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| Essay by � wetzelbill THE MISADVENTURES OF AIMLESS AND COGITATION (OR HOW I GAVE IN AND DECIDED TO WRITE ABOUT TRAGEDY) BUSTED OUT BY BILL WETZEL Where were you when JFK was shot? Fade in. There is this image you see, Americana at it�s most resplendent. Birds chirping, sun shining-what we all like to call pluperfection. Beyond perfect. My alarm clock went off at 8:15 AM on September 11, 2001. On my day off from school at the Art Institute of Seattle, where I was only two short weeks away from graduating with a Video Production degree. Maybe it was fate. Maybe it had an in depth, determinate meaning. Maybe I was just too stupid to turn the alarm switch off, so I could sleep in. Strike one. I was sound asleep in bed when the Twin Towers fell. Rewind to February 28, 2001. I had a day off from school as well, except for the Avid Editing session I decided to sleep through. Once again I was in bed, in that second stage of sleep when you�re really in the zone. The kind when it hurts really bad just to wake up. I woke up almost exactly one minute before it happened. My first asinine thought was a large truck was driving by my apartment, but this was no truck. I remember a bag of potato chips flew off the top of the refrigerator. Earthquake. Big one. 6.5 on the Richter scale. In true Montana hick fashion I dove under my roommate�s bed and prayed. Strike two. Everyone who was alive on November 22, 1963 can tell you where they were when President Kennedy was shot. The same way everybody alive on December 7, 1941 can tell you what they were doing when they heard Pearl Harbor was attacked by the Japanese. Up until September 11, 2001, I only had my inglorious, �diving under the bed� story about the so-called �Rattle in Seattle�. My parent�s always used to tell me I could sleep through a disaster. Looks like they weren�t too far from the truth. I am that undeniable perception I have a bad habit of waking up to catastrophes while I�m on my days off. Fast forward again to me hitting my alarm clock. I never ever turn it off on my first try. My second attempt never came and I just listened. In my blur of incoherence, some guy was spewing out �World Trade Center�, �Terrorist Attack�, �New York�, �The Pentagon� and myriad jumbled words I could scarcely understand. The first thought that crossed my mind was of James Patterson. Stop. Rewind. About two weeks before, I had read a James Patterson novel called �Black Friday�, which has circumstances in the plot that are eerily similar to the September 11th attack. Terrorists attack Manhattan, everything is blown up and our country is in turmoil. Patterson is significant because the movies �Kiss The Girls� and �Along Came A Spider� were adapted into screenplays from his novels of the same names. My initial reaction was to presume the radio host was talking about another of his novels being made into a film. The realization took another ten seconds before it hit me. I put two and two together. This was no movie. Every minute individual hair stood up on the back of my neck. I felt like a drunk, who had just become stone cold sober. Pause. About a week before the terrorist attacks, I had surgery to remove bone chips from my left elbow. One of those infamous old bull riding and wrestling injuries I seem to have collected back in the day. Nothing serious, simply one of those deals where you get up, rub a little dirt on it and walk it off. You all know what I mean. Old school style. One the afternoon of September 11, 2001, the greatest, most powerful country in the world, our United States of America did just that. America got up, rubbed a little dirt on it, and walked it off. However, I shamelessly wore my sling for a solid week longer than I needed to, because all the girls at school were quite compassionate to a poor injured creature like myself. Note�to�.self�.Compassion. Remember this word. Ok, let�s get one thing straight. Sure, I�ve lived in Seattle, Washington for two years and now Tucson, Arizona for almost another year now. I�ve directed a music video, worked on a few films, been to some premiere parties. Sure, I�m even the coauthor of a recently released novel. Forget about my pimped out sunglasses-the style and color I blatantly ripped off from Brad Pitt. Disregard the Kenneth Cole jeans, the DKNY Shirts, even the macquereau earring, which my hardcore homophobic friend always teases me about. Ignore all of the incidentals because we all know who and what I am. I�m a Montana farm hick straight off the Blackfeet Indian Reservation. And if need be, I will act like it. On September 11, 2001, that is precisely what I did. I was living in a major U.S. city, not far from a major tourist attraction, the Space Needle and the tallest skyscraper west of the Mississippi, the Bank of America Tower. In fact, not even two years before �The Millennium Bomber� a 32-year old Algerian man, named Ahmed Ressam, was stopped by U.S. Customs officials about 60 miles northwest of Seattle with more than 1,000 pounds of explosives allegedly to be used to bring down the Space Needle on New Year�s Eve then later for attacks planned in the Los Angeles area. I was planning on attending the Space Needle celebration that night. Ressam had a reservation for a hotel two blocks away from where I lived at the time. All of this was running through my mind that morning. Paranoia. Fear. At that point, the U.S. airways weren�t even secure yet and planes from nearby military bases were flying overhead. Nobody knew what was going on or what was to be