Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.

On My Blog Menu:

InstaPundit
USS Clueless
James Lileks
Little Green Footballs
As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
Secular Islam
Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue

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Tuesday, July 30, 2002
19:23 - I actually thought it might end up this way... http://www.koenighaus.net/indepundit/archives/000789.html	(top)
...For like three days. On September 13th, 2001, I caught the first plane out of SFO after the airports reopened, so that I could attend my brother's wedding it Atlanta. He and his fiancee had had it planned for the better part of a year beforehand, and yet when everything changed on the Tuesday right before everything was set to happen, they decided that the show must go on. The time between Tuesday morning and Thursday afternoon (when I raced from the nearly abandoned San Jose airport, where my flight had been supposed to originate from, up to San Francisco where (with no small amount of surprise at their own system) they were able to get me on one of the first planes to taxi from the terminal, at a little after 3:00PM) was a time when we all spent a whole lot more time inhaling than exhaling. We didn't know what was next. The Golden Gate Bridge? The Space Needle? A cloud of anthrax over Los Angeles? The confident among us said "pshaw" and explained scientifically why such-and-such thing couldn't happen. The jaded gamer d3wds made up tasteless anagrams of "Osama bin Laden" (I still like "damn labia nose"). But most of us simply sat there getting our jobs done and occasionally glancing out the window, nervously reloading cnn.com every few minutes. As we collected our wits, we started thinking about possible futures. Anything seemed possible. New York flattened by a nuke? Disneyland turned into a garden of corpses? Would the America of 2002 be one where Mr. and Mrs. Thompson from down the street had to pick their way from bombed-out rubble-pile to bombed-out rubble pile as they searched for mementos or food, wrapped up in rags to keep out chill arctic blasts brought on by nuclear winter? Somewhere over Texas, at 30,000 feet, was where I dismissed that vision. The South was still the South; Atlanta was still full of life and laughter. We saw the Martin Luther King memorial, we fought the crowds at the big semi-outdoor mall known as the Underground, and we toured the Coke Museum (with its freaky international flavors and its bizarrely endearing refusal to mention what the original Coca-Cola mix was used for). The sun was still bright, the cars still honked, we still had to pay full price for admission. And the wedding still brought families and friends together and let people share memories and hopes and dreams, almost as though nothing had happened. And when their car pulled away from the church, it had PROUD TO BE AMERICAN NEWLYWEDS scrawled across the windows. By the time I got on the plane on the way home, the scenario the Indepundit lays out was long gone from my mind. It just wasn't going to happen that way. Ludicrous. Not on this planet Earth. Not in this dimension. Not in this country. As the plane descended into San Jose, I'd had a lot of time alone to think, staring out the window, the Space Ghost and Brak songs on my laptop long ago having exhausted themselves; I'd had a lot of things go through my head. I'd thought of tanks rolling, troops advancing, impassioned international meetings and summits and condemnations and condolences and complaints and support. But the buildings in downtown San Jose, as the plane glided over them on the way to the runway, seemed anything but flimsy. They were there for good. Even the plane I was on didn't feel like it could knock them down. And as the wheels touched down, the thought that went through my head was, simply, What the hell were they thinking?