Six months on and I still feel like crap and the events are refusing to go away quite the way I'd like them to.

Quick background:
When it happened I was still at home in Carroll Gardens/Red Hook Brooklyn, which is across the river from the south tip of manhattan and unfortunately right downwind that day. So as the buildings were still burning there was a surreal flutter of burnt chunks of bank statements, documents and that day's new york times raining down on the streets, and as soon as the collapse happened a thick noxious fog shrouded all the streets as people scampered off to find somewhere they could breathe better. When I finally came back around midnight there was a snowlike layer of ash (of people, of the buildings of god-knows-what) covering every car, awning and stoop. That all blew away over the next few days or got washed away with the next rain, but it's hard not to remember. And the view out my apartment's back window just feels oddly empty.

But the days after are still stronger. Like a number of new yorkers, me and my girlfriend spent the next 4 days doing relief and rescue work w/ volunteer organizations. I ended up working near the site w/ the huge amount of supplies people sent in while my girlfiend ended up working at ground zero doing unspeakable things like bagging body parts, bringing water and new clothes to rescue workers and stampeding away w/ the crush every time one of the nearby buildings was thought to collapse.

So okay, these are all big things but they're the past, and there are a lot of other people who went through worse and sacrificed more. I should probably just get on with life.

But the news keeps showing battlefields and editorials about widening the war and the lack of support for even the simplest questions about where our country's going. My backyard is what got fucked with, but I still can't force myself to get angry enough. More than anything, the more supposed revenge is meted out in our and my name, the worse I feel about the whole damned thing and the less I feel like I can put it behind me.

And every time a huge convoy of fire trucks or cop cars whizzes past on its way to somewhere, I still freeze, and my first reaction is to find out if something new has happened. Every time this happens, I feel like a complete moron and wonder why I can't just relax.

Every time I read another news report about the air quality at ground zero and how they can't quite figure out exactly what's up with it, I wonder about that first morning in Carroll Gardens and the time me and the girl I love spent working down there. But that's probably just me being paranoid.

Whenever the cops and firefighters or their dogs get a 10 minute segment on everything from the olympics to the Westminster kennel show to the home shopping network I wonder why nobody ever mentions the thousands of average new yorkers who made the whole thing work and had a hell of a lot less training, like the group of young high school kids I met who were just walking by one of the donation centers w/ some clothes and the next thing they knew they were on their way to ground zero w/ hardhats. And just what the fuck was the Salvation Army doing sending teenagers down there anyway? And why do I even care at this point. It's all a little petty right?

So six months on, of course life's picked back up and gotten some sheen of normality back. But I think maybe the disconnect between the horrors and uncertainties of that day and the resulting warfare, deaths, backwards social legislation at home, well meant but hollow tributes on TV in print and in the movies is what makes me unable to leave it all behind. Either that or I haven't been drinking enough. No, I suspect it's the former....

posted by Robotpolisher 7:44 PM ::