ChapterONE  

       M

* THE ATTACK:
   And The Noise Ordinance

  

August 27, 2002 to August 29, 2002
Including Field Note Passages From
(Sept. 10, 2001 and Sept. 11, 2001)

The Rules of Engagement in an Overcrowded World

 

 

For a while last year, we were All One, stunned, numbed, crushed, and inflamed.
But the road forked somewhere, dividing those most directly affected from everyone else.

 

                                                                                                                                                                            Time Magazine (09/11/02)

 

Anyone who chose to obsess about or cover the events of September 11 took a field trip through hell.
 

                                                                                                                                                                         CNN TV News (09/11/02)

 

5
 August 27, 2002
 Lawrence, Kansas

Happiness is Genius:
 Newbie Training Season At the Corner of Petty and Rude

 

I’m just a regular American.


        And like everyone else, I have my own ways of coping with this screwed up and cynical world. I recognize that there’s evil in this world. I just choose to ignore it when I can. Just a regular American with regular American viewpoints and regular American obsessions. Infused with all the regular American strengths and weaknesses.
        A typical artist from America’s heartland, sidestepping a fast multi-million dollar New York City art world to exist globally in scope at a slower pace with a bit more dignity and on a more modest scale. Dedicated to my wife Janet and to our families and our friends and to all the cats in our lives. And dedicated to my creative global vision and to going about my selfish business of art as passionately as my support structure will allow me to go about it. Volunteering at the local schools. Crossing against the lights down on Main Street. Keeping a regular bird watcher’s journal. Attending the demolition derby at the county fair. Spending time out at the lake. Wishing good for others and promoting a global view. Teaching street photography to neglected youth. Still partial after all these years to the old-school music and wisdom of Neil Young and the Kinks. Flannel shirts and blue jeans --- that’s pretty much who I am. Smoking too much and sometimes watching too much TV.
        Just a regular American street artist on a global mission with a simple golden rule that happiness is genius, just trying to get as much of the happy out of this sad messed-up world as I can in this harrowing era of hate. Giving 100 percent to my life’s work and attempting to drive my 50 mile-per-hour art on a 100 mile-per-hour corporate freeway without getting rammed from behind.

        Demanding independence and unfettered access in a world full of unreasonably demanding control freaks. A typically cynical American living an art life in a small airplane-style bungalow in a quiet hundred-year-old historic neighborhood tucked into a tree-covered corner of the University of Kansas campus on the flanks of Mount Oread at the heights of Lawrence, Kansas.
        A very compelling place, Lawrence Kansas.
        One of the premiere university towns in America. A good place for regular cynical Americans to live and a great place for regular under-funded American artists to work. Ignoring the lure of the coasts (where fame is bigger and more distracting -- but the money’s no better) to get done what’s got to get done in a timely manner --- right here in the middle of the country.
        Lawrence, Kansas.
        A charming place known by some as America’s Front Porch.
        Truckers call it Hometown USA.
        Built on the firm foundation of freedom between the banks of the Wakarusa and Kansas Rivers on the edge of the prairie. Crossroads of the Oregon and Santa Fe trails. A place so compelling that the glaciers even stopped here at the end of the last big ice age.
        Lawrence, Kansas. The flash point and ground zero of Civil War-era hostilities and internationally known during the time of John Brown and Bloody Kansas and Quantrill’s Raid as Free State Lawrence. Home of the Jayhawkers. Known as one of the few cities in America founded strictly for political reasons and probably the only city in America established during a terror war. Where anti-slave stalwarts set up camp and where pro-slave raiders infiltrated, murdered, and burned the place down.
        Twice!
        Resulting in Lawrence’s city motto --- From Ashes to Immortality  --- given to us by former resident Langston Hughes.

        Free State Lawrence.
        A line of freedom drawn in the dirt of American history. A place Abraham Lincoln once called, “The Cradle of Liberty.” A place established in 1853 --- the same year as Central Park opened in New York City and Levi Jeans were invented in the gold fields out west. Hometown of the important ABC TV anti-nuclear-war movie The Day After, filmed in and about Lawrence at the height of the Cold War in 1982. An old, historic, liberal, and moral-minded place now known (aside from its history) as the home of the University of Kansas, for its outstanding Lawrence music and arts scene (#15 on a 100-best small art towns in America 2001 list,) and for its awesome Jayhawk men’s college basketball team. A laidback place Psychology Today magazine once called one of the least-25 stressful cities in America.
        But like most university neighborhoods in most university towns, mine has its down side too. Suffering acute waves of humiliating annoyance. Especially this time of the year at the beginning of the fall semester. A particularly aggravating time in Lawrence. Wholly caused by the swell of incoming humanity (about 25,000 people flood this town of 80,000 in August) and in part because so much of the influx are the dreaded 18 to 22-year-old social newcomers.
        Freshmen, and the like.
        I call em’ newbies.
        You know the type. Usually young and sometimes spoiled college students just passing through town, not all of them properly trained yet in community manners with little incentive to be civil to the townies or to feel accountable in the least for their selfish transient behaviors. Damn them for behaving as if stupid were a virtue instead of a fault and damn us too for occasionally having been as rude and immature as they are now when we were their age, before we became cynical and petty with age and wisdom and somehow were molded polite in the process. These damn newbie extremists --- rude with their selfish late night noise that hardly anyone in America would tolerate for very long. These immature newbies that have total disregard for the majority of real-life people living around them. Tired people who don’t have the comfort of late night student party hours and who sleep to professional schedules that get them up at the crack of dawn for work. Real-life people existing outside of academia who certainly aren’t going to tolerate more than one or two impositions on their sleep per year from any one source. Especially from newbie noise terrorists high on flawed expectations of the boundaries of their newfound independence. Hypnotized by their youth. Heads clouded by the fog of their own self-absorption.
        Freshmen and other underclass newbies. Sometimes even seniors or older, finally moved out (or having been kicked out) of their dorm rooms or their Greek houses. Renting their first overcrowded place away from their parents or guardians or any other authority figures (they mistakenly presume). Temporarily setting up shop in my neighborhood on their way to a higher education, moving in right next door to me, into my airspace. And despite this loud transient throng of newbie roommates obviously being outnumbered four to one by permanent owner-occupied houses and bungalows full of quiet real-life people with kids and careers and real-life first-light schedules, the newbies -- every year this time in August -- insist that daily or weekly late night noise after 10 p.m. ought to be just fine with everyone within earshot.
        As the newbies typically put it: Especially for people who’ve chosen to live right next door to the university.
        “What did you expect?” they blurt out as I shut their parties down --- as if I hadn’t heard such self-serving spew from so many other newbies during so many other newbie seasons gone by.
        Oh, I cynically reply, pretending to be surprised at their next-to-the-university argument, “You mean right next door to that thousand-acre park over there? That quiet, contemplative, tree covered university park over there?”
        “Is that what you mean?”

        “Yea, well, we never looked at it that way before, but we’re college students, we have to let off steam somehow. Don’t we?” is the typical newbie pout. As if the student body didn’t have all those downtown music bars to go make noise in, and as if the condition of their steam was the least bit my concern

 

5
 The Ghost of Parties Past

            I’ve been on both sides of the noise issue in my quarter century of partying in Lawrence. I was a Lawrence music promoter throughout the 1980s and was a founding member of two annual music festivals, one a legendary outdoor rock-and-roll event, which lasted 12 years and drew many thousands of loud party fools to it. During those years, (my party salad days,) my old downtown studio was often used as party central for festival organization meetings. And yes, many of those parties and meetings at that house (nick-named the Electric Bandana Ranch) got out of hand. Yet in all those years of hyper-partying down on Connecticut Street (at least a hundred parties) I only had the cops called on me once. That’s because the parties at the Electric Bandanna Ranch were always BYOB (bring your own bottle) affairs --- naturally cutting down on the free beer riffraff that are the cause of so much party extremism --- and because at about 10 p.m. I’d rein the party indoors. Not because I wanted to. I didn’t want to. But because I always thought my neighbors had a greater right to sleep through the night than I had to make my little party noise.
        Those three-day outdoor music events I helped produce (called the Megga Keggar Outdoor Music Festival) with 24 acts and thousands of radical personalities roaming around a farm --- full of beer and drugs and doing God knows what --- usually were another matter. The small group of Lawrence party extremists (anarchists) who produced those festivals each year (as outlaw underground events without ever bothering to procure a county license) had decided early in their planning that in order to preserve wild life in Lawrence it would be unavoidably necessary to be a little rude. Either that, or we’d have had to abandon our mission altogether --- and that just wasn’t an option. So it was just too bad for everyone in the county, but that was the cost of having way too much fun. Forced by circumstance to commit pre-meditated rudeness toward the neighbors within a ten-square-mile air space. At least the ones we couldn’t afford to grease with some cash to put up with all that really loud rock-and-roll blaring past three or four in the morning. It was only once a year, we justified, and what did all those county whiners expect. Buying farms and living in the country just where extreme party givers might chose to throw an outdoor music festival. Hell, we were college students, and we just had to let off a little steam somehow. Didn’t we?

         It was an annual weekend-long circus that took us and about 50 of our friends about two months to produce and once was described in a Kansas City newspaper as, “The area’s largest outdoor music party, three days and two nights of tunes, beer, monkey spanking and unadulterated ribaldry”. An event that hosted only Lawrence music scene acts and for years featured the Lawrence R&B-roots legends The Homestead Grays. A band fronted by songwriter Chuck Mead on vocals and guitar and paced by Shaw Wilson on the drums, the two Grays who moved to Nashville after the breakup and who started up anew as the legendary alternative country music band, BR-549.
        We were loud, we were rude, and we were unrepentant about it. But we had such high quality Lawrence music to terrorize the world with (and so much beer to drink) that we imagined ourselves less as rude and more just operating under the deluded presumption that we were somehow on a sanctified mission from God and that somehow the community at large would just have to find a way to deal with it.
        According to the regional press, our little pirate party group --- party extremists with resume --- were: “Hell on wheels”.
        One rumor printed in the Topeka Capitol-Journal newspaper, shortly after Megga Keggar IV terrorized the countryside in 1985, hinted at the extent of our self absorption:

Beer Party Halted

at YMCA Camp

 

 

            A Shawnee County sheriff’s official said Thursday that a group calling itself The Committee for the Preservation of Wild Life in Lawrence held a beer and band party last weekend at the Young Men’s Christian Association’s Camp Hammond in rural Shawnee County near the Douglas County line.

            Noting the name of the committee, Sheriff Ed Ritchie said Thursday, “They call themselves the Committee for the Preservation of Wildlife, but you can bet the farm they weren’t down there saving the birds, the squirrels or the rabbits.”

5
         At the time I was helping to produce those outlaw music festivals I was also earning my bachelor degree in journalism and photojournalism at the University of Kansas and occasionally wandering for weeks and months at a time down to Cold War-inspired conflicts on the streets of El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Guatemala. There to gather war zone streetphotos for my lifetime global streetphoto project from all the war zones breaking out in that region of the world at that time.
        And when I wasn’t out of town photographing the global street somewhere, or going to classes up on the hill at KU, or serving on the Committee for the Preservation of Wild Life in Lawrence, or lobbying for the environment in Washington, I was a photographer, reporter, columnist, and editorial board member for the University Daily Kansan student newspaper. And it was while I was at the Kansan in 1985 that I penned a column to criticize a movement by the Lawrence City Commission to institute a noise ordinance in the city to protect neighborhoods from extreme and compulsive party noise. From the rude newbies who show up in town every year during fall newbie season. In the article I slammed the idea of a noise ordinance in Lawrence, and I chided the commission for mistreating the golden cow. Suggesting that perhaps the University of Kansas ought to be moved 15 miles out in the county near Stull (population: 28) where the people of Stull would gladly lose a little sleep putting up with a little late night noise in exchange for the fat economy that would follow the University’s move from Lawrence.

        Well --- that was then, and this is now.
        Circumstances have changed.
        The city commission that year totally ignored my student column and voted unanimously to establish that noise ordinance. The same noise ordinance I now use two or three times each year to shut down parties in my role as a neighborhood bitch. Now that I’m older and I sleep through the night  --- I’m grateful that the Lawrence City Commission had the foresight to protect my right to sleep through the night. And so now it’s time for some young punk columnist on the University Daily Kansan newspaper to write a column chiding me for being old and hypocritical.
        My work preserving wild life in Lawrence and defending the right to party is done. I once played those roles.

        But that was then, and this is now...

