A Letter Never Sent

September 14, 1995

Dear Cam,

It feels like an eternity since we last spoke, though I remember your last words to me. You said, “I’ll talk to you later.” I have been very hurt by all of this, and feel quite broken. I still can’t make sense of it. I have read your notes to me over many times, and remember the time we spent together, how happy we were, how happy we could be and how happy I was to be with you, and how deeply in love with each other we were. I feel like we had everything we wanted in the palms of our hands, as long as we kept our hands together, kept touching each other.

I still have all of this love for you and nowhere to put it. I haven’t stopped loving you or being in love with you. I cannot hate you or dislike you. I still want to be with you, and want you to be with me, even though I did say goodbye to you. I guess thought that if I said goodbye, by saying it, I would feel differently, because I don’t want to be unhappy and feel hurt either, and every time this has happened to us that has happened to me, and each time the hurt has been more severe. I continue to feel all this love for you and have no way to stop it from coming. This s complicated by the contradictory feeling that I don’t want it to stop, because it has been the greatest and deepest love I have ever felt. It is very strong. But thinking about it causes me pain, and sorrow, to the extent that I feel that I need to make it stop, but I don’t want to let go of it and never want to lose it. But that causes me to keep loving you, and nothing gets put back. I feel like I am still bleeding and I wish that feeling would stop, because it really hurts.

I don’t know what to do or say, which is why I’ve done neither. I miss you so much and I hurt very deeply I am angry that you haven’t done anything to get in touch with me – and I realize that sounds contradictory. My frustration stems from this: In out time together, I’ve seen you fight for everything – for your opinions in class, for your job, for how your family treats you, for how your coworkers perceive you – everything, in short, except us, our relationship. Even though I think I can understand why this has been hard for you in terms of commitment, it still hurts me very deeply. You told me that you realized that nothing was more important to you than our relationship, yet you never fought for it. You only fought with me. And I was so in love with you, and supportive of you, of your ideas, your feelings. That has really hurt me.

I have been depressed. I guess I didn’t really know what depression could feel like before. I think I know now. It feels lonely and cold and dark, like an awareness that no one really cares that I am alive. Some days my greatest challenge has been to get out of bed. Other days, the challenge has been to get through a full day of work. Some days I have to leave early, or just leave the office to cry without attracting the concern and attention of the people I work with. I find myself not being able to understand what I’m working for, because without you to pursue my dreams with I don’t know what the point is – because my dreams haven’t changed, and they include you, us, our future – the future we talked about and discussed and planned to have together.

What has made me angry is that your actions since we stopped seeing each other lead me to feel that you are willing to just walk away from what we had together, without even trying to resolve anything, regardless of whether that would mean the end of this relationship. It angers me to think that you are capable of just writing it off to incompatibility or fate or bad timing. I realize none of those things are likely accurate, and that you don’t want me to feel that way, but you walked away, and your failure to initiate any resolution is beyond frustrating. And I feel like, every time this has happened to us, if I didn’t initiate communication, there never would have been any, and our relationship would have just ended. I’m tired of assuming that role, of always carrying that responsibility, and this most recent separation doesn’t do anything to convince me otherwise.

I can’t and, honestly, don’t want to repress my feelings. But I have to resist turning on myself, doubting myself – feeling like I missed something crucial that, had I been aware of it, would have allowed me to find the right words or take the right action at the critical moment that would have prevented this from happening, would have saved us. But I know that’s not the case. On an intellectual level, I don’t understand why this relationship failed, but it has failed. I know in my heart that I did everything I could have done and given everything I had to give to make it work. It doesn’t have to be anyone’s fault, the failure; we have discussed this many times. But, whenever we reached those critical moments, you accused me of things that I would never do to anyone, let alone to you, my friend, my beautiful lover, sweet woman – and you also told me that you knew it wasn’t me! I’ve found that it’s impossible for me to not be angry when I think: If it wasn’t me, then why did we spend so much of our precious time together discussing how much I had to change in order for our relationship to be “acceptable” to you? I tell you this with all my heart: I could not have done any more, any better, any differently. I am torn apart inside because I felt so loved with you, by you – you made me feel that way by telling me how very loved you felt with me. But it wasn’t enough to keep me in your life. What do you want, Cam? I never wanted you out of my life, Cam – never – no matter how difficult the issues that we faced were. I felt we could face them together. I was wrong. I finally had to say goodbye, because every time we worked though something (I thought), after every separation and mending, I felt like we really made progress; but we never did, because it always eventually came back to the same issues, and you made it quite clear to me that it was about your needs, your feelings, your emotions and – worse – what I was doing to them, how I was failing to meet them or appreciate them. It’s pretty hard for me to not feel emotionally beaten up by all of that.

