What Colors the Steel Sky Blue

Unlike most Americans, my TV and I have never been that good friends. I hated broadcast TV and was even less fond of cable. I always ended up watching a DVD. Truthfully most nights I just did not have time to sit for hours in front of the TV.

After 9/11, I now watch TV. I, the guy who never watched news, now watch news every morning religiously. If I do not see dead people, a bombing in an embassy, a fire in a nightclub, a failed election in a third world country my whole day is thrown off kilter. News media has bred the need for disaster into our souls so in this sense our perpetual state of catastrophe is a self-fulfilling one. It is not because the world is coming to an end, it is not because anything getting worse than it was before, it is just that our definition of being alive includes a healthy appetite for mishaps, losses, missed chances, and even the demise of others.

To this day whenever there is a documentary on 9/11, I can’t watch anything else. I have to see those towers come down one by one, one more time, as if I was not there; right there twenty blocks away, smelling the fumes, feelings the rush of air as they came down. As I cried for no apparent reason that day all through the event and the rest of the day, I tear up still today when I see images of the event.

When one experiences something this traumatic, the logical course of action would be to get away from the event, and all references to it. This is done for one's own sanity's sake and not because of disrespect to people who died. I could not do this. I reveled in the pain; a pain that really was not mine to be had. I knew no one from the towers, no one I knew really was harmed by the event. So why was I grieving the loss of something that had nothing to do with my life?

For several months after that day, I watched the TV non-stop. I watched the coverage of the event consume all daytime, nighttime, prime time, downtime TV time. I watched on as other shows started to return slowly claiming to be less humorous than before. I watched as comedians could once again make wisecrack jokes on TV, I watched as humor struggled, I watched as I tried to laugh. Then slowly the images of the towers started to disappear. They first disappeared slowly from TV broadcast. Then the signs around town started changing. Subway adds and billboards were the first to defect. Then magazines stopped printing glorious pictures of them. TV shows that even gave a glimpse of the towers were edited to surgically remove any reference to them. New films being released were delayed so that the twins' absence would not be reminded to unsuspecting New Yorkers.

What were we trying to forget? The towers? How great our life was when they were around? How miserable we are now in the aftermath of it all? Or how badly we were hit after all these years, after all these years we thought we were invincible? All of the above perhaps, perhaps none at all.

Like many people, I did not care for these two extremely ugly buildings until they were gone. Until that day, any midtown building could be the joy of my day and perhaps the love of my life. Any building that had a fancy crown, a gilded lobby, any building with a 306 million price tag could be the smile on my face.

I did not realize I liked the World Trade Center until it was gone; erased permanently from the spot it scarred with its footprint. Now in its absence, I craved its ugly existence --much like a kid missing an emotionally abusive mother once she's gone.