Scabs

i had lunch outdoors on monday. i had worked just about every hour of the past couple of days, and i wanted to enjoy the daylight a bit. i had a lumberjack breakfast at the diner around the corner: pancakes, scrambled eggs, bacon, and sausage...swimming in syrup. reason being i'm always counseled, "feed a cold, starve a fever." feed, i did.

i sat, somewhat bovine in my sleep-deprived state, with an equally zombie-like spectre that was my lunchtime comrade. we were humbly munching on the softness of our sap-soaked flapjacks. then two men passed by our outdoor feed plot. they wore black t-shirts with white words upon them. the words read, "remember 9/11."

then i remembered ...that morning.

i never watch the television when i get up in the morning. but that morning, i turned it on. and, there was the local morning newscast. that day it wasn't particularly bubbly. no, it was dark; it was a memorial. that morning there was a telecast on the local news memorializing the tragedy of 9/11. there was a telecast like this one on every channel on the television that morning.

then i remembered ...cnn.

cnn had replaced their "red-alert" ticker. instead, there was a black band filled with white letters. for days, i had been seeing this new alert ticker as i visited the site filled with all the news and information i could handle. in all those visits, those white letters only read one thing: "cnn's exclusive footage of 9/11 to be rebroadcast, uninterrupted here on cnn.com on monday."

then i remembered ...nicholas cage.

for weeks, i realized i had been seeing hundreds of adds that focused on two very tell buildings and one cop with a handlebar mustache. the buildings were the two towers of the world trade center. the mustachioed-cop was nicholas cage. as usual, he looked like shit. the movie was called World Trade Center.

then i remembered ...pennsylvania.

months prior, i remember having seen more adds for another movie about a plane crash. the plane couldn't make it to its final destination. apparently, some bad people took control of the plane. the passengers, unhappy that they couldn't arrive where they needed to go, decided to take matters into their own hands and put an end to this misdirection before it got any worse. in the end, the plane crashed in pennsylvania. everyone was killed. no one got to where they needed to go. no one needed to die for that. the movie was called United 93.

then i got ...angry.

there is something terrible and something great in all of us. but, it's mostly terrible. we pick at scabs. from time to time, we get hurt. and, when we get really hurt, we get cuts or scrapes. and, as those minor fleshwounds start to heal, we get scabs. these marks aren't necessarily troublesome, but sometimes they itch a lot. they also feel different than regular skin; and, they look funny. thus, i think it's safe to say that these aren't things we want so much as that they're things we have to deal with ...at least until they heal properly.

most of the time, we get anxious. we are determined to move forward. we don't want to be pestered with some awkward looking, strange feeling blotches. no, we need to keep moving. besides, those things really do itch like crazy. in our haste to push forward, we start to scratch. and, in the end, the scabs usually come off earlier than our bodies intended. and that leaves a new wound, smaller than the last one but no less raw.

the process starts again, and finally, we get a scar--discolored and melty--where smooth, healed skin should have found its way. now, that mark will always be with us, never to be forgotten.

this is how we've handled 9/11. yet, still worse because we didn't really prolong our ugliness for the sake of moving forward, as a people or a nation. we're pushing forward for a profit, a bottomline. it can be said that these "memorializations" have been perpetrated not by a people, but by corporations. however, it is a people that makes exploitation acceptible. and so it seems to me that we've set ourselves down the long path of destroying the healing process of a people. and, we've lost focus.

really, who the fuck likes nicholas cage?!