Here’s the source of my pain: I feel like you didn’t really want to become as much a part of my life as you did, yet you very much wanted to and succeeded at doing just that. And I wanted you to. I did not imagine the strength of the love and caring that we shared with and for each other. I feel like you must not understand how far in and deep you have become, in me. It feels difficult to breathe without you. So much of you still exists in my life, like you’ve always been a part of it, but you are so far away now. I gave you every part of my heart, and let you fill my soul, and I trusted you – I let myself believe that I could let you hold my hand because you loved me and wouldn’t leave me. Now, I feel more alone than I was before we were together, and it makes me feel pretty naïve.

I dreamed about us being together, having a life together, before we ever were together. This has made it impossible for me, so far, to find any sense of resolution for the sense of loss that I feel, because sharing my life with you was very much the fruition of a dream for me – being with someone who made me feel so complete, my woman, my lover, my best friend, my partner. You are everything I ever wanted in a partner, and I told you this, and you told me that I was the same for you. I wanted to marry you. I wanted us to raise a family, to build a home. We talked about these things, together. Realizing that the dream is over – feeling like it has been taken away from me – makes me angry. My anger sometimes can make me feel like our relationship was just a trial run for you, while I lived it as the real thing, not as some hypothetical possibility that we were talking about doing. I was already doing it. Maybe we were never in synch. But you talked to me as if it were real for you, you made me believe that it was, and I still do. I never doubted the things you told me, never doubted your feelings. Which again confuses me, and my confusion, frustration and anger stem from this question: If what you said was real, how could you give up such a dream, if it had become true for you, as you told me? Why would you give up what you said you most wanted when you had it in your hands? What could be worth that sacrifice, Cam? As you pointed out to me many times, true love doesn’t just come along. To me, the idea that we had that – or thought we had it together – and that you are just able to walk away from it isn’t reasonable, or healthy. Or we were both just fooling ourselves, confining our relationship to some kind of idealized emotional space.

We had a dream together, I though, and it was my most important dream, and now it is gone. I am angry about that, and I have examined my anger, and feel that it is justified.

What scares and saddens me the most are the descriptions of your feelings that you have shared with me, as you were having them. You question almost everything that doesn’t come out the way you hope/expect it to. I’ve done this myself, and can share with you that it is unhealthy and self-defeating. It creates a dynamic in which you set yourself up for failure by expecting things to turn out one way and, when they don’t, assuming responsibility for it, seeing it as a failure, and internalizing this feeling. It is a control thing. I know in my heart that we love each other very deeply, very truly – I have always remained in touch with that, and it has allowed me to separate the real issues in our relationship (including my divorce, my son, individual personal issues) from things that I have always felt are not a part of our relationship, like doubts, fears and mistrust. I have never told you that your feelings didn’t exist, or weren’t real, though you have accused me of doing so, and this was unfair to me. I know that what you felt was real, but you told me yourself that when things don’t feel “right” to you, you compensate by searching for reasons to attach to the feelings. And I feel that you wrongly used our relationship as a scapegoat for some of these doubts, and then you let your emotions construct lies about me to justify the anger that you feel. I know that you didn’t do this consciously and that you weren’t trying to hurt me. But it hurt me every time it happened, and I told you and you continued to allow it to happen. You never stopped it from happening because you felt that to stop it would be to deny your own feelings. You are carrying anger and resentment, rightly so, over bad things that have happened to you in the past, the abuse specifically, and you are afraid to let go of those feelings because you are afraid that if you do those things will happen to you again and then if will be your fault. Even though you know in your heart that you didn’t cause them to happen to you in the first place — that they were done to you. And you know that you didn’t allow them to happen to you willingly, even.

Why does this hurt me? Because those things or anything like them would never happen with me. But you won’t let yourself believe it, because it’s part of the protective wall that you’ve constructed around yourself. To believe that it wouldn’t happen with me qould require you to let go of those feelings, and, with them, the survival methods that you’ve developed to protect yourself. You are too afraid to let go of them now, because you don’t want to ever be abused again, to be a victim. Which is a completely rational way to think.

But they would never have happened with me and I would have protected you from them every happening, as much as that is ever possible. It was wrong of you to project those feelings onto me because I really loved you and wanted you and wanted to help you and be with you. I wanted you to be happy, and I still do. I wanted us to be happy together. That’s all I ever wanted. But I know this will never be. It is what we had — happiness — or maybe I just thought so. Maybe I was the only one who was happy. But I was what you had, and now we’ve both lost the happiness of being together, and you’ve lost this relationship, because of these feelings that you need to deal with. It is very difficult to write this, because I know how much it must hurt you to hear it from me, but I am telling you because I love you so deeply, so intensely, that I want you to be happy. I want you to be happy with or without me.

