The old man's head popped to the surface of the hot tub. The night was pitch black but the stars were dim and unelectric. He retook his seat on the stone bench under the water.  Lately, he has been saddened by this film, Amour.  He is a filmmaker himself and if he had been offered that script, he would not have considered it.  Not on your life.  Not even for a moment.  As beautiful as the film was.  As tender as they were to each other.  He was overwhelmed by the idea of such an ending.  Meanwhile, the night was strangely unfriendly; the moon, wordless.

They said today was the end of the world. I was half way down the fourth floor at 850 Bryant when I remembered.  Suddenly, the linoleum could not have been more sinister; the flickering neon light in the corridor was no white light.  
   A woman was looking at the 8 by 10 framed photos of cops that run all the way down the hallway.  You'd have thought she was at the Jeu de Paume, hand holding wrist behind her back, leaning in, looking this way and that. 
   I was on my way to pick up the week's arrest logs.  As I passed, the woman said, "you should see the reflection in those raybands."  I stopped and went back.  She was in her 30s, blue bandana, beautiful, voluptuous, from an island I felt, painted face, glassy eyes, long earings full of totems. I peered at the photo, but wanted to see her more clearly. 
   "Look real close," she said. "See it?" 
   "What," I said. 
   "In the reflection." 
   I looked long and hard. I could see there was something in the reflection, but I couldn't make it out. The image was too small.
   "I can't see it," I said.  
   "Yes, that's because they don't want you to see it. Things happening there they don't want you to know."
   "What?"
   We were close together now,  just outside this picture of two cops looking at something. 
   "Murder," she said. "That's what you're missing: murder." 
   She looked at me and back to the picture. I figured she was a forensic. I went and got the logs; 15 minutes later I passed her on the way out.  She'd moved to another photo: another cop wearing raybands. As I passed she said something, I couldn't make it out.  I paused my step. She knew it.  "You don't believe in anything," she said. "Too bad for you."

   On the last Tuesday of every month, the San Francisco Historical Association meets at the bottom of St. Philips Church in Noe Valley. There’s always a presentation. Doors open at 7 p.m., but the talking and the lights don’t die down until after 8.  Non-members pay $5.
   At a recent meeting, to celebrate the Golden Gate Bridge on its 75th anniversary, there were perhaps 50 people. A lot of singles, a lot of threes. Men wore safari hates, berets, bald heads and baseball caps heavy with pins from this legion or that. Women arrived in heavy sweaters and scarves and with looks of expectation. There was hardly a person under 50. Next to the sugar cookies and the two-buck chuck were the door prizes, including a 49er pennant and a vintage Giants pennant, along with The Great San Francisco Trivia Game.
   “Has anyone seen Richard lately?” Someone asked out loud in a New York accent.  Whoever Richard was, no one had seen him. Someone else said they thought he’d been ill. “I just hope he’s okay,” they said. “You never know.”
   At Association meetings personal history is as important as communal history....

We all sit down to dinner a little nervously. The drama has been foretold and now the couple is finally here, after a long drive up the coast.  They sit together on one side of the table. He's 18; she's 40.  They seem comfortable, with each other and with the thought that they are being judged.  We've been warned that this is a tremendous scandal and that the boy's mother cannot even speak about it. 'It's beyond contemplation,' she's been telling friends, 'the young man's life is going to be ruined. The woman must be mad. How selfish could a person be? What must her husband be thinking' As the bread basket circles, I am reminded. Once upon a time I was in those shoes.  And the woman was just like this. Blonde, separated, with a daughter, a complete romantic, and reckless, a stunning blend of transparency and secrecy, with pale blue eyes and endlessly sensuous, endlessly adventurous, running off  this way and that, forever awaiting the Hodgkins disease she knew was coming to kill her.

