory of those lost on 911, it is time to massively downsize this national government. The lives we save may be our own.
Some few weeks afterthe 911 disaster I stood on the outside of one of the old car boat ferrys. All the people were fixed in gaze straight ahead toward the St. George Ferry Terminal. I could not help but notice that the sun was setting over Jersey in a brilliant multi-colored Arizona sunset. And nobody but me seemed to notice.
It was at that point that I realized that too much was being devoted to the dead of 911. Oh, they deserved their memorial services. But there comes a point when mourning is too much. It is to be expected to be shell shocked or take our individual time to recuperate from trauma, but the experience of life is to be living.
In fact, the reason I was on the boat that day was because the umteenth Fireman's memorial Service was being held at St. Patrick's Cathedral and traffic was banned from Fifth Avenue and my Express Bus was somewhere, not there, and I took the Subway to the Ferry Boat.
And now they are fighting over putting a $500 million dollar spending limit on World Trade Center Memorial to the dead. I feel that Bloomy dropped the human ball in 2002 when newly elected when he did not condemn the land and sow grass seeds. Hallowed ground is hallowed ground nomatter how much you connive to make a "God" almighty buck in real estate.
By the time that this real estate fiasco is built, so many will have forgotten why we honor the people who died there. We honor them because they are victims of an American/Saudi energy war for global domination. And the money the specualtors have squeezed out of $70 dollar a barrel petroleum could be reduced tomorrow by $20 a barrel if the U.S. Justice Department went after the corporate speculators who want to turn everything in America into a parking lot or a hole in the ground like the former World Trade Center.
I do not want to make this blog too political but the balance of fairness in this once great land is tipped in favor of those that already have and against those who have to pay $3.50 a gallon at the pump for gasoline. And from this end of the spectrum it hurts. And who wants to hear multi-million dollar media mouthpieces tell us nothing anymore.
No matter where I turn in this city I keep running in to the ghosts of common people whose lives directly or indirectly were changed on that great day of American Defeat, that day we could not or would not defend our skys. I give partial blame to it all on Ronald Reagan and his trashing of the air controller's union a decade and a half before. All the senior guys or all the guys who may have had the backbone to push the Defense Department's buttons to scramble jets to New York's defense on 911, many of them were handed a pink slip, a Republican victory over labor unions. And the wusses that stayed on and those who stand there now know that there is no point in trying to do a stellar job of protecting our skys when management, the U.S. government only wants mediocrity.
That's what killed do many on 911. Lack of leadership in government, no backbone and a "it's good enough for government work" attitude of non-excellance rating of all things it touches. And all the Kings horses and all the Kings men could not prevent 911 or give a helping hand after Katrina.
In the name and memory of those lost on 911, it is time to massively downsize this national government. The lives we save may be our own.
Saturday, June 24, 2006
God, Father and Judge
The present anarchy of the Middle East is one that closely parallels and resembles a less violent but very real decline of the values of another age here on the Norte Americana continent.
A couple thoughts merged this week in my mind. And as some of you know me, the mixture may not be true succotash.
I was thinking of Mychal Judge, victim number one of the WTC attack. The Chaplain of the New York City Fire Department rushed downtown to give last rights to the dying and in his act fell victim to falling debris and died. The image of them carrying him across the street from the WTC to lay on the foot of the altar at old Saint Peter’s, a two hundred year old, pagan looking temple of a R.C. church – It is a truly a great iconic American image and symbolic of our loss, losses that day.
Less than a few months ago I caught sight of a NY Waterway Ferry with his name emblazoned on its hull as it sped by the Staten Island ferry in New York bay.
Momentum keeps rising to make this, give this, everyday workaday priest the title of saint. Of course I am not into that thing, but it speaks of respect within the context of the world that he lived in and served. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mychal_Judge
Problem with old poor Mych, he was also chaplain to Gays. Rumor has it that the R.C. church would rather forget him and his heroism. He is not politically correct. He did not properly serve the good ole vatican party line about gays. He served everybody who needed him including his fellow humanity on September 11, 2001.
