endofanera wrote:

warmowski wrote:- "holy shit, howard stern must be dead, he's off the air."

He was off the air in Chicago? In DC he was on the air until at least 930 or so (I went into work then, as I had been on my way in when the planes hit the WTC and stopped along the way to leave voicemails with almost everyone I knew in NYC), but heard that he remained on the air all morning.

yeah, wckg here abruptly switched and carried the cbs tv network audio, which was bryant gumbel and whoever. that was my cue to turn on a tv.

warmowski wrote:

endofanera wrote:

warmowski wrote:- "holy shit, howard stern must be dead, he's off the air."

He was off the air in Chicago? In DC he was on the air until at least 930 or so (I went into work then, as I had been on my way in when the planes hit the WTC and stopped along the way to leave voicemails with almost everyone I knew in NYC), but heard that he remained on the air all morning.

yeah, wckg here abruptly switched and carried the cbs tv network audio, which was bryant gumbel and whoever. that was my cue to turn on a tv.

It goes on for quite a while after they cut it off most stations not in NY to switch to the straight news.

For some reason I had that day off.
The night before I couldn't sleep. Sometime during the night I mentioned to my girlfriend that I had never seen a sunrise.
At about 3 am we drove down to the Jersey Shore to watch the sun come up.
We were headed back to my apartment when I clicked on Howard Stern. I remember Robin Quivers was crying and she said that one of the towers had just fallen.
My first reaction was "This Cocksucker is gonna get in a lot of trouble for this prank."
Then I looked in the rearveiw mirror and saw the big cloud of dust.
We went home and I watched the second tower fall from my fire escape.
When I heard that a plane hit the pentagon I really panicked.
Later that afternoon we bought a six pack and went to the park to drink it. I remember thinking, "With all this shit going on noone is going to give a shit about drinking in public."
I could see manhattan from the park and I remember tons of fighter jets buzzing around. People were all talking very softly some of them wept openly.

I felt scared and angry but at no point did I think any of this was kinda cool.

I was in Portland, Oregon, where I had gone to visit my sister and review a Belle and Sebastian show for a magazine. I was sleeping on the living room couch and her roommate woke me up early in the morning to ask if she could turn on the TV, because a friend of hers had called to say the country was under attack. We turned on the TV, and here's the weird part--I honestly don't remember if I saw the first tower fall "live." I think I did, but I'm not sure, because it was all so overwhelming and incomprehensible. But at some point, almost robotically, I found myself out on the street just walking aimlessly. I didn't know the area at all, and so had no idea where I was going. I wound up walking, I'd say, about three miles and then I came to a bar that was open. There were only a few people there, the kind of people who are in a bar at 8 in the morning. I watched the news a little with them, and I remember there were something like six flights still unaccounted for.

When I got back, my sister and her friend had both gone to work. I managed to get through to my girlfriend, but only because she was also out of the city. So having no idea what to do with myself, not being able to reach people in New York, and overwhelmed by the news, I eventually turned off the news and watched "The Big Lebowski." I remember idly thinking that none of my friends started work early enough to be killed.

The Belle and Sebastian show actually went on. They opened with "Turn Turn Turn."

I found nothing at all cool about it, but I sort of understand the impulse now. Geography plays such a huge role. You could just feel it in Portland--in general, people were not feeling as freaked out as I was. (It got even more surreal when, still stranded in Portland a few days later and going crazy, I went to some big rodeo festival in eastern Oregon with some friends of my sisters.) And with Katrina, I was horrified, but I was able to face the news and be fascinated and horrified by what was unfolding, whereas with 9/11 I just couldn't deal. So I don't think one should be proud of thinking it was "cool," but human psychology is a tricky thing.

The funny thing about being in Portland is that when I first got there I asked my sister, half-jokingly, if she ran into Steve Malkmus all the time, and she said she didn't think she would recognize him since half the guys in the city look like him. Well, the next day I was running in a park and saw a familiar-looking guy walking a beagle with a woman, and even though I think it's rude to do this, I stopped and asked if he was Malkmus, and of course he was. I thought, "I have an amusing anecdote to tell my friends when I get back to New York." Of course, the anecdote seemed stupid and inconsequential by the time I got back, which means the terrorists won.

