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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.


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Tuesday, September 10, 2002
21:28 - What am I doing here?

(top) link

It feels like I should write something for the occasion, considering what day it is and all. Everybody's doin' it. In fact, I even had a post earlier today that I was working on, but I stepped back halfway through, concluded that it was too sappy and derivative and brought nothing original to the table, and I closed down the browser window without another thought.

It's not that I'm unemotional about 9/11. Really, I'm not. I'm not one of those people who thinks we should all just "move on", like it was an earthquake or a hurricane or something-- a terrible disaster that killed a lot of people, but it's nobody's fault, really, except maybe our own, and so we'd best just pick up the pieces and maybe don't build in a floodplain next time. No, that's not me.

I guess what makes me a little uneasy-- and, simply, not in a writing mood lately-- well, except for the obvious, which is that I've been doing nothing but writing for the past two weeks, and in a not-for-fun kind of context, and I'm not out of the woods yet-- is that I don't feel like 9/11 is a blogging kind of "thing" for me. It just doesn't feel right. I wasn't writing last September. I didn't start until late December, when I had a Lileks column to tell me what blogs were and a Peter Jackson movie to babble inanely about. A year ago I wasn't posting my thoughts as events unfolded. I was watching the news, reloading cnn.com, fitfully trying to develop some database code for features that I knew still had due dates, ICQing grimly with friends, trying to keep some kind of lightness to the situation: "You know what this means? The guy selling Klau Khalash is dead."

I wasn't among those who had been writing personal columns since before there was TCP/IP. I wasn't even one of those who furiously started blogging on 9/12. On September 10th last year, on my way home from work, I stopped by Fry's and bought a PlayStation 2. I'd set it up that night, played Gran Turismo 3 for a couple of hours, and then I went to sleep. When I woke up next, everything having happened on Eastern Time and therefore before I woke up, glancing over at the PS2 told me that no matter how hard I tried, I'd never really be able to enjoy it properly, and so I got rid of it a few months later. I still have the receipt for it, though, with it's 9/10/2001 date stamp. One of those things I'll probably never have occasion to look at again, but I know it's in my receipts drawer somewhere, and that's the extent of my nostalgia for the Halcyon Days. I'm not one to weep for those things that are forever lost. I do believe in moving on, but not because I have no sensibility to what we're moving on from.

So I don't feel right about writing about 9/11 specifically, not now, not tomorrow. I'd feel too much like an outsider who comes in after the fact and tells everybody what they're doing wrong. I'd feel like the "efficiency expert" that the pointy-haired boss hires to come into the company to interview everybody and find out who can safely be fired without shooting up the place. I figure other people are already doing the event justice far better than I could.

I'll stay on the sidelines tomorrow, I think. It's what I was doing then, and if I'm going to try to commemorate what life was like last September 10th, maybe that's the best I can do.

"Blog, or the terrorists win!" At least we're not hearing that kind of crap anymore.

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© Brian Tiemann