I submitted this to the LA Times. If they don’t put it up on their site, I’m crying anti-Semitism.
I was living in Greenpoint in Brooklyn on September 11, 2001. At the time, I worked a soul-crushing phone sales job on Broadway just south of Houston. I almost didn’t go to work that day because I wasn’t feeling well, but I was paid hourly plus commission, so a sick day meant a pay cut.
I came up out of the N/R station at Prince Street in between the two planes hitting the towers. I got in line and bought a bagel and a coffee from a cart on the street. I was close enough to see that something had hit one of the towers, but far enough away to not realize exactly what had happened. No one on the street around me seemed to realize that this was more than an accident either.
I walked up to my office and sat down at my desk. About a minute later, the second plane hit the tower. Everyone in the office was online checking news reports, trying to figure out what happened. Once a report went up on CNN.com indicating that this looked like a terrorist attack, I emailed my parents to say that I didn’t know what was going on, but that I was fine. I then tried to go home.
When I got down to the street, it was more or less total chaos. Ambulances, fire trucks and police cars were racing downtown while a huge sea of people walked uptown. A bunch of people were crowded around a ConEd truck that was playing its radio loudly in order to try to help everyone figure out what was happening. I stopped for a second, debated entering the subway at Prince Street before deciding to walk up to Union Square to take the L train directly back to Brooklyn. I walked into the Union Square subway station and actually managed to get onto an L train seconds before they shut down the entire subway system. At that point I knew I’d be walking home.
I left the subway station andwalked east on 14th St over to Avenue A. I walked south on Avenue A down to Delancey, where the Williamsburg Bridge empties out into lower Manhattan. This was back before everyone had an iPod - I listened to Radiohead’s Amnesiac on repeat on my Discman in order to drown out all of the sirens. It took me years to be able to listen to that album again.
By the time I got to Delancey, both towers had collapsed. It didn’t even enter my mind that such an event was possible - I just remember thinking how crazy it was that the smoke was so thick that it was obscuring the view of the towers from the Lower East Side. It wasn’t until I got home and called my parents that I learned that the towers had collapsed. I distinctly remember my mom saying “they both fell” right as I turned on the TV to see it for myself.
As I got to the entrance to the Williamsburg bridge, about 20 cops were trying to keep pedestrians from walking on the roadway of the bridge. They eventually gave up, and began doing what they could to make sure people were walking safely across the bridge. I remember seeing photos later that night of cops handing out water bottles to pedestrians on the bridge. “The world is ending. Here, make sure you stay hydrated.”
As I walked across the bridge to Brooklyn, a man with a portable radio shouted out whatever he was hearing over news radio. At that point, there were several other planes in the air (other than the ones actually involved in the plot) that had not yet responded to air traffic control. Miami, Boston, etc etc. I’m sure that the guy with the radio thought he was helping. He wasn’t.
It took me about an hour to walk from the base of the bridge on the Brooklyn side north to my apartment in Greenpoint. I walked into my apartment at about 11am. My roommate, who was pretty sick, had not even gotten out of bed yet. So I had to knock on his door and tell him that September 11th had happened. Neither of us had a cell phone at that point, so we spent the next hour calling family/friends from our land line, which actually worked, much to our surprise. We then went up to the roof of our building, tried to hold it together, and took some pictures.
That night, a bunch of our friends got together at Enid’s, a popular bar in the neighborhood. It felt good to be amongst friends if for no other reason than to remind me that I wasn’t the only person who had no idea what to think, feel or do. That was the last time I left my apartment for several days.
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(George is “playing the drums” on his desk. He is tapping his desk with pencils.)
*buzz*
Secretary: (over the speaker) Mr. Costanza, Mr. Pensky is here to see you.
George: Mr. Pensky? Of the Pensky file?(via The Barber)
(via dailyseinfeld)
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“we’re gonna see that fucking bridge”
- Global warming is a liberal hoax based on junk sciense
- Barack Obama is a:
(a) Muslim (nothing wrong with being a Muslim, of course, but he’s a Christian)
(b) terrorist (Lupe Fiasco, I smirk in your general direction)
(c) community organizer who wants God to damn the country (direct quote from my cousin’s wife, one of the most shockingly ignorant people I’ve ever met, a.k.a. someone who grew up in Bakersfield, CA)
(d) citizen of Kenya
- Bush knocked down the towers (Jadakiss, I’m looking at you)
- That Sarah Palin is someone to look up to, or listen to.