        Now I’m an aging partier and don’t go out nearly as much or nearly as long or nearly as loudly as I used to. Let’s face it, many of us go from party fool to simple bystanders over time and we eventually get a much bigger kick out of watching other much younger fools party as we ever did being one of the young fools themselves.
        Hell, every now and then --- especially while practicing my streetphoto art at sidewalk cafes --- I can sit contentedly with a beverage and watch fools party until the sun comes up. If only they’d give a good performance and if only they’re not living and partying next door to where I sleep, forcing their lifestyle down my throat.

 
        Slowing down is a natural aging process, and as I discovered, it’s a process which usually lives for a spell in denial. I found that out because I used to blame my party slow-down on my used-to-party-all-the-time wife and my used-to-party-all-the-time friends who now either have kids (parents simply stop applying themselves,) have taken eight-to-five career jobs, or are club-soaked musicians who can’t stand going out to a bar anymore unless they’re booked on stage. My wife (who at 35 is 12 years younger than I am) works early in the morning and is in bed by 8:30 p.m. My friends have all come up with their own excuses to stay at the house. But they, as it turned out, weren’t really to blame for me losing my party drive.
        For a long while I attributed the slow-down to lifestyle and career economics, always saying that I needed all that beer money to travel the world with instead. To feed my inexplicable wanderlust and to afford to fulfill my calling as a global street photographer. But then a few years ago a friend of mine who owns a legendary downtown Lawrence nightspot called The JazzHaus traded me a $350 bar tab for a streetphoto I’d made behind his place the winter before. It was an image of one of my neighbors and fellow Lawrence artists, the poet William Burroughs (Naked Lunch) walking with a cane in the alley behind Massachusetts Street alongside his manager under the JazzHaus back door sign (a dangling saxophone) and seemingly affecting with his very passing the colorful orange and blue Lawrence music scene leaflets tacked to the wall under the Saxophone sign, leaflets that flutter in the breeze as he passes. 

 

       A $350 bar tab in trade for an alley street photograph starring William Burrows. How gritty and party-prone does that sound? But the embarrassing fact of the matter is that I’ve slowed way down (party-wise) and that it’s probably all my fault for getting old and cynical.
        How do I know that?
        Well I guess the fact that I’ve had that $350 worth of JazzHaus beer script in my wallet now for several years and have only spent $45 of it rules out finances and points instead to denial. To the sad fact that when people (regular Americans like me and you) get older and when the fun gets harder to need and harder yet to have, party animals wisely begin pacing themselves. Most of us (even slacker artists) are usually asleep by the end of Letterman and hard at work the next morning by at least eight or nine. Just like a vast majority of our neighbors.
        Except of course for those loud newbie neighbors next door and down the street ...
        I mean my Lord, being a fine artist and working alone means I’ve chosen not to have to be bossy to anyone. But now despite that and beyond my control, I’m thrust into the reluctant position of acting as a neighborhood bitch. Knowing that for the rest of my life (a hell of a lot longer time, as it turns out, than the few years I amused myself with party extremism) I’ll be a radical neighborhood noise czar.
        And from now on (since the attacks of September 11, 2001) unrepentantly so, don’t you know.
        Comfortable with my evolved party position now because when push comes to shove and there’s no choice other than to bow to the calling of a vigorous self-defense (in order to protect peace and quiet on the block and to expose the outrageous expectations of the annoying criminal extremists) I spring into action as party pooper. And I no longer (since September 11) fret that I’m being a hypocrite. Rather, I now see myself as reformed. So now instead of abusing my party privileges, I help educate newbies who --- finding out that freedom isn’t as free as they’d like it to be --- are shocked by the notion that long-time neighbors armed with a citywide noise ordinance and the help of a sympathetic police force could possibly crush the gang’s long term plan. That is, to rent a house together near KU, stay as full of beer as possible, and teach Lawrence, Kansas (Free State Lawrence) how to party.

        “How can you shut us down? We can party as long and as loudly as we care to,” some extremists amusingly bark at me as I shut their parties down. Trying to sound like junior lawyers through the slur of their beer, and in fact sounding instead with their ludicrous arguments like selfish little children.
        Immature, selfish, drunken children.
        “We have to let off steam somehow, don’t we?”
        “Why don’t you just go back into your house and shut up,” one drunken party boy once told me during the newbie terror season. Just before the police arrived and just before I signed a complaint against he and his house full of rude newbie roommates. Just before he and they lost about $300 of their beer futures for disturbing about 250 of their neighbors peace and quiet and just before the court additionally charged the loud one who’d barked at me with being drunk and disorderly and for contributing to the delinquency of minors.
        That house full of rude newbie party extremists not only found out that freedom isn’t free, and that making noise in our neighborhood after 10 p.m. won’t be tolerated, it also discovered that not everyone within earshot was going to just toss and turn and roll over and cower under their covers inside their homes intimidated by the excesses of drunken adult-aged children. Excesses that corrupt community morale and criminally disturb our peace of mind and sense of security, thereby discounting our freedom to sleep through the night in our quiet little neighborhood.

        The latest gang who moved in next door last August, a house full of college girls --- one or two of whom tried to be civil last semester and two or three whom distinguished themselves in embarrassing fashion as noise princesses and who caused several late night police runs to shut them down and who came within a whisker of losing a chunk of their own beer money --- moved back into their house again last week after a quiet summer away. And today I’m pessimistically hopeful that they’ve decided this year to be less self-serving, less immature, more civilized and community minded, and more sensitive to the needs of their neighbors in this overcrowded world.
        Especially me.

        But those same hopes for civility have already been dashed for another Lawrence neighborhood over on the south side of town. Early on Sunday morning, according to the Monday morning newspaper account, about a thousand newbies (some of legal drinking age and some not so much) were confronted by angry neighbors (some who had to go to work at 6 a.m.) for treating their streets and their yards like a drunken beer garden and for trampling on their neighbor’s freedom to be able to sleep through the night. I wasn’t there, but I’d be willing to bet that at least one of the drunken revelers wondered aloud to the offended neighbors how the neighbors, “Could possibly expect to sleep through the night having chosen to purchase a house and move their families so close to a university.”
        And the newbies wonder why the neighbors have all become so cynical, so petty, and so full of un-remorseful anger. While the neighbors wonder if their latest efforts will stop the madness for the rest of the semester or instead will inspire retribution and a ratcheting up of both the violations and thus the ultimate cost of the crime to the offending newbies. The cost in fines, in lawyer fees, and perhaps even in jail time --- if that’s what it takes.

 

5
Good Lord --- Not Again

                               Another aggravating part of this time of the year (especially this year) is that my wife Janet and I, after a welcome six-month break, have the cable television company come over to the house and turn the cable TV back on again. I called them this morning and let them know that I wanted them to come over and let the foolish thing back into my life, and they said they’d be over tomorrow.
        As I’ve been reading in my morning newspapers and hearing on National Public Radio, BBC radio, Radio Netherlands, and CNN radio (the typical daily intake of the media’s take on the world I get when the cable TV’s turned off) the one-year anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attack is looming.
        Good lord --- good lord --- not all that again... not again... was the thought I’d been suppressing all summer long. If it weren’t for the anniversary I’d have had trouble sustaining my grief this long. But now it’s on its way back into my world for an encore of hammering hate.
        A hard way to end a hard year. Reliving some of the worst moments of my American experience. Reliving all that gruesome and empty sadness. Recalling all those impossible choices we were forced as a civilization to make last year. The messed-up world on its way back into my house. Coming back into my living room 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Just in time for the anniversary. Just in time to remind me of this lousy past year and to make me think about how petty the whole freaking world had once again become since the pain wore off. Since that rare post-September 11 season of worldwide compassion.
        A daylong surprise attack against our most vulnerable weaknesses so overwhelming in its audacity and so enraging in its absurdity and so nerve-racking in the fear of its implications, that in time it will be harder and harder to ever again comprehend the actual enormity of it all. On September 11, 2011, after ten years of cushion, I’m certain that it will be impossible to accurately remember the true depth of sadness and suffering and alarm the world felt on that day and in the year after September 11, 2001. But on the one year anniversary this September --- fresh in our minds and not yet glossed over with revisionist polish --- we’re still painfully aware of (and dreading) what we’re predictably about to go through if we decide to follow the anniversary events and remembrances on the television set.
        That impossible sadness rerun over and over and over again up on that screen in our living rooms. Gripping, hypnotic, and just about impossible to ignore. Aggravating video horror clips running over and over again. Burning reminders of September last year when even the newbies didn’t park illegally out in front of the house or make late night noise in the neighborhood. During that time last fall of our collective shock, revulsion, sorrow, pain, resolve, retribution, and bloodlust. A time I’d rather forget, but a time I know I never will. A time whose only bright side was that we were all too stung and strung out to be as petty as our usual petty selves, too disturbed to be as mean or as selfish or as diminishing to others as we typically are at our worst. More patient with others, less loud, more civil then we typically are. A time when --- for a celestial instant --- the entire civilized world came together and reached out in the same direction. An unprecedented season of global compassion --- perhaps the only perceptible silver lining in a horrible year full of lunatic murder and war.
        A season when even annoying newbie extremists were far too shocked to be very offensive and were much more apt to respect the freedom and peace and security of others and a time when I was much less apt to call the cops on them and much more apt to have patience with the selfish indiscretions of youth. A time --- fleeting global unity aside --- that I’d really just rather forget.

        An uncomfortable season when I was forced to come face to face with the notion of bloodlust and with my own Americanism for the first time since those lousy days growing up in the 1960s and 1970s.

 

5
 August 28, 2002
 Lawrence, Kansas

A Bobble Head Summer:
Parking Violations on Stupid Street

 

                        So far so good on party noise in my neighborhood this semester, but of course it’s only August 28 and classes just started last week. Besides, the lengths that unmannered newbie extremists will go to demonstrate the depths of their self absorption is astounding --- and noise is just the worst of it. Some of these outlaw newbies decide (even though it was never permitted where they were raised) that it would be just fine to overcrowd a house outside the bounds of city code and then park all the extra cars on the lawn --- the hardly-ever-mowed lawn that the lazy-ass absentee slumlord ignores, because of course he doesn’t live here himself, so why should he care?
        Of course there’s the back-beat thumping car stereo blasters, coming and going up and down the street with the volume and base knobs maxed out (not just in party college towns but everywhere in this world and apparently at any old time of the night) and there’s that little neighborhood thief who keeps slipping into my car at night whenever I forget to lock the doors and who rifles through my stuff and who steals quarters from my glove box. And there’s that moron who keeps racing up and down the dirt alley in back of the studio as if kids and pets and the neighborhood wildlife had no concern for his rude rush to get on with his own rude little life.
        And of course the driveway in front of my studio bungalow this time of the year (being less than 100 yards from the university and being adjacent to curbside parking spaces on either side of it) becomes a $30 parking fine trap for blatantly untrained newbies. And as fortune would have it, I --- now necessarily tucked into the justifiable self-defense mode of my time and frustrated at not being able to punish the car stereo thumpers, the late night honkers, the quarter thief, or some of the other rude newcomers who’ve slipped through the net --- get to have a petty part in lightening their wallets for being rude and for breaking the social contracts of parking and of being a good neighbor.
        Every year, beginning the first week of classes, some airhead parks his car out in front of my studio taking up two parking spaces and daring other rude newbies late for class to risk a fine or a tow job by sticking their cars into my small driveway opening. I decided years ago that the rules of engagement I’d follow for such violations would be that if a vehicle were stuck into the driveway opening under two and a half feet and the car wasn’t a repeat offender, I’d suppress my petty desire to lower the boom. Less than two and a half feet and I’d suffer the fool and let the violation pass. But between two and a half and four feet, I’d call the police and have them write the newbie a $30 parking ticket. And if the violation were more than four feet, my rules of engagement called for me to have the moron towed for a very painful $140.
        Unmannered newbies who’ve experienced these fates would surely argue with me that my rules of engagement are unfair. They’d tell me I should sympathize with them because they’re college students, and that I should give them the slack to block my driveway because somehow they wound up late for class. However, because my freedom to punish them for being spoiled and for blocking my driveway trumps their freedom to be stupid and ill mannered, I call in the cops every time.

5
          And so that’s what happened today in my life that was most worth writing down in this journal. That on August 28, 2002 the first moron of the new semester parked his Delta 88 in two parking spaces in front of my studio, spoiling order and starting a chain of events that spiraled down to the typically selfish, rude, and petty behaviors expected in the wake of meaningless disorder. I spent the morning working at the downstairs desk near the front window and between 8:30 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. I was forced out of my chair five times to mercifully go outside to inform five separate drivers that there would be no slack. Three young women and two young men, each of whom bothered to get out of their cars to check how far they were illegally poking into my driveway before deciding to park there anyway. Four out of five of them --- according to my rules of engagement --- who would have qualified for a high-dollar tow.
        Then, when I went to the upstairs office for a few minutes in the back of the house out of view of the driveway, a sixth late-for-class newbie fell for the early semester late-for-class newbie trap. I wasn’t there to save him from himself. So, of course --- faced with a blatant petty criminal and my own petty and mean-spirited desires to pin him to the $140 cross in place of all the other poor little bastards who I couldn’t nail along the way --- I called in the cops. A ticket was issued and a towing ensued, ensuring that soon (not many more $140 thrashings from now) the selfish behavior of the self-serving driver would be legislated right out of him.

