Insomnia... or something

Ugh. I realize now how much I dislike weekend nights home alone. During the week my FIL stays here, so I don't feel quite as vulnerable, but on weekend nights when I am home alone, I'm pretty sure that the reason that I can't fall asleep until 1:30 am is because I'm trying to be hyper-vigilant for strange sounds. I leave extra lights on, and check that the doors are locked a couple of times. It's crazy.

Anyway, I know that everyone in the media is going nuts over the whole 9/11 anniversary thing, and I generally dislike the over-exploitative media manipulation of the whole day. However, I had two experiences that actually truly made me reflect - non-cynically I might add, which is a tremendous achievement for me - on what 9/11 really should be about.

I was at Jeffro and CC's place Saturday night, and drove home about 1130 pm-ish. The ride back is 395 south of Reagan National and up the GW Parkway. Well, Saturday night they had the Pentagon all lit up, which on my route one drives 3/5's of the way around. One wall section, the wall I presume the plane struck, was bathed entirely in a deep blue light, and the courtyard had a dozen or so spotlights shining up into the sky. It was an eerie, beautiful sight and the somber colors and simplicity of the lights really made me think as I was driving by. Driving on the GW Parkway is a real treat, because it's nothing to look over to the east and see the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, and the Capital Building. I don't really know what I was thinking specifically, but I just thought about the events without the baggage of the following 5 years of political drama and, well I'll just stop there without getting onto a longwinded soapbox about the state of affairs in this country.

The second thing that made me think of 9/11 - again in a kind of pure, non-cynical restrospective way - was the re-airing of the documentary made by the two French brothers who had been the new firefighter, but ended up being front and center for all the NYC 9/11 events. That documentary seems especially nice because it is free from making judgements and political statements about where the failures were that allowed everything to happen and of course all of the following fiasco. The guys who were at the WTC, and the Pentagon and on that plane in PA, they didn't know or care in those moments about all of the peripheral stuff. That documentary was focused only their story, and really lets one reflect on those events without being baited with political and media sensationalism.

Anyway, I live and work near Washington DC now, and I don't necessarily feel any more or less scared of something major happening than I did on 9/10/01. And while I have fairly strong opinions about much of the stuff that has come to pass in the wake of the attacks, moments like the two above allow me to step back and feel sorrow about the suffering and tragedy in the lives of the individuals who were directly impacted.