Mark --

I'm about to go speak to the crowd here in Chicago, but I wanted to thank you first. I want you to know that this wasn't fate, and it wasn't an accident. You made this happen. You organized yourselves block by block. You took ownership of this campaign five and ten dollars at a time. 
And when it wasn't easy, you pressed forward. I will spend the rest of my presidency honoring your support, and doing what I can to finish what we started. 
But I want you to take real pride, as I do, in how we got the chance in the first place. Today is the clearest proof yet that, against the odds, ordinary Americans can overcome powerful interests.
There's a lot more work to do.
But for right now: Thank you.

Barack

I asked him what he thought of the film, "The Innocence of Muslims," this ludicrous film that turned out to be a trick on the actors as well as the audience.
   He was incensed. Actually,  I was a little surprised at how angry he was. At 18.
  "It's stupid," he said. "It's like what you see on Saturday Night Live. It's a skit. Nobody would believe that. Only the most ignorant."
   I said that wasn't true.  And whether or not it became, metaphorically, the fire or the smoke in the Benghazi riots that killed the US ambassador wasn't the point.  People across the Middle East had reacted to it,  and some were deeply offended.  That's not a justification, I added. But the point is that it was a propaganda film, which had its desired effect.
   "Well, he said, "they're ignorant. They should be able to see through it."
   I reminded him of the reaction against the cartoons satirizing Muhammed.  We had ring side seats in Morocco that year.  He shrugged.
   I urged him to see a documentary of the life of Viet Harlan, the reluctant Nazi film maker, whose film Jew Suss, won the Venice Film prize award in 1940.  Moreover, the film was seen by 20 million people in Germany, and became a Nazi anthem.  Goebbels closely supervised the writing of the script and the production.  He was looking for a propganda film that would help prepare the German public to endorse the Final Solution. Which, of course, no matter how you tell the story, they did.

     Game lost.  The team was flat; the kid was flat.  The air was dead.  And it all ended just as it started 10 years ago.  Out in the breadbasket of California, out in the grapes of wrath. And the same old truth: the ones that want it the most, get it the most.  And once more it was the Latinos who wanted it and the white kids, going off to college, nothing pressing on the mind or the wallet, didn't want it so much.  They had hope not drive.  Even after the harrangue they got at half time.  
     The kid had one goal late, off his head, into the upper right corner.  And almost another seconds later in the same place.  But that was it.  No great runs.  Nothing to compare with the day before, when the winning goal was his, when the whole field was his and as the game went on he just got better and better.  But no way to do that two days in a row.  And so that was the last state cup.  
     And the last trip to Turlock and Ripon and that whole cosmos of motels and games and more games, in summer and winter, all that driving, thousands and thousands of miles, at dusk and day break, up and down the 'meth highway', with everything at stake and nothing, and at the very beginning, with the Mission Black Panthers, those kids overwhelmed in their shorts.  
     And now as we come back into the MacArthur maze, it occurrs to me that this is the last time.  Now it would be busses and planes, on a college team, intense, impersonal.  Far away. We would not making any more trips like this. 

And now a word from Fr. Coughlin’s reincarnation, that good-old-boy by a previous hook-up, that master of sleight, the meister of foul, God’s voice on oxycontin high— El Rushbow, who today had a pronouncement—and he’s saying this just as Sean Peyton —Peyton, the lesser — is up in the wood shed on Park Avenue, and just as Gregg Williams is being heard on youtube telling his players on the eve of the Jan. 14, 49er game about how 'we’re going to fuck people up' and 'kill Frank Gore's head', and how we never apologize for the way we compete. 

     All that’s happening and the Limbot has a revelation, which is that sooner or later liberals are going to use this, and a lot of other stuff, to ask that professional football be forbidden. You watch, said the bot, the liberals going to try to shut this game down.

     Don’t we know it. It’ll be called “Occupy 280 Park Avenue” (15th Floor). There’ll be “sissies” as far as the eye can see. And you know what? It’s all the same people who believe in the “Magic Negro,” the people in old school who were in the drawing room taking violin lessons while the rest of us were out on those infernal fields pounding the sleds, and now all these years later the sissies are back, and not just trying to impose socialism the way it is in 16th Arrondissement, but trying to ruin the very thing that makes America great. 

