Impact
: I was reading Rossi. If you read me regularly, you know that makes me happy. I like her writing. I like her soul.
She started with an observation that echoed mine from the last week, the Week of 100 Terror Warnings. She and I had the same reaction to helicopters. Since 9.11, they seem like bees drawn to bad news, hovering and buzzing over the city, trained like their explosive-sniffing cousins to find 11 o’clock video, their honey. They scare me now because I wonder what they’re buzzing about, I wonder what’s wrong.
Rossi writes:
Now they say the work at ground zero will end and there will be a ceremony and all those men will try to go on with their lives and so will we, and I’m sitting here wondering why I don’t feel happy that the work is ending.
Maybe some part of me feels that as long as there are people there working and searching for bodies and answers, there is some kind of hope.
Hope for what, I don’t know.
It’s been a rough week for me, to tell you the truth.
First there were the terror alerts, rekindling all my paranoias. I climbed the stairs to the roof the morning after the alerts hit the airwaves to have my coffee in the sun. It was a beautiful crisp morning.
It was hard not to feel an eerie deja vu sipping my coffee as countless helicopters whirled by. Most of them whirled about downtown.
The Brooklyn Bridge was just off to the downtown east of me.
The World Trade Center had been just off to the downtown west.
I don’t think the helicopters would have bothered me much if it weren’t such a pretty morning.
Pretty, crisp, sunny mornings tend to make me nervous now.
What I mostly felt, as I watched far too many helicopters whirl by, was lonely.
And this leads to something far more important that Rossi has to say, another observation, another emotion that I’ve shared: The impact of 9.11 is loneliness of one mutation or another.
For Rossi, it’s a very sad loneliness now. But I’ll let her tell you about that.
Pop this!
: Wow, AOL decides that customers may actually deserve respect:
America Online subscribers may finally get some relief from the barrage of aggressive pop-up advertisements that greet them when signing on and off the online service. Reducing the number of pop-up ads is a part of the online service company