The Bananaverse

I just returned from Disneyland. It was a lot of fun, I was there with Liplash and his sweetie for their wedding. It was really nice and all of that. I’m so happy for them, it’s rare to find someone like Liplash who thinks the world revolves around his sweetie. I got all squishy and stuff, it was hard to keep from getting all girly, and I did get a little teary eyed during the wedding.

On our last day we squeezed in a couple of rides on this cool roller coaster and I realized as Liplash went one more time that I wasn’t going to see them anymore, we were all going back to our lives and stuff, and that means no more time with them. I did my best not to come apart, but I sort of did anyway. And of course I tried not to let Liplash see that I was all sad and everything, but he totally did, and I tried to use the ’something in my contact’ story but Scooter refused to back me up. I didn’t want Liplash to feel bad for me or anything, and I miserably failed, which made me feel even worse, and I almost didn’t make it all the way out of the park, and then I felt like a TOTAL tard for all but flinging myself on the ground and sobbing at the Happiest Place On Earth.

I miss them so much, and I think about them every single day and it’s usually some stupid thing that makes me miss them more all the time. I don’t have any fun going shopping anymore, because Mrs. Liplash is the only person that liked to go with me, she’s the only one that has the same deep appreciation for the first Wham! album that I do, and we both are not the girliest of girls, so we get along great. Liplash and I can be rude and rowdy and other words that start with R, and we are loud and fun, and we are both big fans of the Naked, and we’ve had crappy jobs, and we both agree that these chicken chimichangas are really good.

I guess I never truly realized that there were other people as freaky and geeky and nice and mean and kind and evil as me, and I absolutely never thought I’d meet one, let alone two. So it makes it all that much harder that they had to move. I don’t blame them, in the same position I probably would have too, but at the same time I’m sad because I know I would have been a total wreck if I had to leave like, everybody that I care about. So Liplash, since I know you read my lj, you better be home for Christmas! And it better be my house! rar.

I’ll talk more about the actual trip later, but for now just know that I am back and I’m on my way to quite the big pile o’ update.

I’m not really sure what to say so I’m just sort of going to go stream of consciousness and see where it takes me.

I’m listening to my Counting Crows album, Across A Wire: Live In New York and this song Catapult starts out: All of a sudden, she disappears / Just yesterday she was here / Somebody tell me if I am sleeping… and that’s sort of what’s going on for me. It still sort of seems like a movie. And in about 20 years it’s going to be the next squillion dollar epic by Cameron or Ridley Scott or someone. Not to mention the movies of the week and the Lifetime version and all that crap. So much destruction in one day. It is still difficult for me to wrap my mind around it, since I’m on the opposite coast.

And that’s another weird thing for me. I jolted awake this morning for absolutely no good reason. I listened for noises, I felt around for something sharp, Scooter was on the far side of the bed so I know he wasn’t kicking me or something, and I couldn’t figure out what on earth would make me sit bolt upright in bed for no good reason. Then I realized the reason I couldn’t get BACK to sleep was because of the pit of my stomach. I had this terrible terrible feeling, like the feeling you get when you hear someone is in the hospital or you stand next to someone who gets a horrible call. At the risk of sounding totally cheesy, it was the same feeling that Obi-Wan Kenobi got in A New Hope when Alderaan exploded. He said: I felt a great disturbance in the Force…as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened. And that’s what I felt like! I tried to get comfy in bed again and things, but none of it worked. After about 20 minutes of trying to sleep, the alarm went off and the alt.rock station that usually is playing some obnoxious song that wakes me up was just talking about if you live in New York and are hearing the webcast please call us. Of course I had no idea why and Scooter turned on the TV and it said about 20 minutes ago the first plane had hit. Everything I can guesstimate says that I was jolted awake by this terrible feeling just about the time an awful lot of people felt that feeling for the very last time.

So, who was it? What if it was us? Some really cunning McVeigh type. I’m not saying it is but just consider it for a minute. What then?

Today’s date, of course, is 911, and while some people point to the emergency significance of it, I was told today that it is also the day of the Camp David Accord, but all the stuff I can find about it says the 17th which is a week away. Apparently this is something that angers terrorists or at least irks them to no end. I asked about it when it was mentioned at work by the CEO (we’re a teeny company with no walls so it made today a little easier, we all sort of pooled the info from our favorite news sites and stuff) I asked him about it and he said it was a Carter thing. I said I wouldn’t remember it then and I didn’t remember ever learning about it in school. He looked at me oddly and I said that when Carter was elected I was two. His shoulders slumped a little and he said “I voted for him…” and he walked back to his desk. I cause these moments a lot, being the only under-30 employee in my office. I tend to be closer to the kids of my co-workers ages than my co-workers. It’s a little weird.