        And I’m confident that my humiliating responsibility as amateur party and parking cop (this petty role that’s been thrust upon me) should only be at its aggravating worse for between a few weeks and a couple of months. Some of the thoughtless newbie party noisemakers (especially the deluded ones who actually believe they have the right to party at the expense of neighbors) will flunk out or will end up in alcohol or drug treatment programs. Neighborhood leaders will get city inspectors to force students to stop overcrowding their houses and get the city to stop them from parking cars on their lawns. Most of the troublemakers who believe they have the freedom to annoy others will be re-educated and forced to act civil by those they offend --- just like when I was a newbie and was forced to be civilized. When (like they) I learned about community the hard way by being duly bitched out by the offended and by being challenged by the courts to shape up. I haven’t tried jail yet (outside of that two-day civil disobedience stint for protesting too aggressively against nuclear issues) but I have been embarrassed, humiliated, and reeducated by that single police call to my Electric Bandanna Ranch party. Guided into becoming a more polite civilian with a greater regard for others --- a reasonable notion duly bullied into me by the overcrowded community at large.
        So, from the experience of newbie seasons gone by, I’m certain that almost all the illegally rude parking out in front of my studio will die out in a couple of months. Because although not all the neighbors have the courage to confront drunken noise terrorists in the middle of the night to sign a noise complaint, neighbors won’t think twice before punishing newbie driveway-blockers with a $140 tow or a $30 parking ticket. And of course just like this afternoon’s newbie parker, as soon the fines add up and they decide it’s in their best interests to be late for class rather than block an innocent neighbor’s driveway, the violations dramatically drop off.
        Much of the late night outdoor partying will stop.
        Cars won’t be parked on the lawns anymore.
        Gear-heads will stop racing up and down the alley.
        And with civilized order restored by the rule of law, the whole free world will be better off than it had been before, especially the sound sleepers of Free State Lawrence, USA.

        America ’s Home Town.

 

5
Here We Go Again

 

                                   Last year I spent a great deal of time staring up at the TV set, slack-jawed by the condition of this damaged world we’ve found ourselves on. And good lord, here we go again ...
        Almost fully recovered during the months this spring and summer with no television access --- hearing September 11-related news on the radio and reading about it in the newspapers, but never once all summer having to watch another airliner crashing into a another building. But all that recovery is in jeopardy now because this afternoon my cable television was turned back on by the cable TV people. And now I once again have a working news, sports, information, and entertainment appliance.
        And although I need a working television to properly and fully finish the anniversary coverage of the first year of World War III (a small window on the world) I’m positive I’m less better off for having it back in my life.
        Every year at the end of college basketball season in early April at the conclusion of the NCAA Basketball Championships, I make the cable television people come out to my studio and unhook my cable TV. And every year in early autumn when basketball season revs back up, I have them come back out to the house to turn the thing back on. Sure it costs me about $90 to have them govern my summer TV consumption, but I have little self control with the TV news channels (especially since last year) and must deny myself its use as a media source by paying the cable people to shut it off for a few months. Never has this yearly break from commercial television saturation coverage of meaningless (to me) news tragedies and schlock (like the Robert Blake celebrity wife murder or the Olympic figure skate judging scandal) ever been so welcomed than it was this year. The year after the world as depicted on television slack-jawed me out of my comfortable cynicism and spiraled me headlong into a desperately sad, cruel, and uncomfortable world of uncontrollable shock, disbelief, anger, and reluctant resolve. Into a humiliating self-defense posture and ultimately through a bloodlust grinder.
        I’m sure I’ll attempt to use the cable access this time as the educational devise it was intended to be --- and still can be with a little discipline. However, with the first anniversary of September 11 looming, I’m pretty sure I’ll fail and that blasted black box in my living room will instead once again become my dreaded 24-hour CNN Breaking News Box. The name I began calling the TV in my Amsterdam journals just after last year’s attack in recognition of how significant a character that appliance had become in all of our stories. A globally unifying character, that thing that we planted ourselves in front of that day and watched for hour after grinding hour.
        That small window on the world that evaporated my cynicism and demanded of me its attention.
        In fact, I just heard a report from Janet a few minutes ago who told me that she’d just heard on the radio that every morning one of the television networks has begun airing an anniversary broadcast to tell its viewers what the 19 terrorist hijackers were doing a year ago today as they prepared for their goddamn holy war.
        “It was a year ago today,” she told me the radio report about the TV show had begun, “When Mohammed Atta and the other 18 members of the four terrorist sleeper cells purchased their airline tickets for their fateful September 11 flights...”

 

5
 A Year Ago Today

 

                                A year ago today on August 28, 2001, I was probably content at home at my studio in the Cradle of Liberty busy being somehow petty. Not bothering to read newspaper stories about the growing Islamic extremist anger with the dominant Western dog-eat-dog corporate culture and the looming threat of terrorism. And at the time, being fall newbie season and all, I was also probably hard at work helping train last year’s crop of under-trained nuisance extremists in how to live, park, and party in a civilized neighborhood. And a year ago today I must have also been busy gearing up for another exciting September streetphoto shoot to my favorite place to work and play on Earth, on the beautiful rainy streets of Amsterdam, Holland --- with a bonus three-day road trip planned to Paris, France as well.
        I’ve been a street photographer for a quarter century now and wherever I go on the globe during streetphoto expeditions I keep a journal in order to remember the way I saw it at the time I saw it in. Rather than the way I might recall having seen it sometime later on down the road. And I began writing the journal for the 2001 Amsterdam shoot a few days after arriving in Europe, soon after Janet and I had gotten over our jet lag, on Monday, September 10, 2001.
        Since I’ve already begun thinking too much about last year’s horrors, I became nostalgic today for a time before all the violence and before the post September 11 agony began. And the thought crossed my mind that the Sept. 10, 2001 entry in my travel journal had been a perky little essay about how good it felt to finally get away from the grind and back to my favorite place in the world outside Kansas. So in order to help deny and suppress the dread of the coming anniversary, I went upstairs to the library and picked my 2001 journal off the bookshelf and cracked it open to that Sept. 10, 2001 entry.
        To reminisce about the pre-war me.

        To remember the way I’d really been before this generation of war began:

 

 

~
 September 10, 2001

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Lawrence to Kansas City to Philadelphia to Amsterdam

Back on the Streets

 

                           On Friday we finally got off to Amsterdam.

            We passed the feeding of the cats on to our neighbors and friends, Kristin and Eric, left Lawrence by car, and flew the getaway jet airplane from Kansas City to Philadelphia.  

            Free at last, free at last, thank the gods of aimless travel, we’re free at last.  

            Free at last to wander at will together away, away from the stress and strain of our everyday lives. Away from work and convention and from feeding the cats and tending to their every neurotic whim. Away from rude Kansas University student newcomers flooding Lawrence who distract me with their noise. What a rush. To get on that jet airplane and to feel so new as to even rise above the aggravation and hassle of air travel itself. The delays. The lies from the public address system. Stale peanuts. Rude flight attendants. Crying babies.

            We rose above the feeling of being cattle led to slaughter. We rose above our workloads, our responsibilities, and our stress. We rose through the clouds away from our boredom, too long in one place. Away from the grind and into a time of our own...
 

            Dad and Kathryn met us at the airport in Philly. We came out of the airplane and there they were, having come to the big city from the Lehigh Valley to shop and having come to the airport to meet us inside the terminal. It was a quick visit, and it was great to see them, even though we all knew we’d be seeing each other again for some quality time in a couple of months at the Thanksgiving holiday. Together again for turkey dinner and for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade on the streets of New York .  

            Ahhh! The wind bouncing enormous balloons full of gas off tall buildings and the chance to get my hands on a few slices of real New York pizza pie. I could almost taste it, but for now a Philly cheese steak at the Philadelphia International Airport would have to do.  

            The US Air flight from Philadelphia to Schiphol Airport in Holland was fairly uneventful and I even got about three hours of sleep. We arrived in Amsterdam ready to party! We checked our bags into lockers at Central Station and shopped the Damrak on our way down to Rick’s Wild Style canalside cafe, one of our three homes away from home in Amsterdam (I call the place the European Office) where I often write and where I usually do photographic post-production work away from the moisture in my tent.

 

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            There we were --- clocked in again and ready to heal. Supplied for the start of our holiday with umbrellas, tram tickets, an International Herald-Tribune morning newspaper, and a couple of early Amsterdam souvenirs. Clocked-in at our usual seats at our usual table next to our favorite canal in town. Hailing a waitress, we ordered beverages for two.  

            Holiday freedom!

            Back at the best place on the planet aside from our home in Lawrence .

 

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            The waitress brought us a beer and a Bailey’s on ice and we kicked off sixteen days of urban Amsterdam bliss and aimless European street wandering with a toast to our good sense for having come back here again and again ...  

            After a couple of drinks and an hour or two of major-league people-watching, we roused our Dutch friends Mark and Donna from their apartment above The Wild Style Cafe right next door to Rick’s (co-owned joints that operate together and are known as Rick’s Wild Style Cafe) and made them come downstairs for some coffee.           

            Later we headed east by tram to set up house at Camping Zeeburg on the edge of Amsterdam (our second home away from home in Holland) and we pitched our tent on top of what still passes for grass this time of year above the muck of an overused post-tourist-season campground. We spent the next couple of days easing out of jet lag and finding our Dutch sea legs. Hanging out at our favorite canalside cafes in town during the days and at the campsite in the evenings and enjoying the tram rides through Amsterdam in between. Sleazing the nights away at the Camping Zeeburg clubhouse, a charming private campground cafe with a vaulted ceiling, a fully stocked bar, and a pool table in the back. A quiet oasis two meters below sea level --- surrounded in every direction out big picture windows by a busy Dutch transportation corridor.

 

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            Out the windows of that campground cafe, high-spirited bystanders sit and watch two busy bridges spanning the lake harbor, one for local traffic between Amsterdam and North Amsterdam via Zeeburg Island and one jammed with European traffic on the Amsterdam A-10 beltway streaming past the Camping Zeeburg Cafe, across the water a mile or so to the west.

            Campers can sit there with a Baileys on ice and spend an hour looking out those cafe windows and in that hour they can count a hundred bicycles going over the Zeeburg bridge and feel the rumble of dozens of huge canal barges flowing past only fifty meters away on the Amsterdam to Utrecht shipping canal.

            Through the windows across the bay on Buiten Lake travelers can watch the swans and cormorants dodge the sailboats, jet skis, motorboats, and yachts at the Amsterdam Bayliner Yacht Club.  

              A Bailey’s on ice or a hot chocolate with whipped cream in my hand. Back at one of my favorite       Amsterdam spots. Sitting by the fireplace. Reading and writing or fiddling with my cameras or watching Zeeburg life go by out the windows or chatting with people who camp at Zeeburg from all over the world. Listening to their stories. Appreciating their eccentric behaviors. Spending time reading the English and Dutch newspapers or leaving the cafe altogether during sun breaks to bird watch at the canal or to go back to the tent at the lakeshore to snooze for a while.

            Happy as a Coot to be back at Camping Zeeburg.  

 

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            And back on the streets of Amsterdam too!

           An exciting international draw for a milieu of freedom-loving youth cultures that make the place buzz at the turn of the millennium like no other city on Earth. There’s the cafe culture -- people drinking small beers and coffees and whiling away the hours watching other people from their spots at outdoor canalside cafes. Watching punk rockers full of face pins or tourist princesses all dolled up and drinking way too much too fast. Watching a couple of transvestites dressed to the nines stroll by flirting with everyone, even the drunken tourist princesses. Watching a three-piece accordion band and tossing them a couple of coins. Watching a man and woman rushing down the brick streets late for a wedding party, she grabbing on to her burgundy top hat to stop it from blowing off her head and into the canal.  

            Just a thousand different scenes to notice and watch on the street at any one time from a typical perch at an Amsterdam cafe. And a thousand different kinds of human beings to consider as well.

            Like the sex tourist culture. Lonely men shopping red-light windows and gathering later canalside, to discuss their latest stagger through the Wallen (the Red Light District) with their friends.  

 

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            Of course there’s plenty of everyday Dutch culture too, even though anyone from Rotterdam will lie to tourists and tell them that there are no Dutch people in Amsterdam, only other tourists.  

