Sabbath Fringe by Mass Graven Image

The day the country died was in September. As the anniversary approaches, we look again at the bigger picture: who benefits and who suffers? The media lies, and the world of the Middle East was set aflame. And all for what? For whom? And what was with that art installation that was being erected in the months directly before the events of that early September morning?
Why did three skyscrapers fall when only two were struck by airplanes? Why was the rubble swiftly removed onto barges and shipped overseas to China? How did the most sophisticated steel structures in the world turn to dust and collapse into their own footprints, like so many old casinos and hotels, implosions nationally syndicated for all of America to witness as spectacles of excitement during the transformation of Las Vegas’ skyline, making way for more illustrious and diminutive monoliths to the aphrodisiac of populace and greed? This was no prime-time Channel 7 Saturday special; this was rush-hour murder and televised mega-death in ritual extravagance and Technicolor SAP.
Many youngsters born after this new-era America can only imagine what the U.S. was like before the greatest tragedy to hit the continental United States in all its history, what the world became, and what it is becoming in this Neo-Orwellian, philo-Semitic, post-structural, Communist, crestfallen empire.
I was only a boy of 15 at the break of day on September Eleventh, Two Thousand and One. I had always embraced the D.I.Y. ethic of the punk-rocker: make your own patches, take a Sharpie, and draw out the lettering or insignias that drew the attention of other kids. It was extensively innocent and is now fondly looked back upon, as those introspective topics reflect back at you, aged and grained.
At that particular time, I was really into the Subhumans, one of the greats of that era, with real, melodically performed, thoughtful workups that were like nectar to the teenage angst of honeybees under stress—bees that had been kicked too often, too many times, a long way.
The night before that fateful day, the particular album I was going to lay Sharpie marker to plain white tee-shirt read, “Subhumans: The Day the Country Died.” As I got on the bus that following morning, I remember the radio being on; the bus driver would play music for his charter of kids on the way to the public school grounds.
A report came in stating, “A small passenger plane has collided with the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan, believed to be a Cessna or other small fixed-wing aircraft.” As I came into my homeroom class, a television had been rolled in—the large CRT on a tall rolling cart, ratchet-strapped to it by one band that went round it like a lasso. Black smoke was pouring from this monolithic icon of architecture, an image imprinted on the psyche of America’s Big Apple, New York City. Hardly anything could have prepared us for what we would witness that day as we sat and watched, all day long, the tragedies unfold.
Many people leaped to their deaths that day—many hundreds. We sat in disbelief as, one after the other, the towers turned to dust and cascaded asunder into a wall of cancerous dust, deadly drifts of toxic Formica and asbestos, mushrooming out and leaving ghostly figures seeking respite or some semblance of order.
To me, the fact that the night prior I had written out these prophetic words of such manifest acumen and futurism was surreal, as the wave broke its crest and the age of the Kali-Yuga fully began that very morning. The decline of Western civilization, the beautiful downgrade—all the cataclysmic, dystopian, authoritarian manifestations became tangible and reticent as the fleeting memory of the country I grew up in became a lost meaning in some old, missing memory. That was truly the day the country died.
Many things diverged from the position I had found comfort in: my childhood ignorance, my innocence of complacent actions, and my reckless abandon and naivety. By the time we were in Afghanistan, I was getting my first taste of heroin, not the special, maritime-imported Taliban #4 casket compact, but the Southern regional asphalt, puddle-grease, vinegar-pollutant import.
By the following summer, I was on my way to a rehabilitation facility for YAP (Young Addicted Persons), suffering under the weight of divorced familial arbitration and longing for a soul-significant meaning to the umbilical detachment of latchkey acrimony and alimony amidst my own dissolving imagination and ability to freely access and stand inside myself. Increasingly, the only worlds that brought the suspension of linear time had become the dreaming space in-between my waking nights and sleeping days, as every summer always became.
By the time we invaded Iraq, my first sweetheart had been through the wringer as much as I had, fighting a dark demon in a life-or-death battle. I saw my first kiss and my first love laying in a coffin that year. She was yellowish, and she looked as if she had fallen off to sleep, but the truth was that she had fallen out. And for years, I’ve been falling in.
GAB.AI

HEAVY WORLD VIEWS

Oppressive weight of the eternal dilemma of humanity's insolvent indifference.
All works are on a continuum and are subject and liable to change altering and re-selection at any given time.
Experimental art, sound, concept, theory & prejudice.

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