     How? By making a big deal over the name of the game, over a few times when for a few bucks somebody put the lead in, and now these liberals are saying that’s weird and obscene, and unsportsmanlike. Not to mention the lawsuits from what is it now, 120 former players?

     These crybabies who claim Roger GODdell and his ‘fascist’ predecessors were hiding the evidence that the game was becoming more dangerous, and the helmet manufacturers knew all along that even with improvements, there was no way a few people weren’t going to be hurt, or maybe even killed. 

     Well, buddy, that’s the price you pay.  Don’t ever apologize for the way we compete. That’s the cost of living in the greatest country the world has ever known. And don’t you call that "social Darwinism."     

     That’s what the Limp-bot is saying: This Bounty Gate business is all a creation of The Washington Compost, The New York Slimes, and the state-run media. This is just another sign of the liberal intention to extend the nanny state to every part of our lives, the NFL included…It’s just like those people who believe in the Trilateral Commission and that black helicopters control the world.

     Now el Rushbot completely misses the irony that actually he’s the one who has politicized Bounty Gate, and of course you can always find somebody to say they targeted people over the years, but no harm done, and that’s the way the game is played, and if you don’t like it, don’t play it. 

     You can always find players to say that, but there's a lot of other players — even besides the ones who killed themselves or joined a lawsuit — other players who don’t think it’s right to go after opponents for money, who wouldn’t want that done to them, and at the end of the day they realize you don’t get to play this game for a long time, and the truth is you may have to live a lot of your life on what you make in those few years, and sure you want to make a great play and take somebody out if you can. 

     But not with a cheap shot, not for money, not to help some craven idiot of a coach named Gregg Williams. 

     As I was saying, I’m with Rushbow. He played football, right. He knows all about the game. He’s no sissy and he’s not political. He’s a Spartacus if there ever was. He only calls it as it is:  the NFL’s a production. What’s important is the brand. What’s important is that we never apologize for the way we compete.

The work of Billy Collins.  Interesting as well as pleasurable, although not heartwarming.  Not quite reassuring. The first may be the best.  It's all a caption for days when it seems everyone, just everyone, clerks of the court, the face across the table, everyone is angry and unsettled, done in, and now leaving home or husband or wife or sensibility and sense, and for what?  

     "No, that's not the way it happened at all," said Magnus's wife, looking around the table and then finally at her husband. "I remember it exactly.  She called you in the middle of the night, said they were at Pitcairn Island, and there was a problem with the boat."
     "His name is on the tip of my tongue," said Magnus.
     "Somebody Bixby found to sail his boat,"  The wife looked at the person sitting next to her for help, it was the neighbor of this woman once maroonned in the south seas.  But that person shook his head.
     "And didn't she say she'd been raped?" Magnus's wife went on.
     Magnus hauled up his worried expression. "I just remember I had to go down there and sail it back."
     Somebody else at the table spoke up. "I heard they stopped in at Bali. Isn't that partly muslim?"
     "Yes," said a young college graduate who had been silent all night, and added, "They never let a baby's feet touch the ground for the first six months of life."
     The somebody else waved that aside. "And the customs official did a search and found marijuana. I think somebody from the State Department to get them both out. But maybe she told people one story to hide the truth...."
     What about the boat? someone asked.
    "Ah ya, well you know it wasn't such a good boat," said Magnus. "Very long, 60 feet, but cheap materials.  You wouldn't want to go 'round the horn in that thing. That constant knocking, it would fall apart. Not like a Swan, not that quality at all."

