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How do you feel? (a venting thread)

  
  

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Naked Flame
17:35 / 13.09.01
one big scary-ass wakeup call to all of us.

it's like the world going over the first big peak of a rollercoaster... with no safety harnesses. we might make it. but there are switchbacks and loops and maybe even unfinished tracks and further dodgy metaphors ahead.

I think that I'm gonna have to be more active and more of a warrior, the peaceful kind, if I want to be of any help at all. What's that old line, 'all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing'... that. There's gotta be something.
 
 
Red Cross Iodized Salt
17:38 / 13.09.01
Mostly I just feel sad. The footage of people trapped in and jumping from the burning buildings upset me deeply. The news of rescue workers and firemen killed when the buildings collapsed has only served to compound this.

I am so relieved that nobody I know was amongst the injured or killed. One of my friends was late for work on Tuesday morning. He had a meeting scheduled at the WTC and was going to go straight there. He heard news reports of the two crashes just before leaving and decided to stay home. I spent three hours on Tuesday trying to contact my girlfriend to make sure she was nowhere near the financial district. Her office is on 50th street, but there was always the chance that she'd have an early meeting downtown.

I am frustrated that I'm not able to do more than give blood. I'm frustrated that I'm not able to help those of my friends that have been so frightened and angered by the attack. My girlfriend and many of the people I know through her grew up in NYC, and they have all been very much changed by Tuesday's events. People that normally abhor violence are advocating revenge and war. Others are so scared that they are talking of moving away.

On Tuesday afternoon, my girlfriend went into a bar with some friends while stuck in Manhattan to check the news and try to phone me using a land line. She got talking to a guy at the bar. His wife was on the 86th floor and he had not yet heard from her. She had just started working there two weeks previously and was really excited about the job. They were due to go on holiday a week later. By the time my girlfriend left the bar, the man had still not managed to contact his wife. My girlfriend has been crying about this since.

I feel like the whole thing is somehow unreal, despite the fact that it happened close enough for me to see from just outside my apartment. I walked up to the promenade in Brooklyn Heights with a group of friends yesterday to look at Manhattan and New York City looks like it has had its front teeth kicked in.

I hope everyone from Barbelith that lives or has family or friends in New York comes out of this without experiencing personal tragedy.
 
 
grant
18:16 / 13.09.01
quote:Originally posted by runt:
I wondered at the strange conflicting emotions the compositer must have felt when he/she put together that image. The whole process seemed so strange and telling: searching for the most dramatic shot, touching it up a bit.... the pleaure and excitement the image provides - the drama - mingled with a flat, dull fear, horror and dread.

My friend, a neoconservative TV news editor, just told me he blacked out when he saw the footage and had to be sent home.
 
 
Cop Killer
18:47 / 13.09.01
I've been trivializing it a bit when talking about it; the only way I can deal with huge shit is through joking about it. Sometimes I feel like we should bomb the fuck out of everyone involved with this, not because of patriotism or whatever, but on general principle, you don't fuck with the U.S. it's almost like I want to make sure that if someone plays with fire they get burned like a motherfucker. But that's only sometimes and for the most part I don't actually believe it. I don't know whether there will be a war or not and if there is one and they do start up the draft I have enough wrong with me to get out of it and some of my friends do too, but some of my friends are in top shape and may get shipped off to meet their uncertain fates in a war that they don't neccesarily support, more that they just wouldn't be able to get out of. My first reaction, honestly, when my little brother woke me up at about 3 to tell me about it, was "shit, now I bet I can't watch any cartoons," cartoons are my escape from reality and without any on (I don't have cable) I was forced into a much darker reality than I had remembered 10 hours previously when I went to be drunk after hanging out with my best friend talking about everything we could. I'm pissed off at the area I live in, stupid kids walking down the middle of the streets waving huge American flags and screaming nonsense. At the community college a few miles away, that happens to have a large Arab enrollment (about 30% of the whole school), hardly any Arabs have been going, and the few that do have been getting the living shit kicked out of them; probably by suburban white kids who had a great feeling of self-satisfaction afterwards. My thoughts haven't been with the people that died so much, although it is a horrible thing, but with the people that happened to escape dying; like, I'm sure there was some fuck-up like me working there that got drunk the night before and was too hung over to go in so he called in and went back to sleep, waking up to find out that the place that he worked at had collapsed, or all the people that had been fired or laid off from there within the past couple of weeks, severly pissed off about it until the whole place blows up, or someone that happened to be on break at the time and was down the block having a cigarette, or the people that were running a bit late to work that get there right after the plane hit. I think of these people because I'm somewhat of an optimist and it breaks my heart to think of the people that happened to look out of their window to see an airplane coming right towards them.
 