expected. A terrorist cell in every major city and state capital ready to launch synchronized attacks? Seemed logical enough to me. My sheltered hickishness was in full fear mode. I opened the sliding glass door in my apartment and poked my head outside for a tentative peek. A large, plane-shaped shadow dive bombed towards the building and I dove to the ground like I just stared into the face of the apocalypse. One can�t be too careful when they think the world is about to end. False alarm, but that seagull did look pretty menacing coming at me. He was all beak and talons. Strike three. I think I�m out. Now I can look back and laugh at myself. The same way I can laugh about diving under a bed during an earthquake and so on. Even the time when my friend, Dan Brown, and I were robbed by one of Seattle�s finest crackheads seems humorous in hindsight. Self-deprecation holds laughter and laughter covers up fear and embarrassment. Fast forward to August 2002 in Tucson, Arizona. Snapshot a picture in your mind of a short, rippling mass of muscle and devastatingly charming, not to mention very modest, writer sitting at a computer typing out an essay, drinking coffee and baking in 105 degrees of desert heat. This would be your humble writer himself. For some reason, people want to talk to me. Interview me. Write stories about me. Earlier this month, I appeared on a radio show in Lubbock, Texas with our editor and coauthor, Duane Simolke, and, our publicist, John Mudd. I don�t totally understand why me, but I�ll take all the publicity I can get. Back home everybody knows me as a wrestler. An athlete. Here I�m the guy who watches movies, reads and writes all the time. An artist. I�m a boring, tedious version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. A Book and Film Geek Just twenty minutes before writing this I finished watching the same movie for the fifth time this week. Another one of those days off lurching in ennui-bored out of my mind. A great American philosopher once said, �Without suffering, there would be no compassion�. Uh oh. There is that word again. I know this because I just watched a movie, in which, a character playing a leukemia victim about to die uses this very locution. Suffering and compassion go hand in hand. I know this because Mandy Moore knows this. Pause for self-introspection. Compassion. So why would I donate my writing for the sake of raising money for cancer research? Good question. Maybe I did it because my grandmother died from cancer. Or maybe because I had an Aunt and a friend I�ve known all my life die from this infirmity both in late 2000. Maybe because I have a friend who has Hodgkin�s disease. Maybe because I know others and others and others who have been affected by this malady. Maybe I was sick of hearing about the stolen election, the Enrons, WorldComs or suicide bombers I read about everyday. Maybe I�m selfish and wanted to jump start my career. Where were you when Enron fell? When I envision virtue in the world, compassion doesn�t come to mind. I think of Machiavelli. Doing what you have to do to keep the public and the people below you in line. The virtue of screwing people over for your own personal benefit. Power and trepidation go hand in hand much like suffering and compassion. They coexist because consternation gives you power. Fear. Like waking up in bed next to the head of a horse-Don Corleone style. I think of George W. Bush and Kenneth Lay. Elitists posing as populists, the surfeit of wealthy society taking a dollar from a countless families just so they can have another ten million in the bank. I think of a Saudi Arabian dissident named Osama bin Laden. This society of virtue is the same one where the top two percent of rich people in the U.S. have more money than the other ninety-eight percent combined. Where two people would rather walk together down a street, talking in cell phones than to actually have a conversation with each other. Where some clown shoe is fighting to remove �Under God� from the Pledge Of Allegiance instead of being a husband to his, now ex, wife and a father to his daughter. I have something to say to anybody who believes in that ridiculous cause. When you cash your paychecks feel free to send all those bills with that pesky �In God We Trust� phrase to me. . I have no qualms about taking it all off your hands. Where was Osama bin Laden when he murdered in the name of God? Freeze frame on a still image on a cool, crisp, Montana morning. The sun is rising, the sky is crystal clear and sapphire blue. Imagine for a minute this image begins to move into live action. Sounds, smells are emanating all around you through the air. Cattle clamor in the background. The smell of coffee drifts with wistful memories. Two cropdusters are preparing to take flight in separate planes, right outside of, we�ll say, Augusta, Montana. That�s good for me if it�s good for you. This is your own vision of imagery in your head, so dream away. Anything goes. I had this very dream myself. The date is September 11, 2001. Right before take off both men get hijacked by a couple radical, militant Blackfeet Indians. Tribal Councilmen perhaps. Let�s perceive these cropdusters fight back, one plane goes down in the Marias River basin, the other somewhere around Blackfeet Old Agency territory. An hour later the Glacier County Attorney gives a statement. Our sheriff, volunteer fire department-even the Blackfeet hotshots-or as my elders say �hutshots�- get in on the action. Everybody is gathering around, crews closing down and fencing off with yellow