Behold the coming of drone swarms.  Think what this will do for the rejuvenation of noir.  The aging detective with his fleet of quadrotors tailing the unfaithful spouse; the industrial espionage that will become so much easier; and with a larger version what a boon to drug smugglers; not mention a new way to carry out  bio-cyber-terrorism attacks. Think of how much more reason we'll have to be paranoid. On the other hand, no one will ever get lost; because everyone will be under constant surveillance. The slightest misstep will be recorded. People will become much more self-conscious. A new makeup perhaps. And there'll be 'droney', your assistant shopper-drone.  Drones will be ever smaller; and finally someone will slap their cheek thinking it's a mosquitoe when it's a drone. When people call you a drone it will have a whole new meaning.  "Why don't my drones do a flyby with your drones." Maybe for the ladies, a drone landing hat. Color-coordinated drones. Doppelganger drones. And twitter drones, and we'll be available to be seen at every moment, and how fascinating it will all be.....

Winding stairs lead up to the front door. It's half open. I enter. There's a brief ante way, and just to the right, a room, completely dark, save for a rickety looking little fire under the mantle. I call out. Suddenly, he appears in front of me.  He's smiling, always so jovial.
   We go into the kitchen where he has everything prepared. Fresh fish, cauliflower, an enormous pan with paella, bread, hummus, a Greek salad, naturally. "Would you like a glass of wine?" he begins. I shake my head. It's a work day, I say. He is undeterred. "This is excellent. Try it."
   He pours me a glass. "To my play," he says, and he goes on to tell me about how he has prepared the food, and asks if I like this or that. We go outside where he has several ovens cut into the rock. One for bread, one for fish. Finally, we sit down in his diningroom, which is cluttered with small boxes on chairs, stacks of magazines, and on the wall a relief of Aphrodite's head in profile.
   He chatters on, tells me his wife is somewhere about. A man in his 30s appears and disappears. I have no idea who it is. "I do what I want," he tells me, and from the beginning he's drinking quickly. "If I like someone I let them know. I may have them or I may not. You know at this age, you should be able to do what I want."
   Finally, we get to the subject of the play. "What do you think?" he asks me.
   The play is based on a true story of a woman living in a small town. Think of Kalavryta. Nearly 20 years ago she threw herself off a bridge. She was then in her 70s. Here is what happened. During the war, when the Germans reached her town the captain called the people into the square and said what a shame it was that the war had come to this and he certainly took no pleasure in this occupation, and he went on at great lengths to praise Greek culture.  He promised — many times — that no harm would come to the town's people.  His very warm manner was all part of his presentation, and he kept repeating that he would do anything he could to make this period pass without incident.  But of course, there were partisans and remnants of the Greek army; eventually several German soldiers were killed and then the captain called the people into the town square once more and this time his persona had completely changed and that was when the massacre started.

   And so this woman could never get over the way this officer had made her believe that everything would be fine.  She could never get over the way he changed and the way she had been so drawn in.

   "I think the story is extraordinary," I tell him.

   And now he brings a second bottle, and he doesn't want to talk about the play at all.  He wants to tell me he's going to have a pacemaker put in. Again and again he rubs his face with his hand.  As though he's going to stretch it into some new shape, some other identity, mold some new person without all of these problems.

   I draw him back to the play and make the point that perhaps the woman killed herself for some other reason.  After all, why would she wait 50 years?  Why wouldn't she be able to resolve this in that time? Or else kill herself much earlier. And what was the ignition? Something must have happened. I suggest that needs to be part of the play; that he needs to explore the psychology of this woman, not focus on what happened in the war.  And especially considering Greece now.  

   "Perhaps, there's some broader truth here," I tell him. "Perhaps, the idea of not being able to change has some sort of resonance."

   He shakes his head. He swirls his nearly empty glass. He looks at me for a long time. The plates are ravaged and empty. It's not about the play at all.  

   "I feel I am at the bottom of the void."

