Thursday, August 26, 2004

What The First Cache Said To Me

Terri
I don't know how you want me to do this. Connect the cached items and the site, you say. The inner world and the outer.
So: I am getting lots of death, naturally. You sent me to two graveyards, venerated places, one to crack a code about death, one to dig in the grounds of one of the oldest buildings in Manhattan, you sent me back to the beginnings of this city among flowers and stones and grass to gaze upon the great gaping hole at Ground Zero ... the church that was somehow spared when the spars and beams of the twin towers came hurtling down toward the ground.
You had me gaze upon the place that fills me with anger at the primitive emotions it arouses in me, and you had me root around like someone not entirely sane or presentable among the gravestones till I found your cache, and in it, a bullet cartridge. So yes, death. Death and survival, and the willingness to lash out and hurt in order to survive. Primal things. Are you going to send me all across the city sinking my fingers into graves? Is this enough? Help me. I don't understand.
George Washington had his own pew at St. Paul's, you can still see it. He prayed there after being sworn in down the street at Federal Hall as the nation's first President. Birth of a nation, from war. Now another war. Destruction, survival. Is this where you want me to go?
I had a friend who was downtown when the towers fell, in fact I sent her there, she said those clouds of dust you see on the videos of that morning were full of flying fragments of metal. I drank with her at this bar.
9/11 was an act designed to provoke a tribal response. We are all reasonable, civilized people until someone touches our tribal core. Then we change, or maybe we remember. We will kill and more for our tribe. We are all potential torturers. Some things are impossible to forgive.
Terri, what more do you want of me?

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