Sometimes, you decide you’re going to write something momentous, and the weight of that hypothetical essay becomes too heavy for you to move your fingers on the keyboard. My wife is going to give birth to our first child essentially any day now, and that is a Big Deal, and before the child is born I decided I was going to say all there is to say on the subject. Turns out that’s a little bit daunting.

In the meantime, though, I cannot overlook the date on the calendar. For a couple of reasons, ranging from my desire to use Good to eradicate Bad to my warped sense of humor, it would be sort of awesome if my daughter were born on 9/11. (I originally wanted my wedding day to be on 9/11 for similar reasons, but at the time it didn’t seem feasible. It would have been totally feasible, as it turned out, but everyone always makes you think wedding planning is on par with planning a moon landing so I chickened out.) Leaving all that aside, however, I was looking at my thoughts from this time last year and found my thoughts today were essentially the same. With that in mind, I thought it might be nice to do a reprint of myself. Enjoy (?)

a moment of silence, but only a moment

Happy Apocalyptic Death Cult Christmas, everybody!

How were your family’s celebrations this year? Did you get a chance to catch any of the parades and decorating ceremonies on TV today, or any of the many specials and movies that they rerun at this time each year? This year, CNN.com started running a 24-hour marathon of themed programming, which is sure to become a holiday tradition for the whole family to enjoy in years to come. Signs of the season were everywhere today; all the cubicles at work were decorated, and many local radio stations stopped their regular programming to bring us horrible, stomach-turning sounds of the horrible, stomach-turning season over and over and over again.

Not commercial-free, mind you. What, are you kidding me? Everybody’s listening to talk radio on Apocalyptic Death Cult Christmas; you’re never going to find a better time to sell American Equity Mortgage. This year– and this is absolutely true– I heard an excerpt of a Tony Blair speech about the way They Hate Our Freedom played over the Battle Hymn of the Republic, followed immediately by a chirpy pitch for Dobbs Tire and Auto Centers. So presumably they were the sponsors of that hour of audio of people on fire.

I don’t know how your family chooses to celebrate, but my wife and I like to get some cremated remains from the funeral home and just roll and roll and roll around in them.

“Never forget”? “Remember 9/11″? Is that supposed to be a fucking joke? What else have you been thinking about for the last five years? I don’t remember the last time I went a day without hearing about a plane being urgently diverted by air marshalls, but 9/11, yeah, that I remember pretty okay. Thanks anyway for rerunning the footage of people jumping to their deaths. Could you trot out some more of the victims’ kids? Thanks again. My memory’s gotten fuzzy in the last couple seconds. September the which now?

I was going to say “I haven’t had a decent night’s sleep since 2001,” but that’s not true. What is true is that I have not had a pleasant awakening since 2001, starting with that Tuesday five years ago. At the time, I was working with friends at a company with no dress code and a 9:00 a.m. start time, so I usually got out of bed at about 8:46. That day, before my alarm clock had a chance to get to squawking at me, my friend Chris (who worked at a real job) woke me with a message on my machine telling me that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. At the time of his call, it was just the one plane; I can’t remember now whether his message made it sound like a small craft way off course or the first wave of a coordinated attack. I only know that it was armageddon on the radio by the time I got into my car and headed to work. It must not have sounded intentional when Chris called me, because I don’t think I even bothered to turn on the TV before heading out the door.

I remember that everyone showed up for work, and that nobody did any. I remember somebody produced a flippin’ 17″ television from Mary Poppins’ satchel or somewhere and set it up by my boss’ office. I remember my boss asking me if anyone was getting anything done at about 11:00; I thought he’d be mad if I said no, so I assured him that, oh yes, they were, nothing is more important when WWIII starts than daily tasks at a bullshit internet company. Had I been honest with him and said “no,” his plan was to let everyone go home. As a manager, this is probably only one of the many ways I inadvertently screwed over the people under me during my tenure.

I remember my friend Nicole, a school counselor at the time, calling me from Texas to ask what was going on. The kids were being kept away from all the information, so she was in the dark too. I wish I’d had more to tell her, but as you may remember the things you were hearing that day were about 85% crap. A plane had been shot down headed for the White House. A car bomb had gone off outside the State Department. They just found a big pocket of survivors in the rubble. They found a stewardesses’ bound, severed hands on a nearby rooftop. To this day, there are a couple of those that I never verified or debunked. For all I know, they were true.

I remember– and this is one I never hear anybody else say in this era– that the World Trade Center meant absolutely less than nothing to me on September 10th. In the aftermath of the attacks I would hear about everything it had symbolized to us as Americans in its heyday, but I had never given it a moment’s thought, and probably neither had you. I also didn’t know anyone who’d said a kind word about Rudy Guliani; at the time, he was mostly known around these parts for letting his mistress shack up with him in Gracie Mansion. A few months earlier, Virginia and some other states had complained about the excessive amount of New York trash that was being exported to their landfills; Rudy’s response, as I recall, was “New York is the cultural center of this nation; you are lucky to get our garbage.”

I remember driving home from work that night past abandoned streets and businesses. The city’s most upscale mall had been closed in case more attacks were on the way; even that day, the idea that United 93 was headed for Frontenac Plaza struck me as somewhat unlikely, but only because I knew bin Laden had never tried to shop there.

I remember that gasoline shot up to $1.25 the next day for no reason, and that the price never, ever went down again. Given that none of our pipelines or refineries had been attacked and we were still on good terms with the Arab nations that provided us oil, I thought that $1.25 a gallon was a scam and an outrage.

I remember that everybody was nice to one another for a good long while, and though there were reports of isolated foreigners chuckling at our fate the nations of the world rose in solidarity with us. We were all Americans for a while. We really had a chance to do some excellent things.

I remember driving to work on September 12th and, in the midst of the end of the world, seeing a lone woman in front of Planned Parenthood with a poster of a fetus. Though sympathetic to her cause, at the time I wanted nothing so badly as to murder her with the bumper of my car. “Really, lady? Right now??” I decided that, in such desperate times, it became all the more important to cling to the vestiges of our normal lives. Me, I defrosted my refrigerator for something like four days. Maybe if my new fridge didn’t self-defrost, I wouldn’t be here right now.

Ever since, my alarm clock has gone off with the sound of the day’s terrible, frightening news of the people who hate us and our plans to torture them till they like us again. This morning, already a Monday with a sky that looked like death on Halloween, I awoke to the sound of the president saying, “…must never forget that there are still people out there every day that want to kill us.” When did we forget? Will anyone ever get the chance to forget?