Coffee and Caffeine Induced Lunacy.

It's amazing how most of the time, we can't remember what we had for dinner last week, what we may have worn on our first date - and hell, some of us can't even remember our family member's birthdays. (Lump me into that category.) But we always remember exactly what we were doing when life altering events take place. Of course the memory is stronger if it occurs on home turf. But I'm willing to bet that most of us don't remember what we were doing on Sept. 10th or 12th of 2001. We only remember the 11th.

I'm going to shoot that and say that I remember Sept. 10th, 2001 only because I turned 18 exactly one day before the attacks and actually flew out to California that day as that was my "big move". But I don't remember the 12th.

I woke up at about 9 am PDT. That made it noon back over in Florida, who is in the same time zone as New York. And at that point in time, I was used to waking up at noon, so this was about right for me. Like I said, I had just moved out here the day before, and helped both my uncle, Jarrod, and his roommate, Steve, move into a really big apartment in Santa Clara, which is about a 10 - 15 minute drive north of San Jose Intl. Airport. (This is significant.) My uncle's roommate came through the living room, where I had been sleeping, and went into the kitchen as I was saying "Hey Steve, what's up?" He had a baffled look on his face, that I remember. He says, "Someone just bombed the World Trade Center." I just sat there for a moment in confusion before getting up and saying while heading to my uncle's room, "What the fuck, they didn't have enough fun with it the last time? They had to go for a round two? Idiots."

My uncle had the only working t.v. in the apartment at that moment, and he was using rabbit ears to get reception, so naturally, there was a bit of static. And he was just standing there, staring at the screen in shock. Since I'm usually like this, I just stroll on up to him and go "Hey, Gee, what's going on?" and then look at the t.v. just in time to see the replay of the towers crashing. And all I could do was stare and utter "Holy shit."

And all I could think was "Oh fuck. I was supposed to be there."

Little known fact: about a month prior to my moving to California, I had run into an ex of mine. This was right when I was starting to make my plans to move out here, when I was still in foster care in FL. My ex wanted to take off back to his homestate of New Jersey. And he wanted me to come with him. I told him what my plans were, but if he could get his shit together by at least a week before my move, I'd go with him. And he was excited about this. "Oh man, this'll be great. We'll go to New York for your birthday, spend a couple of days in the city, I'll show you this that blah blah" you get the idea. Shortly thereafter, someone lied to him, said I was going to turn him into the cops, so he purposely turn himself in and that shot that.

But fuck. Had things ACTUALLY gone through according to plan, there's a good chance I might have been around Ground Zero. But as luck would have it, I moved out here. And my case worker wanted me to wait UNTIL Sept. 11th to move out here. I was insistent on getting the fuck out of there the moment I turned 18. Glad I was. Had I waited, I probably would have been grounded in either Houston or Dallas if they didn't turn the plane around.

The weirdest thing about that day was the silence around my apartment complex. At one point in time, I had stepped out on the balcony to talk to someone on the phone and noticed just how quiet it was compared to the day before. Like I said, I lived close to an airport. The day before, planes were roaring overhead at least every 30 minutes. I was even hearing them when I went to bed the night before. That day? Quiet. And it was downright eerie. Not just there, either. We went up to McCarthy Ranch (a little shopping plaza very similar to the one over in Porter Ranch) to get a bite to eat and the roads were just dead. Everywhere, quiet, hardly any signs of life. It was already hard to believe that something like the attacks had happened, but that it had this kind of effect on what is normally a very busy area...damn.

6 years later, it seems a bit more real. It's had time to sink in. You can't change facts. You can only accept it and move on.