crime scene tape the two most recognizable monuments in Glacier County. Mayors in other are cities are on the radio giving statements every ten minutes stating nobody has attacked them yet. One plane was headed for the Giant Penguin in Cut Bank the other towards Browning�s Binger Water Tower of �War Party� fame. I wake up screaming to the sight of a shadow wolf sleeping on the living room floor. The smells of sweet grass, Michelob Light and Hooter�s wings are lingering in the air. Compassion. I like to think that I hold this attribute within me, likewise, everyone in Glacier County, Montana. I would be pleased to come from an egalitarian populace, where white people and Indians weren�t incognizant to each other. Where rancor didn�t exist behind so many doors. I prefer to surmise that I�m not na�ve towards a cultural tornado we love to watch clash then ignore. I like to believe Cut Bank and Browning aren�t as oblivious as Palestine and Israel. Most of all, I like to believe that the same God I pray to everyday is not the same one that Osama bin Laden says he kills for. Where were you when Daniel Pearl died? Snapshot. Freeze Frame.I was sitting in a computer lab at the University of Arizona when I read the news on the internet. I recall having a speck of dust in my eye at the time. I wonder if Osama bin Laden has any compassion for the wife and young son of Daniel Pearl? I remember hoping the revelation was a mistake. The tape of his death wasn�t real, he would show up alive and well. Somehow. I find compassion always hurts the most when you pair with hope. In giving compassion to the ones who suffer a part of us suffers as well. Daniel Pearl reminds me of Zachary Ramsay. I never told anybody this before, but I use to pray every night that Zachary Ramsay would be found alive and unharmed. Years after his disappearance I still thought of him all the time. I had hope for that little boy when I didn�t even have much for myself. Then over a year and a half ago, I came home from college for the holidays and I read that his killer had been found. Closure, but not the kind we all hope for. I may have been the last Montanan to know; the last who yet held hope in happy endings. Specks of dust came in spades on that day. Sometimes I still pray for him. Last month, I prayed Samantha Runnion�s killer would be apprehended. The next day a suspect was brought into custody and I read in a different article on the same page that two Mexicans were found dead in the trunk of a car on a Tucson side street. Victims of the cruel desert heat and a driver who snuck them over the border then left them to die when they only aspired to attain a better life. Compassion is a cycle that never ends and never ends and never ends. The compassionate require the commitment to endure unrelenting suffering, considering misery doesn�t end either. So much for welcoming the tired, poor and huddled masses. Where was Erich Maria Remarque when we dropped bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Pause. Introspection on human nature. No secret that war brings out the idiotic essence in humanity. We are at our most heinous when ignorance towards our fellow man is at the forefront. When cultural relations, tolerance and freedom are imperiled, atrocities are committed. Civil wars in Vietnam, Somalia, the former Yugoslavia, throughout history and all over the globe verify that point irrefutably. Even in our present time this holds true. Convicted Bosnian war criminal Dusko Tadic once forced a man to emasculate another. With his teeth. The man who did the biting eventually grew mad while the act proved fatal to the other victim. What is inside a man when he becomes ossified towards wickedness? The evil that lurks in the hearts of men both humbles and shames me. The virtue of hate within. Rewind. Stop. Play. My last week in Seattle was spent editing my demo reel, preparing to graduate and packing my belongings. In mid-September 2001, during one of the most tumultuous epochs in our nation�s history, I befriended someone who had the face of an enemy. The guy who worked in the office where I shipped some of my packages home from was an Arabian immigrant named Hassan. I never really asked him much, just made conversation to pass the time, but mention originally being from Saudi Arabia and that he has lived in the U.S. for thirty years. I wondered if he had been getting death threats. I wondered if the mosque in Seattle some fool tried to burn down was the one he attended, if he attended at all. Was he scared? Was it any of my business to ask? I never asked, but instead just stood making small talk while my packages were being sent home and his people were being scrutinized in the land that he now called home. A Pikuni, farm hick from Cut Bank, Mt and an Arab straight from the Middle East. I wish we had a couple cups of Arabic coffee and a few pieces of frybread . Last month I read that a terrorist cell possibly operating out of Seattle, with ties to a potential Al-Qaeda training camp at a ranch in Oregon. Two men from a radical London Mosque had reportedly cased the ranch out in 1999, presumably for use as a training camp. Living at the ranch, at the time, was Semi Osman a former cleric at a now defunct Seattle Mosque, who has since been arrested for an immigration violation in conjunction with supporting international terrorism. My first inclination was one of hope that Hassan was in no way involved, although nothing would surprise me anymore. My second was to beware of Anthrax in my belongings back home some of which are still in the