11 IX 2001 - 21:33 - sed1

*laughs nervously*

I suppose this is as a good a time as any to begin writing about the Ampersand project's topic, "the end of the world."

Tomorrow or in twenty years I will feel it. Today, my repression machines are working quite well.

Start in the future, move closer. Although I know that what happened today was not the end of the world. It just feels like the end of a world, to me (ah, the perspective of the young? i don't think so...)

In the future, we are doomed to die through the Great Lukewarmness, as I like to call it. At least, I think so. I'm a little unclear on the physics of the universe, so I'll get back to you when I've had physics.

Before that, our sun will explode.

Before that, we will probably have killed ourselves if we keep on going at this rate. Our planet will be a cold, lifeless ball ravaged by pollution and mass extinctions and lots of fun stuff like that.

According to my piano teacher, there's a Maya calendar out there that predicts the end of this cycle-civilization (again, not quite up on Mayan cosmology) sometime in a year equivalent to about December 2012.

Moving on:

There is nothing a teenager trying to maintain a semblance of calm can do to write about what happened today. I can't keen online, and I don't know enough to write -

You probably know what happened (and if you don't? congratulations; where's your hole? not that i advocate hiding, but sometimes-) There are others more eloquent than I; there are others who will not be babbling; there are others made wiser through experience. It is not for me to do. And yet, it is the only thing I can do. I know only a few people in New York - still, isn't it that way for all of us? New York is the Center. It's the United States as much as Washington is. And...

The entire SFUSD closed down, which hasn't happened - certainly not since my sisters were there, more than ten years ago...ah. Not since Loma Prieta in 1989.

Everything of yesterday seems suddenly a little less important. Yesterday I was talking to my sister; today I was worrying about how close she might have been, whether she was able to get home. Everyone has someone or knows someone who does.

It's too much death to process; businesspeople always in early to do their jobs, the people at the Pentagon, the people who were trying to fight fires and keep order, the airplanes, their passangers, and crews-

So I don't. But I can't withdraw myself. My facade is cracking but I push it down - some resistance, but it holds. And I listen to other people worry, and try to comfort them and listen and bear some of their weight for a little while. And in turn I go to others.

Was it this way at the fall of Rome? Did, suddenly, it seem like a danger and not an honor to be able to say Civus Romanus sum? Life has to go on, but we've been reminded that we're vulnerable.

We've been lucky: our continent has been spared war. Bombs have never fallen from the air, not on the mainland. But now...

The world is getting smaller. I am a citizen of the United States. And now this...

We're going to have to grow up fast, shed our skins, as a nation and as a people... now is the time for E pluribus, unum. Once this has started, there is no room for denial or prevarication. Welcome to the new age of... of... god knows what.

End of a world? Perhaps.

J

think: echoes of other bombings, embassies, federal buildings... think: mothers, brothers, sisters, friends, fathers... these people, as in the Iliad, have people left behind to grief and to grieve...

exitium, exitii n. ruin, destruction

end of adolescence?