  

2012, the film, is based on "bad science", an inaccurate premise, and a silly script. Moreover, the subplot dialogue, between the protagonist and his ex-wife, as well as their children and her new husband, has the white-whine whinny of a forty-something quiche eater in a mall-gym confession. The subplot reminds you of Californication, that other disaster movie, literally and figuratively, but without the pornography or the depression bound hero, or the interest for that matter.
In 2012, the hero lives in Santa Monica, as opposed to Venice Beach, and lives in his head but after a few days on the edge of extinction, he finds his humanity. He also gets his wife back, his children, and the word family is preserved, we can see how suburbia will be emerge from the swamp of Namibia. But perhaps the film is worth seeing if you haven't thought about the idea of mass extinction lately.
There's a moment late in the film when the great flood has returned and an Indian couple is looking up at a monstrous tsunami, the heighth of several skyscrapers, and here they are, about to wash them away, and the multitude with them, like ants down the drain.
It's a stunning realization of the old disaster theme but perhaps a foreshadowing after all.  Because sooner or later there will be a meteorite, no bigger than a tennis court or half a tennis court, that will remind us of real calamities,  not hunger in Ethiopia, not war in Waziristan.  We have the lost any sense of real extermination, or fear from something beyond us, and yet we are thrilled by the possibility.

She wakes up in her dreams. That's the dream.  And it's the same dream in whatever continent she is traveling through.  She wakes up and she is in her coffin deep under the ground and there are coffins in every direction as far as the eye can see. And not the musty scent you would think, something else, sweet. She can hear the sound of the ocean coming from somewhere.  She is under the ocean or over the ocean; she cannot tell.  She sits up in her coffin and stretches.  Most everyone is dead to the world, but a few others in the distance, are sitting up as well, combing their hair or looking for a toothbrush.  She herself is tired of this place.  It's as though she had lain in bed too long.  Time to get up but someone a few coffins over is saying that nappy time is not over yet. "Go back to sleep," somebody orders. "We'll wake you when it's time."  But in the dream it's never time.

After the funeral there was a reception in the church hall. A short, blue-haired woman with quite a jaw suddenly appeared. She was very short and I am not tall but for a moment I felt like a giant. She wanted to know if I were the husband of the departed.  No, I said and looked around to point him out but he had disappeared.  Do I look like a man in my 80s, I wanted to say.  But then perhaps, I do, I thought.

Then I saw the priest.  I waited until he was finished eating and was talking to just one person, a widow I was told. I sat down next to him as the woman was saying, "pray for me father. I'm doing this surgery next Wednesday."

"I certainly will," he said. "Now which surgery is this again?"

"The growth I told you about," she said.

"Ah yes," said the priest. "But it's not malignant. Right?"

"No, thank God," she said. "But 've been seeing a man who would like me to have it removed."

"Why does it bother him? It's on your back, isn't it?"

"Yes, but he thinks it's unsightly.  Even though he doesn't see it, just knowing it's there bothers him."

The priest turned to me.  "Makes you think of Steve Jobs, doesn't it?"

"Well," he said turning back to the woman. "I'm sure he has some unsightly things about him, doesn't he? He may need me to say Mass more than you."

She nodded and asked once more for divine help.  The priest promised he would intercede as best he could, and then turned to me and bore into me with his look. "So what is your name again" he asked in his brogue.

I told him.  And I told him that I was touched by his eulogy for the departed.  "Sure," he said, "Well, we're all at the station, aren't we.  The train is always at the station, we're all there, looking down from the train happy or sad we're leaving, or else looking up at the people about to leave and happy or sad we're not going too."

And then he went on to tell me his whole life story in about 20 minutes.  You understand we'd never met.  And although we agreed to lunch, I don't suppose we'll meet again.  I even told him his church was  in danger of becoming irrelevant.  He was the first to agree.