There is a website. Perhaps God blesses them. I don’t endorse the webiste. The public has already named him Saint Mychal Judge, of a so-called parish in Dallas Texas.
Is this the correct way to due things or is this the modern anarchy of a New Age being born, where tradition can be reshaped to fit regions and individuals. It is the original formula that the R.C. church used to merged local deities with established recognized saints. The Virgin Mary replaced the ten thousand years old Earth Goddess etc of every culture on the planet.
One other thing that caught my eye a week or two ago was the fact that some Japanese children or teachers would rather mock their national anthem (a war mongering song) and makes a play on words with the language in English to suit their amusement.
The Japanese?
This modern western age is repidly falling apart!
And of course coming back to the concept of respect. Spanish speaking immigrants in America are not supposed to sing the American National Anthem (the music of which is an old English drinking/whoring song) en Espanol.
Having been governor of Texas, Gorge Bushito, never realized that the majority or close to it of the people in Texas cannot read or write or communicate in Engles. But of course George (don’t have a clue!) Bush in his dreams was only governor of the white redneck population (minority) or so he rekoned.
I say if you want respect or to show it, show it and sing it in any freaking way or in any freaking language you choose to.
More and more, the national governments and the national media centers grow farther and farther away from reality. The end of the roman empire was like this. But after rome fell, the world and life went on.
Out of the chaos and rubble of the old WTC, a new global era may be dawning.
A couple thoughts merged this week in my mind. And as some of you know me, the mixture may not be true succotash.
I was thinking of Mychal Judge, victim number one of the WTC attack. The Chaplain of the New York City Fire Department rushed downtown to give last rights to the dying and in his act fell victim to falling debris and died. The image of them carrying him across the street from the WTC to lay on the foot of the altar at old Saint Peter’s, a two hundred year old, pagan looking temple of a R.C. church – It is a truly a great iconic American image and symbolic of our loss, losses that day.
Less than a few months ago I caught sight of a NY Waterway Ferry with his name emblazoned on its hull as it sped by the Staten Island ferry in New York bay.
Momentum keeps rising to make this, give this, everyday workaday priest the title of saint. Of course I am not into that thing, but it speaks of respect within the context of the world that he lived in and served. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mychal_Judge
Problem with old poor Mych, he was also chaplain to Gays. Rumor has it that the R.C. church would rather forget him and his heroism. He is not politically correct. He did not properly serve the good ole vatican party line about gays. He served everybody who needed him including his fellow humanity on September 11, 2001.
There is a website. Perhaps God blesses them. I don’t endorse the webiste. The public has already named him Saint Mychal Judge, of a so-called parish in Dallas Texas.
Is this the correct way to due things or is this the modern anarchy of a New Age being born, where tradition can be reshaped to fit regions and individuals. It is the original formula that the R.C. church used to merged local deities with established recognized saints. The Virgin Mary replaced the ten thousand years old Earth Goddess etc of every culture on the planet.
One other thing that caught my eye a week or two ago was the fact that some Japanese children or teachers would rather mock their national anthem (a war mongering song) and makes a play on words with the language in English to suit their amusement.
The Japanese?
This modern western age is repidly falling apart!
And of course coming back to the concept of respect. Spanish speaking immigrants in America are not supposed to sing the American National Anthem (the music of which is an old English drinking/whoring song) en Espanol.
Having been governor of Texas, Gorge Bushito, never realized that the majority or close to it of the people in Texas cannot read or write or communicate in Engles. But of course George (don’t have a clue!) Bush in his dreams was only governor of the white redneck population (minority) or so he rekoned.
I say if you want respect or to show it, show it and sing it in any freaking way or in any freaking language you choose to.
More and more, the national governments and the national media centers grow farther and farther away from reality. The end of the roman empire was like this. But after rome fell, the world and life went on.
Out of the chaos and rubble of the old WTC, a new global era may be dawning.
Saturday, June 17, 2006
A Vision
Thoughts do travel.
