What's a couple days compared to ten years?

So, it's Sunday morning on September 4th, 2011 and we're a couple days away from the ten year anniversary of the 2nd greatest tragedy on American soil I've ever witnessed in my life.

And while everybody, EVERYWHERE in the media this week will be posting their lengthy, drawn out stories on the event and it's affect on America in the wake of it, I'm just tellin MY story.

My then 21 month old daughter woke me up from a DEEP, post smang coma. The sun was bright on my eyes...the scent of bacon and french toast was in the air...and my baby momma was NOT laying next to me. Oh, this morning was gonna be GOOD. At least for my belly. I heard something that sounded like a high pitched jibberish directly in front of me and an echoed news cast that was far too loud off in the distance...it was surreal in sound and effect. When my vision finally cleared I saw my daughter in front of me repeating words that I'll never forget for the rest of my days....

"Daddy wake up...THE PLANE HIT THE BIG BUILDING"

I'm like, HUH + WTF + What the hell kinda cartoons yo momma got you sittin in front of?!?! all rolled up into one. But...as I stumbled down the hallway into the living room and saw my daughter's mom on the couch with a look I can only describe as "ghostly fearful", I then turned my head to the t.v. and saw the vision every American to this day has burned and tattooed into our memories. Smoke and flames bellowing from the North Tower.

I was over taken by confusion and am pretty sure I called the pilot a "Hell destined dumbfuck" and I then asked what was for breakfast. See, I had no idea the gravity of it all bcuz I really thought this was a FLUKE...that somehow some idiot pilot that maybe was still drunk from last night's tryst simply flew into the WTC by ACCIDENT.

Fuck, was I ever wrong.

I can still in my head hear Peter Jennings' voice describing the scene in New York as more and more reports came in...and THEN IT HAPPENED.

Ya know, sometimes certain things occur and time simply ceases to exist. CORRECTION: It doesn't cease to exist, more so it ceases to MATTER. Your conscious and subconscious blur together and coexist simultaneously and the world around you paradoxically gets a helluva lot BIGGER and smaller at the same time. You freeze...and while you MAY actually be moving, you FEEL frozen. The volume of the world goes down a couple notches and you're simply...there by default.

I saw on television the event that proved that this could NOT have been a fluke. What happened at the North tower was in no way imaginable a chance occurrence.

United Airlines Flight 175 crashed into the South Tower of the World Trade Center.

A SECOND plane? The expression didn't really "exist" yet, but that was essentially when SHIT. GOT. REAL.

My young daughter had no idea what she was seeing. But her mother and I knew. And we were, as many Americans were that day, for the first time in many of our lives on american soil...SCARED. We had been unwillingly and unknowingly thrust into a new era of awareness as Americans and as people in this scared new world. A world of terrorism, chaos, distrust of the government, conspiracy theory and a myriad of other post 9/11 sociological/psychological reverberations.

Oddly enough, as I sat there...glued to the couch; my eyes helplessly and frighteningly fixated on the television, the rest of the day is kind of a blur. It's hazy memories that surround the major events....the initial crashes and seeing what I then thought were bits of debris falling from the towers, only to find later on that the debris was in fact PEOPLE falling/leaping to their deaths because they were incapable of being saved or saving themselves. And then came the horrifying chill of the towers falling.

Unless you are seriously a psychopath there's no way you can NOT have been effected by 9/11. In some way that day changed...YOU. The way you view life in general, perhaps how you feel about our government and military....or your connection with God. But after that day, none of us were the same.

We changed as a society in our entirety.

I have no idea what the REAL intent of the hijackers or the shadowy figures that masterminded the attacks were. We'll never TRULY know for certain. But they most certainly at the core of it all...accomplished something.

They changed THE WORLD....and every single person in it.

And THAT has to make whatever their specific goals were, seem epically less paramount.