Tuesday Balls. what the hell. so this morning, i am brushing my teeth and the little NPR guy comes on and interrupts the news with a story about an explosion at the world trade center. rumor has it that a plane had a hit it, so i am naturally very curious what that might look like and turn on the TV and realize that this is a big explosion/fire. i IM john at work and ask him to look out the window.
john IM's me back 1 minute later: HOLY SHIT
then as i am watching it, there is another huge explosion, but this time from the other tower. the explosion is so huge that i hear and feel it from the apartment here in brooklyn.
the news people are shocked, and one newscaster asked them to play back the tape because she thought she had seen a plane coming in. they sat there and rewinded it and played it over and over again, and it wasn't very clear because of the angle of their camera and the sun, but they started playing it frame by frame and it was clear that there was a dark silhouette of a plane in the corner. i realized that this was something majorly screwy.
Train i got on the train to go to work, which was stupid. i have no idea why i thought that we would have some sort of normal work day. on the train, everyone was talking to each other, which is very unusual on the morning commute.
there was one idiot who looked like a 30yr old version of that "home alone" kid (Macaulay Culkin). he kept saying out loud, "madness!" and "i am never going to get there"... as if he had somewhere very important to go. people were slowly moving away from him and eyeing him with suspicion. the unusual thing was (i mean other than the exclaiming "madness" constantly) was that he was dressed in shorts and sneakers... i kept thinking, "what, you have to get home to mow your yard?". i was seconds away from rolling up my sleeves and punching his nose (if you can imagine me doing that) and telling him to shut the f*ck up, but lucky for him, i had to get off the train.
Get Breakfast i emerged from the subway onto sixth avenue and there was this exodus of people walking north up the street. as i turned the corner to go to the deli, people started running down the street towards 6th avenue, as if something big just happened. the first tower had fallen.
i got my coffee and roll with butter and jelly.
i walked to work and when i got there, headed directly to the back windows facing the world trade center. the north tower was still there, surrounded by a cloud of dust and smoke. all of the phones were pretty much not working, but the internet was still up, which was great. i was able to email people and had people call my parents tell them that we were safe for the time being.
then the second tower fell.
the news was announcing that they were shutting down the city, and i realized that everyone who didn't live in manhattan was stuck here. rachel was working way uptown, and we decided to walk across the manhattan bridge. by the time she got to my office, they were running some of the trains, and so we jumped on a brooklyn bound train with matt.
Brooklyn brooklyn was downwind of the WTC and had a fine, white dust on everything. ashes and pieces of paper were still fluttering down from the sky. there was this strange smoke smell that we couldn't escape. it burnt your eyes and made it tough to breathe...
the homestead wasn't very dusty, but we closed the windows and cranked on the ac (it still smelled). around sunset, we walked to the promenade in brooklyn heights and looked at the skyline. the smoke was still very thick and made us leave after a few minutes. you couldn't see much except for a huge mass of smoke.
we went to harvest for dinner, where we got to sit next to a jackass who apparently wasn't satisfied with his meal (they were running out of food) and then got pissed off when his amex didn't go through (the phones were still screwed up). matt and i got the last orders of their fried chicken, which was super tasty.
wednesday, i did nothing, except try to avoid watching stupid television. i mean, i understand that this was a huge disaster, but that does not give the local news people the right to be f*cking retards.
wednesday night we came home from dinner, and someone had left little green post-its on the doors in our building that said "i love you".
