If you are sitting alone in your apartment, not watching (or don't have) a TV, and you feel an akward incongruity between the sunny clear blue-sky Saturday going on outside and the wailing grief of a nation, then spend some time with href="javascript:void(window.open('http://www.cnn.com/interactive/us/0109/missing/frameset.exclude.html','cnnPop','toolbar=no,location=no,directories=no,status=no,menubar=yes,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,width=620,height=430'))" title="missing, but hoped for by family">these photos.  Your tears will likely flow like rain, and your heart will be right back in alignment with all the rest of humanity. 

Tears do not darken our view of the world.  The white trim on the brick building next door is gleaming in today's bright sunlight.  Through tears, it absolutely sparkles. 

Something tells me this is sick, but I wish I was there.  Of course, if I was there, I would have wished I wasn't -- like the 5k who were there. 

5k.  A gross impersonalization but, as counterpoint, it emphasizes how utterly personal that attack was for every single one of those who died.  Out of all of those who suffered and died (estimates are that there will be more than 5,000, much more), at the end someone was just taking the first sip of their last coffee; someone was yawning; someone sighed for the tedium of their life at the instant it ended.  Out of 5,000 plus people who are now dead, someone saw it coming.  I wonder what they did.  Scream?  Furrow their brow quizzically at the 'impossible' spectre? 

I wonder what I -- what any of us -- will do now.

An account from a 1998 interview with Osama bin Laden. 

Where has all the time gone?  Just getting into bed now. 

I just don't want to be awake in the daylight today -- or yesterday.  And maybe not tomorrow.  I think I will call in sick tonight, If I don't sleep past noon...

This will become the 'Zapruder film' of the World Trade Center catastrophe. 

I know none of us ever thought a whole ton of things that we are thinking today, but I really never thought I'd hear the term 'forces of darkness' used outside of a fantasy novel, much less by a head of state. 

Words have not yet been invented to describe the way this agony has touched me, this nation, and the world. 

Hitler taught humankind a great deal about inhumanity, atrocity, and lust for power.  These were things we did not then want to learn -- lessons which we would gladly have forfeited had they not grabbed us and shaken us into an unpleasant reality.  Humanity paid dearly for that education.  But it was worth it. 

On Tuesday -- my birthday -- we began a new lesson, similar in its unpleasantness and difficulty to the one Hitler taught decades ago.  However, the topic of that lesson was over-grasping political philosophies while this lesson's theme is hateful religious fanaticism.  And like it or not, now is humanity's time to learn this particular lesson. 

The instructor, probably Osama bin Laden, has aroused in us an epic rage and fury.  Thus he offers us a test, with an opportunity to pass or fail: can we feel within our broken hearts the full breadth of our rage, and attend our agony wherever it takes us, even down to our most terrifying depths and back out again, without choosing to kill our souls with hatred? 

Whoever did this is a hate-filled person who has a chilling skill for turning others toward hate.  His substance is fear, his purpose is evil, and he hates every manifestation of the openness, optimism, dauntless hope, and kind generosity which are, in large part, constitutents of the American personality.  He seeks to kill that goodness in us -- not by murder, atrocity, or acts of war -- but by simply making us hate. 

I can't stop crying, and that is a good thing.  Because once I refuse to cry, I have no choice but to hate, and that bastard is not going to win.  Not in America. 

And definitely not on my birthday. 

Updated: 12:19 PM EDT 16:19 GMT -- 11 Sep 2001

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stunned.

Why can't I just write about the cat, or the boyfriend, or how I am getting my head waxed and going to the beach, or anything just bland and safe and mundane...  Why does it have to be these topics?

"Well, you write because you care," responds my father, "and you care because it matters.". 

There you go.  Because it matters.  Hmm.  So simple; I should've known that.  I guess sometimes wisdom does come with age.  Sometimes.  There are, however, grown men who have less wisdom than most boys I've known.  But underage gay boys share a scary love that terrifies some men, especially when that love is celebrated and not hidden like a dirty English school boy secret.  Some men are positively beside themselves with rage that such a love might dare to speak its name in a widely published glossy mag that claims -- quite correctly -- to tell the truth. 

