2001-09-12 - 6:46 p.m.

On the internal soundtrack: "God Bless America"

I have to write about this, don't I? I don't want to, and yet I do.

I'm so sad. My body feels funny. Sort of hollow, and like it aches. I feel bruised. And I'm always on the verge of tears.

All those people. Those poor people. Their poor families.

What Jason said describes my other feelings very well:

"After the last big quakes on the west coast, I read something about about the trauma many kids felt as a result. It said that it wasn't the destruction, it was that the ground moved. Something they'd always relied on to be stable.

I didn't lose anyone in NYC ... and although the loss of human life and property is horrendous, we are an economic superpower of three hundred million people. It's a disaster we can survive, easily.

But the ground just moved."

Y'know what I was doing when this happened? I was taking pictures of what Poindexter and I are referring to as "The Anti-Abortion Wagon". A mobile monument to free speech that cracked me up and yet made me feel oddly proud at the same time.

I'll show you another time.

I got to the office late, almost 10:30. I had overslept in the first place, due to an attack of low blood sugar at 6am that required some food and left me feeling yucky and draggy when I finally woke up, and then I was out taking the photos.

I was walking tiredly up the stairs to the office, and the office manager was standing at the top and looking at me. She just kept looking, expectantly. I wondered vaguely why. Finally she said, "Have you been watching the news?" I said no, and she told me, "Airplanes have flown into the World Trade Center and they collapsed. An airplane also hit the Pentagon. They think it was terrorists."

I was shocked, horrified, scared; terrified that my brother had been in Lower Manhattan. The first thing I did was try to call my parents, but all circuits were busy.

I completely forgot that my husband works very close to the Pentagon.

I'm glad about that now, because that would have been fifteen minutes of abject terror I really didn't need and wouldn't wish on anyone. Yet there are tens of thousands of people who are still going through that right now because their loved ones are buried in rubble.

Unable to get through to my parents, I called my dad's office and left message there. I turned on my computer. I didn't see Poindexter on IM, so I called his office. The front desk lady answered. She said, "He's gone home for the day."

That's when it hit me. Oh my god, he works right next to the Pentagon.

"Is this because of what happened at the Pentagon?!" It was.

Technically this meant that, unless the woman was lying, Poindexter was fine and was on his way home. Nevertheless, I had a few panicky tears and hugged my boss for a long time. He kept telling me that Poindexter was fine, just that he'd have a hard time getting home.

Then my brother appeared on IM and told me he'd talked to Poindexter and that he was okay and was heading home, but that they'd been worried about ME because I hadn't arrived at the office or answered the phone at home! And my parents were in Cape May.

My brother was in shock. "The twin towers are GONE," he said.

Poindexter was listening to Howard Stern through his headphones -- and Howard was talking about the World Trade Center -- when he heard and felt the explosion.

He took off his headphones, wondering if he'd really heard it. A coworker came in and said, "A plane's hit the Pentagon."

They went to the other side of their building, and saw the flames and smoke and the pieces of metal spinning in midair and sparkling in the sunlight. Ashes were falling outside the window.

Nobody at the company seemed to be doing anything. Poindexter said, "I'm going home."

It took him about an hour, which wasn't too bad really. He knew a lot of back roads.

I had gotten home about 15 minutes previously, saw him turn onto the street from the window, flew down the stairs to the garage and hugged him tight for a long time. And didn't really let go of him for most of the day.

My brother's close friends are all okay. So far most of them are accounted for.

Some of them are having a horrible time of it, though. One friend works across the street from the WTC. He saw a turbine engine hit the ground, and people jumping out of windows. He left his building and got on a ferry to Jersey. From there he saw the towers collapse. He threw up.

Other friends saw bodies at the end of their street in TriBeCa.

This is so horrible.

Random thoughts:

I had the thought that I was glad to have the motorcycles. If anything went wrong enough that we wanted to get out of DC in a hurry, those motorcycles are the only way to do it. We don't even need roads.

Kevin put it best when he called this "the worst kind of vindication." I didn't want to be right about this.

The Twin Towers is just the worst thing they could have destroyed, maybe more so than the Pentagon, even. The Pentagon is the military. I'm proud of how good it is, yes. But the Twin Towers were such a huge part of the Manhattan skyline, and Manhattan represents to me the best of America. People who took an empty cowpoke island and turned it into a living monument to the success of capitalism. To me, it represents the American people themselves, that can-do spirit, of what people can achieve when they set our minds to it.

Do you think the terrorists struck the Towers because they are a symbol of capitalism? In that case, is this less about our "meddling" in the Middle East than it is about jealousy of the richness of America? And it's all so silly, since they could just come over here and be rich themselves...

Although honestly it seems that the Pentagon and the Towers are probably among the most visible targets. The Towers stick up higher than anything else in Manhattan, and the Pentagon is impossible to miss from the air.

Poindexter thinks that the attack on the towers was far more "successful" than the perpetrators probably expected. That they just meant to blow holes in the towers, that total collapse wasn't necessarily expected.

Our phone rang constantly after we got home. We had a break of an hour or two during which we curled up close and took a nap, and then more calls. Very few people had realized that Poindexter works right by the Pentagon, but were worried about us anyway. We had called our immediate families, thinking they could spread the news among the extended family, but some people wanted to talk to us personally.

At first I was a little confused as to why people think this attack is so far-reaching, sophisticated, etc. It seemed to me that all you really needed was one person with a disturbingly clever idea, and then needing to recruit a few kamikaze pilots (not hard, given the idea this fringe group has about going straight to heaven). The idea struck me as incredibly simple, actually, and that scares me because this sort of thing would be so hard to trace. It could be planned by a group of people gathered in someone's basement with airline flight schedules and a few box cutters.

But now I'm hearing that some of the suspected hijackers had been in the United States over the last year getting training on how to fly. Which would mean this even was in the planning stages for at least a year, possibly. God. If this is true, it also means that who the president is has nothing to do with it. They started planning this when Clinton was in office.

Weather-wise, yesterday was a beautiful day. The incongruity of it hit me every time I looked out the window.

Giuliani said something that made me feel really good. "We actually have more volunteers than we need right now." That, plus the overwhelmed blood donation centers. It's so strange how something brought about by the very worst of human nature is juxtaposed with the very best of it.

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