 

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Yup', people from Rotterdam will tell strangers that there’s no Dutch culture in Amsterdam. A lie, yes -- and yet there are indeed (always) plenty of foreign tourists flooding Amsterdam's streets, jacking up the buzz and providing the people-watchers at the cafes with volumes of both culture and sub-culture to watch. Tourists and business people from every reach of the world, giving a show just by walking past in their different costumes. There’s even a healthy slice of the culture of God on the bricks of Amsterdam --- street preachers gathering thick where they see so many sins committed and where they encounter so many sinners in such abundance.

 

 

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            Like the notorious soft-drug coffeeshop culture: not bothering anybody with their tolerated weed and hashish --- sensibly licensed and taxed for sale in Holland like a carton of milk or a loaf of bread. And like everyone else, the stoners gather canalside when the sun breaks out to have a Coke and a beer and a smoke and to watch whatever might flow past them on the charming streets of Amsterdam. Discussing sports, politics, religion, music, art, or science. Or just sitting quietly stoned and watching the parade of international humanity bustle by them.

   

~
 Laid Back Amsterdam:
*

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 Cafe Bliss In The Wild West
 

 

            Today (Monday, Sept. 10,) it was much of the same. Another big day people watching in the city. We had breakfast up the canal a block from Rick’s Wild Style Cafe at Ricky’s (no relation) Dutch Koffeehaus, a canalside breakfast cafe. And, of course the meal was as good as the Dutch breakfast always is outside at Ricky’s, sitting in the warm open-air terrace along the sidewalk and canal. Watching the typical Monday morning teem and buzz of an awakening red light district. It was so satisfying being back in Holland that despite the regular downpours, Janet and I vowed at breakfast to spend the whole day on Monday outside at multiple cafe locations.

            In other words, a typical day for us in Amsterdam combating stress in laid back cafe bliss.

            After spending those nine weeks shooting here last year (during fall 2000) I feel thick with recent Amsterdam street portfolio and as a result I’ve not yet begun overworking my cameras. I made an image or two here and there as I wandered around during the weekend and this morning, but mostly I’ve concentrated on my social skills by killing a few extra hours a day sitting on my ass canalside on the terrace at Rick’s Cafe, chatting with Mark and playing with his beautiful and faithful bulldog, Donna.  

            Janet got herself lost on Monday afternoon, confusing the Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal with the Oudezijds Voorburgwal (go figure?) and ending up in unfamiliar territory. She became disoriented, she said, and was so late getting back to Rick’s Cafe that she made us miss a romp with Mark and Donna over to one of Mark’s favorite cafes in the Jordaan district to meet our friend Bart. She says she got dizzy during her confusion and figures it must have either been lingering jet lag or something she ate.

            We melted into the tent Monday night after a couple of nightcap Bailey’s at the Camping Zeeburg clubhouse cafe. Of course it rained hard all through the night, which only made sleeping in our watertight tent that much more pleasurable.

 

5
August 28, 2002
That was Then and This is Now

 

                    Reading that pre-war passage from my journal now, at the end of August 2002, makes me feel odd. Unpleasantly and indefinably odd. But not near as perplexed or bitter  as I remember being last October, the last time I read that passage from last year’s journal. It was only a couple of weeks after returning home from Europe and I remember that I actually cringed and had to put the journal down once to regroup while getting through it, realizing in lieu of events how revealing that little passage turned out to be. How much more serious life had become for me by October 2001 and how radically the role of television had changed for me by then.
        On September 10, 2001 I was enthusiastically beginning work on part three of my latest streetphoto concentration, focusing the full attention of my cameras on the streets of Amsterdam over a five-year period at the beginning of a new century. I was a 45-year-old street artist on a mission a million miles away from war and grief, and back on the gritty Amsterdam streets I loved so well.
        A year ago today during pre-war August, I was safe and sound in my petty and ignorant global streetphoto zone. Holed-up at my antique bungalow tucked into a tree-covered corner of the KU campus in Lawrence. Packing up my cameras and getting ready to get away from it all. A content global street photographer and unaccredited freelance reporter of the post-hippie youth movement in Amsterdam. Burdened by the bloated and cynical wisdom of a million miles of close-up eyewitness focus on the globe, yet still gearing up my camera bag and my backpack and my tent with virgin pre-war glee. Anticipating another lovely three-week European party with my wife and friends and another two-week streetphoto shoot on the streets of my bustling Amsterdam.
        But of course --- my September 2001 photo shoot didn’t turn out so sweet after all. Because a year ago today (as it turned out) I was at my studio in Kansas packing for my streetphoto trip and training newbies and also unknowingly preparing to be shattered slack-jawed by a distressing world. Preparing to be blindsided far away from home via the horrible miracle of live television. Preparing to be ripped out of my boundless Amsterdam streetphoto shoot and to be instead sandwiched into a sad and awful mull.
        Watching the television turn overnight from the nagging bad entertainment appliance I love to hate and ignore into a gruesome 24-hour CNN Breaking News Box I couldn’t take my eyes off. An appliance made (apparently) for tuning into hell -- live in your own living room. Slackjawed because the messed-up world and its accompanying unavoidable TV news culture had forced a cynic to care. To care to tears, when it had clearly been so much more comfortable just taking whatever the television (and the messed-up world that sponsored it) threw my way without often ever caring that deeply, caring to tears --- because if played correctly, that much pain could almost always be diverted or worked around somehow.

 

5
  A Loss of Faith:
Cynical Means You Can’t Disappoint Me Any More

 

                      My cynicism and loss of faith in government began to build when I was a kid and I’ve become comfortable with that condition over the miles and through the years.
        The government broadsided me early in life (along with everyone else) by committing the Vietnam War that popped up every night on the TV news box between moon missions and Bonanza. And then I saw most of those same Vietnam Experience mistakes being committed live and in person from 1982 to 1985 at the similar Cold War-inspired Central American conflicts while I was shooting my Streets of the Cold War project in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Guatemala. By which thereafter I was to suffer a moderate post traumatic shock disorder (bad dreams; anxiety; hives; temporary insanities) from photographing too many American-sponsored massacre victims during too many American-sponsored guerrilla wars and from being chased through the jungle by one too many American-provided helicopter and way too many heavily armed American-trained soldiers.
        Once during the war in El Salvador, a murdered mayor’s husband turned to me --- as he helped lower his wife’s coffin into the grave at her funeral, chopped to bits a couple of nights earlier by American-empowered machete-wielding death squads in front of he and his children ---and he wondered aloud to me and my camera cohorts; “How could you possibly need any more proof that God no longer exists?”
        A man who’d been driven by the magnitude of his awful new reality to absolute media and government cynicism and who’d lost his religion --- no longer feeling spiritually tied to a lifetime of faith and its now apparently false and bitter promises of hope.

 

 

            And for years since those Cold War days (just like everyone else) I’ve cynically watched religious zealots, politicians and world leaders on the television and in person as they’ve proven to me over and over and over again (I was keeping score and there were few exceptions) that the human nature of leadership (under any system) consistently bred a segment of people who’d stretch the truth, lie, and manipulate for self interest at the drop of a dime. Who couldn’t even be counted on to lead a game of Twister, much less run people’s lives.
        Particularly mine.
        “Go ahead, you can’t hurt me anymore, I thought about the screwed up TV-saturated world circus. I’m a card carrying professional cynic --- don’t you know? You can’t hurt me anymore ...”

            I’d even become so comfortable admitting to myself that I’d become a cynical SOB --- having traveled the world to gather all the evidence myself and having understandably succumbed to all the pessimistic voices in my head that tallied up all the evidence of corruption, fraud, incompetence, and mismanagement --- that I became, in time, an unrepentant cynical son of a bitch. Flying off whenever the hell I pleased. A calculated bystander with a camera at extraordinary places in extreme conditions during globally historic times. An American who over time (and through vast experience) had developed a global accent to his viewpoints, more concerned with the big picture than with petty nationalism.
        And wherever I went in the world to make streetphotos I went as a regular concerned global-thinking American with a desire to get as close as I could to the pain of painful streets without going over. I’d been down that road before (taking the world too seriously) and I hadn’t intended ever going down that road again for any little messed-up government TV reason. A sensitive, caring, unrepentant cynical son of a bitch everywhere I went, no matter how grim the circumstances were for the people on those streets who were the study of my work.
        Sure, I’ve always been sympathetic with the severity of the circumstances I find these unfortunate people in. Greatly concerned with the human condition and figuring my best photos would tell their disenfranchised stories. Yet as a matter of self-preservation I’ve realized along the way that I have to always remain necessarily detached from the emotion of misfortune in order not to spiral into a despondency that would shut my cameras down. Not exactly ignoring the pain of painful streets (after all --- there I am), yet still somehow rising above the fray and avoiding too much emotional connection to the pain in order to complete my global streetphoto mission effectively.

5
       Then on the second Tuesday in September last year, 19 Islamic zealots --- who according to this morning’s media broadcast bought their airline tickets a year ago today --- crashed four jetliners into the two World Trade Center towers in New York City and into the Pentagon in Washington DC and into a Pennsylvania farm field. Horribly killing more than 3000 people.
        Regular people just like Janet and me.
        Decent, petty, cynical, sometimes selfish television-watching  people ... ... ... just going about their everyday lives. Some getting on jet airplanes and feeling the excitement I felt last September in Amsterdam for getting away from it all and for leading a worldly lifestyle.

        But then suddenly (and without mercy) just after three o’clock Amsterdam time on the afternoon of September 11, 2001, the events and images of this messed-up world as seen live on the TV became so powerfully horrible that the entire un-holy gone-amuck revulsion instantaneously jerked me out of my comfortable cynical sphere and slackjawed me into a frightening whole new world. A world where now I was as bumfuzled as the next guy.
        A new hyper 24-hour CNN Breaking-News War Box era for America. And as it turned out, 3000 monumental reasons for me to justify the trouble it took to make my street photography at or near many of the ground zeros during the first season of World War III. Stranded in Europe on September 11. Freaked out at the mailbox on the front porch of my house during the Washington DC Brentwood Station anthrax scare. At a still-burning Ground Zero in Manhattan at Thanksgiving. And then at the battle of Tora Bora. Flying alone to one of the most American-unfriendly places on Earth in the most anti-American of times to make streetphotos at the outskirts of the war in Afghanistan. All for the sake of mental health and in the name of art.
        To the streets of Peshawar, Pakistan --- birthplace of the Taliban.
        Home to the protectors of Osama bin Laden and his global al-Qaida street gang.

 

5
 August 29, 2002
Lawrence, Kansas

TV Trauma: Turn it Off !!

 

                        Today was a lousy day from the get go. My first full 24-hour day with the 24-hour TV hooked back up.
        It started off cynically enough when first thing this morning I ignored the practiced news junkie urge from last year to go straight to CNN to check if there’d been another terrorist attack. Instead, the first thing I did was to tune into ESPN to catch up on what happened yesterday in the Men’s Basketball World Championship Tournament being played in Indianapolis.
        At the first commercial break however, I flipped around the channels (like regular Americans do) and I stumbled onto my first September 11 horror clip of the anniversary season. The one of the second jetliner -- black and spooky -- bearing down hard on the World Trade Center. I could have just quickly flipped a channel up to A&E and I’d probably have woken up serenely to a documentary about the Dusky Dolphins of New Zealand or some other fascinating creature in some far-off exotic port. But I’d already decided nearly a year ago that no matter what, I’d continue to cover and pay attention to the World War III Terror War right up until the one-year anniversary.
        And of course I knew it wouldn’t be long until the anniversary television programs and documentaries containing multiple horror clips began airing continuously --- those of the airliners hitting the buildings, those of the buildings collapsing, and those of people jumping a hundred crushing stories to their deaths rather than burn up alive. In fact, that’s precisely why I had the thing turned back on in late August rather than waiting for the traditional turn-on date in mid October, when college basketball season fires back up. Because I’d decided for personal reasons (coping with the disaster) and professional reasons (covering the horror on the streets of the war and not yet ready to look away) to stick the tragedy out until the end of this saddest of years --- because television had been such a big part of the story.
        And because the cynical side of me hadn’t quite finished repossessing my heart or my soul yet. Because a part of me still wanted to somehow stay in touch with the enormity of it all. Seldom in my adult life have I become overwhelmed  by current events to the point of tears. I can’t remember the last time before September 11 that a tragic news item made me cry. I remember being touched in the months before my three-month-long September 11 nightmare began by the news that eight members of the royal family in Nepal had been massacred by a disturbed crown prince and the news that AIDS was out of control in Africa. But honestly, I can’t remember the last time a news story hit me so hard that it made me stop and cry. Made me care to the point of tears.
        If you do your best to ignore the news you’ll eventually hear it all in passing anyway. It’s everywhere you go and you’d have to be kept in solitary confinement to altogether avoid the CNN Breaking News Box media machine. And even then you’d probably get some word of mouth reports from your jailers.
        If you pay attention to the news, you’ll probably hear a dozen tragic stories a day. If you’re a diligent news junkie, you might run across a hundred stories that would make you cry if only you were somehow attached to one of the victims or if only you could afford the time for all that crying. But along the way we learn not to let our guards down and we don’t let all those sad stories we hear about and see and read happening to the other guy get us down, reduce us to tears. Because if we did, the news would leave us all incapacitated most the time. Unable to cope with our normal American lives, or our normal British lives, or our normal Saudi lives.