…and if only in a second, a thought occurs, it then fades. All is black and yet the mind does wander in thousands of possibilities to label the moment. The mind cross-references and distills. The moment projects common, already acceptable explanations and then begins to search hidden archives on the fringes of reality. It is in this far reaching realm that fear and or fears often hide or live if that is the word and then…?
A blinding distraction appears on the retina. An essence, the crystal of light, of inspiration, flashes a bulb giving temporary brilliance. Outlines appear in levels focusing out away from the former center of brightest whites. These outlines disappear and seem to be reborn but less brilliant with pulsating, diminishing energy traveling down through grays and finally to the darkest shades of dark into blackest black.
A mindstart; a thought.
Is this dream or is this death?
A heartbeat. A throb. A thunder from another world. Silence!
Silence and the echo of the last heartbeat, of the last sound, of the last verbal human moment.
Silence to reflect. Silence to wonder. Silence and the dreaded fear realized, dealt with, melted and dissolved away in an instant of time.
No time here. How long is a second of time where there is no time?
A flash of the shades of gray emerging from the black anti-thought, anti-time, anti-self world are suddenly present. Grays merge backwards into the original flash of inspiration. Blinding light. Pure white. Inner sight is born.
I am trapped, no, suspended in a single moment of time. No past movement; no forward.
The image emerges.
I am sitting at my desk trying to sign onto the companies e-mail system. The system is slow and was no doubt expensive. Computers and software are the tribal magic of this modern age. Nobody is ever quite sure if Bill’s voodoo is better than Blue’s voodoo.
My head is turning. It senses something. Something unbelievable. I can hear screams from the Mexican counter staff in the coffee shop where I usually buy my coffee and bagel. How can I hear screams? That coffee place is floors above me or is it below me. I am in space. I am on the what floor? My mind races for facts to justify ?
Justify what?
What am I seeing outside the narrow slit of glass across the room. What is that object? That round circle both dark and reflecting light like a highly polished metal …?
OH MY GOD! HOLY SHIT!
IT’S A PLANE!. A JET.
I DON’T BELIEVE IT!
IT cannot be!
The moment, a split second before and after presentation of a universal law of physics. The moment passes with my limbs frozen in the last thought of what is it, it cannot be etc. The final moment was real. The last moment existed. But there was no follow up moment to savor or analyze the previous moment. The previous moment was a bitch!
Locked into some disreality of thought. Or perhaps it is a previously unused or unrecognized way of seeing things.. I am outside myself and looking down at some ?
…and if only in a second, a thought occurs, it then fades. All is black and yet the mind does wander in thousands of possibilities to label the moment. The mind cross-references and distills. The moment projects common, already acceptable explanations and then begins to search hidden archives on the fringes of reality. It is in this far reaching realm that fear and or fears often hide or live if that is the word and then…?
I am in comfort. A truly comfort zone enwraps me. I am enveloped in some great benign spirit of the moment. I am merged with dozens of similar hearts and minds thinking the same thoughts, feeling the same feels, realizing the same new realities or possibility of realities.
This must be a dream.
Calm.
I am floating above some child’s play area. Below hundreds of ants are scurrying out of a broken ant farm. The tiny bits, the dark colored entities are fleeing. Some are fleeing in every direction. Others are following others in predictable patterns. Pieces of the clear plastic ant farm cover are falling down on the ants as they try to escape. I focus for a closer view. These are not ants. They are people. They are not fleeing an ant farm. They are trying to escape the wounded entity. Entity? The entity’s name is World Trade Center One.
What an unusual name for a creature? Entity yes. Creature? I don’t understand.
A blinding distraction appears on the retina. An essence, the crystal of light, of inspiration, flashes a bulb giving temporary brilliance. Outlines appear in levels focusing out away from the former center of brightest whites. These outlines disappear and seem to be reborn but less brilliant with pulsating, diminishing energy traveling down through grays and finally to the darkest shades of dark into blackest black.
The flash of light was the impact of a jet onto the outside skin of WTCONE.
