Sunday will mark 10 years since terrorists hijacked four planes and flew them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Wow. I just read that. Did I just write the most useless exposition ever? For those of you who forgot what happened on September 11th, 2001, please read the first sentence. Glad I could fill in the blanks for anybody who was busy that day.
Okay, the point I’m trying to make is I, like a lot of people, remember what I was doing that day and not just because of all those “Never Forget” t-shirts and bumper stickers.
I was 19 years old and couch surfing in various friends’ apartments in the Twin Cities. That morning I woke up at my brother’s place in Shoreview. I was telemarketing part time for US bank and didn’t have to work until 5PM so that gave me plenty of time to bond with my brother’s sweet premium cable package. I turned the TV on around 11AM and saw the footage of the 2nd plane flying into the tower. My brother woke up and we both just watched over and over again the plane flying into the tower. Every station either redirected to one of the big news networks or was off the air. For hours and hours we saw that footage on a loop.
My mom called me at noon and asked if I was okay. I assured her I was still in Minnesota and she told me she was worried that I might be at the Mall of America and the terrorists could hit that next.
After a while we just shut the TV off. We just couldn’t watch that video one more time. We talked a little bit. Questioned what this meant. Were we going to war? Is this just the way things are now? Planes fly into shit? What?
Then we wrote some jokes about the whole thing.
I want to point out that we didn’t joke about the attack out of disrespect to the victims. We weren’t firing pistols in the air and burning an American flag in the parking lot. We were confused and a little scared and didn’t know what was going to happen next and this was a way to brush off some of the anxiety. We wrote three in total. I forgot what two of them were about but one was how it would be funny if it was a total coincidence that two planes attacked the WTC. Like the guy in the second plane is flying up thinking how original this was and nobody’s ever done it and then he sees the smoke and his last thought is “Goddamnit!”.
I never said they were good j0kes.
We laughed about it for a while and that helped. When it was all over I told my brother there was no way I was ever doing any of those jokes on stage and we tore the page out of the notebook and threw it away.
Please feel free to leave any comments about what you were doing on that day.
Have a fun weekend!
also feel free to give me suggestions for a better ending to this blog post than “have a fun weekend!” because that’s just horrible.
I slept in, my mom woke me up, said the WTC was on fire. I woke up in time to see the second plane hit the next building. I went to work at Tartan and saw the first tower fall next to someone whose dad might have been in the WTC. I recall making a joke and felt horrible.
BJ had brought me to the hospital first thing that morning for scheduled outpatient surgery. I went into the prep area, got some happy drugs, and at some point, was wheeled past BJ, who’s eyes were glued to a TV. He said “the towers are gone”. I had no clue what he was talking about, but then I was wheeled into op, and given general anesthesia.
Woke up a bit later wondering what the tower thing was all about. The whole thing was a bit unreal, but I gather it was like that for most people. Being on percocet just helped validate the unreal feeling for me, I think.
Also, my roommate’s confrence/class on bio-terrorism was cancelled that day. When I got home from op, she said they told everyone to go home and watch TV. It made sense.