Then, suddenly, I was the confessor and he was telling me about growing up in the old country and how his father beat the living bejesus out of him, and drank himself to death and it was Frank McCourtville if there ever was, all the cliches, and how he couldn't forgive his father until much later, and he described the scene exactly, how he was trying to help some man who reminded him of his father and somehow the moment drew out his compassion and that was the end of his hatred.  Almost.  And he went on about his father's legacy, all of his own drinking and carousing, even as a priest, and how he hasn't had a drink in a long time, but how long wasn't clear, but of course it's still a constant danger and then one night he was at a restaurant I think it was, and he had his hand on a woman's knee under the table and her husband was across the table.  Both parishoners.  When this was wasn't clear but it seem recently.

"Not a good situation," he said to me, his eyes glistening for some reason.  "But like I said we're all either on the train or standing at the station."

"Sure," I said.

"And which are you?" and he was looking right through me with those eyes, say what you will, doubt them if you like, but the eyes that see it all.

Berns stopped by for a drink the other night.  He was wearing his famous, tattered cashmere coat and not looking well.  "I feel like Greece," he said. "I am Greece."

I proposed some old Polish Vodka out of the freezer and he agreed.

"Everyone I know is still looking for work and not finding any," he went on. "Most are giving up."

"Get a grip," I said. "You didn't think you were going to get a job at your age, did you? It's all rigged. Haven't you figured that out?"

"I still have certain skills."

"What are they? List them."

He shrugged his shoulders. "Branding expert; illustrator; mechanic; furniture designer, 'idea man', zoo keeper....I was also a bon vivant once.  And before that, a jokesmith."

"What happened to that?"

"It didn't lead to anything substantial. Well, marriage if you count that. And now I can't remember any of the jokes.  But worse than that I just feel like Greece. I feel like everything is collapsing. I feel like my Parthenon is in ruins."

"What's your Parthenon?"

"My mind, basically."

I told him he needed to stop being so I-I, me-me.  Get out of yourself, I told him.

"No," he said. "I am.  Actually I did find a job.  Doesn't pay anything, but it keeps me out of trouble and actually it's a way where I feel I can go a and get a high dose of common misery?

"What is it?"

I've become a full time activist.  And then he went on to tell me how he goes over to Oakland every day to be with the occupiers.

"Your father was a banker," I said.

"Don't you think I rue the day?"

"But so what do you do over there?"?

"We have 'mike check' and I talk to these kids about the old days.  A lot of people are paranoid."

"You must feel right at home."

"I do and I don't."

"How long can you keep this up?"

"I can't; I'm done with it."

"Why?"

"You know why.  Because it's fucking boring.  I realize I can't stay with causes because they're so fucking boring."

It's what old people say, "I'm glad I'll be long gone before that happens."  Or, "That's something your generation will have to deal with, thank God, not me or mine."  This is always in the context of some  future shock: global warming, meteorites, or the terrible inequalities that go with population growth, or just now the notion that the United States is committing social and political suicide.

This is Pat Buchanan's latest call to despair, a wish-fulfillment based on the notion that America has been caught in the worldwide vortex sucking everything down the drain: a world never more fragmented and a country never more adrift.  Nothing holds us together is the thesis: not language, religion, state, or common history; nor a sense of a common destiny, nor the means to achieve the American Dream.  Not even capitalism itself.

And if you don't believe it, why just look out the window at all those protestors down in the street.  Whether Occupiers or Tea Partiers isn't that all symptomatic of 'end times'?  Isn't it in the air?

Everything is askew and the most forbidding proof of gloom is that in 30 years whites will be a minority in America, And just think of it —130 million Latinos; 66 million blacks — the house will be run by minorities and 'darks' and darkies: the uneducated, gardeners and short-order chefs, check-out counter types, and we won't have that calm, all-clear, now-don't-you-shout-because-daddys-home, assurance that everything will be alright, we won't have Reagan's voice, God love him, to help us remain steady and thoughtful. And hopeful.

