Holes
: Monday, on the anniversary, as I wrote then, I visited the hole in the city, the World Trade Center. The next morning, I came to my office at Times Square and looked out the window and realized that there I stare at anther hole in the city, the hole where they are building an office tower that was supposed to be occupied by Arthur Anderson. Now this, too, is empty, thanks to greed and stupidity instead of terrorism and evil. I’m sick of the holes.
Ghosts
: After I wrote my story of Sept. 11, I regretted my last line, my kicker:
:”You sure you’re OK?” some nice stranger asked.
“I just look like a ghost,” I said, still shaking off the white dust. “Better to look like one than be one.”
But I feel better about it now, reading Rossi, one of my favorite writers hereabouts. She saw the CBS 9/11 documentary and wrote about being glad she saw it. She said it’s like going to a gallery near her that has stark pictures of that day. In that gallery, she writes:
Iím allowed to feel exactly how I feel all the time walking around the PC world where people are trying desperately not to talk and think about September 11th anymore.
Thatís why I felt so happy for this film and for the commemoration of the 6-month anniversary.
It was a chance for everyone to stand up and say, ìYes this is still on our minds and in our hearts. We just pretend it isnít.î
I went up on my roof last night and turned toward the place in the sky where the towers used to be and watched the memorial lights shoot up into the sky for their first night.
They are haunting and bluish-white and soft and strange.
My friend Wolf, visiting from L.A., calls them ìThe Ghosts.î
There are a lot of ghosts walking around Manhattan these days.
Some of them are dead and seem to brush past us when we walk anywhere near ground zero, or a fire station.
Some of them are alive and smile at us a little sadly when we look in the mirror.
Bloggers as social animals
: I’m so damned jealous. Ken Layne reports on a super blogger party in L.A. last night, in honor of the arrival of Instapundit himself. And today, Layne and Matt Welch go upcoast to teach with Nick Denton, who just got back from SXSW, where, he reported in IM last night, he saw “everybody.” And tonight, I’m sure, Denton et al will party with sprout-eating bloggers.
Don’t ever let anyone tell you that computers are antisocial. Once they are networked, they are the greatest socializing agent ever invented. At the end of all those wires on the Internet are people.
Terrornet
: Smart: CEOs of top U.S. companies set up their own wireless and web communications network in the event of the next attack.