Nine years on

[mellotron_breakfast]

Nine years ago I was cursing Woodbridge College for giving me a day-opening spare and no actual lunch anywhere in the schedule (ask [miss_tee] about roughly how common this predicament was) when John the AV dude had wheeled out a television in one of the halls accessible to people on Spare.

Depicted on the screen was a building I didn't quite recognize with smoke pouring out of it, and I asked him which action movie it was. He told me we were watching CNN. I wasn't the only one around to watch it; hundreds of kids in a school with new wings under construction and thus far too many portables, and you'll get a couple dozen with that dreaded opening spare and maybe half a dozen more.

(Zero cutting class would be in a building full of closed circuit cameras; you'd roam off school property if you wanted to do that, if you were smart, and then there are the outdoor cameras to consider though there's not always somebody watching the feed.

I just wanted to address that because the last time I bothered to recount this story, one or more people accused me of cutting class. They can GTFO, no time for their idiocy. That wasn't something I was liable to do after already entering the building, until Uni when it was my tuition and my choice if I didn't want the full fair value of it for some reason.)

Some time into the discussion was quite a large explosion, which confused me and possibly the anchors. Were we watching a replay? No, it was a new development because as they finally got to a replay you could see smoke was already coming out from somewhere before that happened. Now there was "too much smoke to see the buildings"--no, there weren't buildings anymore.

Following that in my day was Miss T---'s Math Class. She was one reason I eventually dropped out of the course and was greatly discouraged from succeeding at that in life, but I digress. I got into that portable, and there was a quiet depressed silence; you could hear riding mowers as custodians took care of school property. The teacher may have remarked about how good we were being compared to usual, I don't recall but she's better remembered for shouting at us because we asked her how to do something. Somebody said to her what happened, and she didn't believe it was possible. The rest of the students instantly corroborated it, and she accused us all of being liars and threatened to send people to the office for saying such horrible things.

There were a lot of whispers and falsehoods about what else had happened. Somebody circulated a rumour that the White House got hit too, or that something nuclear had happened elsewhere, things you might dupe people into believing because of the alarming magnitude of what happened and the sense that the center cannot hold, that chaos was going to dismantle the world now. I had a lot of nightmares before and after that and was quite unhinged myself.

And the way that went, I always remember 9/11 as the sound of mower engines, the smell of cut grass, and otherwise that blank depressed silence of teenagers who wouldn't be surprised if we were spending our last living day before Armageddon in a lousy portable.