First Person: Twenty Years After
I’ve been trying to write an essay about 9/11 for more than a year. With the 20th anniversary coming up I wanted to write something really meaningful and profound about how 9/11 affected me over the past twenty years. At first, I thought, “Who wants to hear your 9/11 story? Everyone knows this stuff already, you don’t need to add another one to the pile-on.” But then I thought, “That’s exactly why you should tell it, because you were there, because being a witness is meaningful and important in and of itself.”
I don’t remember when I started doing it, but every year on 9/11 I share my blog posts from that day in 2001 and the days the followed on social media.
Because I worked on the 21st floor of the Woolworth Building across the street from — and facing — the World Trade Center, and because I got to work early that morning, and because I was a blogger at the time, I have the dubious distinction of being the first person on the planet to have written an eyewitness account of 9/11 in real time. So, lots of people know my story from that day. They don’t necessarily know the story leading up to that day or what happened after.
I had great ambitions for this essay. I was going to finish it a few months ago. I was going to get it published in a real magazine. I was going to intertwine three threads of investigation into one stunningly integrated whole that would illustrate the interconnectedness of the political, personal, technological, sociological, psychological, spiritual and cultural realms. It was going to be beautiful, elegant, surprising and profound, maybe occasionally humorous. Or something like that.
The first thread was going to be about Terror and how the 9/11 attacks succeeded in transforming America into a country wholly suffused by terror to the point where external terrorists no longer need to attack us themselves. How the length to which we’ve gone to protect ourselves against external terrorism has undermined our trust in our institutions and each other and unraveled the social fabric — or maybe exposed how tenuous it was to begin with. How all the violence we have committed at home and abroad in the name of the War on Terror (and let’s face it, it is really mostly a War on Muslims and Black and Brown People) has exacerbated, and in some ways legitimized, domestic terrorism.
The second thread was going to be about technology, how the advent of social media and mobile computing gradually eroded the dividing line between physical space and digital space. How the vast, interconnected hybrid physical/digital emergent metaverse serves as a fecundating matrix for terror, an amplifier of fear and our most negative impulses. How the market-driven evolution of digital technology has so horribly, and intentionally, betrayed its earlier promises of building meaningful connection, access and democracy. How the relative intimacy of personal space on Web 1.0 became the relentless publicness and desperate attention economy clamor of Web 2.0. What does it mean to be everywhere at once and nowhere at all? And it was going to be about how bearing witness to violence in real time on the Internet changed between 2001 and 2021.
I was also, somehow, going to weave the pandemic into that second thread — how Terror is a Virus, and things “go viral” on social media and we’re living through a pandemic that actually, tangibly, personally affects everyone in a way that 9/11 didn’t, couldn’t, and yet, because of the frayed social fabric that resulted from years of living in a culture of fear after 9/11, because of the distrust and disparities, we have been unable to secure ourselves against the actual coronavirus. If we are in a war against COVID we are losing it in much the same way we lost the war on terror. “As we act, let us not become the evil that we deplore.”
The third thread was going to be about my personal experience, about the impact 9/11 had on me, how it influenced my career and life choices over the past twenty years, how it informed my spiritual, intellectual and emotional life in both negative and positive ways, and how my personal story intersected with the two previous threads.
But I just haven’t been able to pull it together. It’s just too much. Every time I sit down to write I feel overwhelmed. It has been 18 months (?) of the pandemic and I’m exhausted. I’ve got a toddler to look after and aging, ailing parents to worry about. I can barely think anymore. I live in a sun-drenched fractal metropolis that is at once magnificent and terrifying; there’s something about Los Angeles that makes it difficult to focus. It seems like everyone is always distracted. I know I am, most of the time.
So, this is an essay that isn’t the essay I intended to write. This is it. What was I saying? Oh, yeah, right.
I tell this story because on that day, and for a little while afterwards, 9/11 was a very specific, local and personal tragedy. If you were there and you saw the planes hit the towers, the sky filled with paper and fire, the people jumping and the bodies flying, if you saw the towers come down and ran away, walking uptown covered in dust, if you experienced all that first-hand, in-person, then 9/11 was personal in a very specific way. If you watched it from Brooklyn, Queens or uptown, if you smelled the acrid burning pulverized concrete and steel dust suffusing the air for months afterwards, it was personal. If you lost someone you loved or even just knew casually, it was personal. If you wandered the streets in a daze that day and for months after felt like you were living underwater, separated from the world by an invisible, impenetrable wall of shock and grief, it was personal. For a little while at least, it wasn’t everybody’s tragedy, that came later.