        Business is business all over the world --- and the show must go on --- and there for the grace of God go I ...

        But September 11 was simply too powerful a news story to ignore. So tragic in so many small ways, and so clear and present in scope for an American that between 2:53 p.m. Amsterdam time on September 11, 2001 to midnight Pakistan time on December 14, 2001 --- I must have cried a thousand times.
        Probably more.
        And I remember how little of last September 11 I spent being self aware. I took no streetphotos that day (just a couple of snapshots inside and outside the cafe before I became too weak) so all-encompassing was my distress and so all-confining was the emotional prison the attack put me in. But I did know in my heart by the end of that day before I went to sleep in my tent in Amsterdam that I would soon be going off to the streets of that war. A regular unaccredited American street artist from Kansas going inside the TV again --- like I’ve been wont to do over the years. To make myself a picture-taking bystander on the streets of history. It’s one of the things I do as an artist and the only difference between this war zone and the other five war zones I’ve worked in or around was that during those other five, I’d gone off to war as a passive bystander observing conflict as a logically unnecessary act. This time however, since nothing could possibly justify what I saw on TV on September 11, it looked as if I’d be going reluctantly off to war as an angry pacifist on a pacifist sabbatical. A regular peace-loving American, unjustly attacked on TV and slackjawed out of a comfortably cynical and skeptical state of mind and reluctantly forced to fight back. Forced to face my demons and forced to somehow create a civilized balance within myself between good and evil --- between hollow pacifism and reluctant bloodlust, between common sense and mindless flag waving. Between rage and peace of mind.
        Today, August 29, 2002, almost a year after, already ruined by a chance encounter with that terror TV video clip. Powerful imagery glimpsed in passing already rekindling the sickening emotion of last year and already beginning to bitch slap me around again with its pain. Today already ruined ...
        So knowing that, I decided the mood might be just right for catching up to the anniversary by reading on from last year’s journal, which I’d left on the coffee table in front of the TV after last night’s reading of the Sept. 10 pre-war entry.
        Today already ruined and the anniversary (in a way) already here.
        Capping off my lousy morning by reading about what happened to me on that awful day in Europe. To fill in the cracks of my flawed recollections before remembrances of this anniversary get too thick up on the TV to keep track of which were theirs and which were mine ...

 

~

Stranded in Europe

Amsterdam, Holland

September 11, 2001

An immediate clear and present danger ...

 

 

Act of War:

Turning Plowshares Into Swords

... smoke rising into the sky and charred corpses on the street ...

 

 

 

The Number of Casualties Will be More Than Any of us Can Bear.

 

 

                                         Still a bit jet-lagged, Janet and I spent a long lazy Tuesday morning at Zeeburg lounging around in the tent in the rain and washing down our breakfast croissants with hot chocolate and coffee at the campground cafe. In the early afternoon we took tram 14 from Zeeburg to Rembrandtplein and had a quick lunch from the falafel vendors there along Reguliersbreestraat.

            Another cafe-hopping day planned.

            That is to say, we had a plan that called for us when it was raining to be holed up somewhere inside near a bar, and otherwise when there was no rain, to be holed up canalside near a bar.

            Beyond that, we had no plan.

Our first stop after lunch was at Spui square to buy an International Herald-Tribune newspaper and for Janet and I to have an after-lunch beer and Bailey’s at De Beiaard beer café, outdoors during a sunburst off Spuistraat.

Not much news in the Tuesday newspapers: There were elections in Norway; A grand jury in the United States rejected a request to investigate Gary Condit Jr. for the disappearance of Chandra Levy; and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld remains firm on his support for the missile defense program. There was a typhoon in Tokyo; A hurricane (Erin) in Bermuda; A 4.2 earthquake in Los Angeles; And sharks were still terrorizing swimmers on the oceans off the southeastern coast of the United States, like they’ve been doing all summer long.

            An Afghanistan rebel commander either just missed being assassinated or was assassinated a couple of days ago, depending on which source you cared to believe; Germany opened a new Jewish Museum; eight died in the year-old Palestinian intifada (which began this time last year while I was here in Amsterdam); a new leash law in San Francisco was (according to the headline) Sparking a Dog Fight; Bob Dylan said in an interview about his latest endeavors that he constantly argues with his daughter these days about her taste in music; and the International Herald-Tribune reported that violence between Muslims and Christians erupted over the weekend in Nigeria, resulting in bloodletting between the two communities that left smoke rising into the sky and charred corpses on the street.

            According to a poll published in the newspaper, Americans blame George W. Bush Jr. for the worsening economy; elsewhere, the anti-corruption movement in France was broadening and rumor had it in the paper that the Iraq government of Saddam Hussein (another proven liar --- more brutal than most) claimed a kill on an unmanned US spy drone operating in the no-fly zone.

            I took another sip of Bailey’s and peeked over my newspaper to spy for possible streetphotos I might encounter across Spuistraat at Spui Square. Crowded trams and people on bicycles (up to four people on a bike!) flowed easily past a steady stream of determined pedestrians, many of them students enrolled at the University of Amsterdam. I finished my newspaper and my beverage and Janet emptied her beer. After paying our bill we walked north up Spuistraat and turned left over the Single canal at Heisteeg Centrum and crossed the bridge over the Heron canal on Huidenstraat.

 

*Oh My God!

 

                        At 2:53 p.m. we popped into a little hole-in-the-wall coffeeshop called Down Under in the middle of Huidenstraat between the Herongracht (canal) and Keizersgracht (canal) for some coffee so I could perk up and so Janet could use the toilet. I banged my head on the stairway sign as I tried to enter the tiny cave-like basement and suffered a few moments of dizzy pain followed by another moment or two of embarrassed laughter before trying the steep stairs again.

            We entered the lower door still chuckling about my clumsy head-banging incident and immediately noticed everyone in the room staring bug-eyed in disbelief at live CNN breaking news coverage of the World Trade Center in New York City burning from near the top like a road flare. A blizzard of office paper fluttering around a smoke-belching scar in one of the skyscraper towers.

            Janet was sucked right over to the television screen, and as I put down the umbrellas and my camera bag at an Internet-equipped cafe table I surrealistically heard the announcer say that it had been about seven minutes since a light aircraft crashed into the side of the World Trade Center north tower in perfectly clear weather...

            It was intentional? I heard myself blurt out loud to the room, a very small room filled with about 9 or 10 people, the smell of Dutch-tolerated soft drug products scenting the crowded little airspace. We wouldn’t ordinarily hang out at Down Under Coffeeshop (it has neither an outdoor terrace nor a bar) but we ended up spending the next six and-a-half hours trapped at that little Amsterdam hole-in-the-wall hash den, on line at the computer table and glued to the miserable TV.

            For the first 10 minutes of the ordeal we watched in horror and in dreadful anticipation that someone may have intentionally rammed an airplane into the building, and the dread of that potential mind-wrench and all its implications was instantly too much to bear. Nobody in the place said a word or did any kind of work. Nobody ordered anything to drink or smoke. Nobody tried to sell anything to anyone. We just sat silent and starred up at the TV --- numb with shock, bugeyed and slackjawed.

            The CNN TV reporter watched the burning tower from a midtown Manhattan rooftop perch and fretted along with the rest of us. After listening in his ear piece for a moment he lost his train of thought for a second and after sputtering he reported that he’d just heard from his producers (through the earphones) that one or more airline flights had reportedly been hijacked.

            “Stay tuned for further reports ...”

            And then suddenly and menacingly --- --- --- the other World Trade Center tower exploded before our very eyes up on the TV set as another jet plane tore through it, a tremendous ball of fire and black smoke cascading all around and flowing down the building, swarms of office paper and window glass fluttering around like confetti in the clear air outside the smoke and fire.

            I could conjure up no words in that moment that could describe how helpless I felt watching all that ungodly atrocity happen in front of my eyes up on that TV screen. Shocked. Stung. Frustrated. Eerily put out upon and angry. Instantaneously furious that my peaceful and prosperous post-Cold War world I’d helped build (while I was still young and less cynical) was being turned upside down right before my very eyes. Stunned into a virtual comma. Suffering an instantaneous and primitive boiling rage...

Terrified at what it all meant for global peace and security. Distressed at what it would all lead to -- the evil consequences of all-out war. Mesmerized by the success of the attack. Traumatized by the horror. Confounded and depressed by what I knew it all meant. A sinister mind-wrenching ordeal in progress live on TV that was beyond my ability to put into proper words. I was saddened, astounded, outraged, and distressed. I was mute with worry and I didn’t know what to do next ...

 

            “I always know what to do next, I remember thinking, but now I have no clue ...”

 

            The TV showed people hanging out of windows and reported that some were jumping to their deaths. It was all just too absurd, too ruthless, and too sinister to comprehend and it all went beyond my reach. I was petrified and came as close to cerebral meltdown as I ever had in my life. The indescribably powerless feeling of panic and loss that I had in those first minutes for people I didn’t even know who were now presumed horribly killed. It was so intense that I thought for certain a time or two that I was about to spontaneously self-combust. Just flame out in my Internet-equipped cafe chair, leaving only a pile of ashes, melted plastic, and some fragments of charred bone and clothing on the floor of the Down Under Coffeeshop in Amsterdam to mark where I’d been.  

 

 

*Epic Proportions:  
Evil Masquerading as Anarchy

 

Thoughts about self-defense, modern warfare, and notions of civilization

 

              Janet and I sat there in shock and mostly in silence along with everyone else for the next 50 minutes as the CNN announcer reported that the Pentagon had been hit and that American airspace had been closed down, and that at least one more hijacked jet might still be heading toward Washington DC. That President Bush (who just before the Pentagon strike had given a short sound bite from Florida on the CNN TV screen vowing to, “Track down whomever was responsible ...”) was now busy fleeing somewhere out west on Air Force One and that Vice President Dick Cheney had been, “Hustled away to safety,” at the White House --- stuffed into a fortified bunker.

The TV showed another shot of desperate people hanging from windows on the 100th floor of the raging inferno. About that time a Dutchman sitting across the table from us with an equally distressed look on his face as I imagined I must have had on mine, leaned over the table and asked me if I were an American --- then wondered aloud to me what I thought might happen next. And in my emotional shock (and drawing on the experience I’d gained from a lifetime of hands-on military study with first-hand concentrations in American firepower and battlefield precedent) I calmly exploded.

I told him -- and the rest of the captive audience in that tiny place -- all the theories that had been swirling around in my head since the moment the second jetliner hit the second World Trade Center tower and war was inevitable. I fielded questions and came awfully close to giving a bloody lecture. And everyone there listened --- just because I was an American ...

 

              I’ll tell you what’s going to happen now. I began, You’re about to hear a lot of people on TV make statements like, ‘We’re going to level Afghanistan,’ but I’m pretty sure that’s not exactly what’s going to happen ...

“So you think the US will invade Afghanistan?” the Dutchman interrupted as he straightened up in his seat, his shock by my quick answer drifting through his eyes toward denial and then flashing back to a dull acceptance of the inevitability of my Afghanistan theory --- all in the flash of a single thought across his face.

Look, this thing, I started up again, waging my trembling hands at the fiery mayhem up on the CNN television screen, this thing isn’t just another terrorist incident. This thing --- it’s insidious -- and it’ll go down in history everywhere in this world as a ruthless act of war against whomever civilization thinks did it. And common sense tells me it’s not going to be very difficult  to trace all this back to Osama bin Laden. And that one’s being protected by that squirrelly government in Afghanistan. The same ones who blew up those huge ancient Buddha statues last spring and who just banned music, kite flying, television, and photography. And to protect ourselves, justifiably defend ourselves, to try to stop this kind of despicable thing from ever happening again, we --- and I mean you and me both, because I’m sure the Dutch government will be going to war in one way or another along with us --- we’re going to have to fight this war until we nearly eliminate the pointed threat of terrorism against the West from the face of the Earth. It’s no longer going to be country number one versus country number two. It’s going to be the civilized world versus the uncivilized world, and I’ll bet everyone in this room will be forced, after watching this thing happening here, to come down on the side of civilization and ultimately to support coming down hard on those who’d do such an inconceivably uncivilized thing. What we've got here folks is out-and-out evil masquerading as anarchy, pretending to be legitimate political discourse. A group of street thugs capable of hideous mass murder. And we just can’t sit on our hands and let them attack us again without consequence. We are now, as misfortune would have it, duty-bound by the code of justifiable self-defense to instinctively fight back.

