2001-10-31 - 11:43 a.m.

How do you hold your head up high when the weight of the world is on your shoulders.

How do you smile and say everything is alright when 5 years of hurt is laying heavily on your heart.

What good is there in reminding others of what you're going through - you only remind them of your pain and get pity. Pity is not what you need, nor is the inevitable feeling of bringing someone else down in the muck and the mire of your depression.

How do you go on when everything that once seemed right and wonderful and beautiful and loving becomes an act of violence and agression and terrible terrible memories haunt you.

Why 5 years later does it still hurt as bad as the day it happened.

Why can I smell the stagnant air and the bodies and hear my own tears from the 2 hour bus ride in tattered clothes with a broken soul.

Why must I remember every detail, the blade of the knife, the harsh ropes, the fabric in my mouth, how it all tasted, sounded and felt.

Why does it consume me...why do I want to take millions of showers when I know it will never wash the dirt off my soul?

Why won't it just fade away.

Every song, every feeling of fall holds it and every year it haunts. I can pretend its not there all I want but in the dark chilling hours of the night I know its there.

And he doesn't feel this, he doesn't know this pain, this suffering, what he caused in my life, what mistakes he pushed me towards, what hours of agony he caused.

There's a burnt pile of cd's under a rock in a hidden place behind Gordon College, there are letters and memories and thoughts that I tried to burn and let go..but they're still there unscathed in my mind.

Must I really be alone tonight?

2001-10-25 - 3:45 p.m.

Well lets see,

I'm now a highly overpaid technical support worker. I should be happy right?

No.

I'm not a tech support flunky (no offense intended to those that do tech support).

I'm a highly trained coder, project manager and fucking amazing team member but fuck all that...sit me in a cube and make me do tech support bullshit all day...someday I'll quit right?

no.

underpaid for what I'm supposed to be - overpaid for what they make me do. Unchallenged and unhappy I sell my soul everyday for a paycheck.

I missed a better road somewhere.

2001-10-04 - 11:22 p.m.

What do you do when the world turns upside down? Where do you go and where do you hide when it just gets to be more than you can bear? Is there a god in which you find solace, is there something that can restore your faith in what is good and right and true in this world when it seems there is nothing left that you once believed?

For the last 3 hours I've laid 100% awake, exhausted but unable to sleep. The world runs through my head. When I close my eyes the trade towers collapse in a burning inferno. When I squeeze them tighter to make the thoughts and visions leave I hear the cries of orphaned children and see the starving bloated stomachs of young afghanistani children. And when I open my eyes the big bad world is still there with its layoffs and economic turmoil, with its senseless robbing of the old - taking away their dignity and their very person. And somehow I need to make sense of it all, somewhere, somehow in this senseless mixed up world I have to find some reason some logic to it. But I can't.

I've been all over the place lately...frankly I'm not suprised if people don't know what to make of me these days...not even I do. It doesn't make sense...everything I grew up knowing seems null and void in this day and at this hour. Its not to say all is bad or hopeless. Nick is an overwhelming joy in my life when I just relax and let him be, my family and friends never cease to amaze me with their love....whatever force that is out there has truly been good to me.

Since the terrorist attacks I've been plagued by lack of sleep....its not for fear that the next attack will be my house or even that my comfortable means of living at the moment will be destroyed in the end...its for the feeling that we don't do enough...that I don't do enough.

Hundreds of thousands of innocents will die in this next year. They will starve to death, they will die of medical conditions I wouldn't even worry over here. They will die to rescue others, they will die for reasons that never should have existed. If that's not disturbing enough to think about - its more disturbing about how rarely we really do think about it. Listen to Johnny Cash sometime - figure out why he wears black and really think about it.

And at 7:30 tomorrow I'll crawl out of bed, groan at the sunshine coming in through my window and hop in the shower...all to start another day of designing and implementing another web hosting platform. Wow - now doesn't that seem insignificant. I had to laugh when the company announced after the attacks that they were giving out free webhosting to victems (both corporate and family) of the attacks. Great - I'm sure they were all thinking about loss web revenue as soon as they ran down 100 or so stories to saftey leaving friends and coworkers to die. Its just a small reminder of how insignificant this all is. And I have the opportunity to rise at this company (should it survive). I would have jumped at that chance 6 months ago...more money, more prestige, more success. At what cost? To work all night and never see Nick? To further neglect my friends? To keep me far away from a grandfather who needs me so badly? Money, prestige and power don't seem important anymore. I've proven I can be successful but I never needed to prove it to anyone but myself. So why am I still trying to prove it?

You know where I want to go right now - right into the heart of everything we hate right now as a country. I want to go to Afghanistan and I want to hold and feed as many men, women and children as I can. I want to heal hearts not sit here and watch us bomb innocents. The government can oust the taliban and they can take lives. I just want to heal a few and feel like I've made a difference.

Awhile back Nick and I had a long talk in the car one day about how you can choose to bitch and cry about the world and its atrocities all you want - but if you take no action then you ought to realize that you are a contributor to those atrocities. So in my own inactivity and passivity I have condoned the very things I dispise about this world. Where does one start? Its a big world and I cannot fix everything and everyone, for god's sake some days I can't even make myself work right.

And my mind wanders to wondering how many children could be fed if I sold my computer. How much medicine could children have if I gave up my car or my piano and gave the money to them. Its the only way I have to fight terrorism - give love. I will not hate people, I will not kill or condemn for all these things are the very reason what happened on September 11, 2001 happened.

You don't have to respect what those men did on those planes - hijacking them and killing innocents. I'd never ask anyone to do that. But in some odd way we ought to see that at least these men believed in something and were willing to work for it. Its more than most of us will do in a lifetime. They're not heros - but they didn't have it all wrong either. The US has done this to other countries time and time again, it doesn't make it less of a tragedy or even more understandable, it just makes it that much clearer that its time for it to stop.

I'm only one person - I can't throw every starfish on the beach back into the water...but I pray to whatever forces govern our lives that I remember through my years to throw as many back as I can for it will make a difference to that one.

Do you remember how you felt on September 11th? Did you open a few more doors for your neighbors? Talk to strangers more? Smile and knowing and loving smile at others? Did your heart soften and did you act a bit more generous toward your fellow man? Those actions are a tribute to those that have died - don't let it fade just because time goes by.

We'll never make sense of this world and we'll likely never figure out how to make peace either...somewhere in all of this I'll find my way to reconcile and to move on but my life will never be the same, and that's how it should be. To those that love me, just understand I need this time to grieve in my own way for lives and ideals that are gone now. I feel like I'm standing at a crossway and I can't decide which path to take....no one can show me though, I have to find my way this time alone.