I was living in Manhattan when IT happened, and I'll never forget what happened to new york city. It became a land like no other I had been in. And granted, I've grown up only in the USA, but I lived in a number of places along the way. Nothing had ever resembled late 2001 in Manhattan. Nothing has since.

That's what I want to hold on to now. That view of us. That is where I want to return for a moment.

To when my girlfriend and I ventured downtown to lend a hand or give blood or something. And finding out that the entire city was already on it. Hospitals were turning away blood, so many people had come to donate. One minute you see a sign in a window calling for blood (talk about surreality in the city) and the next you are there, and they have more help than they can handle. The city was well-stocked with blankets and water bottles and food and all other forms of love that can take form in matter.

Almost all the ads in the newspapers from even the media giants and corporate monsters and the biggest icons of commerce were printing humble, personal messages instead of advertisements. When you came across a typical ad yelling out from the page with blarey colors or fonts, it just felt all wrong. Our guard had been blasted off and the city was warm and naked and breathing softly like a newly exposed artichoke heart.

It felt wrong to go about with the lazy, busy, thoughtless, often greedy or selfish but always barely-conscious doings of the average and successful metropolitan day. It felt wrong to bicker. We stood or sat on the trains quietly, a soft tension between us, a warm understanding, a panged recognition. I thought to myself at one point that all day, we all have tears in our eyes. I wrote it down. I don't know if it was true. But it felt like it for a little while.

I was walking one day and fell off the curb when a plane went over the city again and I missed my footing because my eyes were jerked to the sky and I looked up and I was in the middle of the street, and so were other people, all stumbling at once, looking up to catch each other, looking at what the sky might be dropping on all of us without any warning.

And even around the world we all stood for a moment as one.

It was like nothing in my life.

I still remember one night shortly after the Towers fell, sitting on the curb at the end of my block. It was me and Shannon. And someone was sitting on the opposite corner of the street. We had set up candles and were just chilling there, unannounced, unplanned. We realized that there were huddles of people all around, actually. Here and there. Glowing tiny islands in the dark. Candles on every corner.

The aftermath and confusion and hate and pain that the tyrant of 2000, the Decider, the vile nameless imp hath wrought (with so much backing and help) is painfully clear. He and his crew have made a mockery of such empathy, of introspection, of anything that makes us human, and namely of truth and telling the truth. And in that hell they have brought about, there is no clarity, and there is no kindness, and there is no relief. Maybe there never was in the political world, what do I know. I doubt it.

But of our society. What they have done. Now, there is the pain and confusion they intend, and they continue to handle us. They have sown fear and distrust and anger and division. And we are still deep in it, and it is so easy for me to begin to get crazy. Paying attention. Because that is what is there now. Crazy. That is what we are doing as a nation, and who we are! Judging by our most prominent discussions. Given the consistent (mis)focus and omissions. I have to remind myself. There's never been anything like this in the USA. It still has not been truthfully dealt with. Of course it feels insane to you. Of course you feel you cannot return. There is nowhere to return to. Those days are done.

But of justice. Of truth. There we can return. Can't we? Those things need not have been blasted away into dust. Right?

A million thoughts occur to me. A million problems with pretending any of this current mess resembles a sane world. A million cracks in the façade the moment I try to pretend any of it is not mad hatter nuts. A million tiny oddities that tangle up the mind and make navigating from one side of the mess to the other literally impossible. All of that, all of this, all of the true perceptions and realities and feelings of the people have been manipulated and we think that the TV is WE and we forget that we are we, and our GOVT is not we.

At least I do. And I have to remind myself. That's what I'm doing now. Again.

The media cannot be trusted. You just can't trust it anymore. And I mean even the Internet. PSYOPS is the Way We Do now, from fake personas littering comment threads to stain the candidates they claim to support to the reports on the news about what it is we are even doing in the world. Our government has said as much, and that blowback is acceptable. Our own government has included us in its war against the reasonable limits on power and property. Our government acts as criminals and terrorists around the world, and we are to support it nonetheless. We bicker and tear at each other in the name of candidates who will for the most part continue the game. None of which dare go back to September, because we swept up that rubble and shipped it away on purpose, yo, and we STILL don't dare look through it.

And what else is there to say at the heart of this conversation aside from WE HAVE LOST OUR WAY and we need to get back? How silly the minutia feels to bat around, how much I sigh at even myself for engaging in table tennis when the basement is filling with blood and lava.

I don't know what else to do.

We may not need to cure ourselves and everything all at once, but we need to move in a positive direction again. We need to feed positivity. At all costs, we need to do this, we need to encourage it, we need to nourish ourselves and our world. We need to remember what is good about us. Or maybe this is just an "I" thing. I know it is an "I" thing. But I'm pretty sure there's a lot of us needing this. I feel we are walking around so often making war in so many ways now, repeating traumatic motions that have been visited upon us by those we thought we could trust. Or perhaps we knew we couldn't really trust them, but had no idea how far.

War is not all there is. Except in Hell, perhaps.

Our "leaders" want to bring Hell onto this world and keep it here. I suppose this is not new. I suppose I always bring a handful of naïveté with me. Then again, I think I would not be sane without it.

What of us. Divided on our continent, divided in our nation, divided in the world, divided on the Left, divided on the Right and our monies and our energies go into fights and walls and fences and armor and troops and

and

what is there to do for someone who cares and wants to change things for people who are suffering? Or even someone who just wants to bring forth life from the earth and satisfy themselves with the bountiful offerings of this creation into which we've been born? Without feeling an accomplice to the ugliness and crime being perpetrated left and right?

I've been feeling unhappy with what I see around me. I've been losing faith in people. And I think I wandered a little, myself. I just wanted to take a moment to remember. What we were, what we are. What we still are. What is real. Or at least what is important to me. And my peace of mind.

Today is my birthday, I was born 39 years ago on the West Side of Los Angeles, in 1969.

I woke today. And I woke up to a beautiful sunrise. Well, actually, I woke up first to being in the bathroom and having the ceiling drop in and water fall all over me. In my sodden confusion I suddenly remembered some conversation in the hallway about plumbing and repairs taking place while I had been drifting into those first few moments of sleep.

But THEN, after I shook the water off of me and had a laugh. The sunset, man. It was amazing.