Chapter 310: Coffee

I would be remiss to begin the blog on this day, September 11, without sharing a few thoughts on what exactly it all means to me. 9 years ago today the way that we live our lives in this country was changed indefinitely and it is insane to think about how much that day still affects the way that we live our lives all these years later. It is kind of like this country was riding high, enjoying being up on it’s special pedestal and somebody suddenly pulled the rug out from under us. I still remember that day quite well. I was living in an apartment with my sister in Banning, CA. I had just turned 18 less than 2 months before this and was in that phase of wanting to go out to clubs and stuff all the time because I finally could. I was also working my first really serious job at the Casino Morongo. Tuesday and Wednesday were my days off at that time, so on that particular morning I didn’t have to wake up and be ready for work at 7am and I believe my sister, my best friend Don and I had all gone out the night before, because we were all at the apartment asleep. My sister was scheduled to work a little later that day and we all woke up to a message on the answering machine from my Aunt, who was also my sister’s boss at the time, saying that she didn’t need to come in to work that day because the country was in a state of emergency. We were all really out of it and like, “What the fuck does that mean?” She called my Aunt back and we turned on the TV to figure out what the heck was going on and that is when we discovered what had happened. I don’t remember many of the details of that day, except that I was really upset that everything was closed in our area because that was the day that Mariah Carey’s soundtrack to “Glitter” came out and I couldn’t find anywhere to buy it. Needless to say, I didn’t quite understand the gravity of what had happened. The following night, we all went out to this club in Riverside, CA, where we used to hang out frequently at the time. It was karaoke night on Wednesdays and we were all really into karaoke at the time, as well. So, we went to this place and there was a really odd mood in the place. The DJ that night tried to stop a few times to say a few words about the whole thing and the people in the crowd that night were all drunk and pissed off when he did. Eventually, he was taking a moment to be serious and somebody shouted at him to shut up and he snapped and shut the place down. He just told everybody to get out but after he did he came up to us, and these two other guys that were there, and told us to stick around. We weren’t sure exactly what was going on but we stayed. He disappeared into the building, which was closed and all the festivities were taking place on the outside patio area, and came back out a little while later after the place cleared out and spent a little while talking with us and the other guys about the fact that he had a few friends and family members who were in the towers that day and hadn’t been found and such. One of the other guys told us that he was in the military and was likely to be deployed soon because of this. It really made the whole thing sink in a lot more. It was kind of a crazy night. After we left the club, we never saw that DJ again. I assume that he was fired for that night, which sucked. After we left, though, we went to a Jack In The Box around the corner from the club and happened to notice that the car in front of us in the drive-through was the two guys from the club, and they signaled for us to pull into a spot in the parking lot, and we all sat down on the ground in the parking lot of this Jack In The Box and ate together, exchanged numbers and such, and we wound up being really close with these guys for a long time. For a long time, that was my main memory of 9/11 and I kind of looked back on it fondly. I mean, of course, I didn’t look at the events of the day as a positive but I kind of associated the whole thing with meeting these friends.

The whole thing didn’t really sink in to me until a few years later, in 2006, when I discovered an Off-Broadway musical by Michael John LaChiusa called “See What I Wanna See.” This is still one of the most incredible musical works I have ever experienced. Unfortunately, “See What I Wanna See,” never really took off and didn’t make its way to Broadway or anything. I think a large part of the reason is that it was such a complex and really heavy story. It is actually three separate stories in one show, each based on one of the short stories of Ryunosuke Akutagawa, (whose story was also the basis for the film “Rashomon.”) The first of these three stories is only used as the introduction to each act of the show. Set in medieval Japan, this is the story of two lovers, Kesa and Morito, who have each for their own reasons come together this night with the intentions of killing the other. Kesa is a married woman and her husband has discovered her affair so she feels that killing Morito will cleanse her of her guilt over the affair and prove her dedication to her husband. Morito, on the other hand, feels that by killing Kesa he will restore his honor for having had this affair with another man’s wife. At the end of each part of their story, you are left not knowing which was successful in killing the other. The second story is set in 1951 New York City, and it involves the police trying to solve a murder that took place in Central Park late one night. A man and his wife were out to a late film one night and, by the end of the night, he was found dead in Central Park and she was found frazzled and, presumably, raped. The story is told and retold by several different people, including the murder suspect, the wife, a random passerby who did not want to get involved and a medium who claims to have been contacted by the ghost of the murder victim. Each of these people have extremely different versions of the story, ranging from the murder suspect’s tale of becoming obsessed with the wife and luring the husband with promises of a foolproof money-making scheme to the wife’s version of the story, in which she was raped by the murder suspect, blacked out and woke to her husband blaming her for the entire situation and attempting to kill her, so she killed him in self-defense. The husband, by way of a medium, also makes a really compelling argument that his wife turned on him and was not raped but willingly made love to the thief and chose to run away with him, and he killed himself because of it. The actual truth of this story is never actually revealed, either. The part that really made me understand the events of 9/11, though, was the third story. The third story is set in New York City in 2002, a year or so after the terrorist attacks of September 11. This is the story of a priest who has lost his faith in God after not being able to make any sense of what happened on 9/11 or comfort his congregation about the whole thing. So, with his faith in tatters, he comes up with an idea – he begins posting fliers all over the city stating that three weeks later, from the pond in Central Park, a miracle will occur. He states that Christ himself will appear there on that day at 1pm sharp. In the process of posting up his fliers and such he meets several different people who have fallen from great heights in life and are desperately in need of some hope. On the day of the event, he finds that hundreds of people have gathered in the area to see what has gone one. Several of the people he had met come to him and thank him for giving them hope again. At the last minute he has a change of heart and attempts to tell the people that it was a hoax and that nothing was going to happen but they stay there watching. Then, at precisely 1pm, The sky goes black, a harsh wind picks up, lightning flashes, mist hangs in the air, the earth trembles and a tornado hits the lake. Everyone flees to get away from the debris and the priest looks back at the pond and he sees Christ rising up. He goes to all of the other people in the area but finds that nobody else saw it and they are actually all really angry with him for getting their hopes up. The story ends with the priest returning to his work at a church but still questioning what any of it actually means.

