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Saturday, September 22, 2001.
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Please visit the Nostradamus Index at faqs.org. I know, I know... I read most of this site days ago and refrained from mentioning it because of its kookiness quotient. But this site is somewhat scholarly and objective in its treatment of the topic. The introduction gives a good sense of where this stuff is coming from.
Even if such prophecies are viewed as nothing but the curious obsession of a few, they still allow us to look at various interpretations of the present and the future. They gave me pause to reflect, and as a result I gained a perspective on life which I did not have before. And interestingly, for all of Nostradamus' bleak and desperate predictions, I came away with a very sturdy conviction that goodness and enlightenment will prevail among humankind -- eventually.
We are exactly where we are supposed to be right now.
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How vain. But I just cannot waste a good e-mail -- especially if the recipient liked it.
To: Joan x x x x x x <jxxxx@juno.com>
Date: Tue, 18 Sep 2001 04:10:05 -0500
Subject: RE:hello
From: burgwinkle@msn.com
Hi Joan,
Hell has come to America. It really was only a matter of time -- it has been brewing for decades. It may be disingenuous to frame the World Trade Center tragedy as anything but what it is; a shaking, screaming, ripping agony of epic human suffering. Nonetheless, it represents the beginning of a painful process during which monumental social, religious and philosophical stresses will resolve themselves with often explosive and deadly force. When it is over, I hope the seething anger and the livid hatred will be thoroughly spent.
I hope you are well, and not too depressed by it all. Everyone I know has been crying and distraught, myself especially. But I feel more aware now of the world, as though awakened and released from an unrealistic innocence. So much so that I bought stock for the first time in my life today.
Yup. I can't pay my phone bill, I can't pay any of my credit card bills (except one), but I'm buying stock. You see, I'm not going to be marching in any desert sand in this lifetime, nor working for the military in any other capacity; I will not ever be a fire fighter again, nor an EMT; and admitting people to a detox... well, it just doesn't give the same sense of power and potency that I might have if I were helping to lift a slab of cement off of a survivor. And the image of an economic collapse springs to mind far too easily since watching those towers fall. The economic collapse of the United States is probably no more likely than the end of the world -- but to be honest, even that seems possible lately.
So I bought fifty bucks worth of PriceLine.com. It was one of the biggest losers on Wall Street today, with one of the highest volumes of shares traded. It costs 50% less today than it did before the attack, and with airline ticket prices certain to increase dramatically, 'bargain brokers' like PriceLine will see tons of business -- if they stay in business.
And all of this has made me realize that paying off my credit is as much if not more of a contribution to this economy than is the purchase of stock on a day when everybody seems to be selling.
These terrorists seem to have awakened the survivor in me: I used to pay the minimum due on high interest rate credit cards with balances maxxed -- and often over-maxxed -- even though I knew I was treating myself like dirt, throwing value away, and wasting money I needed to buy food for myself. (I fled from everything that could be considered competent self-caring.) I used to ignore the poor innocent plant that was given to me by my friends at the hospital with their condolences when my mother died in 1998. (At times I hated my mother almost as much as I hated myself.) And I was getting increasingly hopeless about life, accepting social and emotional isolation as an acceptable method for coping with that hopelessness. (I told myself I did not deserve for my life to be any different.)
...until I turned 43, on September 11, 2001. I have never grown up so much, in so few days, under the weight of so many tragedies. It is no longer acceptable for me to isolate when New Yorkers weep openly in the streets, sharing their many griefs with other New Yorkers they have never before met. It is no longer acceptable to devalue myself by misusing one of the symbols of my value, money. And it is no longer acceptable -- been practicing plant care for a couple weeks now -- to shun the responsibility of caring for the dead-mother plant, which is utterly dependant on me for everything.
Maybe none of this makes sense, but one of the things I learned this week is that the World Trade Center towers, (and other places occupying the rarefied air space above lower Manhattan) -- places where I thought only the vaunted powerful and rich dwelled and worked -- were in reality filled with people just like you and me. They were men and women, some terribly young, who got up early to fight traffic or subway crowds. They took the time each day to dress sharply and to present themselves enthusiastically to the often mundane and tedious tasks of administering the financial capital of the world. And they each did these things day-in and day-out in a 110 storey building with the precious hope of improving the little Jersey Shore futures of their little two-storey lives. They were optimistic. They wanted to make some progress in this world, which must have seemed to them, before they died, to be a world brimming with hope and endless opportunity; for them the world was not so little as it is for us today -- today we measure distance in minutes by missile.
