Then something goes BOOM!

I’m sitting back at ManCamp yesterday afternoon hoisting a few beers with my neighbor. It was a long day at work and I needed a little R&R, a little decompression. We’re just sitting back there talking shit and all of a sudden there’s this huge BOOM. My neighbor and I stare at each other for a second in stunned silence.

It turned out to be a truck’s engine catching fire and exploding. Not an everyday occurence but something that does happen from time to time.

But I learned, no, I confirmed something about myself just then. I am definitely not the same person I was before September 11, 2001. Call me paranoid but for that brief instant, for that tiny miniscule second I was scared.

I heard the explosion and I immediately thought Fuck. We are being attacked. I know, it seems silly now, but the truth of the matter is that I did think it. Even if my mind quickly dismissed the thought as some kind of mild hysteria, it happened. I thought it.

In that microsecond I pictured my wife driving home and finding me dead. I pictured my parents distraught at losing their son. Would they have been killed too?

I know, it sounds crazy. But I have to admit it. I can’t fool myself. I just don’t think so naively anymore. My little world, that microcosm of friends and family and work and home no longer feel so isolated from the reality of the rest of the world. I am not the same. My family is not the same. And while the world around me still revolves as if nothing had ever happened on 9/11 and beyond, I know it disguises itself in its familiar daily routine. Yet somewhere there is that little nagging voice that says Be careful man. Shit just aint the same anymore.