In a recent interview Marc Maron expressed it pretty succinctly:
Everything was happening in this cloud of that toxic burning-metal smell and the growing proliferation of pictures on walls of people missing. People were wandering around like zombies. This trauma that happened to the city and to everybody there was tangible. Nobody really knew what to do, and I didn’t feel that we were scared of another attack as much as we were just shattered. Then people started flooding in to go look at the pile of smoking metal. It felt like an intrusion that so many people were flocking to a city that they may have judged before as enemy territory, in my book.
Twenty years later, there are adults who were born after 9/11 happened, who have no lived memory of that day, whose entire understanding of 9/11 has been formed by what they learned in school or the popular conversation in the media — the books, the articles, the movies. Whether those conversations are coming from the mainstream media or partisan outlets on the right or left, the events of that day are now interpreted through the lens of history and politics; 9/11 is deployed as a shorthand, a symbol, a rallying cry — mostly as a justification for war and more violence. The Forever War.
9/11 was an act of war. For me, and for many others growing up in post-Vietnam America, 9/11 was the first time we personally experienced the violence of war. Having experienced it, I wouldn’t wish that kind of horror on anyone, anywhere, ever.
I count myself lucky because like most Americans, with the exception of the 1% of the population that is currently in the military, the 14% of the population that are military veterans, and the immigrants and refugees who came here seeking safety from war and violence in their home countries, I most likely will not have to experience it again. Though the events of the past few years, like January 6 Insurrection, might give one cause to worry about what will come in the days ahead.
But 9/11 hasn’t left me. For more than a decade after 9/11 I was susceptible to triggers — the sight and sound of a plane moving along a certain arc in the sky, some sounds, some smells, sequences on TV and in films, even in plays. It would just hit me. Even now, if the sky is the right shade of blue and the wind just so, I can find myself staring into space, the visions returning and with them, tears.
So, maybe I’ll start there instead.
The sky was blue. It is almost too painfully cliché and obvious to write that. Of course, it was blue, it almost always is at this time of year. Would the blue of the sky have been any different but for the events of that morning? That morning it was the kind of blue that made me turn my face toward the sun and stand in place and breathe it in, the Lou Reed song “Perfect Day” playing in the background of the secret movie inside my head. I closed my eyes and opened them again, delighted and amazed. Was it any particular property of the sky or merely because of my mood? Because I was happy? Because Lower Manhattan, on certain days when late summer gives gently over to autumn, is almost too beautiful to believe. It strains credulity, in fact, one imagines one must be on a film set.
Standing on the edge of City Hall Park looking south the foliage was starting to turn a particular shade of orange-yellow like squash and the tree branches commingled to make a latticework of leaves framing Broadway, historic City Hall behind, Park Row to the East, Woolworth Building and St. Paul’s Church to the West. The air has warm top notes and a crisp, cool finish, you inhale it and remember backpacks and school books and pencils in pencil cases and blue blazers. You stop and listen to the sounds of the traffic and people walking by, the smell of burnt coffee from the coffee cart with a donut, or two, and it is too soon for roasting nuts, but you think you smell those sticky-sweet roasted peanuts that you probably shouldn’t eat but always do because they’re so good.
So maybe that day the sky was particularly blue and clear because I was happy and there to notice it, and maybe it was not just me, maybe it was just one of those days when everybody is happy from a long weekend and dawdling on their way to work and taking a moment to admire the sky and breathe in the air and the smells and it is our collective — if unconscious and completely uncoordinated — act of simultaneously stopping to take it in makes it even bluer and more translucent. And maybe it is the feel of the sun on your face with an intimation of cooler days ahead, maybe all those things made the actual fact of the street and the sun and the sky more startlingly, vibrantly, soul-stirringly real, ecstatically, unbearably beautiful, you couldn’t help but be happy. And I was.
At least that is how I remember it, sometimes. The further we get from that day, the more perfect it becomes in my memory; the impending cataclysm more ruinous and heart-rending. The end of Eden.
I walked over the Woolworth Building, took the elevator up to the office on the 21st floor, and greeted a few other early-arriving co-workers. I sat down at my workstation facing the north tower, turned on my monitor and leaned under my desk to turn on my computer when I heard a loud bang. It was 8:47AM.
When I raised my head from under my desk I looked out the window and saw a gaping hole in the north tower of the World Trade Center billowing black smoke and flame. At a loss of what to do and not believing my eyes, I wrote a quick blog post. The clear blue sky was filled with fluttering sheets of white paper and falling bodies. There’s no need to recapitulate it here — everyone has seen the footage countless times, everyone knows what it looked like. And because everyone has seen the footage, people think they know what it was like to be there.
