Radio Silence

I don't normally talk about what I remember from that day or the weeks following. When the anniversary comes around, I think about it but I don't normally participate in the active remembering that usually comes with that day. This time, it feels different. Maybe it is because it is the same weekday as when it actually happened but it has brought back a lot of memories from that time.

I had some time to kill in my car last night because I had to drive for an hour or so by myself and since I was tired and wanted to make sure I stayed awake, I listened to a radio program on my XM that I haven't been listening to in a while. It is Opie and Anthony and they are irreverant and rude and make fun of everyone and everything and they can usually only be handled in small doses or you really start to corrupt your brain. Anyways, so they live in New York and they have been on the radio for a long time and they were playing some clips of their shows from the weeks following 9/11. They were playing tribute songs that other radio stations were playing and then making fun of the self-importance of the people that wrote the songs and how they weren't really trying to honor the people and the country but really just hoping that their song would become popular and they would be famous. So they were playing these songs and they were all really quite awful and I was trying to remember why the songs didn't sound familiar to me. I couldn't recall hearing them play on the radio. And then I remembered why. Starting that morning when I heard the news of the attacks, I couldn't bring myself to listen to the radio when I was in the car driving. I would listen to NPR occasionally but the mostly I would drive in silence. There was something that felt so wrong about be-bopping down the road when this horrible event had occurred. It was about a month before I started listening to music again while I drove.

So there's my obligatory post about 9/11.