- That what Anthony Weiner did is worse than what David Vitter did
- That gay people choose to be gay, and that they have some sort of evil “agenda” (I live in West Hollywood. As far as I can tell, a big part of their agenda consists of working out a lot and eating healthy, so we have a lot in common besides the sex with members of the same gender thing).
- That undocumented aliens caused the wildfires in Arizona (John McCain, it’s time to retire.)
- “Intelligent Design”
- That believing in god is somehow superior to not believing in god.
- That there even IS a god (seriously).
- That 2 1/2 Men is funny
As far as I’m concerned, nothing on this list is even remotely debatable, yet so much energy is wasted on all of this crap (especially the 2 1/2 Men thing). I consider myself to be a pretty informed, passionate person about politics and I just wanna shoot myself in the face after 5 minutes of cable news, etc. I’m glad to have Olbermann back because he makes me feel relatively calm, if nothing else. No small task. Now I’m going to tag this post with stuff like Jersey Shore and Britney Spears so people are confused.
Good night.
Sorry I cut you in half and attached you to a door.
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This guy! I know!
Best part: “Ailes is also deeply paranoid. Convinced that he has personally been targeted by Al Qaeda for assassination, he surrounds himself with an aggressive security detail and is licensed to carry a concealed handgun.”
We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic. Uncontroversially, his crimes vastly exceed bin Laden’s, and he is not a “suspect” but uncontroversially the “decider” who gave the…
(Source: guernicamag.com)
We were hesitant to post the first one, felt like it might have been at a car show or photo shoot or something. At they very least, it didn’t feel so random. But then we got a second DeLorean pic, on the road no less, so they both made the cut. Also enjoying the flat tire in the first pic….
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It’s not surprising that a photo of a terrorist with a bullet hole in his face would turn Sarah Palin on. The way she asks for it to be released though, is an interesting bit of dishonesty.
“Show photo as a warning to others seeking America’s destruction.”
I’m imagining a group of terrorists sitting around a computer, pulling up a photo of Osama Bin Laden’s corpse, and one saying “WHOA GUYS, if we try to ‘destroy America’ they might try put BULLETS in our FACES. We better knock this malarkey off ASAP. Return that fertilizer to the hardware store and let’s use the fuel we’ve stockpiled to power the generator at my nephew’s school for a few weeks.”
Terrorists, especially of the Jihadi variety, are frequently prepared for and SEEKING death, whether it comes in the form of a bullet, explosion, or underpants conflagration on a Detroit-bound flight.
But I presume Sarah Palin knows this. So her tweet is both “politicking” and “drama.” It’s theater, in fact.
And way to wrap it up with “That’s the mission.” Though she didn’t shoehorn the words “Islam” or “Muslim” into her clunker of a tweet, she did finish it with a word whose definitions include “a group of people sent by a religious body, esp a Christian church, to a foreign country, to do religious work.”
I’m glad she was so transparent about what her “mission” is. And let’s also salute her for sneaking the word “pussy” in there. Osama Bin Laden is killed while Barack Obama is President, and Sarah Palin’s immediate response is to explicitly link him with the word “pussy.” Would she have worked the word “cocky” in there if he released the photo?
To conclude, her tweet is bloodthirsty, purposefully dishonest, willfully ignorant, xenophobic and rude. It’s a fantastic snapshot of who she is.
(via wendles456)
O’Hare to Detroit is a MONSTER flight.
Amazing how fast whitewhine.com ran out of ideas. This isn’t even slightly funny.
A lot of people have been reading and commenting today; I really appreciate all of your thoughts and that you’ve taken the time to share them with me and with other people across several social networking platforms.
Given some of your comments, I thought it important to write up a clarification…
As I wrote last night, I’m not at all sad about the death of Osama Bin Laden. He committed terrible acts and he caused or encouraged others to commit terrible acts. I have no sympathy for him or for those who supported him. That said, I’m also not jubilant in the way that, for example, Mike…
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Joakim Noah started OFWGKTA.
As I wrote last night, I’m not at all sad about the death of Osama Bin Laden. He committed terrible acts and he caused or encouraged others to commit terrible acts. I have no sympathy for him or for those who supported him. That said, I’m also not jubilant in the way that, for example, Mike…