Think of all the things we talked about doing that we never had the chance to explore because every time we got close the feelings would come out. And we’d spend all of our time and emotional energy sorting through them, sorting and dealing instead of walking in the park, or going out to meet people and make new friends, or spending time with our families, or making love. Every minute we spent dealing with your unresolved issues was lost to us. What did all of that time spent get us? As you used to point out to me, time, in this life is so short.

You can do this, Cam. I want you to know that you can, and to know that I know you can do it. And I still want to help you, if I can. When you discover how to let these things go you will give yourself a gift, a precious gift — permission to be the person you are inside, the one eager to come out and live the life that you want to live. Your life. The one you dream about! That is the strong and beautiful and passionate and intelligent woman who I see you as, the Cam who I fell in love with and remain in love with still.

So many times you told me that we can’t be anything other than who we are. That it would be wrong for us to change. Sometimes you even said that it wouldn’t be possible. When you really listen to yourself, I think you will find that the voice you hear telling you not to change is your own voice. When you learn to accept who you are, then you can enjoy the wonderful experience of being that wonderful person, of living that wonderful person’s life. Your life, Cam. You have no idea how much it hurt when I heard you say things about yourself like, “I should have been famous.” Or asking yourself negative questions like, “why can’t I be different?” They are unfair questions, because they subject themselves to pre-determined answers. They beg for negative answers. When you pose them, you make unreasonable demands on yourself to answer them, and trying to meet those demands is self-destructive. It causes you to stray further from who you are, from your center, from the center of who and what you are. You already have all of the answers because you are naturally beautiful and complete. That is how the universe makes us. Until you accept those positive answers and embrace them as a part of you, become comfortable accepting that you are that beautiful and complete person, no one — most importantly yourself — will be able to give you the peace of mind that you can only give to yourself, and which you will not receive if you continue to deny who and what you are to the self that is proclaiming the truth. You don’t have to live with these fears. You can change these things if you want to. You are strong enough, and brave enough. Please believe me. I know you. I love you, and I am your friend. You told me that I was your best friend. I am just trying to be that person. Take the gift. Do the work. You deserve to give this to yourself.

I hope for you, and hurt with you.

R.

September 2002 Entry -- Reflections

A Failure of Angels

A Prayer for Peace

I know you'll never forget where you were or what you were doing, when it happened, when things changed. For all of us.

Today, we remember the victims and their families, the survivors and the witnesses. Though we are all, today, witnesses, to some extent.

God bless our nation, our principles and our way of life. May we never stop trying to do it in a better way, a way that is better for all nations, and all people.

This is a prayer for peace.

A Failure of Angels

11.21.01

We knew it was real before we arrived, of course.Somehow we knew. I say somehow because there are so many people who seem not to get it, whose behavior would indicate that they don’t really know that it happened, or don’t know that it happened on any real level. Perhaps they should go, go to New York City, go to lower Manhattan, and see for themselves. Maybe then they would understand, would feel something, anything. Would at least stop annoying the rest of us with their obliviousness.

They say they haven’t been “directly impacted.” How are 3,000, 4,000 — at one point it was upwards of 6,000, we thought — people killed in the span of 45 minutes without directly impacting everyone who’s left? The true nature of this event is that, among those who do know that this has happened, there is a very real sense that we were lucky. There is a sense among the living that we escaped. Somehow. We were all targeted. That much is clear. Those of us who are still alive simply escaped. For all of the same reasons that some of the victims were in the Towers, or the plaza, or one of the nearby buildings, also destroyed, were simply there — visiting on business or for pleasure, shopping, walking their dogs, taking a last-minute flight, heading out on some long-awaited adventure, or just enjoying what has widely been reported as an otherwise beautiful early fall morning in New York.

We’re still alive because we were lucky. We escaped.

10.23.01

I’m watching TV, first snippets of news, then some show about a judge and her dysfunctional family and her interactions with them, and their interactions with her. My annoyance with myself for not getting this journal entry posted sooner is tempered by a surprising realization that I no longer need to look at the keyboard to type. I wonder how long that’s been possible. I wonder if it’s some amazing tele-type-kinetic feature of my little Compaq Armada. I wonder if it’s a Microsoft trick. I wonder if it’s a rare effect of mixing a relatively cheap cabernet sauvignon with a Foster’s Lager, and, if so, I wonder if it can be duplicated in daylight. It would be pretty useful. I could, for instance, ditch this management mess, and become a court stenographer. Something interesting with my life, my career, my time, if there is such a thing, if any one of us has anything even remotely similar to time that we can call our own.

