September 1, 1999
10:44 p.m.
I was awake at eleven minutes after 5:00 this morning, e-mailing all concerned that i had a migraine and would not partake of
the delights to be shared at our office this fine day. it took over 11 minutes to start up the kitchen lap-top, dial in to
the ISP, figure out which "Personality" to send this mail from, then make this deliberate e-mail, and while all this
was going on i heard the 5:00 wake-up from NPR's "All Things Considered." whoever does that announcement/news-summary made me
feel great, even though i'd been awake almost all night long. i haven't thought of the notion of saying "Good Morning" for a
long time.
for some reason i remember seeing 5:11 pass through the clock this morning on my table, the way i've seen the seconds and the
minutes and the hours of the night pass through the clock radios of women in other cities who slept next to me once. or twice.
regardless of where you were on earth at that hour, this is really the day, 60 years ago, that World War II began after
Hitler invaded Poland, leaving news reporters to sound like idiots acquiescing to every single sweet-talking thing he said
and did. War was declared the 3rd of September, 1939.
i grew up with volumes of Time Magazine's "Time Capsules" on the shelves outside my sister and I's bathroom, and on the
covers of some of those volumes were drawings of Hitler -- "Time's Man of the Year."
it has always mystified me how so many people see Time's "Man of the Year" distinction as some kind of award for a job well
done. even at 10 i knew what it meant. and i spent endless summers leafing through Time Magazine and Newsweek and U.S. News &
World Reports, just reading and looking at the pictures, taking these fine publishers' words for it that they had a grip on
what was happening and what mattered and why.
in retrospect, i know now that i am on my own deciding who and what means where and why, and what the big story of this
generation is, and what is important and what is just cool, common hype.
as usual, fuck everything.
i can barely imagine living in a place where an army would invade the land at 5:11 in the morning, or at any other time of
the day. though i can not describe it, something about me wishes i lived in a world at war.
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