Eight Feet Deep

My friend Suzie, who lives in Arkansas, called to my attention yesterday that I had one too few “o”s in my headline “Still too early to revisit that September morning.” She was right of course. I had spelled “too” as “to.” I edited and now it is correct. I had no defense unless you want to count that I still had not finished my second cup of morning coffee when I wrote that. The same could be said for this post. So my thanks to Suzie for, as she called it, “an English lesson.” Where would we be without spelling? Misspelling?

How could I forget? Some 545 posts later EFD has been here for more than a year beginning on April 21, 2005. A lot has happened since then. I somehow failed to commemorate the anniversary when it happened. Oh well. I guess I’ve been busy. Nonetheless, I’ve enjoyed the blogging experience, for the most part, over the past year. I’ve also enjoyed what I’ve been doing no matter the pain, no matter the struggle to pay bills. So, ‘scuse me for missing my own anniversary here at EFD. Maybe I have just been enjoying life for a change.

My friend Sarah and I were watching the trailers of upcoming movies last week while waiting for our picture to begin. The trailer came on for “United 93,” the big screen treatment of the ill-fated flight that crashed in a Pennsylvania field on Sept. 11, 2001. After the trailer, I think we both turned to each other and said almost simultaneously something like: “I can’t see this.”

The reviews for “United 93” have seemed to assure me that this the film is not just a gratuitous use of tragedy to fill box offices. But yet, I think anyone with any feelings, regardless of where you lived on that September morning all have different memories. Along with those different memories are different ideas as to how quickly one would want to get a stark reminder of what happened that day.

In some ways I was lucky on Sept. 11, because I was working as a reporter and my day was spent in a blur. That includes the fear I had that day about getting shot when I pulled up to the security gate at George W. Bush’s ranch in Crawford to get a quick comment an editor wanted from a law enforcement-type.

In other ways I was far from fortunate. I had just returned to work after being off three weeks, convalescing after surgery. And during those weeks I had developed for what was the first time in my life, a case of full-blown depression. Needless to say, 9/11 didn’t help that a bit. I have since had other bouts with depression but medication is helping me do a lot better. But 9/11 and the surrounding days were dark ones for me. It’s going to be awhile before I can revisit them without trepidation.

Prez GW seeks counsel from one of his smaller assistants.
The White House Correspondent’s Association dinner, broadcast on C-Span, proved to be pretty edgy last night. After Prez GW spoke with a Bush impersonator at his side, Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert launched into a routine in his faux right-wing talk show personae that seemed to leave Bush pretty red-faced and unsmiling. Probably one of the funniest moments though came when Colbert acknowledged Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in the audience. Colbert flicked his hand under his chin while hailing Scalia, mocking the gesture the Italian-American justice made recently to a reporter that was a subject of controversy. Scalia apparently found Colbert’s joke funny.

It’s hard to imagine this is what a radar picture used to look like.

During this sanity break from my tech-writing project from Hell, I decided to check some of the local weather radars. The reason is that I am just curious if it is raining anywhere around where I am. Apparently not. I could not have imagined when I was a kid and was fascinated with the weather report on television that I would have a relatively accurate and pretty near real-time radar picture I could summon with the click of a mouse. I could not have imagined I would be clicking something called a mouse, for that matter. I feel I am truly fortunate that all this high-tech stuff wasn’t around for me when I was kid because I probably would have been deeply obsessed.