I digress, as is my tendency when needing to focus on the task at hand.

10.12.01

Your Humble Chronicler and Our Muse spent the weekend in the city. We landed in LaGuardia Friday afternoon, flying in from Cleveland Hopkins Airport. We heeded the FAA’s advice to allow ourselves two to three hours prior to scheduled departure time, to allow for intensified security checks. So, we got there at 8:30 am for our 10:55 flight, and more or less spent all of our time allowance waiting in the concourse, after our ID’s were checked against our tickets, and we went through the metal detectors, and they wanded our coats, the Muse’s purse, and had me tip my cap. Security was tight, I’d say, but relatively efficient; tight for America, that is, compared to the carefree atmosphere that typified air travel in America prior to that horrible event a month and a day ago. Probably still would get us laughed at by, say, Israeli airport security personnel, but I don’t know that for sure. At any rate, we weren’t stuck waiting in any line for more than fifteen minutes, which these days can sometimes qualify as the express line at Starbucks. There were only a few MPs in Cleveland that I noticed, but in New York we had the full monty – uniformed national guardsmen armed with submachine guns at every possible point of entry. It was intimidating as hell, but we did feel safe. As safe as one can feel, I guess, in any situation that requires armed military personnel for safety. America’s very weird right now, that is, if you’re an American. In other words, this is a weird situation for Americans. We had a smooth uneventful flight, which is another current oddity. There is no such thing as an uneventful flight right now.

We were in for a weekend of paying respects. My uncle passed away at 75 on September 18th, 2001. I wasn't able to find a reasonable ticket price to get to the funeral, which was that following Saturday. I’d just started a new job in August, and we’d moved to Ohio from Pennsylvania, so a lot was happening. Much going on, many visits, my son in a new school, trying to stay in touch with family and friends back in The Commonwealth, Our Muse looking for work here in OH – lots going on. Then they blew up the Towers. And everything already disrupted was disrupted further.

So, when a week later my youngest sister sent me an email to tell me that my uncle was in the hospital, followed shortly by another telling me that he’d died, I guess I just kind of went numb. I tried to get a flight into Manhattan for a reasonable rate, but it just didn’t pan out. I didn’t want to drive to New York, the Muse didn’t want me to go alone, and, frankly, at the time, I wasn’t crazy about the idea, either. I was trying to fill some positions in my department, and had some interviews scheduled for Friday, which would get me flying into New York Friday night at best, or Saturday morning at worst, and, either way, basically going to the funeral and turning around and flying back home. I couldn’t get my brain around it. Most of the rest of my family – my mom, five out of my six sisters, my brother -- were able to make it in, which made me feel guilty, but better because at least my aunt wasn’t alone. Plus she had a lot of friends, and so did my uncle. So, while everyone in my family drove in, except my brother, who somehow found a decent non-stop flight in from Columbus, Ohio, the Muse and I stayed in town, and wound up having dinner with my sister and brother-in-law and their two kids, in nearby Akron.

To be honest, I might have been able to find a flight if I’d started really looking as soon as I got the bad news about my uncle, but I couldn’t pull it off. The attacks have really thrown me off. I’ve been way distracted by the news, and have allowed myself to become a bit obsessed with keeping up to date on everything, as in up to the hour, almost. I’ve spent lots of time digging into the news, using search engines like Metacrawler to troll the internet for alternative media sources of information, things like the World Conflict Server, Jane’s Information Group, The Middle East Media and Research Institute. Glum stuff, mostly all of it. Even found an online Afghanistan newspaper -- "Welcome To Dharb-i-Mumin Web-Station (Pakistan's Largest Weekly Newspaper)" -- which was packed with chilling anti-Western diatribes, with the U.S. as the primary target of abuse. Pretty scary stuff, and I’m generally not one to be affected by blatant propaganda, regardless of how inflammatory the language. After the American military response started, I found that I couldn’t access the site anymore. I wasn’t real surprised, but I had to wonder whether access had been restricted on our end, or theirs. Like, were the jihad wackos restricting American internet access to their news, or was the U.S. restricting access to overseas media? For all I knew, it could have been something as simple as the location of the server it was hosted on being blown out of existence by NATO forces. But the times were nothing if not suited to suspicious theories and speculation. And, somehow, information can act as a balm of sorts.

