perpetual memory loss

Apparently, this is the thing to do now with the anniversary so close. So I will jump in and add my two-cents to the cacophony of 9/11 essays (two particularly good ones are Andrew Sullivan’s and Christopher Hitchens‘ love ‘em or hate ‘em they will make you think). However, in order to properly formulate 9/11 I have to go back a few more years to set the stage for where I was personally at that time. In 1999 I was working at a television studio, doing something that I thought I liked. I hoped that it would turn into something more. Well surprise, surprise things didn’t quite go as a I wanted. Being that I was young and dumb I only exacerbated the situation and proceeded to burn some of the first bridges in my young professional career. I didn’t give a fuck though. I was young and feeling cooped up and I badly needed a change–or so I told myself. So towards the end of 1999 I moved on to a construction supplies delivery job which I half-heartedly worked at (sometimes when I was tired I’d just pull over in a housing community and take a nap). When I got bored with that job I quit. Then my brother started talking about going into the Marine Corps. As he discussed it with me it planted the idea in my head which over the course of the next few months sat dormant in my head but just percolated subconsciously biding its time. About mid-2000 my brother was accepted to Naval flight school in Pensacola, Fl. A fairly difficult school to get into especially when your grades aren’t the best and you’re not a legacy kid. It was about that time that he decided he didn’t want to join up anymore. It was also about that time when I decided I did and I voiced my desire to my family.

I think it’s too harsh to say it was met with outright derision but there was a large amount of skepticism from my father and brother. I mean I was the less athletic brother, I was lazier, and avoided hard work like the plague. But their jokes just strengthened my resolve. I wanted to join not only to prove them wrong (and my ‘friends’ weren’t any more supportive, their mockery was even more infuriating) but because this burgeoning desire to serve my country. I’m not exactly sure where this all came from but I have my suspicions, and I think a large portion of this desire came from my reading list as an adolescent, which ran heavy on titles with Epic poems like Beowulf, The Illiad, The Odyssey and with a different kind of epic like The  Lord of the Rings and Star Wars. It was definitely a confluence of events though as all these ideas and feelings came together at the same time. Add to that the mockery from a lot of the people close to me and my resolution was set. If there is anything about me that’s true it’s that I a stubborn son of a b.

So I quit my job and went to work at UPS part-time and the rest of my time was spent running and working out. I quit drinking (seriously I’m not lying) and even though I didn’t eat a lot of junk food I quit eating the little that I did. My singular focus was to continue my regiment throughout the winter and go to boot camp in March. But alas, the best laid plans…, as it turned out I never made it to March. Instead, after some poking and prodding from my recruiter, and finally being given some more financial incentives I left at the end of January 2001.

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I have usually had enough of yelling, screaming children and dumb tourists at work which is one of the pitfalls of working at a museum on a daily basis.  Usually the last thing I want to do is go to a museum on my day off.  This is unfortunate because DC has a plethora of museums and I haven’t seen really any of them in the last year that I’ve lived here.  One of the museums I have been wanting to check out though has been the Newseum.  Add a $20.00 fee to screaming children plus dumb tourists and well my desire to see it was never great enough to actually get me to go see it.

Luckily, the other day I was able to score some free tickets so I was able to check it out yesterday on my day off (it also gave me the opportunity to try out the HDR photo setting on my iPhone).  My initial reaction to viewing the museum is that would have been totally worth the entry fee.  There are a ton of different exhibits with outstanding artifacts that really make it worth its while.

I started out on the bottom floor checking out the Berlin Wall Gallery.  The fall of the wall is one of my earliest memories.  I remember learning about it, I remember Reagan’s “Tear down this wall” speech, and I remember watching the East and West Germans start breaking down the wall.  I thought it was cool as a kid and didn’t really understand the significance of it until later, but I did know that for some reason it was a big deal.

Next up was the G-Men and Journalists Exhibit.  I honestly didn’t expect much from this one but I was pleasantly surprised by the artifacts that they had in here.  The exhibit is in honor of the FBI’s 100th anniversary so they had some of the biggest cases from the last century including: John Dillinger, Donnie Brasco, the KKK, the Unabomber, Oklahoma City, and the DC Sniper.  Lots of cool stuff from all those cases but seeing the Unabombers shack was pretty surreal.  From here I went up to the 6th floor to check out the Katrina exhibit and to check out the view from their balcony.

While I wasn’t particularly interested in the Katrina exhibit I came away after going through it with a new found appreciation for everyone who went through the hurricane and those that stayed around to report on the events as they happened.  One of my favorite exhibits, since I am a huge history nerd, was the News History Gallery.

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Well this is it the last game perhaps ever at Shea Stadium.  This season has been a roller coaster of emotions and I have risen to tremendous heights and desolute lows with this team this year.  However, it all comes down to the last game of the season, and the Mets have to do it, again, against the Marlins.  Last year Glavine didn’t even make it out of the first inning, and hopefully this year they can pull it off, and with a little help from the Cubs, make it into the playoffs without having to play a one game playoff tomorrow.  I’ve been watching the pre-game show for an hour and a half and it’s good to see all the old Mets at the stadium talking about Shea, and some of the old memories. 

One moment they have been talking about a lot in Piazza’s homerun after 9/11.  That moment was voted the #2 moment in the history of Shea Stadium (#1 was game 6 of the 1986 WS where the Mets won on the Buckner error).  For me, however, that is my favorite memory.  Only in retrospect do I realize how much my life was changed by 9/11 even though I was 3000 miles away.  I was stuck on base when Camp Pendelton was put on high alert, and we were all ready to ship out at a moments notice.  All of us were still reeling from what had happened.  It seemed like, even in California, that the nation had come to a grinding halt, and everything that we thought we knew seemed foreign.  Baseball helped to normalize everything again, and when the Mets were set to continue the season against the hated Braves, I was able to put the tragedy in the background for a bit, and ressurect my absolute hatred for the Braves.  When the Mets came back with that dramatic Mike Piazza homer, it was pure elation, and just for a moment everything was forgotten.  Anyways that’s probably my fondest Mets memory, because I was a bit too young to remember 1986, and because still 9/11 is one of the moments that has so dramatically effected the course of my life.

Update 1:21

Currently still in a rain delay, game time is now set to 2:00 PM EST.

Update 1:58

Here we go, games about to start.  I really nervous about this game, and I’m even more worried about how Perez is going to pitch on 3 days rest–especially with CC pitching in Milwaukee.  Hope for the best that’s all I can do.

Update 2:03

1-2-3 inning for Ollie, and with only 7 pitches to boot.  Like Gary Cohen said “no 7-run inning this time.”  Thank God.

Update 2:13

Nothing doing for the Metties that inning, but they did make Olsen work–25 pitches that inning.

Update 2:20

A brief scare when Ollie tried to grab Uggla’s ground ball.  He stayed in but his control was terrible afterwards, but he managed to get through the inning.  23 pitches through 2, and no score in Milwaukee yet.

Update 2:31

1-2-3 inning for Olsen.  The Cubs scored before the inning was over, however, and the Shea faithful gave a rousing cheer.

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