 
Ethan Hawke
19:03 / 13.09.01
I just can't stop visualizing the towers collapsing. It was so unreal. No one expected the towers to fall. I thought they would just burn out of control. I can't get the image of tower one falling, the antenna hanging in the air just for an instance before following the rest of the floors to the ground.

I've ridden the subway into Manhattan twice since the attack. Everyone in the cars is on edge. This morning I was in the F Train, accompanying my girlfriend to work (she's midtown, back at work. My office, downtown, won't be accessible til Monday. My girlfriend is a financial journalist in manhattan. She was told today to call up companies and ask them how this tragedy affects their operations. Unreal.) You feel like you could die any minute on the subway. between last night and today, they've evacuated the Empire state building, Grand Central, Penn Station, La Guardia airport, and God knows what else because of bomb threats (in all probability false, but effective nonetheless).

The smoke from the explosion covers the city. You can smell it in Brooklyn, smell it in Midtown, smell it in Flushing. I can't imagine how much it must be choking people at ground zero. And those people are exposing themselves to hazardous materials (asbestos) dust that will more than likely kill them in lingering and painful ways years from now, because they are selfless enough to try to do something.

I burst into tears today when I heard they had pulled 5 firefighters from the wreckage. Such a small victory in the face of the carnage, but so moving.

I don't know what else to say.
 
 
shirleydoe
19:26 / 13.09.01
I'll tell you how I feel. I'm sitting here researching biotech weapons instead of writing boring ad copy. I veer between hope and horror.

I gotta go buy some rubber suits.
 
 
grant
19:51 / 13.09.01
quote:Originally posted by shirleydoe:
I'll tell you how I feel. I'm sitting here researching biotech weapons instead of writing boring ad copy. I veer between hope and horror.

I gotta go buy some rubber suits.

Start a thread. We may need to know.
 
 
Ganesh
19:53 / 13.09.01
quote:Originally posted by shirleydoe:
I gotta go buy some rubber suits.

I'll lend you one of mine...
 
 
shirleydoe
20:04 / 13.09.01
I just talked to one of my wrestler buddies who is in the guard and was 13 blocks from the explosion doing clean up.

It's pretty chilling, but teh guy is so positive, he's trying to remain up.

He told me he's seen shit he will never recover from. And this is a quote...

"u know how hard it is to tell a mother her 4yr old baby girl is dead"

That's been his job. Telling people their loved ones are dead. But he's trying to stay positive. One hell of a kid.
 
 
Regrettable Juvenilia
20:16 / 13.09.01
It's just too fucking much. I can't tear myself away from the news, but watching it is just some kind of horrible see-saw: I'm veering between waves of horror every time new details emerge from NY (which comes with a huge dose of appalled guilt for even indulging in any anti-US feelings), and horror at the reaction: the talk of the "civilised world", the trivialising of tragedies elsewhere in the world (American ambassador on Question Time, former or current I don't know, chastised a woman criticising the USA's Middle East policies, as if what went on there was an abstract political ideal, the deaths not as real somehow as the deaths in NYC), the terrifying, terrifying words "Pakistan must decide which side it's on", the idea that "terrorism" can be completely eliminated (what does that MEAN? can you eliminate a form of action, and if not, are you in fact going to eliminate a form of thought?)...

God.

Oh, and IDS is the new Tory leader. Whoop-de-fookin-doo.

I'm going on holiday tomorrow. Can you please all still be here when I get back?

[ 13-09-2001: Message edited by: The Flyboy ]
 
 
the Fool
00:23 / 14.09.01
I feel scared, sad, horrified. My parents and brother and sister were on a plane, an hour out of LA when it all started. I worried a lot that night (all started 9.30 - 10pm East Aust time). They were one of the last planes to get into LAX after it was evacuated.

I spoke to them on Wed morning, they were all okay. Jet lagged and stunned. A great time to have a holiday. They were going to go to disneyland but instead stayed in the hotel with the 24hr horror channel for company. If the had of left a week earlier, they would have been in New York.

I really don't want to see anymore footage of the crashes and collapse. I think its starting to scar me. Trying to comprehend the scale of death, has almost brought me to tears a couple of times. I don't know if I want to comprehend it anymore, or the minds that devise this level of suffering.

I'm horrified by the useless loss of it all. What could the terrorists possibly hope to get out of it other than more fear and more death.

[ 14-09-2001: Message edited by: the Fool you though you knew ]
 
  

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