Since my uncle died, I’d been using the web to try to locate his obituary in some New York publication. I never found one, but I did run across an online memorial page put up by a club which my uncle had helped found. The club is called the "Sons of the Desert," and it’s a social club for fans of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, the old-time film comedy duo. Old-time as in these boys started out doing silent pictures, and ushered in the age of “talkies.” The website consisted of a single page, which simply showed a stage curtain in black and white, with the words “In Memoriam” displayed over my uncle’s name. Some text at the bottom of the page said that their next meeting was taking place on October 12th, and that “the evening will be dedicated to our dear friend,” my uncle. I got the idea that The Muse and I might go up for the weekend, attend the meeting, spend some time with my aunt, pay our respects and the like. I ran it by The Muse, and she thought it was a nice idea, so we spent a little time online and were able to track down a weekend package that included roundtrip flights for the two of us, plus a hotel from Friday evening to Sunday afternoon for a half decent price, so we booked it that evening. I’d check with my boss to make sure I could have the day, and we’d fly out of Cleveland on Friday morning, and get into New York early afternoon with more than enough time to get from the airport to our hotel near Times Square. Aside from our itinerary, it was a little exciting, despite the not unwarranted national mood of general anxiety. On September 11, 2001, over 5,000 people were killed, suddenly and without warning, in a series of coordinated terrorist attacks in Manhattan, Washington, D.C. and Pennsylvania. The terrorists used planes to do it, just simply high-jacked them with box cutters, terrorized the respective crews and passengers, and flew them into both of the World Trade Centers in New York City, the Pentagon, and field outside a small town about 80 miles southeast of Pittsburgh. Fucking box cutters, they used, and they threatened the passengers, said they had bombs, and slashed the flight attendants, and told everyone they were going back to the airport, to remain calm and they’d be ok. This is what we have been told by the journalists and the authorities, and I believe them, what they tell us, though I don’t know if it’s because it’s credible, or if it’s because they’re very good at what they do. Or if I just really want to believe it, to believe anything that might lead us to think that someone out there is in control, is somehow in charge, has things under control. Aren't we in America? This shit can’t happen here. But it has.

They killed over 4,000 people that morning, in less than 45 minutes. In America.

• As of 12/27/01, the official count has been reduced to under 3,000. - Ed.
  
• As of 1/3/02, the victim count is 2,936, according to CNN. - Ed.

So goddamn them to all hell, and now there’s another fucking war going on, if you can call it war when the world’s mightiest financial and military power decides to launch full-scale attacks on a so-called nation that has no GNP to speak of, unless you can consider starvation a GNP, and then, well, whoa, we’re talking some kind of Super Power. Frankly, it’s hard to tell really who’s crazier. The enemy of the day, today, is this whacked out group of fanatics (they claim to be Islamic fundamentalists) who call themselves the Taliban (means “students”), who live to rid Saudi Arabia, land of the two holy places (Mecca and Medina), of the corrupting influences and presence of Western society, such influences taking the form of our instant-gratification-money-driven-godless-heathen-pagan-economy and presence in the form of American forces in Saudi Arabia, the sick residue of the Persian Gulf war of the early ’90’s, when the bad guy was Sadaam Hussein, and our interest was oil rights. What a twisted mess that was.

So we decided to go to New York because my uncle died, to see my aunt. This in the midst of ongoing threats of more attacks, even as the FBI was warning US citizens that “further terrorist events should be anticipated.” We were on “high alert” during the time we travelled, and we still are. We were bombing the shit out of Afghanistan (and we still are), plowing a steady stream of missiles into the bomb-shot waste of a nation already decimated by thirty years of civil war, most recently with Russia (itself formerly America's sworn enemy No. 1) which, before withdrawing in defeat, had pretty much reduced the entire place to rubble. I think a lot of what we’re doing now is turning rocks into more sand. And we have militant radical groups everywhere calling us terrorists, and denouncing the American military response, calling this a jihad or holy war, accusing the US of using the whole thing as its latest excuse to wage an all-out attack against Muslims everywhere. It’s all pretty confusing. But, we were going to New York, the greatest city on earth, The Muse and I, and I’d be a liar if I denied that there was some appreciable level of spite involved. I think I’m pretty liberal, but lately I’ve had thoughts like, “no third-world underbelly whacko is gonna tell me when I can and can’t fly in my country.” Fear does weird things to your brain.