And that is the other reason I bought stock today. The world is -- indeed, because of the missiles it must be -- a world still brimming with hope and endless opportunity; that's the way the world was before the attack, the only difference now is that we can't see quite as far as those who were above the 89th floor. We built our way of life upon the courage of millions of people who were willing to come to this country and start from scratch. How dare I lose hope for the condition of the world today when, only a few miles from the tragedy of the twin towers is the place where hundreds of thousands arrived in this country and began new lives in which they overcame far greater obstacles than I face today -- and they did it with far less fanfare, and far more cheer.
I will never forget the image of a man leaping to his death, who appeared tiny, almost negligible, against the massive backdrop of the burning North Tower.
And so, I will keep their optimism and their hopeful, far-ranging view. I will keep alive some fragment of their humanity by cultivating my own humanness and breaking down my own walls of isolation as best I can. I will keep their tenacity and enthusiasm; they have become mythic. And I will pay my annoying, overdue bills, even as I keep on investing (in my tiny way) in the stock market.
Most of all, I will try to remember; it is not the one causing the most damage who wins, the winner is the one who causes the most healing.
luv
joe
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Friday, September 21, 2001.
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From Today is the 14th...: "...and I have a feeling both of us benefitted emotionally from our chat."
Out of context right there, that quote sounds facetious -- but it is not. After just a few minutes at Sovaj's site you know.
Maybe my isolative behavior makes me more acutely aware of human warmth and sincerity. Maybe I'm just seeing what I hope is there -- but I don't think so. I don't think so because there comes with these recognitions of young men who are generous and sensitive a kind of jealousy on my part -- no, it's more like a soft lament for the boy in me who always wanted to be generous and sensitive, but never let it out. That unpretensious sentiment makes me believe that my perception is accurate; that impossibly beautiful young gay men do exist. And I don't mean beautiful that way -- I've never seen his picture.
It's nice, even if it's not me.
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It finally dawned on me what hurts so much about that picture; it's a warning light, intended to help aircraft avoid collision with these tall structures.
I hope we do not let this horrific tragedy make us cynical in all our human activities. I hope we can maintain the optimism which makes America one of the most desirable places on earth to live. We cannot predict every monstrous plan, nor forsee every potential for evil. We cannot create lives of utter invulnerability in America without losing a great deal of what makes those lives so very much worth living.
The course of this conflict is not known, yet its outcome is certain. Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them.
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Thursday, September 20, 2001.
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...all fall down
My heart is breaking, and it is not because I have to go to work. It's because they are gone.
I was reading National Geographic last night, an article about light. Physics, photons, waves, spectrums -- it was all there. And as a curious aside, they included a picture taken at dawn of a workman replacing the red blinking light that is perched atop the antenna tower on the Empire State Building. It was a nice picture, maybe I will scan it after work and post it here. And it is fascinating to see close-up such things which are familiar to us at a distance. There was the East River in the thin light of early dawn, the Brooklyn Bridge, the surrounding huge buildings looking tiny from the tip of that height 1400 feet off the ground.
And there was in the grey distance near the tip of Manhattan, two towers -- so fond. So painful.
They are gone.
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This e-mail message was forwarded to me, but unlike most of the garbage forwarded to me by my dear friends (who really do mean well), this possesses some intrinsic value.
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Wednesday, September 19, 2001.
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This story piqued my apocalyptic fears earlier today, though I could not find the details of it until I got home from work.
Osama bin Laden is the perfect solution for fanatical Arab states. Through him they are able to prosecute a war which officially and diplomatically they decry. The hobnailed boot of Arab agression in the Middle East has been left empty as the result of an international (mostly American) prohibition on its use. They have been gnawing that angry leather idly for many years, one might even say for decades. Finally, as if in answer to their prayers, that boot is now filled with the force of a potent phantom, a non-state entity responsible to none, who has the resources and the will to carry out the most brutal schemes of the most fanatic elements within the several bona-fide Arab states.
Attacking the Great Satan half a world away was a stroke of self-promotional genius by bin Laden. He proved to the Arab states, especially to their fanatic elements in their Intelligence and Military communities, that he was capable and competent. He capably pulled-off the boldest incursion ever into the sovereign land of the world's biggest superpower. And he proved his competency by executing this grand horror without losing any of his cover. I submit that what connections we have discovered between bin Laden and the dead mass-murders, he has intended to reveal to us. He wants us to attack.