The civilized Dutchman and his two civilized mates nodded in unison, convinced by my crystallizing statement, yet apparently unaccustomed to (and clearly squeamish about) winding up allied with the American government on any issue.

It’s going to be all the civilized people on Earth on one side, and all sadistic terrorists and their supporters on the other. And the civilized majority of the Earth will be spending the next ten or twenty or more years arresting, convicting, reforming, or executing those who’ve become capable of this kind of primitive evil. And it won’t be like those old kinds of wars we’ve fought in the past. No D-day landings, no advancing armies with clearly defined front lines. In fact, I doubt anyone will send even a small standing army into Afghanistan, and if so, then it won’t be for long. It won’t be a war about territory. It’ll be a war about good finding evil and hammering it.

The US has spent most of the twelve years since the Cold War ended defending Islamic countries, all the while trying not to become the world’s policemen. We pushed Europe into taking responsibility for the Balkans and then we ended up attacking together under NATO to control ethnic cleansing. But with this thing now, I said waving up again at the World Trade Center inferno on the CNN screen and the TV’s new report of dozens of people jumping out of the burning buildings to their deaths, it’s a whole new world. No matter what coalition we end up fighting this war under, America has now been reluctantly forced by self-defense into the indisputable roll as the world’s goddam policeman.

So now we’re going to have to go whichever way the terrorists take us and suffer waging war and launching corruptible covert military police raids on every suspected group of sadistic terrorists we identify. There’ll be lies and manipulations and there’ll be unspeakable atrocities. There’ll be multinational special forces galore and there’ll be a worldwide call for death to responsible and suspected terrorists alike, no matter how many allied or innocent lives it might cost along the way to get them. It’s going to be an awful couple of decades or three because with this thing here, whether we like it or not my friends, the genie’s out of the bottle, and I believe it’ll be a long slow war to the bitter end. We’ll splinter them up and keep them on the run until the end. And in the end there’ll be nowhere left on the planet for the tiny uncivilized criminal minority to hide from the vast civilized majority.

Nowhere.

It’s going to take a long while. And hundreds, or maybe thousands, or tens of thousands, or maybe even hundreds of thousands of soldiers and innocent civilians will die. But there’s really no other choice for us --- is there? To be battered and baited into the humiliating act of an all-out self-defense. But that’s what’s happening here --- and quite simply, now we’re going to hunt them down and kill them all.

Before they can kill all of us.  

“But how about those caves in Afghanistan --- all those thousands of caves --- how are we going to get at them there” the Dutchman fretted. “The Russians couldn’t do it!”

Well, the Russians --- or for that matter Americans for as long as I’ve been alive --- have never had the license or motivation that this attack will provide America and the rest of the world to crack down on this kind of mass murder of civilians, I replied. And lemmie' tell you, that cave culture down there in Afghanistan will challenge us and most surely will increase the death toll, but don’t kid yourself, it won’t stop us short, wherever we end up fighting.

Not after this...

“But that won’t stop terrorism --- it’ll just aggravate it,” the Dutchman interrupted, both of us glancing back up to the TV screen as the World Trade towers burned and as more civilians jumped to their deaths. “You’ll just kill a lot of innocent people, make a martyr out of bin Laden and there will be more terrorists in his wake, not less!”

You’re still not getting it, I scolded, pointing up again at the television carnage. It’s gone way past that now. It’s a whole new world we’ve got folks. Understand, I’m not necessarily telling you what I think I’d do if I were in charge, because American or not, I’m mostly just a TV-watching civilian like you are and as much a spectator as anyone else in this room. I’m trying to tell you what’s going to happen up on our TV sets now whether any of us want it to happen or not. The terrorists have just made martyrs out of perhaps tens of thousands of Westerners and out of the security of America and the Western world. It’s a new planet now and there isn’t going to be a place on this new planet where a terrorist can hide from the shadow of this thing. Dare to identify yourself as a supporter of this kind of penis-driven insanity and the civilized world, everybody in this coffeeshop I reckon, will turn their backs on extremism that could be capable of doing something as smarmy as this. And without a power base, there’ll eventually be no place left for the killers to hide from the flag-carrying armies of the world whose responsibility it is to protect regular people like us from this kind of crap. Our Generals aren’t just TV-watching civilians like us, it’s in their job description to go after this kind of scum, and now whether we like it or not, were all in for years and years of a new world war out on the streets and up on our TV screens.

Sure, plenty of innocent people will die and there’ll be political and combat excesses, and that’ll be the civilized world’s great regret. But is that more our fault for having to defend ourselves, or is it more these idiots faults for forcing our hand -- predictably forcing us to defend ourselves.

Or were they stupid enough to think anyone wouldn’t?

Now we have to go whichever way they lead us, and because of that, this whole thing could get out of hand. It could end up in a goddam world war. Hell, these idiots DID just attack the whole world with this thing. This is World War III folks, not just another terrorist incident ...

 Afghanistan will be first, then perhaps Pakistan or Iraq. And if those smaller places in the Middle East and in Africa who support terrorist training camps like Yemen don’t end up falling into a civilized and common sense line of thinking on this thing, we’ll be going in there too. Since the end of the Cold War the US has tried to cast itself away from the role of world cop. Well, it’s a whole new un-holy world now, and it’s time to stop taking it from these terrorists and it’s time to start driving them from our midst’s... ... ...

        We looked up again at the awful TV screen and before our very eyes the South World Trade Center tower collapsed. Just went down as if it had been wired to go down by a demolition crew. Each story collapsing on top of the next and on top of the next and on top of the next until all that remained of a 110-story steel and concrete skyscraper was a sickening gray pall of smoke and pulverized dust --- blanketing all of lower Manhattan.

I began to whimper. My cheeks puffed up. Tears rolled down my face. My head throbbed and it felt again as though it would surely explode spontaneously into flames. I held my head in my hands to keep it up and to force myself to keep watching the agonizing television screen --- and to stop it from shaking uncontrollably back and forth.

I wonder how many rescue workers just died, I moaned to my tablemates, neither taking my eyes from the screen nor my head from the grasp of my hands. I’ll bet the death toll will reach into the tens of thousands now --- maybe even more. I can’t remember, but I think 50,000 to 100,000 people work in just those two buildings alone ...

  

*Allahu Akbar:

 Box Cutters and Red Bandannas

 

  

 

goddamn  unbelievable ...

 

 

              We found out during our six hours watching TV that while Janet and I had been having lunch at Rembrandtplein around 2 p.m., four jet planes had taken off from American airports destined to be used as terror weapons of mass destruction. At 1:58 p.m. ( Holland time) United Airlines flight 175, a Boeing 767, took off from Boston Logan Airport meant for Los Angeles with 56 passengers, nine crewmembers, and at least one hijacker ---probably more. A minute later at 1:59 p.m. American Airlines flight 11, another Boeing 767, also took off from Boston Logan Airport meant for Los Angeles with 81 passengers, a crew of 11, and at least one hijacker. Two minutes later, at 2:01 p.m., United Airlines flight 93, a Boeing 757, took off from Newark International Airport meant for San Francisco with 38 passengers, 7 crew, and probably several hijackers. Nine minutes later and only 12 minutes after the first terror jet left Boston, American Airlines flight 77, a Boeing 757, left Washington Dulles Airport meant for Los Angeles carrying 58 passengers, 6 crew, and hijackers.

As Janet and I finished our drinks and my newspaper at the outdoor beer cafe on Spuistraat, the second jet to take off from Boston (American Airlines flight 11) slammed into the 94th to 98th floors of the north World Trade Center tower. At about 2:53 p.m. we entered the Down Under Coffeeshop to use the WC and went from a Bailey’s-and-a-beer holiday at the high water mark of the post-Cold War Western world to an outrageously confounding ordeal of epic proportion shared live by the whole world on TV. About ten or twelve minutes later we watched on CNN as the first jet to take off from Boston (United Airlines Flight 175) slammed into the 78th to 84th floors of the south World Trade Center tower.

          At about 3:30 p.m. President George W. Bush announced that, “The US will hunt down those behind the attack.”

At about 3:45 p.m. it was reported that a jetliner (American Airlines Flight 77) had plowed into the Pentagon in Washington DC, that a bomb had gone off at the State Department there (later revealed to be an erroneous report) and that at least one more jet had been hijacked and might be heading toward Washington.

At about 3:50 p.m. it was reported that President Bush (on Air Force One) would be flying to an undisclosed location and that Vice President Cheney had been taken from the White House and locked down at a bomb shelter. At about that time I began answering the Dutchman’s questions, and I gave my educated theories as a globetrotting American combat photographer about where this out-of-control thing playing out up on the TV screen will lead us to. At that point the TV insanity included airplanes full of people crashing into skyscrapers full of people forcing perhaps thousands of people to burn or jump or to be crushed to their deaths.

It was astounding.

It was cunning premeditated mass murder.

It was a massacre.

It was absurd...

I didn’t think I could feel any worse. But then just before 4 p.m. the south tower collapsed and I sobbed and wondered aloud how many rescue personnel and trapped office workers must have just died. My lecture stopped, my mouth went dry. And for the millionth time in less than an hour I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Couldn’t believe what I was saying to total strangers about a world so new and so different from peace, prosperity, beers, and Bailey’s on ice. A future thick with bombs, bullets, dead soldiers, dead civilians, and lots and lots of lies.

A grim future the whole world was conjuring up inside of their heads after watching their own TV sets, wherever they were in this world. Brought to us live by those electronic appliances in all our homes that when hooked up and plugged in and turned on and tuned into will tell us immediately (up to the second) how screwed-up the world can be that we’re all stuck in.

Twenty-four hours a day.

Like at 4:15 p.m. when it updated the story about that unaccounted-for hijacked passenger jet (United Airlines flight 93) reporting that it had crashed somewhere in western Pennsylvania.  And then again 15 minutes later when I watched on the screen as the other World Trade Center building, the one with the radio tower on top of it, vaporized into near-nothingness as well.

  

*Why Us?

 

              A young American woman who’d come into the cafe to use the Internet and who’d been commiserating about the trauma with Janet, refused to believe me when I told her,  Look now!, the other building ... it’s collapsing too ... Incredible! ... Incredible ... ... ...

Both she and Janet said they couldn’t see the radio tower dipping and drifting on the screen and both told me they thought I was wrong, refusing to believe me and choosing to believe instead that the north tower was still there. Somewhere there through that black column of smoke up on the TV screen. Then the CNN commentator solemnly confirmed that the second tower had indeed just collapsed.

Janet shrieked and her hand came up to her mouth. Whatever color she’d regained in her face --- after finding out about the first jet, after seeing the second jet crash into the building, after hearing about and seeing the smoking aftermath of the Pentagon attack, after seeing the first tower collapse, after realizing there was no way on Earth for her to get back home --- all the color went out of her and she sat straight up. Stiff and pale as death, her fingers over her mouth for at least three or four minutes.

The young American Internet woman also raised three fingers to her lips the instant the announcer confirmed the compounding tragedy, and she didn’t move a hair for the longest time --- so all-encompassing was her shock. Ten minutes later she’d not yet moved her fingers from her lips. Had not yet moved her eyes away from the TV. Had not yet spoken a single post-collapse word, the only movement about her caused by the two streams of tears leading from her sad unbelieving eyes to the three fingers stuck in shock on her lips. Her terrible unbelieving pose, frozen through all the first reruns of the north tower collapsing over and over and over again and then frozen through the confirmation of the fourth jet crashing into a Pennsylvania farm field. Her terrible, unbelieving pose that became a monumental image for me that I had no heart to capture with my cameras. This haunting act of mass murder we were forcing ourselves to watch live --- --- --- as if we could have looked away from the massacre even if we’d wanted to.

Why did they do that to us?

What could possibly happen next?

  

*Speculation Begins

 

              At about 5 p.m. CNN reported that the jet that crashed in Pennsylvania (United Airlines flight 93) had gone down near Shanksville and that it had been hijacked and that the passengers -- knowing of the implications of the hijacking through cellular telephone calls -- may have rushed the terrorists and caused them to crash the jet bomb short of its target. Perhaps, journalist’s speculated, sparing the US Capitol Building or the White House or Camp David.