We picked up our bag, called for a shuttle and then sat down to wait. Not a bad wait, but long enough to be greeted by the face of New York mayor Rudy Giuliani (now Rudy Giuliani, KBE), having a news conference (when did they stop calling it a press conference??) to announce that an NBC News staffer – a woman named Erin, or Aaron, I think, an assistant to Tom Brokaw, had been exposed to and had contracted the anthrax virus from a piece of mail that had been sent to the studio. ......guess so -- didn't hear until this morning, while waiting in LaGuardia Airport for a flight back in to Cleveland......spent the weekend in Manhattan, saying goodbyes and being a good nephew and citizen........had dinner with my aunt -- was good to see her, and spend some time with her....they really loved him.......was good to hear their stories, and how they felt about him........(he also was for years *the* Santa Claus for the Daily News, when they were still in business)........they meet in this wonderful place called the Players Club (in the Gramercy Park section -- used to be Edwin Booth's house (brother of John Wilkes Booth)).........very historic -- packed with memorabilia from Booth's acting career, and paintings and portraits of other famous members, like Mark Twain, John Barrymore, Eugene O’Neill, Helen Hayes, Jane Pauley, Jack Lemmon, Walter Cronkite and James Earl Jones – none of whom were present this particular evening – but very interesting, nonetheless.

......Saturday, spent the day just walking the city, riding the subways......our hotel was in the same block -- right around the corner, actually -- from the Ed Sullivan Theater, where Dave Letterman does his show, so we were about four blocks from downtown........had lunch in Chinatown, and then went down to the site......I think you have to.....I can't imaginec how anyone could go to Manhattan today and not go........just the thought of it......all of those souls.....I think they are still calling to us....I can't even attempt to explain it, so I won't even try.....when we flew in, we could see it below us........like a grey hole in the middle of this amazing metropolis........it's part of you as soon as you get there -- the whole city smells slightly of wet ash from burnt paper.....how could we not be breathing in some atomic residue of the victims?......it's ok......I wanted to feel like I could take some of them away from it....suffice it to say that it is, truly, the saddest thing I have ever seen........the pictures, and the notes........the sight of it all is poignant and terribly heartbreaking.....it really, really makes you angry, but you're crying within about two minutes or so of paying your respects.....and no one messes with you, no one gives you looks.....everyone leaves you alone, because they know.....for once, everyone knows the same thing..........we left flowers, shook hands with as many law and other official types as I could reach.......it is a different city today..........how could anyone do this........we were glad to have been able to be witnesses, though........kind of makes you feel closer to the heart of our nation.....more a part of the American family, maybe.....but this is truly so heartbreaking........I plan to return when they reopen the site, or a memorial....as the case may be......I will never forget the starkness of it all.........elderly new yorkers stopping as they pass openings in the blocks, where you used to be able to look up at the towers......they're prolly on their daily walk to the newstand, or fruit grocer, something they've done for the past 50 years.....this was, still is, their neighborhood.......Deniro lives here....Lou Reed......the Tribeca area........they stop, and look, and just shake their heads, and drop their faces and continue walking........what amazing people......I felt like I loved them all -- even the wild-eyed freaks, cursing invisible people who they think offended them..........stopped in for a much needed beer, and on a whim called an old high school buddy of mine, who I haven't seen for at least 15 years, knowing he lived in the area, and he stopped into this 50-year-old corner bar, and we had a few pints.....was very good to see him.....he lives three blocks from the site, and works nearby.....saw the whole thing from his office.......has a wife, a 9-mo-old son......all are fine, thank god.......said when you see shots of the site on the Fox news, they're shooting from the office next door to his...........

.....home now......son, asleep.....lover, asleep.......cat's a little nuts.........stay safe.....keep in touch..........peace.......rune

[10/5/2001 4:04:02 PM | Rune ]
Pretty well-organized gobs of information here, courtesy of the WSJ and MSNBC.

[10/4/2001 2:26:44 PM | Rune ]
Ken Kesey, he of Merry Prankster Fame, on The Real War. (Was Dubya listening....??)

[9/28/2001 10:08:09 AM | Rune ]
communiques

----- Original Message -----
Sent: Friday, September 14, 2001 1:22 PM
Subject: RE: ...the bowl breaks....

Hi folks,

Forgive the unattractive formatting as I attempt to frame my responses below with outtakes and pastes.........my $0.02......

H. writes:

"So, my feelings are mixed. I feel something like we are victims, and something like we are the ugly Americans."

Well said -- a good description of the contradictory emotions that we're all wrestling with. I share a message I rcvd today from my best friend:

J. writes:

"Hey Buddy: Feel the same way. Or is it that I don't know what I feel? Want to kill somebody one minute, want to hug somebody the next. When I'm in the hug mode, I'm thinking of you guys."