While he is baiting us to attack, he is dangling before the noses of those fevered hate-filled Arab fanatics an irrestible dainty: Isreal. When the Great Satan superpower attacks the impoverished Afghanistan, bin Laden will have accomplished what he set into motion on my birthday, September 11, 2001 -- justification for the Arab world to retaliate against the United States. And since the Arab states with nuclear capability have no launch vehicles capable of reaching the United States, they will retaliate by striking Isreal who they hate even more than the United States. This is why I oppose a military retaliation against bin Laden, the Taliban, or Afghanistan.
He is revolting, an ugly and disgusting soul who seeks nothing good for anyone, yet claims holiness. He very effectively is gaining power for the sole purpose of feeding his insatiable pride in the same way Popes and nations have been doing it for centuries; by claiming to serve God. I would like nothing more than for a cruise missle to flick him like a snot from the face of the earth, but I don't think we would get him, and besides, that's exactly the attempt he wants us to make. Everything he wants we must oppose. Osama bin Laden is the closest that humankind has ever come to the Anti-Christ; he may yet prove to be.
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Tuesday, September 18, 2001.
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Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres told CNN: "The world is facing an unbelievable danger and we have to put aside secondary skirmishes."
Why is it that only Isreali politicians tell it like it is? Here in America we swim in our political leaders' soothing rhetoric -- we elect them for their ability to tell us what we want to hear. There is a nobel purpose in attempts to minimize fear and terror. But let us not be deluded, as any rational person is wont to do in this situation; we are indeed facing an "unbelievable danger."
And from the same article:
Arafat ordered his security commanders not to fire on Israeli targets even when under fire from Israeli forces -- the first time he had told his police officers not to shoot back in self-defense if attacked.
This scares me. Enemies ally themselves -- without first resolving their enmity -- only under mortal threat. Isreal and Palestine are indistinguishable to a re-entry vehicle, and Jerusalem lies within minutes of an Afghani ballistic missile. I can't believe I am even saying these things, it is all so unthinkable. But it is also visciously real.
"God bless us, every one." --Tiny Tim, from Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol.
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Monday, September 17, 2001.
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Doorbell woke me. Hours ago. It was Bobby the cab driver, not Bobby the one I love. Funny, it interrupted a dream of Bobby the one I love:
He was standing in the sun, turning as if he had just started to walk away, or as if something behind him had drawn his attention away from me. His hair was not the usual light brown, thinning and receding slightly. His hair in the dream was thick and long, it was so bright it looked white, even luminous. His body was the same as in real life, trim and muscled, sexy. But even that seemed different; his skin had more than just the usual warm glowing tan. It seemed brighter, too, in a way, and more precious, more valuable -- like gold that had turned to platinum.
Before answering the door, while stumbling around still half-asleep, I thought maybe the dream was a premonition; I thought that maybe it would be Bobby at the door, the one I love.
It was the cab driver. He'd shaved his head since the last time I saw him. "Today's not a good day," I croaked, my eyes still squinty with sleep. Bobby the cab driver comes when he wants to fuck. We suck and lick -- never kiss -- and he bends me over and pumps it in. Then he leaves. Quick simple sex. He's the same age as Bobby the one I love (31), but he's not half as cute, and not near as sexy. Later on, when I'm horny, I'll think, "Why the hell did I let him go? Why didn't I just let him do me? Jeesh."
I dreamt of Bobby the one I love the night before last as well. In that dream his naked, lanky, sleeping body was suspended just slightly above my head and to my left in the branches of a tree; his limbs were splayed out in a random though comfortable pose, his face and pelvis were both turned away from me, concealing their details. I thought, "He is peaceful there, I should not disturb him." The tree was in the city.
When I woke I had to wonder why I saw him in a tree; one never wonders these things while dreaming them. It seemed as if he had fallen from a great height and, caught by the branches of a tree, was uninjured and peacefully asleep. But for some reason that made me very sad, I was not allowed to touch him.
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Sunday, September 16, 2001.
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Lots of bizarre news stories. It can be a few minutes relief from the story; the obscurestore.com. I've been lost there for an hour.
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File this under 'fate': Couple altered itinerary.
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My DSL is back up. Yay.
I have no TV, recently lost my phone, and when I got home from work, no DSL. Cut off. No contact at all.
Here's a couple golden-hearted young men whose sites I found in my referrer log. i'm running and 14th brother. God, i love the web.
Good night.
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