In a same measure of time, my skin, my former skin merged with the skin of WTCONE (a name? – an entity, a creature? Has to have a name, a label? How human to label things. Was I once a thing???)
Our skins merge in a force of energy, the crash and the instantaneous spark of fire. Fireball. FIRE. LIGHT. HELL!
I withdraw back into my comfort cocoon. Best to replay this tape from a distance. Yes a distance. A safe marked boundary from that other world. That other world?
A mindstart; a thought.
Is this dream or is this death?
This is not a dream.
This is death.
* * *
What an artist thinks…No…What an artist feels is what I perhaps now feel. I am connected with all the chaos below. I am floating. No I am standing in the midst of screaming, of blood dripping, of detached limbs and heads and emptied torsos, crushed oozing bodies, flames, of sirens sounding, of a thousand screams, no, ten thousand prayers to a living GOD. Where is God today in all this confusion? No answer. Perhaps an answer later. Perhaps.
Valley of tears is a phrase from a childhood prayer comes into focus to label this instant. Life on Earth can indeed become a trek through a great valley of tears. Lord have mercy. Amen.
An artist inspires. An artist touches the souls or is it the spirits of others when they look at his creation, his painting, his music, reads his book. At this moment I want to look away. I have no choice. I am part of this moment. The moment sculpts reality into eternal pictures.. Thoughts and photographic images, real in the human sense, real in the spiritual sense are being formed.
The living and the dead will no doubt in their own time stand back and admire or not understand or may even despise the art of this present moment. Where is the museum? It is here. Time stands still on this planet or at least slows down. Time pauses from second to second. A hundred lives passed in one second. Then two hundred lives passed on not the next second but the second after that. And so on an so forth. Statistics amass.
Amidst the screams and sighs and puzzled thoughts of the unexpected dead, a silence comes. I slip from this macro of life and fade into some micro aspect of my former existence.
I come to a bright sun filled prairie. A simple wood clabbered, white washed house stands in stark contrast to clear blue sky and rich green vegetation textures. A woman with her back to me is hanging wet laundry on clothes lines a short distance from the house. A small barn is also in view. On a short stone wall sits an old woman in a plain white robe. She is watching a small child, a girl in a gingham dress walking about the yard area. The old woman looks in my direction. I recognize her. She is Myrtle. I had been her elder in a church I belonged to. The last church I had belonged to. Haven’t been to church for a long time.
She smiles a faint smile at me. I never made it to her funeral. She never had a funeral when she died at 94. Her body had been willed to science.
The thought occurs to me that she is perhaps dreaming about some scene from her own childhood in early twentieth century rural Illinois. Myrtle gives me non-verbal nods to my questions to her. She had made it to the other side. I would not consider donating my mortal coil to be entrusted to the likes of some smirking first year medical students…
The smell of charred meat. How I always hated that smell. Leaving the roast in the oven too long to dry up and then to burn.
More like a barbecue smell. The teacher in eighth grade wrote in chalk on the slate blackboard common American words that originated in other languages. Barbecue had Spanish origins I think. I remember this as the pungent smell of burning meat rolls off the olfactory senses of a wandering creature all bent over as if in pain. Clothed in a thick dark outfit, he climbs stairs, step after step after step after bloody, dusty step.
The fireman’s breathing is labored. He occasionally reaches for assistance in breathing from the tank hanging off his back. Crackling noise of walkie talkie sounds mix with breathing, and hisses and the smell of burned meat dance around senses in a misty fog of smoke coming and going. The smell of burning petrol and plastic add to this undefinable barbecue sauce.
Why do I smell human smells if I am truly dead? Why am I suddenly connecting in consciousness to the senses of one living man, this fireman? Why am I connected back to the world of the living?
People push by on the dark stairs.
The fireman’s flashlight wavers back and forth to give momentary assistance to the descending surviving refugees of terror. The fireman’s goal is upward, ever upward. A ladder to heaven is not possible but in this behemoth structure heaven might in fact be at the top of this arduous climb.