Nostradamus saw this too, apparently. He said: “In the City of God there will be a great thunder, Two brothers torn apart by Chaos while the fortress endures, the great leader will succumb. The third big war will begin when the big city is burning”
…and he said it in 1654. And this is after he nailed the elections, too: “Come the millennium, month 12, in the home of the greatest power, the village idiot will come forth to be acclaimed the leader.”

I’m starting to think I should pay more attention to whatever prediction he made after this one.

This is just so hard to even accept. It’s so hard to believe it happened, even after a whole day of hearing about it in every way. I don’t have any kids, but I wanted to go home from work and hug some anyway. Mostly I just wanted my mom. She lives next to Umatilla Army Depot, one of the largest stores of nerve gas in the country, and some missiles and things too. So I was a little worried. But even more than being worried about her because of where she lives, I really just wanted my mom. My dad too. I called them both and pretty much talked about stupid stuff for awhile just to hear their voices. It’s things like this that remind me just how far away I actually am from my mom and my dad.

Scooter and I went to get some dinner tonight because we didn’t want to cook and I was pretty hungry. We went to Red Robin and on the way out is a picture of the NYC skyline, an old black and white, with the twin towers featured prominently. There’s a hole in the skyline now, just like there’s a hole in the Pentagon, and a hole in an awful lot of hearts that weren’t just broken outright.

I was speaking with some of my online friends earlier and making sure my friends in Baltimore and Fairfax, VA are doing ok, and that their families are all right. I showed up and just sort of sat there, not talking about a whole lot and trying to make sense of all the senselessness. It was like a regular room of friends you might find actually all physically in the same place, even though it was just words on a screen. We comforted each other, shared news, tried to talk about other things, and did the same sorts of things that went on all over the country as this tragedy just continued to spiral into surrealism. It was nice to have them to talk to, from all over the world, to know that we were sort of all reacting the same way.

What about the people who actually did this? Was it some foreign government? A known terrorist group, or some supersmart solo act? How on earth did they pull this off? Last I heard it was with box knives. Jesus.
The thing is, this makes no “statement”. If you could equate this to fighting, it’s the equivalent of being kicked in the balls. Hard. So who would do this? Terrorist acts tend to be like, “you did this thing I didn’t like and now I’m resorting to extreme violence to bring attention to my cause and this horrible thing you did.” But what could we have done that was so bad that it caused the worst terrorist attack in history? And what if you are the person who really did it? Not only are you losing the few people you sent to suicide bomb these planes, but probably your whole organization and everyone ever associated with it (and perhaps everyone who ever knew those people) needs to collectively bend over and kiss your butts goodbye. This will not bring attention to anyone’s cause because whatever it is that was so unjust, it will always be overshadowed by 220 stories worth of rubble and a hole in the side of the world’s largest office building. This attack is the most terrible thing to happen to America ever, including Pearl Harbor, which is a close second at least until we get body counts.

Incidentally, the man charged with the first WTC bombing was to be sentenced tomorrow in a building near there. I saw the whole thing go down on tv over and over again. And even today it was the same thing. over and over. No escaping the sight of those towers collapsing. I will never forget that. It was etched into my brain with the crystal clear accuracy of the Challenger Explosion, the Branch Davidian fire, Oklahoma City’s Murrah building collapsing, Columbine students running for their lives, and Kip Kinkel’s face as he was led from the courtroom. Those images will never leave my head.

I realize I don’t have a super popular lj or anything but if you are reading this, please do two things to help. One of them for those directly affected. It doesn’t matter what. Give blood. Donate blankets. Send ten bucks to the Red Cross to help them cope. Light a candle. Say a prayer. Then do something indirectly. Call your mom. Hug your sweetie. Smile at somebody. Tell someone you love that you love them. Call that friend you don’t talk to very much. Forcing this country to a halt and into terror is what they wanted, whoever “they” are, and if you do these two little things, you can help prove that the stranglehold they desire is nonexistent and that will do more to help heal us than anything.

If you lost someone in all of this today, my thoughts and prayers are with you.

So, last night me and Scooter watched Dude, Where’s My Car? which rates, on the SNL scale, as Night At The Roxbury. (For the official SNL movie scale, check earlier entries.) I was highly amused. I agree with a review I read which said that if you sit down to write a movie called Dude Where’s My Car you aren’t really aiming to make the next Citizen Kane, right? Well they didn’t make Citizen Kane, not even by accident. But it was pretty funny. I enjoyed it far more than I had any right to, probably mostly because it was a rental and it was totally funny for like 2.79 instead of eight bucks. Of course now Scooter shall be terrorized by “an deeeeen?” from the Chinese Foooooood scene. I think you know what I mean.