boxes. Anthrax and Small Pox. Biological weapons are hazardous to a paranoid Indian�s health. Where were you when Ted Kaczynksi went to trial? Rewind again. Rewind back to a winter amid several meaningless years that are all the same to me. Play. Ted Kaczynski. Actually, I was sitting in the Unabomber�s former jail cell in Helena when my fellow Montanan went to trial for mailing bombs that killed and maimed innocent people for nearly eighteen years. Yes, I was in the very cell. Call it one of the youthful indiscretions I had before I left my hometown; my reservation, grew up and changed who I was and who I am. Before I discovered I could get attention from writing stories about small rural towns and Indian reservation. Before I found writing about the crazy lost souls I call my friends would be something other people would enjoy reading. A time before anybody ever called me an apple behind my back. When I was just as lost as everybody else, if not more so, because of what I was wasting. I had to embarrass myself by calling my Uncle Mike to come bail me out. Just when I thought I couldn�t get any lower I went to court handcuffed to a child molester, who told me I had cute feet. At least, I found out I hadn�t lost my sex appeal. Size six shoes. Tiny. Well-shaped. I guess they are pretty adorable. Fast forward to Seattle and September 11, 2001. After the alarm clock. After the Grim Reaper-like bird flew at me. By late afternoon, I arrived to the conclusion the world was going to stay intact for a little while longer anyway. I had been listening to the radio all day, my roommate moved out a few months earlier and I was without that addictive little box we call television. The news I heard the whole day was all terror. All destruction. All death. All fear. I looked outside and saw what a beautiful day it was. The sun was even shining. The world didn�t look like it was ending. I walked outside and bought myself a special edition of the Seattle Times. The cover showed a still image of a plane crashing into one of the towers. This was when I first viewed one of the single most graphic and horrific images in our nation�s history. I looked up to observed people walking, talking, and laughing. This all appeared eerie, somewhat strained, but yet it didn�t look like death was coming to hunt us all down. I continued walking along the street waiting for the depths of hell to open up and suck all of mankind in before closing shut. When this didn�t happen I walked into a Japanese restaurant to have the breakfast, lunch and dinner that I hadn�t eaten yet that day. I ate one of the best bowls of chicken teriyaki I�ve ever had. My elbow even ceased to hurt for awhile. The United States of America had survived and was beginning to start the healing process. Stand up. Rub dirt on wound. Walk it off. Repeat as desired. It works every time. Where were you in 2002? Fast forward to August 2002. Visual image of yourself reading this essay right now. Now, almost a year after the fact, we continue to be embroiled in a war against terrorism. From firefighters, policeman and now to soldiers, we send our bravest to fight a cowardly, almost invisible enemy. A gutless, faceless foe-which stands little chance of defeating the most powerful nation in the history of the planet. But at what cost? Just how many billions will the war on terrorism cost the already fragile economy? How many lives? How many children? How many dreams? All sides stand to lose, because nobody truly wins when blood and death are the hallmarks of victory. When the compassionate hope and the suffering cry. When all that exists is the thought of enduring. My innocent idealist nature was buried long ago. My perception of society as Utopia vanished like desert dust in the wind. I know this because I see, hear, read and observe it every day. Snapshot. Freeze Frame of me ensconced over my notebook. Feverishly writing out my original rough draft of this essay, basking in air conditioning, thinking about laying out by the apartment complex pool and getting a tan, but knowing I�ll just end up finishing the novel I�m reading as an alternative. This is where I should be writing something profound, poignant and intelligent for all of my readers out there. Instead I�m wondering in thought to the novel; a Lakota Indian named Charging Elk, some guy named Welch and a pot of way too strong coffee that will bring me to the brink of head butting my apartment walls. I may be the only guy on earth who gets rabidly pumped up before he takes time out to read a book. None of this gives me perspicacious insight on a final, thought provoking statement. I want this to read like the world is both cinema and specks of dust playing in your eyes. I could use some help from a sweet, little, pop tart waxing philosophic right now. �Without suffering there would be no compassion�. Rings over and over and over in my mind. Compassion. Something like that might actually make the world a better place. I wonder if the world has an elbow, because, in that case, I suggest wearing a sling for the rest of eternity. That is unless it has a cute pair of feet for it to get by on. Fade Out. Please be kind. Rewind. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Bill Wetzel is a writer and filmmaker. He is a coauthor of the recently released novel �The Acorn Gathering: Writers Uniting Against Cancer�. http://acorngathering.gq.nu/ The writer would like to acknowledge that no pop stars, giant penguins or pairs of feet were hurt during the writing of this essay. He can be reached at Wetzelbill@y... |
