Tomorrow everything is a commemoration of what happened ten years ago. I don’t want to remember. Today though  I finally stumbled across the journal I was keeping at that time and thought it would be a timely reminder to myself what the time frame really was all about.

9/17/01

This has been the first time in a week I have been compelled to write. Too many opinions, too much editorializing, too much crap to listen too. Too many flags, people wearing Old Navy tee-shirts, news name branding (AMERICA RISING!), that god damn song “God Bless America” which is not even our national anthem. That herd mentality that runs through the vein of every annoying American, causing flags, false emotional patriotism and clogged churches through out the nation.
Mean while what has really happened is extraordinarily sad, and also terrifying.
My first compulsion was to head for the hills. Move away. Pack it in. Get me out of here. How can I talk Ben into wanting to leave.
Never mind, there are far weightier matters that I finally resolved by saying, please just stay quiet.

I wanted to write “it has been very David Lynchonian weather.” You can almost suggest that robin pulling the worm up from the green, sun flecked grass as a signifier for disaster. It seems as if to say, the contrast is too extreme. But don’t worry, you can not escape, turn to a line of normalcy because it is every where, on the minds of everyone. In the store, walking down the street, at the bar, at work, and most of all, in a tunnel vision only the American News media can bring you, it is on the TV.

I was extremely depressed. Susan was too. I felt bad leaving Ben alone for the weekend. It didn’t make me feel any better. But I would be a fucked up thing if something could.

I am glad to be working with cynical, left leaning characters at my place of employment, who all seem to be on the other side of the fence about this thing. I do not want to go to war. I do not want idiots, with their lack of knowledge about the world going around killing innocent people, because they look Arab. I do not want cab drivers crying because they are only trying to do their jobs.
This is not about me, not about my opinions. I think I need to step up to the plate and see what there is for me to help with. Some people are using it as a self righteous soap box.

The government is getting huge thumbs up. Guiliani is being slated for an extended term. One wonders about the largess of ego.

The firefighters made me cry the most…along with the people jumping to their own deaths from a 100 story window in the World Trade Center. People going to a funeral for a man identified only by his hand and the wedding ring on it. The people who are continuing to turn 12 hour shifts and do not want to stop even though tomorrow it will be one whole week of this. The dogs working on the rescue site and all the pets that will not have anyone coming home to take care of them. The fact that Jerry Falwell is so filled with hatred, and that people’s identities, for instance the alleged gay man who helped bring down the plane in Philadelphia is being suppressed by the media. The economy is freefalling.

The hate crimes that are running rampant are the most upsetting. Why are people so hateful? That I said to myself, is going to be the true thing I will miss about NYC when I leave, the fact you do not think about these things in the same way. You feel everyone belongs, at least I do. And yes, we all can have our personal differences with people, but this whole “I want to kill every Arab I see” mentality sickens me, and speaks loudly of how most people really just want everything to be the same in our society. Why do people dislike diversity? This whole thing has been one mass study in the human condition. But I can not say that as if I have been some silent observer, it has made my heart weighted down as well.

9/22/01
Perhaps the first nice night we’ve had for almost 2 weeks, maybe longer. We went out with Ken last night to the Pourhouse and the Art Bar. Nice, unpretentious neighborhood places. Drinking as a refuge. Getting out of the house. I had had a horrible day of anxiety, feeling close to tears. Little things keep clouding the memory. Ben had his photos developed from the day we stood there and watched the Twin Towers burn, and unlike how I remember it, we both have horribly grim looks on our faces. I can’t look at those photos now with out thinking of all the people that died, instead of thinking only about the buildings burning. I would imagine it is ridiculous to think things will really just be back to normal.
I certainly don’t feel like going into Manhattan on my off hours. For some reason this is freeing, I like staying home. This morning we went out for the best brunch at allioli, sitting out in their garden, they have the most impeccable food and nobody ever goes there. A nice day too, strangely warm. Almost too warm. I had good dreams last night and it is good to spend time with Ben.
So today I am fine. But little tinks in my psyche yesterday kept cracking. At lunch I had to go to the ATM and found myself looking up at the Empire State Building (where my bank is) wondering if it would stand in the future. Also you realize living in New York City, daily life is enough to create anyone into an alarmist. Constant weird circumstances abound, and sirens, low flying planes, bizarre traffic accidents. After awhile you drown it out. But if you are alert to feeling weird about stuff, you can practically have a nervous breakdown.

So it is near and far in my brain all of these things. I walked home too (from 31st to 14th street anyway) and looked at the skyline where a skywriter was writing. You can look all around, especially with this Indianish summer weather going on and see the beauty of life. But there is something that keeps blockading that when your thoughts again turn to that wondering of “what if?”. Yesterday Josh posted that one of the webbloggers is missing from the WTC incident. Any time this whole thing returns to personal territory, it becomes so unbearable.
Last night at the Pourhouse there was this cute, tiny little puppy that Ken said looked half teddy bear. It kept looking at me, I wanted it so bad! It completely felt like this little toy dog with acrylic fur. Very funny.

So today holds some calm. Ben and I realized we haven’t spent a weekend together for over three weeks, so that has only added to the whole stress of life. It feels good to do nothing.
Tomorrow the Art Bar is holding a sale of donations to contribute money towards the WTC catastrophe. I am going to clean my closet out.

I guess Mark’s wife wants to move too. Perhaps this is a common feeling- flight. But still, I want to go. I hope I don’t forget that in the coming months. Ben knows loud and clear what my wishes are. I am hoping it is what he wants as well.

Six months later.

Why the hell have I never heard of this movie, let alone seen it?

Joan Mitchell: Portrait of an Abstract Painter.

I love her paintings so much my stomach hurt looking at them on screen. A scene with Elizabeth Murray talking about the color yellow made me teary eyed.

There was a scene shot in the old Museum of Modern Art, in the Abstract Expressionist wing that I recognized immediately. If you stood in the gallery looking  straight ahead at the Jackson Pollack on one side of you was a room containing DeKoonig and the other side the Motherwell. I’ve been through that exact spot so many times. It doesn’t exist any more.

It’s so funny, so many artists of this era have been so discussed ad nauseum, every detail exposed and perhaps over analyzed.

But I had not even heard Joan Mitchell speak before. She is my favorite. She nails it.

How come when I was in art school in the late ’80s no one mentioned the name Joan Mitchell?

I didn’t realize it but a confessional is a standardized piece of furniture.

We went to ReStore last weekend (a second-use store) to browse fixtures and things.  After prowling around for awhile I noticed looming from stacks of old doors and double glass windows a Confessional. It gave me pause. Even though I haven’t been in one for over 30 years, a shiver ran down my spine. Out side of a dankly lit church, in the midst of rubble it looks strangely pathetic. I never thought about it before but what an elaborate fixture to dedicate solely to the recognition of sins.  Who decides when you are done with a confessional?

The straw covered chair where I assume the priest sat was caved in and splintered. One can’t help thinking up close it’s all smoke and mirrors. Why such a expanse of effort to fool you into thinking the preist on the other side of the window is all powerful and non-human?

I have one last memory of sitting in one. I was in fifth grade. We were living in a new town that was relentlessly unforgiving to newcomers. This lack of a welcome matt spanned every price point from the kids on the playground at school to yes, the priest in the shadows ready to listen to my confession. For context, Mass at this particular church was still said in Latin.

If I remember correctly, and I certainly didn’t then, you had to say recite scripted material, explaining to the priest why and what you had wronged in your life of sin. I was a horribly shy kid and stammered in the box. I couldn’t remember the order of prayers or the rules. I can’t imagine what I would have confessed  anyway having such a limited life to draw from. Probably lying to my parents or tattling on one of my siblings. I remembered being harshly taken to task by the priest on the other side of the wall for not adhering to the PLAN. I was both yelled at and berated. It was a mortifying and crushing experience which upon recounting this detail to my husband last weekend upon seeing the abandoned confessional, I said, “I think that was the end of religion for me”.

That can’t be true as I am sure I was dragged to Mass and Confession for another six or seven years until I could permanently disenfranchise myself from the whole mess. The rest I must have blocked out of my head or perhaps I  became a savvy enough soldier to learn how to lie and scheme and make up things that I knew wouldn’t dock me five rounds of the rosary sitting in Holy Family church.

When I was 16 years old I went through the whole program that readies you for confirmation. In the 11rh hour I decided I wasn’t ready. I have no idea in hindsight what that means but I have never embraced another religion in all of  my adult years since that happened.

In contemplating what that piece of furniture is all about,  I consider it an object that lives in near darkness and poaches on peoples fears of not being good enough. Simultaneously one can’t avoid reflection on the sick incidents of Catholic priests that made the news in the past decade or so.

It is curious in this world of  reform and reborn that the Catholic church has never embraced rebranding. Perhaps some like to visit Mass for the quaint offering of wine and host, of ritual and the promise of purity after your 10 rounds of rosary. Yet there are some fairly unacceptable ideas sitting at it’s core that seem so stuck in the days of Monty Python’s Life of Brian. Maybe one could point to the 1970s West Coast Folk Mass as a feeble attempt in updating the culture, but that was clearly not a broad reaching effort. As a small aside I would like to mention is the continuing belief that woman are second class citizens. You mean through out all the corruption you still think it’s a grand idea to remain a patriarchal society? There are no inroads that make it a comforting or supportive environment. I wonder how many people are actually joining the Catholic church today.

There is a sad aspect to this personally. When I was in Amsterdam a decade ago I went to a beautiful church that was holding a Sunday Gregorian Mass. The pomp and circumstance is definitely a selling point to all of this. The singing was beautiful if not overwhelming. The atmosphere was solemn. When the priest got into the thick of the mass though, I stomach became nauseous and I had to ask my husband to leave with me. It was all too much.

So little confessional sitting bankrupt in the midst of ReUse. What do you have to say for yourself?

RELATED: The History of the Confessional

POST SCRIPT: The renovation of churches to remove to remove confessionals for the more modern reconciliation chapel.

This could be the most expensive photo for me to ever look at. I want to do this.

Perhaps I am a foolhardy optimist, but I realized the other day I still think I have so much time in the world to do everything. Still nothing gets done.

I thought it might be a good thing to sit down and ask, why is this?

At the ready I have the following activities I want to master at but haven’t for months:

gardening

knitting

writing

sewing

photography

writing. did I say writing?

At one point I was poking fun at myself and had a small site: what is it this week?

and as I write this it is time to go to work.

On Christmas Eve,  on one of my last liquor store stops I decided to walk an additional block to visit Open Books.

I will hopefully write a better piece than this, I am too tired right now, but in the hush of poetry books, I felt that small piece of mind I so need. Only one other person besides the shop owner was in there and my wet shoes made that horrifying shrill squeak across the floor.

I know nothing about poetry except the five or so poets I have discovered and decided to take ownership of. My favorite is Adélia  and I almost cried when I found they had a copy of her book in the store. Almost tempted to buy another copy of the Alphabet in the Park, but settled on two other books I don’t know.

This is perhaps what sealed the thinking though about the qualities of life.  Poetry is an art of slow and well thought out measures (or blurts I guess for the impatient writer). Where does this fit in with the world I think? White walls with text running around the east wall. I wanted to stay in there and meditate on all of the poets currently unknown to me. I thought for a second I should be embarrassed to be there, such a neophyte, but I was not, because on all side of me were glorious things to discover. I wish to go there more often this year and hope to think more about this soon.

I can feel it. There is no time to think any more.

Tonight I fell down a rabbit hole of Joan Didion and wondered when the last time I read something substantial, or went 10 inches deeper with a thought.

Some day there will be multitudes discussed about how we ruined ourselves with new technology. I embrace it but also feel my soul, the part of me that wants to do this very thing, disintegrating.

I was thinking about Joan and M.F.K. Fisher whose words are stunning and much of the other essayist I read so frequently. Anne Lamott. Even Andrew Cordescu had a radio piece recently about the distractions of the digital world.

I need a place, one where I can just sit and chew the fat. I keep starting a million web blogs, but this is what I really want to do. Even the diary is neglected. The garden is neglected. It’s as if there is no room for self reflection anymore. People are afraid to be alone with their own thoughts and now it is actually hard to do that.

Oh lordy, why am I starting this project on a late work night?

A strange era we are in. I am not saying it isn’t exciting and amazing it, but so much is available and still our brains are shredded.

What is this thinking?