We'll have to do it ourselves and whatever parts of life aren't already self-service, will be.  We'll have to find some new hope, some unknown, unforeseen reason for optimism.  We'll be living in like-minded communities, of course, and we'll have to reach out; and one day, sure enough, a meteorite will come and a dirty bomb will go off, and people will remember the good old days, they'll scold themselves that they weren't more careful, and mindful, and they'll come up with drastic new plans, and their kid's kids will get old and they will be ever so glad they won't have to deal with the future as they imagine it.

And that's all true. Every bit of it is true.  And it all means absolutely nothing, nothing at all, next to a cliche I suppose, but still, there it is, the sunlight coming in the window, just this minute, right now.

Here is a place to begin. You are whoever you are, "Sheenasakai" or  "SheenaBaby" , apparently. I have only the screen name, along with the photo of a half-faced, one-eye young woman.The image is reminiscent of the Tai-chi symbol of eternity.  Perhaps, that was your intention.

     And so you threw out this note in a digital bottle, to drift across the algorithms, and in the space of a Max Planck millennium, it washes up on the beach of my interest.

     My interest is memory and here is my question: apparently, you were recently in love, then not. Something happened. Right now on 9/20/11 at 21:59 your revelation is that "love is short, forgetting is longer."  

     But does whatever pain you're in now deter you from falling in love again?  Probably not.  

     This is my point.The forgetting, no matter how slow, is already beginning.  You can't stop it.  In weeks or years, or lifetimes if you are so unlucky, you will lose this memory.  It will be no different than trying to remember a face you saw in the next car on the way home from work today. 

     And then sooner or later you will fall in love again, and it will be long or short but eventually it will falter, it will become a ruin, and worth a visit from time or time or not, but you'll remember the sensation of having been in love and the pain you felt until you forget, and you start all over again.

     This is not an argument against falling in love.  On the contrary.          And you know all this already anyway. I am merely reminding you.  I am merely a messenger whose message will last only as long as the next funding round for this site or until whenever.  

On December 9, 2009 I wrote an entry based on an article I read in a local newspaper in San Mateo.  The article was about a woman named Suzanne Caadium, a Stanford graduate and just then apparently homeless.  She'd also had a run-in with the police. I did some research, found out more about her, and added what details I could.

I've never met Ms. Caadium, but my blog has apparently become a kind of home base for those who know her.  Occasionally, people comment on the original story, or a subsequent one I wrote some months later.

Today, I received this anonymous message:  "This person is sick and needs help immediately so she cannot put her family thru hell any more!!!! Running from the law and your problems is not the answer Suzanne! You are not in the CIA nor any other gov group for that matter, you are a mom who left her children. Get Help.... "

I would only say that if I can help any of the people involved in this case, I would be glad to do it.

Beyond the planes hitting the towers, which so resembled a special effect, and even the buildings collapsing, the most indelible memories of 9/11 to me were the scenes of people jumping out of upper floor windows. Forced out by the infernal heat and perhaps also by the sheer horror around them. Forced out by what the body couldn't stand and what the mind wouldn't accept.

And so from time to time, sometimes in a dream, sometimes not, my mind holds fast to the thought of the couple stepping out into thin air hand-in-hand, or by the sight of the man in the Drew photo, the 'falling man' portrayed by the performance artist in the DeLillo novel.

Or there is the moment a policeman described to me once. A teenage boy with a gun sitting on stoop. This was in the docks of Marin. The policeman approaches the boy, tells him to put down the gun, but the boy is locked. The cop says what you're trained to say in such a situation. But at some point the boy and the cop realize that there is nothing to be done, the force of destiny or just a broken down mind, something has gone too far, and somewhere in that moment the boy kills himself.

Or the scenes that keep repeating, where you under the surface of the tsunami, where human life is deconstructed, and at the same time blown apart and held in place. the sea's plunder, and in that vast black realm of oil and junk, from a toothpick to a two-story house, inside the real Godzilla, the bodies: patients from the Sendai hospital; the elderly couple whose daughter came to the rescue but couldn't quite them into the car in time; fisherman floating inside their boats; a child inside a car