2002-09-02 - 10:00 a.m.
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This is what's actually happening now.
"Why don't the newscasters cry when they read about people who die / At least they could be decent enough to put just a tear in their eyes" - Jack Johnson
The bombs fall on the ground. Here, at Ground Nothing, far from any sort of angry exchange of ammo or death, I sit on my porch, breeze attacking me viciously like beating beaten to death with a feather.
The world keeps spinning as lives fall to the ground, buried, only to grow into pure rage. The flower of hatred grows from every dead body, every casualty, every "number". Numbers. The people have become numbers.
We sit here, my sister on the phone. It's her birthday, September 1st. There is exactly a week and a half before that terrible terrible day, that day that people will "Never Forget" will "Always Remember". That day that no one will talk about.
WE bicker and fight, my feet propped up on a table, the wood damp from the beer the night before. My sister is arguing with me over my address. All I want her to do is write it down, she wants me to call the house (at home) from my house (at school) and leave the address. I get enraged, upset because people have too much dependency on these silly fucking boxes, shoved full of enough silicon to make a model's underwear wet and now I can't relay more than a zip code and a house number without the electronic mediator. As if thier simple brains would stop at a 7 digit memory.
There is no need for the fighting. I'm not so diligent about the fight for taking back your memory from machines that I'd suicide bomb someone. But I think the fight has come from somewhere, somewhere else, somewhere I've never even been.
A bus explodes, killing 15. I turn to watch this. Look at the death toll. 15 dead. 15 people riding the bus to get where they had to go, outside of these little squirmishes. Outside of the agression. Outside. I see the fire, I hear the screams and laments and I feel nothing more than sorry as I turn the TV off.
The fight becomes a quarrel as my father gets on the phone, wondering why I'm not complying with the request to give them my address on the phone at home. We bicker a bit about how I'm being "difficult", how there's nothing to "just calling home". But there is. I am being difficult, this is true, but it's becuase it's not just calling home. It's allowing yourself to be dependant on that box for your source of intelligence and memory. That's what I want to avoid.
Homer was a blind man. Not the "d'oh!" Homer. Not Homer the Profit. Homer the Prophet. Wrote the greatest stories in the world, some of the best ever told. Never once ever took even a pen in his hand, but could tell you the entire 2 day story off the top of his head, perfectly. Never met the man, wish I had.
Yelling comes back into the phone, waking me up from nodding off into my thoughts. Something about shoes, I can't remember what. I really don't want to remember. Just another detail that gets lost in the shuffle. I'll never even remember having this conversation in a week, in a year, when I'm drinking and having fun, when I'm in the heat of the action. MY brain will have other things to pay attention to when my lips are united with anothers. So, I just spit answers so that the yelling stops, I say my hellos and goodbyes, and I go back to the porch, escaping from terror as I sit back.
A 14 year old boy runs across the flaming wreckage of a street where he narrowly escaped being blown up by a bus along with his entire family, escaping from terror as I sit back.
BMC
What did you just say? - What's he gonna say next?