H. writes:

"We have played into bin Laden's hands, just as if we had handed him guns and armies."

I'm currently thinking of terrorism in terms of being the most extreme form of passive-aggressive behavior. On the one hand, having been attacked, if we don't respond, we are the vanquished. If we do respond, we are the oppressors. It's a lose-lose game. If there were a shred of humanity of morality at work here at all, terrorists who have made the decision to engage in an act of such egregious aggression against a nation (forgive the jingoism) of America's size, stature and resources -- financial, political and technological -- the very absolute *least* they could do is to warn their own citizens, and then immediately evacuate the nation.

Because we've been known to be swift and brutally ruthless in our retaliation. Brutally merciless. Our own pundits and politicos have already verbalized their opinions -- that our retaliation, which will inevitably come, will be, when it arrives, "completely disproportionate" and will take the form of "ending states that support terrorism."

S. writes:

"It's not just our support of Israel, altho that has a lot to do with it. Why do we support Israel? Not because we *like* Israel, necessarily, but more because Israel is our toe-hold into the Middle East, and we need to protect our affordable gas prices. Our Middle East policies are driven (if you'll pardon the expression) by what is good at the gas pumps and in our pocketbooks, with little regard for anybody else."

I'd be hard-pressed to come up with a better summary of the origin of the term "ugly Americans." As for oil interests, see "Gulf War." Nothing about that one fit Aquinas's definition of a "just war."

S. writes more:

"IMNSHO, suicide bombings are a tool of desperation...I cannot accept the stereotype that "those people" have glorified suicide to the point where it has so easily overcome the instinct of self-preservation. For a people (or an individual, for that matter) to consider a suicide mission to be viable, they must feel that there is no other way."

B. asks:

"Ever notice how those that direct suicide missions in any form, never really put themselves in a position to die for the cause their own damn selves?"

The phrase "lunatic fringe" comes to my mind. For instance, who in their right mind would, in our current climate, phone in a bomb threat? Who would attempt to board a place with false id's? Answer: No one. No one in their right minds would even consider such a thing. These individuals are of some wholly alien psychic make-up.

H. writes:

"My reaction is weak in the extreme, and I'm a bit ashamed of it. Maybe I've been working in juvenile court too long, but I have this feeling of wanting to understand what in god's name we have done to them, that they are pushed to this much anger. It's the same reaction I have to juvenile murderers: what happened to this kid that makes him so angry and lets him have so little regard for life?"

[ I would say that shame is not what we need, but I understand it. And I appreciate your humility -- you've stared in the face of serious and irreparable injustices more than most of us, certainly more than me, H. (H. is a public child advocate attorney.) ]

S. poses a similar question:

"It's time for us to ask what our culpability is...what have we done to make America and Americans targets?"

Best I can say is that I'm conflicted. Coming from someone who doesn't believe that humans are intrinsically evil, this kind of tragedy is hard to explain. I tend to think there is no explanation, though I, too, am at risk for oversimplification. The only way I can even remotely comprehend it is if I look at it from a perspective of critical mass. Perhaps the sum total of positive and negative mass in the universe is continually swinging into and out of equilibrium. Perhaps at present, we've reached a point where the negative has reached critical mass, and has become a real threat, and only The Universe really "knows" this, and what we're sadly witnessing is a cycle, the utterly conscience-less swing of the pendulum. Think of the human spiritual energy involved -- we're talking like 5,000 *LIVES* -- where does that energy go? I don't believe that it goes nowhere. Perhaps, as I heard Netanyahu (sp?) say, this was our "wake up call from hell," like Pearl Harbor, like the Holocaust. Perhaps humans are just dense, and this is what it takes before we realize that there's a serious imbalance, that the center is not holding. There's nothing positive about it, but maybe, from a Universal perspective (which I, granted, have no right to claim, even if it were possible, and I don't know that it is) this is a corrective measure, some cosmic trigger to address a universal wrong. I wish I knew more. I wish I knew anything.

Peace,

Rune

Aside: Ram Dass responds.

[9/26/2001 10:48:35 AM | Rune ]
and only shadows remain

tears from a metacrawler search:

Windows on the World, New York City --- Reservations: 212-524-7011
9, http://www.windowsontheworld.com/ (Direct Hit)
Pages at this site with the same name:
1. http://www.windowsontheworld.com/wow/index.shtml | More Like This

Top of World Trade Center New York City: Click on this Internet Keyword to go directly to the Top of World Trade Center New York City Web site at wtc-top.com.
750, http://www.wtc-top.com/ (Internet Keyword) | More Like This

In memoriam

• The Black Day
  
• Shattered

[9/21/2001 5:24:44 PM | Rune ]
perhaps the only objective picture

and then some flags

well said

[9/13/2001 3:06:02 PM | Rune ]
speechless, still

What can anyone say. Here, some NYC bloggers cover the tragedy in words and pictures at The Fine Line, Like An Orb and cia's ext212.

