2) It was reported that the attacks were supposedly to take place August 22. Terrifyingly, this was the day after Jacob flew home, but should have consoled me that his flight to London should have been fine.

3) As a political person with my eyes open in this sordid political climate, I am well versed in the techniques (i.e. “terror alerts”) our government uses to divert our attention from realities it cannot change (In a race many were calling a sign of things to come for the midterm elections, Joe Lieberman, a so-called Democrat who loves Bush so much he actually once kissed him, had just lost the Democratic senate primary to an upstart progressive named Ned Lamont.). I should have been smarter than to fall apart over this. But I say that now, with a week’s perspective and the fresh knowledge that the attacks were not as immanent as we were originally told. At the time all I could think of was my love, and the absolute necessity that our lives together be allowed to run their natural course.

Thursday AM:

I call Jacob, wake him up, my breath coming fast. He is fine and eager to get back to sleep. He seems to think that the knowledge that he is safe will set me free from what is about to happen, but I’m too shaken.

I sit at the computer.

Interlude: Technology

One should not be allowed unfettered access to a computer during the early stages of a nervous breakdown.

The first thing one will do is obsessively read all she can about said terror plot.  Because the story is new, there will be a lot to read, and most of it will later be confirmed as crap.

After that, she will think for a moment about calling a friend to talk everything out, but will not do this. There are three possible reasons for this: 1) she doesn’t want to bother anyone, 2) if she emails all her friends she can bother all them at once, and 3) she feels she might cry if she has to talk, but can certainly type her heart out.

The act of actually writing – in her pale blue lined journal with her favorite pen with brown ink – would calm her down, but she does not particularly want to be calmed down. She is at the stage of the breakdown in which unsupervised access to the internet is particularly dangerous: it is the stage in which she needs to empty the contents of her heart onto the sidewalk and jump around on it for a while before she can begin to feel better. 20 years ago she might have written a friend a real letter, then, in a few hours when

Of course, this is just the sad excuse I give myself for wasting any time at all on MySpace. In reality my MySpace page is a useless, self-aggrandizing waste of time. Like everyone else, I just want to impress my friends and browsers with my undeniable awesomeness, and my profile has been carefully selected to project my hippest qualities. In the “who I’d like to meet” section, I’ve written: johnnie walker blue (subtext: I party hard), farmers (subtext: I’m down to earth. Although I am a cook, so maybe that one isn’t so bad – I really do want to meet farmers), postpostmodernists (subtext: I’m smarter than you),

darkly witty people with an NYC jaded Jewish sensibility who get my own darkly witty NYC jaded Jewish sensibilities (subtext: you’re not cool enough for me).

In sum, MySpace and the internet in general is hideous, brings out everyone’s worst qualities, and I must get off the MySpace/internet crack pipe.

i officially give up.

if you need me, i will be drinking whisky and reading martha stewart living and waiting for the end of oil when the roving bands of wal-mart shoppers who, angry after ransacking my house and finding only kitchy 1970s craft books and vintage typewriters (nothing useful like a TV or doritos), decide to BBQ my meager vegan body because there is no other meat to be found. since that day is bound to roll around any minute, do not fear i will get bored - i have a large back catalog of MSL to keep me occupied, dreaming of the fitted sheets i will never get to perfectly fold.  

when i wake up each morning only to read headlines that quite often make me so queasy i need to close my eyes and take several deep breaths before i can get up to eat breakfast, when each molecule in my body still remembers standing too far downtown one sunny september morning not enough years ago and watching people jump to their deaths before the buildings they were standing in collapsed, and, most of all, when i wake up to a phone call from a friend informing me that planes going to the exact same location at the exact same time as the plane my love (my love, my lover of 9 years, my best friend in the world, my fellow old soul, my anchor to the world of mental health) is on have been targeted to be blown up into little tiny pieces

Thursday midday:

I sit in the bed with my knees up to my chin.

I ride my bike into town on the quiet, neatly maintained bike path my inefficient shitass little pacifist lefty town has created. As I ride, I keep repeating out loud that famous Mario Savio quote:

There comes a time when the operation of the machine makes you so sick at heart that you can’t take part, you can’t even tacitly take part, and you’re gut to put your bodies upon the wheels and the gears, on all the apparatus, and you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.

My mind naturally wanders from this quote to my personal Darkest Place. My personal Darkest Place has a name: Rachel Corrie. She put her body literally upon the wheels of the machine. She was crushed to death in 2003 as she tried to block an Israeli bulldozer from demolishing a home in a Palestinian refugee camp. The driver of the bulldozer ran over her, then backed up over her with the blade down. She was about my age, just another white American liberal young woman. I know I should be just as upset at the thousands of innocent Palestinians and Israelis that are killed, but the fact remains that I feel more upset

about Rachel because I feel I know, and in fact am, a person like her. She is of course an inspiration to me, but she is also a bit of a rebuke. I should be in the Gaza Strip, I should be in Lebanon, what right do I have to be feeling so upset about needless killing as I ride my bike on the picturesque bike path in my picturesque, affluent East coast little town?

The truth is that needless killing all around the world hurts my life not at all. This thought stops my bike. I am at Sojourner Truth Park, a tiny park with a view of a river where I often take a picnic lunch. I walk to the water and think about a bulldozer twice running over the body of a young woman, about my age, who went to the Gaza Strip because she knew she had to put her body on the wheels of the machine.

I hold myself very still and look around to make sure no one is near. I think I am going to throw up (bones and a skull crunching under the blade of a bulldozer, bones and a skull, blood and more blood) but I stop myself just in time. I take deep breaths and do not cry.

I know I am in my Darkest Place and my sweetheart, the one I always hold onto when I feel myself spiraling down, is not here to hold my hand.