This section will comprise serious work, and some not so serious work. All of it will, of course revolve around the world since September 11, 2001. Unfortunately I'm too busy with school and work to dick around with this site much these days, but I'll throw some stuff up once in awhile. Each addition to this section will appear as a link on the bottom of this page.

That Day

      I awoke at 8:30 AM on September 11, 2001, reset my alarm for 9:00 because I was too tired to get up. Oddly enough, I had been up late the night before reading about, of all things, the Taleban, who reportedly had just successfully assasinated the leader of their only major opposition in Afghanistan (as it turned out, the man did not actually die until the following Sunday). It is weird because I was reading about the Taleban, and I thought to myself, "these people need to be contained." And by that I meant that the West had to keep an eye on the Taleban and wipe it out if it managed to gain influence outside the borders of Afghanistan. I've never really had a thought like that before. I'd always been too far to the left for that, I suppose.

    Anyway, as I prepared to face the day, the 1010 WINS told me that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. A minute later (actually I guess it was exactly three minutes later) a stunned reporter announced that a second plane had just hit the south tower. I turned on the TV like everyone else. I decided I was not going to work.

     Big'Un called me. We met for coffee a few blocks away, and returned to my apartment to watch our city fall.  About twenty minutes after the first tower collapsed, it rained in our Brooklyn neighborhood of Carroll Gardens. It rained dust and paper from the WTC. The air became unbreathable, even with the windows closed. We covered our faces, ran to my car, and picked up our friend Jeff in nearby Park Slope.  

     The three of us fled south to Bay Ridge, away from the fallout. It was a beautiful day, the sky a perfect blue ... except, of course, to the north. To the north was the cloud of smoke that was once the Twin Towers; that cloud hung over New York for weeks. The smell of burning asbestos, other man-made materials, and human flesh permeated the air for months. That smell...I'll never forget it and hopefully I'll never smell it again