-
…and if only in a second, a thought occurs, it then fades. All is black and yet the mind does wander in thousands of possibilities to label the moment. The mind cross-references and distills. The moment projects common, already acceptable explanations and then begins to search hidden archives on the fringes of reality. It is in this far reaching realm that fear and or fears often hide or live if that is the word and then…?
A blinding distraction appears on the retina. An essence, the crystal of light, of inspiration, flashes a bulb giving temporary brilliance. Outlines appear in levels focusing out away from the former center of brightest whites. These outlines disappear and seem to be reborn but less brilliant with pulsating, diminishing energy traveling down through grays and finally to the darkest shades of dark into blackest black.
A mindstart; a thought.
Is this dream or is this death?
A heartbeat. A throb. A thunder from another world. Silence!
Silence and the echo of the last heartbeat, of the last sound, of the last verbal human moment.
Silence to reflect. Silence to wonder. Silence and the dreaded fear realized, dealt with, melted and dissolved away in an instant of time.
No time here. How long is a second of time where there is no time?
A flash of the shades of gray emerging from the black anti-thought, anti-time, anti-self world are suddenly present. Grays merge backwards into the original flash of inspiration. Blinding light. Pure white. Inner sight is born.
I am trapped, no, suspended in a single moment of time. No past movement; no forward.
The image emerges.
I am sitting at my desk trying to sign onto the companies e-mail system. The system is slow and was no doubt expensive. Computers and software are the tribal magic of this modern age. Nobody is ever quite sure if Bill’s voodoo is better than Blue’s voodoo.
My head is turning. It senses something. Something unbelievable. I can hear screams from the Mexican counter staff in the coffee shop where I usually buy my coffee and bagel. How can I hear screams? That coffee place is floors above me or is it below me. I am in space. I am on the what floor? My mind races for facts to justify ?
Justify what?
What am I seeing outside the narrow slit of glass across the room. What is that object? That round circle both dark and reflecting light like a highly polished metal …?
OH MY GOD! HOLY SHIT!
IT’S A PLANE!. A JET.
I DON’T BELIEVE IT!
IT cannot be!
The moment, a split second before and after presentation of a universal law of physics. The moment passes with my limbs frozen in the last thought of what is it, it cannot be etc. The final moment was real. The last moment existed. But there was no follow up moment to savor or analyze the previous moment. The previous moment was a bitch!
Locked into some disreality of thought. Or perhaps it is a previously unused or unrecognized way of seeing things.. I am outside myself and looking down at some ?
…and if only in a second, a thought occurs, it then fades. All is black and yet the mind does wander in thousands of possibilities to label the moment. The mind cross-references and distills. The moment projects common, already acceptable explanations and then begins to search hidden archives on the fringes of reality. It is in this far reaching realm that fear and or fears often hide or live if that is the word and then…?
I am in comfort. A truly comfort zone enwraps me. I am enveloped in some great benign spirit of the moment. I am merged with dozens of similar hearts and minds thinking the same thoughts, feeling the same feels, realizing the same new realities or possibility of realities.
This must be a dream.
Calm.
I am floating above some child’s play area. Below hundreds of ants are scurrying out of a broken ant farm. The tiny bits, the dark colored entities are fleeing. Some are fleeing in every direction. Others are following others in predictable patterns. Pieces of the clear plastic ant farm cover are falling down on the ants as they try to escape. I focus for a closer view. These are not ants. They are people. They are not fleeing an ant farm. They are trying to escape the wounded entity. Entity? The entity’s name is World Trade Center One.
What an unusual name for a creature? Entity yes. Creature? I don’t understand.
A blinding distraction appears on the retina. An essence, the crystal of light, of inspiration, flashes a bulb giving temporary brilliance. Outlines appear in levels focusing out away from the former center of brightest whites. These outlines disappear and seem to be reborn but less brilliant with pulsating, diminishing energy traveling down through grays and finally to the darkest shades of dark into blackest black.
The flash of light was the impact of a jet onto the outside skin of WTCONE.
