2002-03-13 - 3:02 p.m.
I love the Internet. I fucking love it. Do you know why I fucking love the Internet?
Besides the obvious reasons. (And get your minds out the gutter, anyway--I hardly have any porn at all on my computer. No, really. I know people who need a dozen JAZ disks to store theirs.)
A few weeks ago (thanks to the bankruptcy of a certain high-speed Internet service provider which shall remain nameless) my e-mail address changed and so I had to send out one of those "please update your address books now so your mail doesn�t bounce back as undeliverable and you start to feel like I�ve abandoned you even though it�s not my fault" messages to about half the people I know, including a good number I haven�t heard from in quite a while. One of them--my best friend in college--had upped and changed her address since I last wrote to her, and so my e-mail bounced back as undeliverable. Making her feel like she�d abandoned me even though it wasn�t her fault and it wouldn�t have happened anyway if I hadn�t been such a piss-poor correspondent in the first place, of course.
One of my other college friends did write me back, however, and the ensuing flurry of back-and-forth e-mails produced (among other things) the new address for the first friend. So I wrote to her again. And started another exchange of e-mail. And so on and so on.
The last time I heard from B she was living in Arizona and--like all sane residents of Arizona--hating it.
Nowadays she�s living in the New York area, and loving it.
New York. Where I�m going in about a month.
B is fabulous on a global scale and I�m utterly and completely stoked that I�m going to be seeing her again. Over the years she and I have had one of those friendships where we can always pick up right where we left off no matter how long it�s been and how much our lives have changed since we last saw each other. She�s a survivor, in the true meaning of the word--not the whiny modern-day it�s-all-about-me sense in which "survivor" and "victim" are used interchangeably--and we both share a certain living-well-is-the-best-revenge philosophy. The Five Boroughs had better be stockpiling beer for the occasion, that�s all I�m saying.
***
Of course, in the last six months everyone who finds out I�m planning a trip to New York just has to ask, "So, are you gonna visit Ground Zero?"
In a word--or two--fuck, no. If I see it at all it�ll be from the top of the Empire State Building--that�s as close a view as I intend to get of it. I was living in Northridge at the time of the 1994 earthquake, just a few blocks from an apartment complex that collapsed killing several dozen people. After six months I was ready to napalm all the lookee-loos showing up around the clock to gawk at the wreckage and I�m sure the circus at the World Trade Center site is about a million times worse. Plus, you have to wait in line for hours and pay for the privilege of seeing it. I�d rather spend that money buying an off-duty firefighter a drink, or something.
If it were up to me, once the WTC debris is cleared I�d put up a small, tasteful memorial (alas, I don�t think "small" and "tasteful" are anywhere in the post-9/11 lexicon so odds are good that whatever future monument gets built there will be huge and tacky), then I�d construct a new WTC even taller. And then move my headquarters into the penthouse. If Dr. Evil can have the Space Needle, then I can have this.
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