Ok it’s been a long damned time I guess

I remember being online and seeing the second plane hit live. I knew that a friend worked in one of the towers. They didn’t find his remains for almost two months.

I don’t mean to short change or ignore the other two plates. But I saw the first plane hit come up in my feed I guess seconds after it happened.

And I couldn’t click thru to the story. I tried a search and still couldn’t.

All the servers seems to have frozen.

I was listening to then Howard Sterm show on the radio.

They were talking about Pakels Anderson of course.

They don’t even know yet

I saw just a headline that the some plane had hit one of the towers

I thought it must be a Cessna and maybe it was a pilot that had a heart attack or something because how could that happen accidentally

I guess like many I was just totally naïve about the level of threat and cleverness

And then somebody like within a minute came into the Stern show which I had on headphones and told the studio everybody that a plane had hit the World Trade Center

I was where there wasn’t a TV

But they turned on TV in the studio and watched and described it and then people in the building started talking about it and nobody knew anything

At least the people watching television could see it and it didn’t look like it had been a Cessna

And of course, the Stern show immediately went to talking about that and nothing else and people were calling to say there was some huge problem in lower Manhattan

And somebody said, I think it was one of the collars that maybe there had been an airplane maybe even a passenger jet

And after a couple of minutes of that, the second plane hit and then everybody knew, of course

And so I’m focusing on images of the two towers because they are so iconic and were so instantly New York

And because I lived in Manhattan for more than half a decade and loved every minute of it, it was back when you can live in Manhattan and not be a zillionaire

And so I loved those towers because to me they always looked light and Aries somehow

And I loved going up to windows on the world just to visit the gigantic geodes and see through the windows

And after that I felt I had to get out out of where I was and just go for a drive and let my head try to absorb this

So I got into my vehicle and just hit the freeway and headed out of town to the west

All this time I was listening to the Stern show and they were describing everything they saw on the television. The Stern show was in Midtown so not an immediate danger.

And the Stern show usually was on the air from 6 AM until about 11 AM

But this day they killed all the commercials, I think, and just took calls from people who witnessed something or other or sometimes they took calls from people with crazy theories

And within a very short time, all traffic in Manhattan was grounded and I think most of the traffic around New York City. I don’t know what they did with the inbound planes to Kennedy and LaGuardia and the New Jersey airports.

But the sky started filling up with military aircraft, and some of the military aircraft experts called and identified what they were doing and which aircraft and how many they could see from their rooftop or something

And people were calling in as they walked uptown out of Wall Street area and some of them we’re walking uptown from the basement of the World Trade Center even

This was a good while before the towers collapsed

And I wondered why they left the show on the air until something like two or 3 PM by which time the entire show crew were exhausted

They had to sneak off to the bathroom, one by one while the caller was on the air

I later found out that the reason they left the show on the air was because they’re listening numbers were completely insanely high

Because the people on the Stern show could see it either out certain windows of the building they worked in or on their local televisions and they were giving human reactions

So what a lot of places we’re doing was running one of the news feeds from the networks on the TV and then playing the Stern show on a radio in the background so they could have both the sober but uninformative newsfeeds but they also got the pictures and so they knew as much as anyone

But they also had the human reactions that were so personal coming from the Stern show people and from all their colors

And that’s kind of how the first half hour went for me after the impacts

I remember thinking it was gonna create a different United States and a different world and not necessarily would either be better

Moon over Manhattan

I remember getting to school and our principal coming into my math class to have our teacher turn on the news just in time to watch the second plane hit the south tower. I was in 9th grade and it was first period. We did nothing in school that day except watch the news. The silence that fell over our class when the towers fell, well, I had not understood was stifling silence was until then. Walking home was surreal. The sky was so blue and empty.

I was working and a coworker heard about the first plane crash on the radio and told everyone. He continued listening and then turned it up for everyone when it became apparent that it was not a horrible accident. At the time, I worked at my desk for a while then outside. The first collapse happened before I left the office. The day was weirdly quiet with little to no traffic. I asked everyone I saw what was happening because I did not have any access for information back then. I had a spiffy flip phone for emergencies.

After work I watched the news channels and just did not seem real. I still can’t imagine the horror of being there. Or worse losing family and friends. The TV footage is still haunting.