Or perhaps that fourth jet was making another run at the Pentagon where the terrorists knew the cameras would already be set up covering the first Pentagon jet attack, creating another horror film clip they knew would be captured and then re-run over and over and over again on the 24-hour CNN Breaking News screen. That is --- on every television set in the world.

            Just maybe that fourth jet had sadistically been heading toward the cameras to tear out another piece of our hearts by providing another sickening terror film clip to the 24-hour News Box. Compounding the lasting effect of the attack just like that second jet was already compounding our horror at the fate of the World Trade Center. Egotistically performing for the TV cameras rather than idealistically fighting for the orphans as extreme Islam claimed.

At any rate --- that bomb never made it to its target and apparently was fallen on by regular Americans fighting back.

Astounding ...

 

At about that same time, New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani (himself trapped for a time in the collapse of the first tower) announced on the run that an immediate evacuation of all non-essential rescue personnel from Lower Manhattan south of Canal Street had been issued. The TV showed bloodied and shocked people scrambling up the avenues toward Chinatown and it showed people fleeing across the Brooklyn Bridge carrying open umbrellas and coughing into handkerchiefs and shirts through the dust.

The grotesque sight of Lower Manhattan up on the TV screen, crashing and burning. Buildings pulverized, people vaporized. A surprise war zone that had just been closed down south of Canal Street until further notice.

Unbelievable!

Goddamn unbelievable...

 

*Angels With Big Muscles:
    The Thumbs-up Punk:

 

                       You all usually sit around here bad-mouthing America, don’t you? I asked loudly enough for everyone in the place to hear through their shock and with a sufficiently-summoned lilt that caused a couple of them to chuckle through their fear. They all sheepishly nodded yes in unison and a French woman across the way at another table replied, “Et vu?”

And I told her, of course, that in fact I do. I told the whole room that as a regular American artist I generally mistrust all governments and politicians and I admitted that I didn’t trust George W. Bush any more than the rest of them. That I thought he was a simple-minded distorted American (frat boy) in a position that demands a more well rounded, more far-sighted, and more sophisticated global mindset. I confessed that the thought had crossed my mind several times since this all started that, all in all --- I wish Bill Clinton were still president. They all nodded and a few of them smiled --- most of them apparently already having had the same thought earlier in the middle of their own ordeals.

But this, I said pointing up to the ongoing tragedy on the TV screen with a sickened finger, this is different. Either you’re a civilized person and can’t understand this sadistic thing, or you’re not a civilized person and somehow this monumental terror tactic against civilians all makes sense and can somehow be justified. This bloody thing up here on the television screen. Airplanes full of civilians crashing into buildings full of civilians, collapsing both of them to the ground. This thing! It’s different.

For the third time all of the heads in the room reluctantly nodded. Eyes lowered at the awesome crystallizing thought.

No one smiling any longer...

~

                    A minute later the American woman who came into Down Under Coffeeshop to use the Internet only to end up a haunting image now burned into a dark place somewhere inside of me ---  her fingers up to her lips, her unattended tears running off her finger tips and into the corners of her mouth -- got up and staggered toward the door. As she opened and walked through the door she passed a young man about 19-years-old who’d bounced down the stairs on his way into the place. He closed the door, shook off the rain, looked up at the TV, and turned around to face the crowd. 

Apparently a regular Down Under patron, he beamed at familiar faces, glanced up again at the television set, smiled brightly at nobody in particular, and then flashed an enthusiastic thumb-pumping victory gesture with his left hand. Smiling because he was happy. Pumping his thumb up and down to punctuate his delight at watching the second American skyscraper collapse being re-run over and over and over again up on the TV.

 

Well, the line between civilized and uncivilized in the whole new world had suddenly been crossed, unmistakably making its first ugly appearance. And I remember instinctively blurting out loud, “That’s not funny!” But I’m sure no one heard me. Because only an instant later (and again in unison) about eight or ten apparently civilized customers and staff of the Down Under Coffeeshop (male and female alike) leaned forward screaming toward the misguided young man who couldn’t have had worse timing, having made his ill-mannered cheer just after the conclusion of my latest rant about civilized character versus uncivilized character. People of several different nationalities screaming at him in anger --- veins sticking out of their faces and necks Some of them actually sprung up out of their chairs while they were yelling and I thought for an instant that the boy would be beaten to a pulp by one or more of his cafe pals, and that I’d distastefully be forced into helping to defend the little bastard. Fortunately, that wasn’t necessary, but in their disgust and revulsion they did brow beat him in Dutch and French and angry broken English to let him know in no uncertain terms how offended they’d been by either his uncivilized immaturity or his uncivilized and very badly timed political extremism.

The punk’s smile evaporated. His thumb stopped pumping and wilted into a shrug. He muttered an unintelligible defense only to be shouted down again by the crowd and then spent the next four hours at a corner barstool by himself drawing pictures on napkins. Almost completely silent the entire time he was there because no one else in the place cared to speak to him.  

 

~

                        Sometime between 8:30 p.m. and 9 p.m. New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani made his first official live statement to the world about the surprise attack on his city. He talked about the ordeal as, Obviously being one of the most difficult days in the history of the city and the country.” He talked about how his heart went out to, “all the innocent victims of (these) horrible and vicious acts of terror.” And he added that, “Our focus now must be to save as many people as possible.”

When Giuliani first walked up to the microphone to say those things, the featured speaker at an historic event he must have recognized as such, he began his statement by saying matter of faculty, “Good afternoon.”

Now I’ve never really liked Rudy Giuliani very much --- thinking of him as just another one of those unreasonable lying control freaks --- but when something of this magnitude happens, you’ve got to go with what you’ve got, and when the jets of September hit, we had Rudy Giuliani --- apparently a civilized man. He began the worst press conference of his life by saying, “Good afternoon” as if there were anything good about it. He finished the statement by voicing in a no-nonsense fashion what we’d all known in our hearts all day long. That he thought that, “the number of casualties will be more than any of us can bear.”

 

Janet and I were as empty as we could be by the time the mayor finished speaking. Our mind’s had been flat-lined, and we could bear no more. We raised enough faculty to gather our things up and to leave the TV, and as Janet and I were filing out of our accidental CNN Breaking News Box platform to the attack --- hypnotized by the woes of the world at that tiny international hole-in-the-wall, glued to that extraordinary event and unable to flee for six and a half agonizing hours --- Janet noticed what the Thumbs-up Punk had been doing in those silent reflective hours alone in the corner at the bar as he too watched the continuing human drama unfold up on the TV.

Using a pencil and smudging spit-moistened ashes from his cigarettes, the young man (an artist from Austria --- as my Dutch tablemate later told me in a snapshot explanation of his offensive friend) had drawn a detailed picture of an angel. According to Janet, it was a startling depiction of an angel ascending into the heavens --- an angel with oversized muscles...

 

*Like Whipped Cream Topping 

on a Rotting Carcass

 

  

... more than any of us can bear ...

 

017-A'dam Broken 9-11 Umbrella.jpg (378008 bytes)
 

              It was after nine o’clock when we finally tumbled out of the Down Under Coffeeshop. Stumbling into the dark and away from our borrowed CNN TV News Box and into a wet new world.

            We crossed the canal bridges alone on a brick street usually dotted with people that time of night --- rain or shine. Spui square was eerily quiet in the drizzle and we zigzagged back down to Dam Square under our umbrellas on Spuistraat and Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal. We stopped at tramstop 14 and began waiting in surreal silence for our ride back to our tent at soggy Camping Zeeburg. Dam Square was spookily mute, as if nobody who was there wanted to disturb anyone else’s funk. Amsterdam was stunned quiet, as I imagined most of the world was tonight.

Stung and depressed.

I knew that I was depressed as I stood there at tramstop 14 behind Dam Square at the Royal Palace on Paleisstraat, fighting my lack of concentration and forcing myself to listen and look around through my bloodshot eyes to remember those people I shared that street with at that poignant moment. Some of them were on bikes and rolled gently past me, rain water spitting off their tires their only sound. Others walked quietly up and down the sidewalks, their footprints preserved on the wet brick for an instant until rainwater filled them in. There was a taxi here, a delivery van there --- but the traffic on the streets was inordinately thin. Raindrops crackled on the plastic tramstop roof and on my umbrella as I looked about me. It was hard to concentrate on anything for very long because everything and everybody seemed alike to me. Sad, lonely, depressed, gray, and in misery.

The whole scene twisted madly in my mind’s eye like a Salvador Dali painting. But maybe that was only my perception, and perhaps in my shock I imagined the surreal and the quiet. My mind was racing like cotton candy twirling around on a stick. I was chilled and my body felt too weak to stand up straight on its own. So I slouched and shivered uncontrollably, wishing I’d wake up and find out I’d just been dreaming.

People passed by me on the sidewalks and on their bikes in the street, dressed for work or for an appointment, or for a night out on the town they couldn’t beg out of. They seemed to me tonight --- dressed cosmopolitan in flashy fashions --- like whipped cream topping on a rotting carcass.

Grim faces stood around outside at an international call center bank of green plastic sidewalk telephone trees in front of the KPN Dutch Telecom building across the street from the Royal Palace. A small group of subdued people dressed to the nines for an event, under umbrellas and frantically working the phones. Yet despite their bold fashion statements, they were virtually invisible to the street around them because nobody passing by could focus long enough to notice the fashion through their own anxiety and grief. Unable to see anyone or anything outside their own shock and revulsion of this thing, this thing the television (and our hearts) keeps telling us all is the beginning of a brand new (more violent) world.

People covered in the fluff of everyday Amsterdam fashion. A shinny new pierced belly ring here; a fancy hat there, a spiked hairdo; a hand-painted yellow bike; a flashy pair of red high heels; a new tattoo; a hot peach mini skirt with radical black fishnet stockings.

Pure everyday Amsterdam.

But all wasted tonight on a stung and strung-out street that could barely see through the veil of its own confusion.

The soft ring of an Amsterdam bike bell up the street turned my head from the dressed-to-kill phone-bank people, and I noticed Janet alone in her thoughts as well. Distracted for a moment by the ringing bike bell --- she lowered her head back down in its place under her umbrella. Alone right next to me. Kicking at the street in the rain and waiting for tram 14 ...

 

All at once the quiet pall of the street was cut by a high-pitched scream.

I turned my head back around to the well-dressed group across the street at the sidewalk phone bank and I focused my attention on the shrieking high-heeled woman standing at one of the telephones next to a man much taller than she. The woman was the most dressed to kill of her group, coifed in black three-inch heels and a lacy black evening mini dress with a sheer black evening shawl over her bare shoulders and protected from the rain by her smartly-dressed companion who held an umbrella over her head as he passed her the telephone receiver she was frantically grabbing for.

She listened for a moment into the telephone receiver and soon her shriek became a low extended moan --- and then another full-fledged scream. She collapsed on the wet sidewalk below the telephones and began to wail, the black telephone receiver swinging wildly back and forth from its silver cord attached to the green plastic telephone tree --- her companion unsuccessfully groping to help her up with his right hand while simultaneously trying unsuccessfully to maintain control of the umbrella in the wind with his left.

As if the umbrella really mattered any more.

As if his night hadn’t already been ruined.

As if today hadn’t really happened live on TV and as if it hadn’t all just hit home over the telephone for he and the poor screaming woman at his feet.

As if he were in shock.

Stunned, stung, terrified, depressed, and miserable. The poor wet woman in a fit there below him on the sidewalk. Wailing and screaming and thrashing about back and forth on the bricks in the puddles in her black lacy mini dress now rolled up onto her thigh.

Bad news from home and the smartly dressed man was caught reacting slowly to the brand new demands of his brand new world, finally coming around to the moment and releasing the umbrella to the wind and to the street. Picking the woman up off of the ground. Wrapping her inside his coat. She still moaning, still screaming, still wailing in her anguish. Inconsolable --- and now only held off the wet bricks by the strength of her well-dressed friend, her black three-inch heels littering the wet sidewalk below them.

Then mercifully, tram 14 came rumbling around the corner. Mercifull because in the condition I was in I’m not certain I could have taken any more. My head for the third time today feeling as if it would explode into flames with grief. The sorrow across the street so horrendous and so vivid and the horror no longer just up on the TV screen but in my airspace now as well. The tram rolled past the nightmare scene across the street, screeching to a halt on its track and blocking the horror from our view. Sparing us and picking us up for the miserable ride back to the campground at Zeeburg.

At least I think I was miserable?

I don’t remember the ride back, though it was only a few hours ago. I only remember wanting to lie down in the tent in the rain, and wanting to end my own horror for a while by forcing myself to sleep. My nightmares couldn’t top what I’d seen on this day with my own eyes and with the rest of the world all watching together on our TV sets. I had to get back to the tent and somehow get to sleep and somehow stop my cotton candy brain from swirling round and round and round ...

