91106. Collection of random stuff just like the rest of my life. I order takeout but then wander over to the bar on the corner. There are people inside playing cards to dub music. Gin rummy I am informed. Why rummy? I ask one of the guys on the side of things. It's a totally boring game. He asks me what game I would play instead and I say bridge. I'd play Texas holdem he announces. "We should have a Texas holdem night."
No I say, you should have a Hold Me night. A Texas Hold Me night. Just come in and hold each other. I can tell that everyone is simultaneously (a) creeped out but (b) amused. I suggest that once it gets going maybe they could have a Hold Me Closer Tiny Dancer Night.
The TV is on and tuned to a local channel. It's all September 11th stuff, most of it ridiculous and totally repulsive but I don't want to say anything because I wasn't here. I notice--oh my god--this year they've spun 9/11 into a logo: 9 11 06 it reads, with the ones extending upwards like the twin towers. Every time I watch TV again I am filled with horror. This is reality, carefully manufactured and airbrushed in photoshop.
They made it a logo. I just can't get over that. It's like UNL agressively defending their rights to the word "Huskers" in white cursive on a red background. "91106." Closed captioning is on but I can hear them say it: nine eleven oh six. It has a nice ring. They show some guy playing bag pipes on Long Island Beach. What could any of this possibly have to do with anything that actually happened to real people.
When I walk outside I notice the spotlights extending into the sky just across the river, two parallel beams.
Posted by Alan at September 11, 2006 11:00 PM"They made it a logo."
In America at large, the remembrance of September 11th has become a proxy for the mindless acceptance of every vicious stupidity the current landlords of the world system have decided to manufacture in the last 5 years, and nearly every bad-taste bullshit expression of mass culture.
I'm not sure what to say to all of this, because it's not like I have any kind of meaningful or personally earned response to the deaths of all those murdered people, which ought to have been the point, let alone to the completely fucked appropriation of their deaths by everything I despise most.
Posted by: brennen at September 12, 2006 01:24 PMi've thought about this more after the original post and i've come up with a logo of my own: 55378008. to commemorate 6th grade and my discovery of the calculator.
Posted by: alan at September 13, 2006 11:44 PMwe got the 16 year old who's living with us now (long story, that) a ti-83 the other day. i spent a good half an hour trying to do some kind of cool graphics with the thing before i realized that my patience for crippled BASIC dialects and 8x16 character displays has drastically eroded since middle school.
i do wish my game of life implementation had survived. or the two-player battleship.
Posted by: brennen at September 14, 2006 01:20 AM