Wait. Let me start over. Please, let me start over. I’m starting over.
I was hardly an Internet pioneer, I didn’t get online until 1994. In 1996 I bought my first personal computer — a Macintosh Performa — and joined the much-derided wave of newbies starting their online life through AOL. Frustrated by the limitations of AOL, I switched over to Earthlink, and started teaching myself HTML to build out the personal website that came with my account — the kind with a tilde as part of the URL.
With my limited knowledge of HTML and lots of curiosity, imagination and hustle, I managed to transform myself from itinerant writer, downtown performance artist and production assistant into an interactive producer at a fancy ad agency. In Silicon Alley, Downtown and Dotcom had hooked up for a raucous, riotous, dare I say giddy no-strings-attached good time. It was 1998, I was 30 years old, and had landed my first legit corporate job. We had reached Peak Dotcom and I was having the time of my life. If, by 2000, the dotcom bubble may have begun to burst, or at least slowly leak air, I didn’t think anything of it.
In late 2000, I moved agencies to Fallon Worldwide where I joined the five-person Integrated Services Team to develop interactive campaigns for big corporations. Fallon’s office was on the 21st floor of the historic Woolworth Building in Lower Manhattan. Fallon’s offices on the 20th and 21st floors embodied the self-conscious corporate whimsy of the dotcom boom: Silicon Alley meets Minnesota Nice.
There was the requisite ping-pong table in a corner office, and a refrigerator full of free Snapple, cabinets full of free snacks, and everywhere exposed ductwork. The room was wide-open and flat, like a Midwest prairie, surrounded by blue skies and suffused with light from the windows on all sides. Workstations were arranged so that everyone, from entry-level administrative assistant to the CEO, had a stunning southern-facing view of Lower Manhattan.
Still, even with all the dotcom trappings — Gen X is changing the entire concept of the office! — working in the corporate world felt like selling out. Like many of my Generation X peers, I was trying to maintain my “alternative”, DIY values and worldview, while ambivalently riding the Internet wave into corporate America. Like many of my peers I needed a space where I could still be myself, where I could find others like me; and without even really intending to, I found blogging. My first “official” blog post was in August 2000.
This may seem obvious, but twenty years ago, the Internet was still a Third Place and building a personal website and blog was like building a room of one’s own. Starting a blog felt like writing a zine or recording songs on a 4-track or making mix tapes from LPs to share with your friends. It was very much a part of DIY, indie, alternative culture. Blogging was a form of personal expression that reflected who you were. You had to know at least a little HTML and it was fun to open up the source code of someone’s site to see how they did something that looked really cool. The way you designed your site, as much as the stories you wrote and the links in your blogroll, was part of who you were online. It was handcrafted, sometimes messy, but it felt really personal, authentic and true.
So, when I started blogging, the World Wide Web didn’t seem so wide, didn’t seem to encompass so much of the world; it did not feel crowded. Rather, it felt like a private place unlike any other, a place where I no longer needed to perform some version of myself. I could write truthfully, brutally, and sometimes beautifully about my life, expose my innermost self with only the handful of people with whom I had shared my URL. It felt authentic; I felt that I could be genuinely myself online.
Blogging allowed me to put more of myself out there and know more about the people I was meeting; we were able to have thoughtful, reflective conversations and share experiences and opinions both in-person and afterwards. For me, it made the relationships feel closer and deeper more quickly.
Over the course of that first year I became part of a small community of mostly LGBTQIA bloggers in New York City who started to socialize regularly in real life; when we first met in bars or cafés, we would often introduce ourselves by our URLs — oh so you’re Ultrasparky, East/West, TinManic, Bazima, Uffish Thoughts — before learning each other’s names.
Many of us were already writers or artists of one kind or another, drawn to blogging as an online extension of our creativity. Blog culture operated in the same way that zine culture did: a macro scene of intersecting micro-communities of individuals and their quirks, making a varied and distinct type of alternative literary culture. Not everyone aspired to being a Writer but the process of writing about our lives in real time, sustaining an ongoing conversation, created a literary aura around the community. At least I felt that way. It wasn’t the Algonquin Round Table, but it felt to me — and maybe to others as well — that we were writing ourselves into the artistic lineage of the literary city, documenting an era of New York that would somehow, someday, be looked upon as magical in its own right.
So, when I blogged 9/11 in real time, I was essentially writing for that small community of fellow bloggers and faithful readers, the handful of people I knew or who knew me, who knew my voice as a writer and a lot of the details of my life that would provide context. It was an act of personal witness, not journalism, and there was no chance that it would go viral, because there was no way for it to do so.