Numb.

No appetite or mood for dinner or for campground conversation or for Bailey’s on ice or for beers. Janet and I trudged under pouring skies over the Zeeburg Bridge spanning the Amsterdam to Utrecht shipping canal, slipped out from under our umbrellas, and crawled into our tent at the muddy campground in a driving rain. And eventually we wound ourselves down to a miserable fitful sleep. The horror of all those screaming jets running through our minds. All those poor desperate people jumping out of burning buildings. All those final phone calls. All the fear. All the violence. Sickly anxious about the next few days of bad news. Of horrible new media chatter to absorb as the death toll climbs and all the grim tales about this Tuesday are told. Wondering where this war might end up taking my street photography to in the next few months. All the times I’d be haunted for the rest of my life by the images up on the television set and what the shock of them did to that woman who’d come into the bar to use the Internet --- three fingers frozen to her lips ---tears running down her face. And all the times I’d be haunted until the day I die by the frantic wailing of that poor woman at that phone bank at the Dutch Royal Palace. All the times I’d imagine her there thrashing about in that puddle on that brick sidewalk in the rain ...
 

 

 


 

 


 


 

 


 

 

 

 

 5
 August 29, 2002

Wrong Side of the Bed

 

Zeeburg Mud Camp.jpg (167713 bytes)

                        By the end of that awful night nearly a year ago we still hadn’t absorbed the terms Taliban and al-Qaida. It was a bad way to wake up. First the anniversary video horror clip I accidentally saw, then choosing to read over those journal passages from last September 11. Vivid reminders about all my own distress and confusion. Recalling how grateful I was (even in the mud and the rain) that I’d been stranded on the night of September 11 in a primitive circumstance (the tent) without access to any more TV.
        But in a way, regaining access to TV this morning on the homefront (nearly a year later) and reminding myself to live up to my agreement to stay focused for the entire year in the name of the journal project (my obsession) may have been the best way to kick off this grim anniversary. Using my own thoughts and recollections to remind myself just how traumatic it had been to be a TV-watching human being during the day on September 11, 2001. Before the new TV anniversary programs a year later (now) try to tell me how it was ...
        A hard way to wake up or a good way to remember. Waking up to the dreaded anniversary and remembering the pain and critiquing all the correct and incorrect presumptions I gave in those Down Under Coffeeshop ravings while New York and Washington burned up on the TV screen.

        My day today was trashed.
        I’d lost my concentration and my will to work, and so I gave myself the rest of the day off and clocked out. Dedicating what was left of it to flipping endlessly around the newly re-acquired television channels. Looking to sample bad entertainment for the first time in months. Looking to keep up with developments in the looming baseball strike. But all the while secretly hoping that I’d run across another inevitable video terror clip before the end of the night. Because after reading that September 11 entry from last year’s streetphoto journal, maybe I can take it now. Perhaps already more grounded than I’d been since last fall and heading toward almost as sad. Beginning to lose a bit of my protective cynicism again, a downward slump in denial I fear won’t bottom out until after the 11th.
        In fact as I spent the rest of today stewing on the couch and flipping around the TV dial over and over and over again, I decided the thing to do for proper remembrance and accurate reporting in my journal would be to begin keeping track of the number of video horror clips I’d be exposed to by the cable TV during the next two weeks.
        The jets --- the buildings --- the people jumping.
        The story wasn’t just being covered on the TV. In great measure the story was about the TV. When I couldn’t fly off to terror war zones to be a bystander on location,  I was covering the homefront by consuming the media that fed us our information. And so that naturally meant that I planned to do little else for the next two weeks except watch anniversary documentaries and September 11 specials on TV and to keep my journal until the clock strikes midnight on the morning of September 12. The moment I’ve already decided will be the proper time to rededicate myself to avoiding (in the future as best as I can) the distractions, lies, and manipulations of the annoying TV world. Giving myself license to once again comfortably aspire to and ultimately achieve a proper born-again cynical balance --- trusting that this time I’d end up even more protected than I’d been before September 10 of last year.
        That is --- if you can believe in the common wisdom that; what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger...

        After seeing the video horror clip this morning that helped me ruin my day, I didn’t see another until just before I passed out at about two o’clock in the morning. But who knows, I well may have missed one or two of them during the time I was rudely distracted from my work (on the couch mindlessly flipping TV channels) by the noise of the selfish newbie girls next door. Making their first newbie noise of the new newbie season.
        “Damn!” I thought when it came time to go out the back door bitching to shut the princesses down. “What luck!”
        “Maybe tonight’s not going to end up as badly as I thought it would ...”
        With the onrushing anniversary already under way, I could feel my cynicism weakening, sliding from where it had been before the TV showed back up and leading again toward September 11-levels of compassion and understanding. But that’s for everybody else, not for the habitual noise newbies next door. And I’ll tell you what, they may not be violent terrorist extremists, but they’re terrorists all the same. And no matter how sentimental  I get in the next two weeks, the noise newbies in my airspace get no slack.
        They’re a menace, and if not properly controlled they can go off at any time of the night, exploding noise on the sleeping neighborhood. Thus, these newbie noise extremists must be controlled at all cost by the mounting of a rigorous newbie self-defense, no matter how much the enjoyment of crushing them cuts into the edge of my anniversary funk...

 

 

5
 The First Newbie Noise of the New Newbie Season

 

         I had an interesting time dealing with the loud newbie girls next door tonight. They fired up the excessive noise on their back deck about 8:30 p.m. There were only six of them, but hell knows, it takes less than a half dozen rowdy college girls drinking beers and trash-talking boyfriends or absent girlfriends to create enough high-pitched squealing noise to disturb a whole sleeping block.
        I was having the kind of scary bad hair day that only an all-day couch-sleazing slacker artist (or fight promoter Don King on a good day) can attain. So I opted not to wear a baseball cap for the confrontation. And as luck would have it, I’d been writing 12 hours a day for several consecutive days and hadn’t showered since the weekend or shaved my beard or trimmed my mustache for over a week. I looked scruffy and somewhat deranged, which all added to the bad don’t fuck with the crazy theme I was aiming for. I hitched my sweat pants up and pulled the T-shirt all the way out of the waistband. I slipped on my high-top Converse Chuck Taylor All Stars (not bothering to tie up the laces) and I walked out my back door and onto my back deck ... ... ...

        During early parts of such nighttime newbie confrontations, I’m either at an advantage or a disadvantage with how little detail I can see, depending on how you look at it. My eyes haven’t adjusted yet to the dark by the time I start bitching. I can only see shapes, shadows, movement, and forms. If I thought I was under any direct physical threat from these noise terrorists, I’d be at a distinct disadvantage because their eyes are already adjusted to the light, making me an easy kill. But these aren’t real terrorists. Just the old fashioned run of the mill (generally non-violent) old-world civilized Lawrence kind that show up every fall. Shooting off fireworks and exploding a megaton of self-indulgent noise into our sleeping little one-ton neighborhood.
        And rarely are there any bullets or bombs, and never are there any box cutters ...
        And so, in lieu of the unlikelihood of a violent newbie reaction, I believe the inability to properly see the offending newbie’s faces at night is to the neighborhood bitch’s advantage. Because that way the beautiful princess in-charge (the one I end up reading the riot act to) can’t possibly disarm me with her sweet, oh-I-didn’t-know-we-were-bothering-anyone eyes in an effort to temper my temper.

        Newbie noise incidents such as tonight’s are par for the course for a newbie household in its second year of neighborhood residency. The newbies have already been asked to stop making excessive noise. They’ve already been bitched at by neighbors for continuing to party into late night hours despite all the warnings. They’ve already had the cops come out and shut down a couple of their parties. And they’ve typically already been issued a Lawrence noise ordinance citation by the police, forced to pay a hefty fine.
        The second year rolls around and the annoying household agrees among themselves that they can no longer afford paying their beer money out in fines, and the property becomes quieter, more neighborly. But there’s always one or two of them that really just don’t get it and who try to stretch their privileges by only inviting over five or ten of their friends at a time to drink a couple of beers on the back deck instead of 50 or 60 of them to drink a keg.
        The first thing out of their mouths when the bitching begins in this circumstance is usually something like: “Look Gary , there’s only six of us out here. How can you complain? It’s not a party. It’s just a little get together!” These are among the most insidious and rude of the newbie types and among the most dangerously immature of the newbie princess types as well. With that hair-splitting argument they have taken their best shot and if a bitch isn’t very careful at this point, he’ll probably end up winning tonight’s battle but losing the overall noise war. This is a very dangerous and crucial juncture in the confrontation for an inexperienced noise bitch because for one thing, the longer the newbie noise princesses keeps you there --- your eyes adjusting to the dark the whole time --- the more likely there will eventually be anti-productive eye contact. And two, it’s just the most petty and weasely and insidious of all newbie arguments. To get the neighborhood to put up with some sleep-disturbing noise just because it’s not as bad as last year.

        “It’s not the number of people,” the correct neighborhood bitch’s pissed off reply should begin, “It’s the amount of goddamn noise you make and the goddamn time you choose to make it.”

        So I walked out onto my back deck (shoelaces flopping around my feet and my hair sticking out in several directions) and walked down the steps, across the driveway, and stopped at the end of the newbie neighbor’s porch. “Look, it’s 11:15 p.m.,” I began. “You know how much I hate coming out here to bitch you out for having fun,” I lied, “I have so many more important things to do than baby-sit my neighbors,” I lied again,  anxious to be finished with her as quickly as possible so I could get back to the couch and the remote control. “But it’s an hour and fifteen minutes past the curfew that I know you know about. And I’ve got to tell you that I’m out here for the last time to warn you that this year the neighborhood’s just not going to take it. It’s zero tolerance on late night noise from this property from now on. Do you understand?”
        I ended my opening statement with the stern: “I  and others in the neighborhood have told you all that same thing several times before, and we think it’s time you get it. The next time I have to call the cops --- tonight if I have to --- I’m signing the complaint.”

        “Look Gary”, the roommate who was hosting her five girlfriends predictably began, “There’s only six of us out here. How can you complain? It’s not a party. It’s just a little get together.”

        “Well,” I correctly responded “It’s not the number of people, it’s the amount of goddamn noise you make and the goddamn time you choose to make it.” And I followed that one up with the obvious: “It doesn’t matter if you wake the neighborhood up with 100 guests at a beer bong party or six at a little get together or just one person on the deck talking loudly over a cell phone --- it just doesn’t matter”
        There was silence from the deck.
        “IT DOESN’T MATTER,” I bellowed for a third time, just a little bit louder and a little bit angrier than the first two times. “Why can’t you get that? Loud noise after ten o’clock wakes people up and I’ve waited more than an hour past ten o’clock to come out here to bitch you out about it.”
        “Well, we didn’t know it was past ten o’clock,” the princess newbie whined as all six began retreating toward their back door from the growing embarrassment of my scolding and probably from my spooky bad-hair look as well. “Why didn’t you just come out here and tell me nicely that it was ten o’clock, then we would have stopped making noise.” she outrageously added.
        Well, that was a new low for this veteran noise bitch. I’d never had an extremist get that pitiful before. Suggesting it was up to me --- my freaking responsibility --- to keep time for her and to let her know when her time was up!! “Boy, Isn’t that rich,” I thought... So I told her, “You mean as if you had no clocks of your own. Or as if none of you could tell time. Or as if I had nothing better to do than to act as your fucking time butler. “As if you were a child. Or some kind of spoiled princess or something,” I barked.

            At that point I pretended that I was aghast (not much of a stretch by that time) and I turned around and stumbled back into my studio muttering to nobody in particular about freaking princesses and wondering how an adult college-aged woman could possibly expect anyone to buy such crap. Expect anyone to give her that much slack ...

 

5
 Whether I Wanted To or Not

 

                        Later, tucked back into the couch, remote control in hand and flipping around the TV dial like a zombie, I finally (for the first time today) felt relaxed. Relaxed and in a much better mood than I’d been in. Better prepared for the coming anniversary, now that I’d invested the pain of going back in time to September 11 through the awful pages of my journal. Better prepared for the new 24-hour CNN Breaking News Box season, having come to terms with how many video terror clips I’d be seeing on television during the next couple of weeks --- whether I wanted to or not.

            And now I was also fairly certain that the newbie girls next door would be giving me no more trouble for a while, considering my effective self-defense tonight, preaching new world zero tolerance and waving the Lawrence noise ordinance I tried to defeat in 1986 at them  --- and the sheer level of embarrassment and humiliation they forced me to suffer them with tonight.

 

* Go to Chapter TWO

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