2001 -- Death on a Stick

2001 -- The Year in Review The year we ALL wish we could have skipped.
Created: 31 December 2001

So, I'm sitting here about to do my usual year-end thing.. you know, where I sit down and type out a "Top 10 Things That Sucked" list about the previous year. It was going to be full of one-liners and obscure references to things that happened over the last 12 months that really sucked, chock full of the irreverance and sarcasm those of you who know me personally have come to expect.

And then I got to the Number One thing that sucked about 2001. And suddenly I was no longer interested in really thinking about the last year.

With all that has happened the last year... from the dotcom crash at the beginning, through having to move from San Francisco because of it, into a long summer which saw little positive employment opportunities surfacing.. and to perhaps the darkest, blackest day I have ever lived through, there's little for me to poke fun at, really.

It was a sucky year, all around.

So, instead, I want to relive the events of September 11, 2001 from my perspective.. if for no other reason that it will provide "release," and perhaps I won't have to think about it anymore.

September 11 began for me at a roadside rest along Interstate 10, just inside the Arizona border. I had left late the night before, heading towards Phoenix for a couple of potential job interviews. Around 2:00am PDT I was starting to get really tired, so I curled up at the rest stop and went to sleep.

About eight hours later, I awoke and fumbled for my Sprint PCS handset. Upon turning it on, the phone literally went nuts. Sometime over the past two hours or so, everybody and their mother had sent me 911 pages and "oh shit, call me" voice mails. But nobody said what was up, just that I needed to call them.

I had no idea what could possibly be going on. I thought it was some kind of personal emergency, like a relative had died or that there was some kind of minor disaster in Phoenix and everybody wanted to make sure I was okay.

First person I got ahold of that day was my wife, who told me that one of the buildings of the World Trade Center had just collapsed. I was still a little confused: I was still getting my bearings from waking up. After talking with her for a few minutes (and getting on the freeway heading towards Phoenix) I slowly started returning calls and tuning into one of the Phoenix newsradio stations.

Of course, the initial news was sketchy: two planes had crashed into the side of the two towers, and (at that point) Tower Two had collapsed. Shortly thereafter, the newsradio station was reporting that Tower One was (or has) also fallen down.

At this point, it all seemed really surreal. I was hearing more or less thirdhand what was going on, and the information the newsradio stations were getting was probably from watching it all go down on TV. How could this happen? What circumstances had lead up to this? What aren't we being told?

When I arrived at my friend Brent's house in Phoenix, that's when the full weight of the situation hit me. Actually seeing the television footage.. that's when I really snapped into reality and knew that all hell was literally breaking loose.

The remainder of the day, I sat in a Motel 6 room in Tempe and just stared in absolute stupification at the events as they unfolded. I lived in LA during the riots, and watched on California 9 TV as crazy mobs set fire to a ticket booth near City Hall. I was at work one early morning in Whittier when an earthquake literally shook the building I was working in down to a pile of rubble, as I was crossing the street to buy a cup of coffee from the donut shop. Eight hours before the Loma Prieta earthquake permanently erased the Nimitz Freeway from the Oakland skyline, I drove south on it towards home.. only to see it hours later upon arrival there as miles of concrete wreckage. I've sat on the roof of my home in Orange watching huge forest fires blacken the Southern California sky and replacing the normal bright hazy sunshine with the unmistakeable dull orange glow of scrubland ablaze.

None of this struck me as the horrors of September 11. Two of the largest buildings in the world, and thousands of lives, snuffed out literally in an instant.

Natural disasters happen: they are unavoidable. Forest fires and floods may be caused partially because of the works of Man, but even they require the help of Mother Nature to reach the ferocity required to become disasters of this scope.

Which brings me to the final list of the Top Ten Things that Sucked about 2001. All ten of them can be summed up in one statement.

On September 11 we saw, totally and completely, the darkest side of humanity imaginable. As a result our lives will forever be changed, not just in the United States but in the entire known world.

Here's to hoping that in 2002 we see the exact opposite side of ourselves.

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