In a same measure of time, my skin, my former skin merged with the skin of WTCONE (a name? – an entity, a creature? Has to have a name, a label? How human to label things. Was I once a thing???)
Our skins merge in a force of energy, the crash and the instantaneous spark of fire. Fireball. FIRE. LIGHT. HELL!
I withdraw back into my comfort cocoon. Best to replay this tape from a distance. Yes a distance. A safe marked boundary from that other world. That other world?
A mindstart; a thought.
Is this dream or is this death?
This is not a dream.
This is death.
* * *
What an artist thinks…No…What an artist feels is what I perhaps now feel. I am connected with all the chaos below. I am floating. No I am standing in the midst of screaming, of blood dripping, of detached limbs and heads and emptied torsos, crushed oozing bodies, flames, of sirens sounding, of a thousand screams, no, ten thousand prayers to a living GOD. Where is God today in all this confusion? No answer. Perhaps an answer later. Perhaps.
Valley of tears is a phrase from a childhood prayer comes into focus to label this instant. Life on Earth can indeed become a trek through a great valley of tears. Lord have mercy. Amen.
An artist inspires. An artist touches the souls or is it the spirits of others when they look at his creation, his painting, his music, reads his book. At this moment I want to look away. I have no choice. I am part of this moment. The moment sculpts reality into eternal pictures.. Thoughts and photographic images, real in the human sense, real in the spiritual sense are being formed.
The living and the dead will no doubt in their own time stand back and admire or not understand or may even despise the art of this present moment. Where is the museum? It is here. Time stands still on this planet or at least slows down. Time pauses from second to second. A hundred lives passed in one second. Then two hundred lives passed on not the next second but the second after that. And so on an so forth. Statistics amass.
Amidst the screams and sighs and puzzled thoughts of the unexpected dead, a silence comes. I slip from this macro of life and fade into some micro aspect of my former existence.
I come to a bright sun filled prairie. A simple wood clabbered, white washed house stands in stark contrast to clear blue sky and rich green vegetation textures. A woman with her back to me is hanging wet laundry on clothes lines a short distance from the house. A small barn is also in view. On a short stone wall sits an old woman in a plain white robe. She is watching a small child, a girl in a gingham dress walking about the yard area. The old woman looks in my direction. I recognize her. She is Myrtle. I had been her elder in a church I belonged to. The last church I had belonged to. Haven’t been to church for a long time.
She smiles a faint smile at me. I never made it to her funeral. She never had a funeral when she died at 94. Her body had been willed to science.
The thought occurs to me that she is perhaps dreaming about some scene from her own childhood in early twentieth century rural Illinois. Myrtle gives me non-verbal nods to my questions to her. She had made it to the other side. I would not consider donating my mortal coil to be entrusted to the likes of some smirking first year medical students…
The smell of charred meat. How I always hated that smell. Leaving the roast in the oven too long to dry up and then to burn.
More like a barbecue smell. The teacher in eighth grade wrote in chalk on the slate blackboard common American words that originated in other languages. Barbecue had Spanish origins I think. I remember this as the pungent smell of burning meat rolls off the olfactory senses of a wandering creature all bent over as if in pain. Clothed in a thick dark outfit, he climbs stairs, step after step after step after bloody, dusty step.
The fireman’s breathing is labored. He occasionally reaches for assistance in breathing from the tank hanging off his back. Crackling noise of walkie talkie sounds mix with breathing, and hisses and the smell of burned meat dance around senses in a misty fog of smoke coming and going. The smell of burning petrol and plastic add to this undefinable barbecue sauce.
Why do I smell human smells if I am truly dead? Why am I suddenly connecting in consciousness to the senses of one living man, this fireman? Why am I connected back to the world of the living?
People push by on the dark stairs.
The fireman’s flashlight wavers back and forth to give momentary assistance to the descending surviving refugees of terror. The fireman’s goal is upward, ever upward. A ladder to heaven is not possible but in this behemoth structure heaven might in fact be at the top of this arduous climb.
-
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