The Events that are: My Life

I slowly awaken, the distressed voice of Katie Couric is in my head. I’m in that dreadful state between dreaming and waking, where my subconscious is aware again, but doesn’t want me to know it.

“A plane has hit one of the World Trade towers.”

“Shit.” My subconscious realizes it’s time to stop fucking around and divert my full attention to the present reality.

I’ve been sleeping on the couch the last few weeks because my room is being remodeled.

The smell of breakfast begins to fill the air.

It should have been just another Tuesday, the start of another school year, my sophomore year of high school actually.

It’s not even six AM yet. Why I am I awake? As I gather my thoughts, the events of that last two minutes start to click together like individual frames of a motion picture being run at full speed for the first time: Mom coming into the living room. Mom turning on the TV. Mom waking me up.

I’m helpless on the west coast. So far removed, yet affected all the same. An ultimate hell? Almost.

A million thoughts run through my mind, trying to make heads or tails of the situation. What if…? What if…? What if…?

The clock strikes 6:03:11 AM Pacific Daylight Time. Another plane hits the other tower.

“Fucking shit!” I whisper to myself, under my breath.

It was surreal. A scene from a movie, the greatest hoax of all time.

No. It was now…it was live…it was 1461 days ago. It was the 11^th of September, 2001.

The remainder of my day was filled looking at the sky. Evaluating targets. Seattle was a pretty good target, I thought to myself over and over. I was convinced we were next. Microsoft. Boeing. Gateway to Canada. Layover from Asia and Alaska. Shipping ports. Train stops. Technological infrastructure.

I’m glad I was wrong. I’m usually pissed when I’m wrong…but I’m glad I was wrong this time.

All the sophomores meet in Mark Hoover’s music room on the second floor of the new Arts Center. We talked. Colin said something about different classes of air space, not that it meant anything now. The sky was dead. Nothing moving. A sudden population increase on the grounds of the BrokenUnited States of America.

They made a movie called The Day the Earth Stood Still. I never saw it. Maybe I will. But for me, for my movie: this was the day the Earth stood still…and I stood still with it.

I stubbed my pinkie toe this morning on the corner of my bed and now it’s all blue and it really hurts. I thought I’d complain about it a litt.e Pictures coming soon.

Um yea…Happy (20th) Birthday Ben.

Brian Alvey made a Red Cross: Katrina Relief, Donate Now dog ear that can put on websites with just a litte bit of code (see upper right of this blog). However, Brent Yager wanted one for the Salvation Army. Wait no longer, Brent…and everyone else. Just copy and paste the code below anywhere on your website. Then head over to Brian’s site and grab the Red Cross dog ear.

<script type="text/javascript">
<!--
document.write('<div style="position: absolute; left: 120px; top: 0px; overflow: visible; height: 120px; width: 120px; margin: 0 0 0 -120px; padding: 0; z-index: 9999; border: none; float: none;"><img src="http://www.andrewferguson.net/wp-content/images/salvation-army.gif" width="120" height="120" border="0" usemap="#sa"/><map name="sa"><area shape="poly" coords="0,120,0,0,120,0" href="http://www.salvationarmyusa.org/"></area></map>');
// -->
</script>

Update: Here’s the image so you can right-click and download if you would like to host it off your site

Update: Here’s the PSD file that I used to create the image. Don’t forget to open it in ImageReady though, as it is an animation. I’ve also released the GIF and the PSD under the Creative Commons.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

Brianna, Shanan, and myself where going to go to church this morning. However, 10am rolled around and no one was at our designated meeting place. So I called Shanan and just the two of us went to church and then looked at some garage sales. Long story short, Shanan was up ’till 3am, making sure her residents got back safely and Brianna was up ’till 4am.

Ben’s cat, Kitty, wasn’t feeling too good. So Ben took him to the vet. The vet thinks that Kitty has Distemper. Kitty hadn’t eaten since Ben brought him home, nor had he drank anything. He also looked anorexic and had vomitted a couple of times. So we took him back to Table Mountain Animal Clinic to be put down. The chances of Kitty surviving were very small. That put a bit of a damper on the rest of today.

Ben and Sarah are going to disinfect the house while I go pick up Dunstan.

Dunstan is my new cat, a red/white tabby a mere 3 months old. Dunstan will join his “brother” Kitty, Ben’s cat, tomorrow after he’s been “fixed”. I found him online yesterday and Chris and I went over the the Denver Dumb Friends League today and check him out. Cute little guy. He’s a little under the weather, just getting over an intestinal infection. Dunstan even has a spot on the web at http://www.andrewferguson.net/dunstan/.

There is an interesting discussion happening over at BoingBoing that is discussing how to the tech community can help them. One of the most prevalent concepts is how communication tools can best be given to the victims so they can contact their loved ones and start getting their lives pieced back together. Specifically, there is an idea submitted by BB reader Rich Kulawiec: “we the geeks put together and deploy the world’s largest cybercafe in the Astrodome.”

I’m in. There are very few times where I believe that me being present in a situation can actually do it some good. This happens to be one of those situations. Let me know when it’s happening and I will buy a ticket and fly down to Texas and help in what ever way I can.