Boys are attractive in their own right, regardless of the beholder's orientation or age.  That notion alone is difficult for the sex-phobic American culture to accept.  Much less acceptable are any efforts made by anyone to validate and normalize the sexual attraction felt between some teenage boys. 

To the boys:.  Whatever you are feeling is right and good.  I don't care what it is.  There are a lot of bad men out there who are terrified of boys who love other boys.  If you dare to love another boy, those men will hate you for no reason other than that.  Many are very respected, and powerful.  One of the bad men, unfortunately, might be your father.  Or he might be your minister, your rabbi, your teacher, your bus driver, or your scoutmaster.  He might be all of the above.  But if you hear it nowhere else, then hear it now; your so-called 'bad feelings' are not bad, in fact they are good.  Supress nothing.  Deny nothing.  Accept everything about yourself as precious (yeah, that's right -- precious) and good, and wholesome, and true.  These things will lead you to integrity, deep happiness, and freedom. 

I had a lover when I was in the fourth grade.  His name was David.  We had terrific, fabulous, wonderful, intense, red-hot sex, even though neither of us was yet able to ejaculate.  But sex is not all we did.  Mostly we were just boys who did boy-stuff together; camping, Boy Scouts, drawing (he had talent), watching TV or just hanging-out.  In fact, David was so flamboyantly femme -- and I, so homophobic -- that I would have avoided being seen with him, except that we were lovers, and we each had few other friends.  And because he was nice to me. 

I wanted to be like David -- or, more accurately, I wanted to be like me without all the pretenses and self-consciousness.  David was certainly not ignorant of the straight boys' contempt, but he never once let them dictate his behavior or cramp his femme ways; he met every intimidator toe to toe and he never once backed down.  David, the queen, was more man than me.  From the perspective of the closet I was in then I could not have recognized how much I looked up to David.  But despite the swish, the lisp, the limp wrist and all, David was what I wanted to be -- free. 

In the mid-sixties there was no way for me -- or for David and me -- to be gay and okay.  There was a lesbian (I think) teacher who was our champion and our patron, who did make it okay to be gay, at least in our immediate vicinity.  For a school trip to a museum, she had, perhaps on her own initiative, made arrangements to support the friendship of these two lonely boys, neither of whom had ever been able to make friends with others before.  So with half the elementary school assembled to receive the rules for the class trip, Miss Williams announced that she had gotten special permission -- from the Principal and the other teachers -- to have me come over to David's bus to ride with him. 

With her help, it would have been okay to be gay, except I was just too afraid to acknowledge my own affection for my loverboy.  I learned that cowardice from men.  I stayed on my own bus. 

If you ever see a tall forty-something blonde named David Ackley, originally from Northboro Massachusetts, please say hello to him for me. 

I'm glad summer is not over.  I'm glad my air conditioner still works.  For all my tantrums and bitterness, I am still grateful that all the world's people continue their precious journies despite my occasional desire that everyone except me be vaporized.  I am grateful for the work I am allowed to do -- even with all of its frustrations, catch-22's, and angry-scared-hurt people who call and try to be mean. 

I am thankful for consciousness; for sight; for the ability to read; for the opportunity to write; and for the paperback set, now venerable and disintegrating, given to me by my sister 30 years ago, 29 years before she died. 

I like woodsmoke carried on crisp air, or the scent of suntan lotion mingling with sweat and sea air on a brilliantly sunny beach-day.  I apreciate the performance art of day and night, of sunset and sunrise, of cloud and sky, and of star and spirit.  I love all my ex's and their vast capacities to forgive; few of them hate me, but most of them have had reason to.  I am grateful for all the trauma's I have suffered, for my abortive evasions of trauma's effect, for the decades I have lost to self-pity, self-contempt, and breathtaking rage.  And I am grateful to have lived long enough to grow up and to retract the blame that really belongs to no one. 

I have hated living only because I loved life more than I thought I could bear.  I am grateful now to know that my love for life is vast -- and exactly the equivalent of my capacity to bear it.