Other opinions at Madison, WI's The Capital Times.

Namasté.

September 2001 Entry -- Turning Over a New Leaf

Tides

There was beauty
and sadness, yours --
some sweet poignancy,
like when a leaf turns brown,
because it knows it is about
to fall on the wind
and die.

I can still see the look of fear
on your face, the mask you wore
to frighten your demons,
who nonetheless offered you
the gift of some remote despair,
flesh-ridden and dissipated
like smoke, eviscerated.

I was afraid, too, scared of
the voices that screamed at you
to scream at me because you had to
survive, so I had to watch what we had
slip like the tide, from sadness
into the past.

Copyright 2001, Rune

August 2001

...no entry for August, as ring ownership and administration passes
from anna
    (good luck!)
        to dyanna
          (good luck!)
yet another example of
  the peaceful transfer
     of power
for which America
is known and respected ...

July 2001 Entry -- The Truth

Waiting

If you can stand the wait, you will feel time
grow up and fill the space around you
like the grass around the lake
where you used to play hide-and-seek
and where you learned that hiding the truth
is like tracing a flower in wet mud.
It gets hard.

Sometimes for the sake of knowing
you must cast belief like your last handful of sand
into the ocean and wait for the tide to wash
it back to you, as surely as time
casts today into tomorrow.
Drop your bucket in my well,
and it may not come up full of anything

but blessed certainty.
I think to learn the truth you must look for beauty,
and to answer love's questions, you must close
your eyes and mouth and
feel what you feel.

Simple beautiful theories work
like nature, like playing catch
is like making sense,
and the sun melting the snow into
clear pools is like making love.

Copyright 2001, Rune

June 2001 Entry -- It's Over

Gardening

I

When we still lived lives
as if we mattered to each other,
we used to garden, tilling soil so rich
I felt that I could plant anything in it --
tomatoes, melons, myself, dreams --
and they would grow.

But we ended up with some kind of tree,
a dwarf, I think, with deep gnarled roots,
branches that twisted and cracked
just short of blooming every time we
got close to having Spring.

I watered that tree even after you left,
with everything I had -- rain, tears, hope,
more rain. I planted other things around it
to encourage its growth, but the branches
never looked like anything more than something
you might use to start a fire.

II

Eventually,
it just turned brown and stopped
growing.

III

After snow had covered it two times,
and the year's first warm sun shined
its life-affirming light upon it, I took off my
shirt, pointed a spade into the just-thawn ground
around that tree,
and pushed.

I cut a circle around it with the shovel's blade
and dug -- dug for hours, dug for years, dug until
I stood in a kind of moat that separated it
from everything else in my life.

I couldn't believe how angry I was
at how deep the roots were
and how they still fought me,
still held on
hard to the earth
and tried to make me feel like I should help them.
I couldn't believe that I'd planted them.

I remember leaning hard on the shovel's handle
with my life's full weight and wedging
the blade between the roots and the soil
and how those last roots
snapped! like firecrackers.

IV

I remember feeling free.

V

When I lifted the root ball up and out of its home
it seemed to shudder, as if shaking itself free of soil.
I just left it there, in the open, not even buried,
wanting everyone to see it and know.

Copyright 2001, Rune

May 2001 Entry -- Remembering

shroud blossoms
- for Courdry

today I watched them unfold quilts
while old women wearing name tags
circulated among somber witnesses
they were godsends bearing boxes of kleenex
to those who struggled with the balance
between decorum and emotion,
those old women were sharp
and came just in time -- like cures
are supposed to -- but          the war hero general
was right when he said, "life
is not a hollywood movie"
but you lived your's like one my
boyhood friend turned careless queen --

I wasn't trying to but I remembered
my mother's voice over the phone when
she told me you were sick, her denial words
"I hope he gets better"          cracking with grief
as I silently listened, because I'd already heard and
I just couldn't tell her you wouldn't get better
with dread certain          impunity
your failing kidneys ridiculing all hope,
miracles being about as likely as god
admitting it was all just a big joke

-- so they opened these oversized cards and love letters
and I watched flowers bloom anyway out of grave-
sized cloth         plots of grief, opening like buds
petal by petal, and filling the room
with a scent like remembering.

Copyright 2001, Rune