There is one song featured in this section of the story that really sums it all up for me. The song is called “Coffee,” and it is told by one of the people that the priest meets in the process of spreading the word about his great hoax. It is a woman named DeAnna, who was an actress on the verge of her big break in Los Angeles. She had just finished shooting a coffee commercial and was certain that this would be the thing to shoot her into superstardom. After shooting this commercial, she and her boyfriend, who was an actor on a soap opera, decided to celebrate by getting incredibly fucked up on booze and cocaine and going out driving through the hills. In their inebriated state, they were not paying attention as they drove and their car wound up being tossed from the side of a mountain. Her boyfriend died and she was left severely injured and scarred from the whole thing. This whole thing made a lot of news and her coffee commercial wound up being pulled because of it and her big break was suddenly ruined and her acting career ended. She returned to New York after this and struggled with a cocaine addiction ever since. She tells this story in the song and eventually gets to a point in the song where she tells the priest, “Yeah, I could use a little help. I could use a little hope. I could use a little something that has worth, that illuminates the point of my being on this earth. I look around the earth and I see – I don’t need an agent. I don’t need a job. I don’t need the coke or booze. I could kick them if I choose… but I could use a little miracle.” In a lot of ways, I feel like that is where America, as a country, is at. We understand the issues that we have and we know that we need to change them but we need SOMETHING. We need a miracle. I don’t know if that’s exactly what it is at this point but that is kind of how I feel about it right now.

“See What I Wanna See” is really an incredible story and, like I said, really managed to make me see what exactly the attacks on 9/11 really did to this country. It took the hope away from people in this country for a very long time. It is still questionable whether or not hope has genuinely been restored. I’m sure it has, on an individual level, for many people but for the American people as a whole, I’m not so sure. There’s been widespread bouts of reckless behavior, creating the financial crisis we have been going through for the past few years. It seems like the country as a whole has been going through the steps of grieving, and this financial crisis was brought on by the “denial” period. According to the Kubler-Ross model, there are five stages of grief – denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. This country definitely had a denial period, in which the general public became increasingly obsessed with all things wealth and began living outside of their means. We also definitely had an anger period, the largest result of which was the war that we are still in the midst of, or the widespread bashing of the Bush administration, (although, that was well-deserved.) Bargaining, in my opinion, took place in the time leading up to the election of Barack Obama when everybody put so much stock in their hope and belief that he could come in and magically wipe away all of the terrible things that have been taking place in this country as a result of 9/11. That leaves us where we are now – depression. Depression is described as overwhelming feelings of hopeflessness, bitterness, frustration, self-pity, etc. As awful as it is, it definitely seems like that is the place that the American public is at right now. I guess all that really leaves is acceptance. I really hope, for everybody’s sake, that it isn’t long before we reach the final stage – acceptance. Acceptance can basically be summed up as finding the good that can come out of the pain of loss, finding comfort and healing, etc. I really have my fingers crossed for that to come soon. We’ll see, I suppose.

In any sense, I had honestly just intended to share a few small thoughts on the topic and it somehow wound up being the topic of the entire blog post. That’s okay. I didn’t really have an eventful day, anyway. I spent a good portion of the day singing in my bedroom. One thing I do have to mention about that, though, is the fact that I have come to the realization that my voice is not as bad as I thought it was before. I can still sing just as well as I could before – I just wasn’t entirely aware of the limitations of my voice before. I can still do just as much as I did before but I have realized that I couldn’t do as much before as I thought I could. It makes me feel a whole world better about my musical aspirations and the talents that I do have. I also spent a little while experimenting with some of the new products I received from Stila yesterday, and created a really gorgeous look using all of the same products I used for the look I did on Rachel last night, which was featured in last night’s video blog. I didn’t do the same look I did on her but I used all of the same products. I used nothing but Stila products, even for foundation. I decided to give another shot to the Illuminating Tinted Moisturizer I had picked up from them and not used since the first time I tried it and felt like I looked too shiny. It was good that I experimented with this, too, because I got a call from Rachel a little while later wanting to go out, so I already had a full face of makeup on and just had to get dressed and do minor touch-ups. This evening we had initially planned to go out and do the whole Starbucks thing again, like we did last weekend, but somewhere in the process I got to text messaging with April and Whitney and we wound up going and having a couple of drinks with them and Devin and their friend Johnny, and then hung out at The Dark Side, the comic book shop, with them, as well as Nate, and played a few random games and such. It was a pretty fun night and it was good seeing everybody again. It had been a long time, so I was happy for that. I have also made plans for a little get-together with them all and Rachel next Friday, so that should be fun. For now, though, it is nearly 3am and I should probably get to bed. Goodnight.