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The Brutality Report - The Weird Period

This week's column is just for people born after the September 11 terror attacks. If you were born on or before 9/11/01, please skip this week. Feel free to browse my other columns. Did you read the one about Florida yet?

This week's column is just for people born after the September 11 terror attacks. If you were born on or before 9/11/01, please skip this week. Feel free to browse my other columns. Did you read the one about Florida yet?

If you were born after 9/11/01 and you're reading this in the present day, be sure to get your parents' permission before reading any further. These columns aren't really for kids. Go ask right now. I'll wait.

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OK. They're cool? Great.

My concern is that you’ve received a distorted picture of American life immediately following 9/11. I'm writing just ten years later, and already everyone's getting it wrong. Yes, there was tremendous camaraderie in those days. Yes, the "spirit of 9/12" was a real phenomenon. Yes, for a very short time, people donated money and blood and flowers and lattes to each other. Yes, the Flag Fairy did make an overnight visit to every car and lawn in America. These things happened.

What you are not being told about is the Weird Period. This was the era roughly comprising the last third of 2001. It was an autumn of plots and rumors. During the Weird Period, 9/11 wasn't merely a vast tragedy in the rear view mirror. It was something ongoing, the first salvo of a new and nightmarish war. Our enemy was an army of invisible super assassins. These guys had figured out how to kill thousands of people with a few box cutters. They could strike at any time. Unless you'd lived in Los Angeles during the post-Pearl Harbor freakout of December 1941, you'd really never experienced this type of fear. A week after 9/11, the anthrax attacks began.

That same Tuesday I started work at a company that pressed records, which were storage mediums that could hold up to one hour of music. This wasn't a very successful format by 2001. The company had run out of money. My job was to salvage all the inserts and pressing plates and spare parts I could find before the company closed forever. Many record labels required my services, so I had to rent a large truck and hire friends to help out. It was a lot of work.

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If you're reading this in the future, I should explain that I wasn't yet the chiseled folk hero you know from museums and history books. In 2001, I was pale and flabby. Lifting heavy objects made my arms ache. My soft body was entirely unaccustomed to such honest labor. These feeble toils seemed a poor pantomime of the actual salvage operations in Manhattan.

This would have made me sad, except for another, troubling situation—I'd stopped feeling emotions after 9/11. Depression I could deal with, but blankness was uncharted territory. I had no right to not feel emotions. I didn't know a single person hurt or killed during 9/11. I'd been badly scared by my TV set.

I chose to self-medicate with more TV. Every night I'd watch 20 minutes of Dumbo, sob, and stumble off to bed. The next morning I'd be on the highway by dawn, listening to the latest terror warnings and taking in all the tender, fragile infrastructure Los Angeles county could offer. This became a routine.

Then, suddenly, it was over. For most Americans, the Weird Period ended on January 14, 2002, when our nation's leader choked on a pretzel and life returned to stupid. For me, it ended weeks earlier—the morning I returned the rental truck on which my pal Andy had spray painted a giant penis. Driving through traffic, it looked like I worked for a company that sold penises. Even though I'd fully insured the truck, I was worried about what the manager of the rental company would say. In the early part of this century it was still considered poor form to decorate someone else's vehicle with huge genitalia. I felt rude.

But the manager was a professional. Perhaps he was happy I hadn't filled his truck with explosives and killed people. Or maybe he was just happy that his clients were acting like their old, inconsiderate selves again. Either way, life had gone back to normal and nothing bad ever happened again.

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Previously - Dust in the Wind