Head Tale

There’s a lot of commentary today online, in other media and at memorials around the world.   So instead of adding to the noise, I thought I’d do a quick round-up of some of the most interesting things I’ve seen…

(Oh, okay – I’ll quickly do my own “Where were you when?” story since I don’t think I’ve ever blogged about it.  It’s nothing special – I’d just been hired at the Writers Guild of Alberta and had done 2-3 days of training with the outgoing Program Coordinator but she’s run out of things to teach me so I had a couple days off before my official start date which I think was scheduled to be September 15 or something.  Shea and I were sleeping in our apartment when the phone rang.  Shea’s mom was on the line and told us what had happened then warned us not to go downtown or even to go out if we could help it.  Calgary has their own twin towers but I think she meant her warning more generally as, like so many people that day, nobody knew where or when further attacks might happen.)

We turned on the TV and I don’t really remember much about the next few hours as we both sat there basically glued to the TV, flipping between CNN, CTV, CBC coverage.  No laptop or wifi or iPhone in those days and no real social networking either so I also went on my desktop computer in our office and tried to find out more.  But of course, many sites were overwhelmed and not accessible.  The MetaFilter thread I link to below was one of my main sources of ongoing news and I also remember that I ended up in a ICQ – remember that program? – chat with a former co-worker in Saskatchewan where we traded news and speculation.  Later that day, suffering a bit of overload – in terms of information but also in terms of emotion – we decided to go out and run some errands.  We went to Costco and I can’t think of a more surreal experience in my life then walking through the huge aisles of Costco, looking around and thinking “you’re alive and possibly 20 000 people in New York are dead” as I walked past people.  “Look at all this STUFF you can buy with MONEY but who cares about that anymore?”  And yes, I also was having many of those “the world has changed” thoughts too.)

Kirk Miles, one of the poets I got to know during my time in Calgary posted the following poem on his Facebook wall and so I thought I’d re-post it here:

Dust

Dust is the story of someone’s sorrow.
We see it all, sad listener.
(May I call you sad listener?)

Everything has changed in the news today.
Swirling particles where fathers should be.
Everything has changed including
the shape of mountains and the color of revenge.
Everything has changed except atrocities
and all the dust they send.
Dust is the sound of hijacked screams.
We see it all, sad listener.
(May I call you sad listener?)

Everything has changed on this
September morn.
Accounts payable pages float down
like unfinished business.
Human bodies caught falling
like humans bodies falling.
Everything has changed—
the air is shrieking
as we are scraping the sky
for meaning.
Dust is the sister of tragic ashes
We see it all sad listener.
(May I call you sad listener?)

Everything has changed inside the TV:
Planes exploding like excited stars,
buildings awash with smoke and terror
and the weight of collapsing steel,
like the death toll, is more than we can bear.
Everything has changed
as Auden shouts from the third tower,
the tower we build from light and water:
“There will be no peace.
They hate for hate’s sake.”
Dust is the feel of sand in a throat
We see it all, sad listener.
(May I call you sad listener?)

Everything has changed as
commerce wobbles then topples
and carpeted halls turn to powder.
Everything has changed except
we do not need the money
as much as we need each other.
Everything has changed including the shape
of clouds and the colour of fear.
Dust is the story of someone’s sorrow.
We see it all, sad listener.
(May I call you sad listener?)

• The Internet Archive has collected and compiled 3000 hours of television coverage from 20 TV channels around the world on that day into a video summary of major events of September 11.  If you’re a “world changed that day” kinda person, watching the initial clip as it goes from the on-the-street cheering, waving crowds of NBC’s morning program to a commercial for a mortgage broker which almost instantly cuts back to a “Breaking News” shot of the smoking first tower.  (via Huffington Post)
• “The Mission to Get Bin Laden” – The New Yorker has an essay which purports to tell the inside-story of the Navy Seal Team Six that infiltrated Pakistan and assassinated Osama Bin Laden earlier this year though there’s lots of debate about how accurate an account of this type could be, especially this quick after the events it documents.
• The original MetaFilter 9/11 thread does an amazing job of chronicling events as they happened.
• Tech-guy Jeff Jarvis uses Twitter to re-create his morning ten years ago going into NYC for a business meeting then being caught in the cloud of debris (unfortunately, Twitter cuts him off after a number of posts as having reached some daily limit.)
• Hungarian apologizes for infamous photoshopped “Tourist Guy” image. (via MetaFilter)
• Paul McCartney sings a very appropriate song during the Concert for  NYC: