Everybody's got that story that's true that nobody else believes, and mine is that my family was in NYC days before 9/11. We'd been visiting relatives on Long Island, and spent a few days in manhattan doing things like going to Macy's and FAO Schwartz and climbing the statue of liberty because that was a thing you could still do. I remember we left on the 9th, and as we were on the thruway headed back across to new jersey I swear on his goddamn ashes in the urn on the mantle my dad said, "You'll always know it's the New York skyline by those two towers."
No one in the family talked about this for approximately a decade, because oh my god, oh my god.
Also, one of my aunt's exes worked in the one of the WTC towers, but he was on vacation that week. That one's less incredible but still a bit wild.
Anyways happy 9/11, please remember one of the most inadvertently funny things in retrospect my dad ever did.
Also, listen, I know I've been making a lot of jokes about 9/11 and being pretty flippant, but I assure you my actual feelings on it are a lot more serious and angry. I'm eternally mad about how many people died. Not just talking of course about the people who died when the towers collapsed, I'm talking about all of the search and rescue crews and firefighters who got horribly poisoned in the process of doing their jobs, how conservatives decided to cut all of them off from any sort of support or compensation, to dump money into wars. Wars in two countries that had nothing to do with 9/11, even though it was used prolifically to justify both. Wars that killed literal millions of people in those countries. I'm mad that in the middle of bum fuck nowhere Minnesota between Wilmer and St Cloud there is a chunk of the World Trade center. I am mad about the way conservatives treat 9/11 as their own personal Holocaust even still. I am mad that conservatives talk about New York City like it's the open and leaking maw of hell spilling evil onto the world the other 364 days of the year. I'm mad about conservatives only thinking of it is the great symbol of America's Freedom whenever it's something blows up there and kills a bunch of people. I am absolutely Furious about the day this whole country went off the fucking deep end. Everyone around my age was traumatized by seeing this happen live, and there being no point at which there was any actual resolution of it. I didn't know anybody who died directly, but I know more than a few people who did lose someone.
But if I stayed Full-tilt angry about this all the time, I would have died of an aneurysm somewhere around 2011, so instead I make jokes about it and laugh along with everyone else because it also happens to piss off the exact kind of people that have me so angry in the first place. Fuck em. Fuck you. Fight me.
