On September 11th, 2001, I was living in Manhattan. When the plane hit tower one, I was playing Pokémon with truant teenagers in Central Park. When the plane hit tower two, I was eating a honey tomato chicken sandwich in my apartment in Harlem.

Cell phones, land lines, and the subway stopped working. I passed out water with my neighbors to the parade of humanity, covered in white dust, who walked uptown like a troupe of zombies. I scanned each face in that throng, looking for the man that I loved, who I had no way to contact and who could have been dead.

I spent the next few weeks on the streets of the city, talking to people who were wandering the island, looking for lost loved ones and volunteering wherever I wound up on a given day. For the first time in my life, I was alive and breathing meant something.

Then, I sat back and watched as the months went by and my country went more and more mad with fear, anxiety, paranoia, religious intolerance, rage, and wrath. A lot of wrath.

Is it wrong to say that the attacks on that day made my heart leap? In a positive way, that is. Yes, it was difficult, it was painful and it was terrifying, but it was still a gift from someone, somewhere and that gift will never be repaid with saptastic, sentimental, pandering memorials, films or documentaries. Everyone is so keen to remind us that we shouldn’t forget, but no one can qualify WHY we should remember this. Why is that day worth occupying a memory palace in our minds? What does it teach us? What will it teach those who weren’t alive when it happened? What does it mean to the world? Is that different than what it means to Americans? To New Yorkers? To those who worked in the World Trade Center?

Look, I stood on a railing once, and leaned my forehead against the window of the something-something floor of the Center. I imagined the glass breaking and the flapping, fanciful fall I’d enjoy on the way down. Then I wrote a poem about it, and people thought I was suicidal, not quite getting what I was getting at, what I had gotten up there, looking down at ants-people. Once, I turned down a job at the top of Tower One, because I had to take a drug test and I’d been to a wild party the night before. I had friends in those buildings, who didn’t have cell phones to call me while they were trapped and before they jumped. What do you think those towers meant to me?

I have friends, who got married at the top of the Trade Center, and who enjoyed a complicated and frustrating divorce, all while watching the Towers fall. What do you think those towers meant to them?

What about the girl with the boss in Tower 2, who got her ass slapped every day so that her kids could eat? What did those towers mean to her?

You know how I feel whenever this day rolls around again? Annoyed. I resent the oblivious flag-waving and trumpet-blowing. It’s always the loudest when it comes from those with no context for the attacks – the T-shirt-wearing contingent, who seem to think that the World Trade Center was a big shopping mall and that their mall could be next, unless they paint their own feces red, white and blue, then show it off to their neighbors. Towers that they never knew existed are now dry wood for their stoves of warmongering rhetoric.

Whenever this day shows its face, I am reminded of how we had an unprecedented opportunity for national unity for the betterment of the world and how we spat on it, shat on it, swallowed it, digested it, puked it up and spat on it again. Sure, liberals love to point the finger at President Bush and say that it was he who sowed division amongst us rather than unifying us, but we can’t blame one man for our collective inability to understand and stand by our fellow countrymen and women. The old cliché of "united we stand," can finally be illustrated in contrast to our current fall – a snarling, sputtering, foaming beast of a rabid country, unable to agree with itself and allowing its arms, legs and teeth flail about without reservation or attention while it tries to win a stalemate of a cold war with itself.

When this day gets all up in my face, I think about how America freaked out after getting what it was asking for. I think about all the cataclysms and orgiastic apocalypses in movies, how we had destroyed city after city, whole coasts and continents in our collective consciousness because our lives had become repetitive, too simple, too mundane and routine. Make no mistake – even though we may never have said it out loud and in plain words, we wanted the world to throw us a curve ball, we wanted to be afraid, we wanted our hearts to beat faster and we wanted to know that we had survived the cut of something very, very terrible.

When we got it, like the dumb, spoon-fed animals that we are, all we could say was, “It looked like a movie!”

And it still does, doesn’t it? With the world disintegrating all around us, we’re equally upset by the events on the news as we are with events on our favorite fictional programs, films, books and the like. We’re still a people who can classically identify and differentiate between reality and fiction, but the drawing of the line doesn’t seem to designate a true emotional separation of the two.

I’m sorry if this is indelicate, but then again, that is exactly what I have become. I watched New Yorkers gracefully and gloriously walk through a fog, a mirror and fire after that day. It was inspiring. Then I moved to the American Midwest and saw countless little outposts of humanity, still quaking in the wake of something that they still can’t quite understand, but are afraid to probe too deeply for fear of facing fear itself in the bathroom mirror.

There are two cats a few feet from me, who are hissing, clawing and wrestling with one-another. Would that I were able to simply let them duke it out and squirt the USA, the Middle East and an index of squabbling, stupid nations with a giant squirt bottle.

I’m spending the day in reflection by watching monster and disaster movies, the ones that were part of the spell that was cast for and by us and that summoned this present reality.

Here’s to life imitating art, or trash mistaken for art. Here’s to a cup filled with happy joy nectar, toasted at the beauty of such a monumental mistake made manifest. Here’s to art instructing life and maybe eventually ending it with a sigh of relief. Here’s to the colors and patterns in the bowl as the world and its increasingly psychotic landscape circle into the sewer of tomorrow, to be the fertilizer and the bedrock for some firebird. And when that bird forgets where it came from and it too falls to ash, may its last night be this bright, this cacophonous, and bittersweet, but not so oblivious that time.

Not so oblivious, please.

Let’s play that old cool wax one more time, one perfect time and then let it go.