Got drunk and high like any other day.

i was working this super-dumb show-and-tell at my work. it was a show-and-tell of products the company had made in the last year.

it was for, like, the janitors and factory workers and shit. it was this rah-rah thing for people who frankly didn't care about it and were there b/c it meant half a day off. it was totally stupid even normally, but to be there during all of this jazz was just insane.

i eventually left a couple hours earlier than i was supposed to leave. i had gotten all the info in bits and pieces as i sat at this fuckin' booth. i had only been at the job for a few months, so i didn't know better (which would have meant bailing a lot earlier).

i got through to my friend marc, who works two blocks away from the tower site. he was getting ready for work w/the radio on when he heard the first plane had hit. obviously, he didn't go in. watched them fall from home.

he said his first reaction, pre-falling, was that it was a big deal, but new york was tough and would be fine. when they fell down, he realized it was more like an amputation than a flesh wound.

lot of dead firefighters in his neighborhood in queens

another friend saw it all from a couple blocks away--first plane hit when he was walking to work. a friend's cousin ran out of tower 1 from the 25th floor or so. it's crazy how many people were affected heavily by it, beyond even the people who were killed and their families.

i think i watched about 100hrs of tv that week. i did almost the same thing with the new orleans mess. i think it's useful to sear these things into one's memory. i don't want to forget any of it.

i didn't think it was cool at all. i thought it was WWIII.

however, the day before katrina hit n.o., i told some people that i had felt disappointed in past 'killer' hurricanes that lost strength before making landfall. i didn't want to feel that way, and i was sort of ashamed of feeling that way, but that's how i had felt. i don't think i'll feel disappointed in them again.

I was shocked really confused by the whole situation and I really felt guilty and bad for awhile like when I was having fun or something. I also thought I was gonna be drafted into the military. It was fucking weird.

I was at my temp office job. I checked the NY Times online when I first got there, must've been around 8:45, and saw that a plane had crashed into the WTC. "Bummer accident. Awful," I thought, and got to work.

A few minutes later a coworker stuck her head into my cubicle: "Did you hear the terrible news? A plane crashed into the WTC!" "Yeah. Sucks," I replied, approximately, and went back to my database.

In a bit I had to take some shit to another floor. By then people were clustered around TVs and not talking much. I was pretty focused on what I was doing and didn't feel like participating in the televisual gawking. I began to get a sense that people thought it was fucked-up that I was still doing my work, which annoyed me.

In the elevator on the way back (it was pretty full) I saw a coworker I was friendly with. "You heard?" she said. "Yeah yeah," I said. "They crashed another plane into the Pentagon," she said, and then my hands rose involuntarily to clutch my head: "HOLY SHIT." It was a moment of sickening horror and fear unlike any other in my adult life and I hope that it will not be repeated.

The rest of the work day I spent watching TV with my mother, who was 74 years old at the time. I remember trying to argue her out of her conviction that it was Islamic terrorists by talking about the Oklahoma City bombing.

Walking home through a nearly empty downtown that afternoon was surreal. Hearing silence in the sky (usually the commercial flights over where I live are consistently audible to the point where I don't hear them at all now) was surreal. Then the overhead silence started to be punctuated by the sound of bomber jets. I got into bed and put the covers over my head. I listened to NPR for a little while. The only thing that made any sense was the announcer who read W.H. Auden's "September 1, 1939" at the end of his show.

I didn't think "Cool" when the towers fell but I understand it. The deeply shameful and fucked-up part of my reaction over the next day or so came when I noticed that some part of me was disappointed when the death toll was revised way downward from the initial estimate of 10,000. I have no excuse or explanation for that except to say that clearly there is something in me that relishes horror on as large a scale as possible as long as it isn't happening to me personally or anyone I know.

i woke up late. turned on the tv. saw shit going wrong. flipped around and saw the same shit going wrong on other channels. turned the tv off and went back to bed.

it happend around 1 PM local time. not even a minute after i turned on tv it came as a breaking news on cnn - it wasn't confirmed it was a plane, i started to wonder how could you make a gap like this in the wall of wtc. i turned my vcr on and went to another room to turn on the computer and take snapshots with tv card i had at the time. after the second plane hit one of the stations put a much closer, much detailed look of the second tower's and i remember exactly what i thought: "shit, will it be possible to re build the tower after they will deal with the flames?".
when the first tower collapse i was shocked and high on adrenaline. it took my a while to realize the tower has actually collapsed - i remember looking at the blue sky behind the dust in the place where the tower was standing seconds before and being totally puzzled.
2 hours after the collapse of the second tower my brother came back from school. he didn't know about anything. i said to him wtc towers are no more, and he was like "yeah, right". he sat in from of tv and was sitting there for 5 minutes with jaw dropped, totally confused - tv was showing pictures of rubble, i was trying to explain that this is what wtc towers look like now, but he couldn't understand it at all.