skonen_blades

It’s planned.

This entire town is like an octopus in a cookie jar. Out here the flies wear helmets and smash through the cellphone signals, handing out whiskey-soaked business cards before they dive too deep into trouble. Bearskin rugs wear crowns and dream of burning-castle screenplays and far-off forests. The ugliest angels you’ve ever seen plummet down to earth, making acne craters in the driveways. Each feather a razor, each halo a carcinogen.

The small white houses in this suburb are measured and pristine. They don’t betray the sharks that swim inside. Dragons with delusions of fireworks and connections to drug dealers stay up late trying to set milk on fire. All they find is that blood makes horrible shampoo. This is a suburb lost at sea but the oars are being ignored. Every bathroom cabinet here is stuffed with orange pill bottles the size of beer cans. The cupboards have enough canned food for the apocalypse but it’s barely touched. It's the liquor cabinets that need constant restocking. All the basements hide blind identical twins hugging each other and crying. “Hyde seeks Jekyll” personal ads are tattooed on the eyelids of every plastic-surgeon promise. The children are pretending to be children and the parents are pretending to be parents.

Snails can be just as awkward when they pose in front of a mirror. In these houses, even the televisions ignore each other. The downtown core is hours away, a series of sandwiches on the horizon. A moustache breeding skyscrapers far away, infested with commerce, excitement, and crosswalks.

Out here, in the manufactured desert carpeted with lawns, marriages become neon signs and the bored pray for any excitement at all. Hypocrites with zombie intentions hoard steering wheels, brake pads, and airbags. Their right arms are longer than their left arms so it’s easier to stab each other in the back.

Every stuffed animal has arteries. Every husband screws the babysitter. Every summer there are a few hunting accidents. And no one reads the paper.




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I remember being in Scotland when the plane hit the first tower. Scotland is eight hours ahead so it was in the afternoon for us, close to the end of the workday.

I remember the reports that over sixteen airplanes were unaccounted for. I remember reports of trucks filled with explosives going off in front of the senate. I remember hearing nothing more about that.

I remember reports of the plane hitting the pentagon and then the second plane hitting the other tower. I remember seeing the first tower lean dangerously and thinking that there was no way it could actually, like, y’know, *collapse* or anything. I remember no one knowing who was responsible or where the president was.

I remember the screams of bystanders when they noticed the jumpers. I still get chills thinking about it.

I remember feeling a queer sense of disconnected concern when watching victims in Darfur or Afghanistan because it isn’t North America but when I think of the visceral, raw emotions I felt during that attack, I think I got a window into how the rest of the world must feel when they see horrible things happen to their own country.

I wonder if it was an education for Americans as well?

I remember three reactions.

America: Find out who’s responsible and slaughter them. Who could do this? Why us? Oh my god what a shocking thing!

Canada: We joke about hating Americans but really, in this time of trouble, we must remember that Americans are our brothers and sisters. We feel their pain and want to help.

UK/Europe: Tragic on a level never before witnessed. But America had it coming.

I remember being in line for a movie in Scotland a year or two later. The woman in front of me heard my accent and asked me if I was American. “NO! No. No way. Ha ha. No.” I said, perhaps a little too enthusiastically. See, the woman who asked me was American but I hadn’t really registered that her accent was not British.

“What’s wrong with being American?” she asked. And she was serious. This was post-911. She’d been in Britain for years, she had said. I honestly couldn’t believe my ears. But it made me think.

My hatred of America has never been feigned but neither has it been personal. I’ve traveled around the states a little bit since then and while I still have a distaste for their country, I realize that I hate American reality television, not American people. I hate American foreign policy, not the American population. I hate the litany of American fear-mongering, dollar-worshipping, education-isn’t-important, check out Beyonce’s ass, fuck the weak, only the strong survive *shit* that blasts out of hundreds of channels in every single living room.

But I also remember that a massive percentage of New Yorkers voted against Bush in the last election. I also remember the huge protests I saw in San Francisco against the war in Iraq.

I’ve always said that no one who died in that attack deserved to die but America itself has had that coming for a long, long time and I stand by that.

I think Bush is a monster but also just as much of a puppet as Reagan was. I don’t credit the conspiracy theorists that say it was an inside job but when I look at Bush’s eyes, I believe he’d have no trouble going along with the plan if it was proposed.

I remember The Onion’s coverage being some of the only coverage that I really hit me in an emotional way. I remember the media trying to put a terrifying, negative spin on the first actually terrifying, negative thing to happen to America in decades. It was surreal and weird watching the news trying to do its usual job of instilling fear into an already terrified public.

The planes hit all of us. It’s like Ani DiFranco said “…because we were all on time for work that day.”

I wanted this to be a positive entry about how the world is healing and feeling closer to each other the world over since this tragedy but I’m not sure if that’s true.

American is the new Rome. Rome burned to the ground. I don’t want to be living next door when that happens.







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