one of the many reasons I am feeling more agitated about this coming September 11th. I think it's obvious that there is a mixture of intense emotions surfacing as we get closer to this anniversary, and the cynical side of me is gearing up to protect myself from the onslaught of unwelcome and, in my mind anyway, offensive, things I'll be subjected to. Clearly the reactions to, and rememberances of that day will be as varied as the number of people it affected. I hope that I can find a way to tolerate, ignore, or otherwise deal with reasonably the ones that are very different than my own. Television will once again be a huge part of this, as even those of so close experienced so much of it thru that machine. But early this morning, as I woke up coughing and headachy, trying to find a tv show to pass the time, as I flipped thru, I saw what I thought could only be a joke. Larry King was doing a "Where were you on Sept 11th" sort of compilation clip show - and of course it was all celebrities. Last year it seemed it was weeks before we were subjected to the usual tv onslaught of "how to make this event more entertaining - let's find some celebrities" formula. So it should be no surprise that a year later, it will be part and parcel of the tv coverage. But it still bothers me; it in fact made me cry, flipping the channel away from Tom Cruise and Judge Judy. All that crap about how we are forever changed by that day. I know that we can't all be changed in the same way, but it did seem, for a while anyway, that we realized that the regular joe was important. That the range of workers, strangers to each other, that helped each other get out of that building, comforted each other inside that building, searched the city and put up posters together in the days and weeks after.... We seemed to have a renewed respect and admiration for firefighters and cops and even people like the manager of the subway station at WTC who knew when the first plane hit to evacuate immediately, saving tens of thousands of lives. This instinct, this gut reaction to not only save yourself, but to reach out to other humans was wonderful to relearn about each other. And in the days and weeks after, as we roamed about the city, often in a daze and lost in our own thoughts, that nod, even that faint smile that we dared share with complete strangers, it said more than "i know what your'e going thru" - it said, "I'm there for you, brother; I'm there for you."