The interactions that happened online were more direct and personal. I was overwhelmed by the outpouring of support and compassion that came to me in the form of blog comments and emails. At the time it felt as if the Internet was fulfilling its promise of connecting people and bringing people together. It was the best version of what the Internet can do.
Afterwards, Fallon’s office remained closed for three months. For a while we worked out of its new French corporate parent company’s office in midtown. We only returned to the Woolworth Building office for a week or so in December when they laid off most of the staff, myself included. I spent the next six months in my apartment, mostly, chain-smoking, living on unemployment benefits and ramen, accumulating credit card debt.
But I wasn’t alone. I spent that spring hanging out with my community of bloggers in coffee houses and bars, at picnics in the park, field trips to Coney Island. It was one of the worst periods of my life and, in many ways, one of the most wonderful, all at once. It was one of those haloed moments where traumatized people come together in the wake of tragedy to take care of each other.
Being a part of the small blogging community that, in some ways, coalesced in the wake of 9/11, determined the path my life would take. Unconsciously, perhaps, I gravitated towards community over commerce. Our little blogging community helped launch the website Culturebot.org in 2003, which in turn grew into a resource for the community of downtown artists and where, over the next decade, I really learned how to write. When my friends Chris and Dan and I started the WYSIWYG Talent Show in 2004 — the first ever all-blogger reading and performance series — it was our community of bloggers that showed up and made it a success, year after year. When I ran for mayor on the Blog Party ticket in 2005, they all helped in one way or another.
Why does any of this matter? I don’t know for sure.
The podcaster Dan Taberski, discussing his new show 9/12, said in a statement, “Twenty years later, it’s not the day that we need to ‘never forget’, it’s how we reacted afterwards, how we let it change us and how it still does.”
In 2011 I was working on a series of public program for the 10th anniversary of 9/11 called InSite for LMCC.
We exhibited a work by the artist Xu Bing called “Where Does The Dust Itself Collect?” It is a beautiful, haunting installation. Getting the installation up almost killed me. At the last minute our downtown site fell through and we had to find a new storefront, eventually ending up in the Flatiron District. It was a complex installation where the scaffolding had to be built just so and the dust had to be blown just so and we didn’t have enough money, time or crew. I worked a 28-hour day in order to get it finished in time. In the final hours it was just me and the Xu Bing’s designated installer, flown in especially from England for the job, working together to complete the piece. We got it done. But after I went home and crashed and woke up again and showered, I realized that it was time for a change, that I had been working non-stop for 10 years in part because I was still fucked up from 9/11.
I was chain-smoking and drinking to excess, going out every night of the week, unable to maintain a healthy romantic relationship, moving from one fucked-up scenario to the next. I had gotten Type 2 Diabetes and wasn’t doing anything about it. I was easy to anger, went from manic and happy to despondent and depressed within the same day, I was just out of control. I’d been wrestling with some of this stuff for a long time and in the year before 9/11 had finally begun to get better. But 9/11 knocked it all out of me. It took me ten years just to realize that.
On the 20th anniversary of 9/11 I’m in a good place, personally. I don’t feel like I can say the same for the world at large.
There are plenty of journalists and cultural critics who will be able to analyze what happened far more skillfully than I ever could. (Just check out this episode of Radiolab called “60 Words, 20 Years” about the origins and legacy of the AUMF (Authorization for the Use of Military Force) passed by Congress days after 9/11 that has been used to justify the mission creep and expansion of the forever war ever since.)
There are tech writers who can write more deftly about how big tech have created an echo chamber, a distortion field, a petri dish for terror and hate, how the data aggregation and surveillance state erected in the name of the War on Terror is erasing privacy and eroding democracy. There are epidemiologists, pundits and even poets who will opine on the current moment and how we can trace it all back to 9/11. And most of them are correct to one degree or another.
There is an essay I hope to write one day, maybe for the 25th anniversary, that ties it all together in a grand unified theory of everything.
But looking back at 9/11 today, and the days that followed, what stands out most is the small stuff, the human stuff, the emails and comments I received on my blog in the immediate aftermath, and ways people took care of each other in the days, months and years to come. The relationships and communities the formed. The crack in the hard varnish of self-interest and competition that characterizes modern life that offered a glimpse into another possible world, another possible way of being. We had a choice then, and we have a choice now, to work towards the good or towards the bad, to choose compassion over cruelty. Having experienced terror, we can work to reduce the harm we inflict or we can continue to pursue violence and vengeance. One road leads to healing and redemption, the other is just an endless highway of hurt for everyone involved.
I know which road I’m taking. I hope to see you along the way.
