I wouldn't trust him with a lost child at a department store

The preceding statement is from the psychiatrist that Social Security had me see so they could evaluate my pending SSI case. Yeah, I've got problems- both mentally and physically- but I was shocked to see such a statement from a supposed professional who only saw me for about twenty minutes. I'll say this, you'd better fuckin' HOPE that I find your lost child before someone really insane finds them. I also freely admitted that I do drink alcohol occasionally, i.e: about three or four times a month. That admission led him to conclude rhat I am an alcoholic. It sure doesn't always pay to be honest.

Sometimes it sucks to be right.

It would seem that I knew instinctively that, well that this was either a terribe act of neglect on the part of Bush & Co. or this was one terrible act orchestrated by the Bush administration. Conspiracy theory? Not to me. To me it's just, CONSPIRACY. Whatever the case, one thing is clear, and that is that the President is the servent of the people, or, he's supposed to be, yet he clearly doesn't care what we the people think. As of today his approval rating is in the low to mid thirty percentile. Does he give a shit what we the people think about....anything?

Intensity is the mother of intention.

Eventually of course, the towers fell (along with building seven) and now "the whole world has changed" theoretically, and I've got this piece of music with no lyrics. This was one of those times for me where it seemed like I was plucking the words out of the air or something.

The image of the great collapse made me think of a bible verse from Revelation:

Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen.

I always remembered that phrase because it always struck me a bit odd. I mean, why say it twice? "is fallen, is fallen?" Now I'm not a big bible guy, but it's pretty trippy when you look at 9/11 through the lens of that verse. Two buildings, two symbols of capitalist excess, two, "is fallens." Simple.

Here are the words to the song as I remember them from that place you remember things from:

BABYLON

Manhattan city towers standin' side by side;

A monument of human power, wealth, and pride-

In my opinion they just build them way too high;

but who the hell am I to say?

Yeah, who the hell am I?

Something suicidal came out of the sky;

a ball of fire as captured by the camera's eye-

and as we lapsed into the "who what where and why,"

two hundred-twenty floors collapsed in double time,

Babylon the great has really fallen, fallen-

Babylon the great has truly fallen, fallen-

Meanwhile not too far away in Washington,

the dogs of war were seated in their Pentagon;

and if they're the ones who claim to know what's goin' on,

well who the hell are "they" momma?

Somethin' homicidal came out of the sky;

A flaming arrow struck the nation in the side.

When trouble makers find themselves in troubled times,

who can really say, momma?

Who can really say?

Babylon the great has finally fallen, fallen-

Babylon the great has fuckin' fallen, fallen-

It's better to be wide awake than paranoid;

It's better to be paranoid than be destroyed-

but you'd better know the methods evil men employ;

You'd better look around brother-

Better look around.

Somethin' suicidal came out of the blue;

Somethin' in my bible's finally comin' true;

Nostradamus made the New York Book Review,

but no one had a clue really,

no one had a clue.

Babylon the great-blah blah blah......

What the hell happened to America?

That's what they're going to be asking in the not too distant future, although most people of average intelligence are asking already. Yeah , okay. Sure. This is still "America" but clearly something fundemental has changed. Ever since 9/11 I haven't been feeling all that free. Granted, G.W.Bush made it known, everything has changed since that terrible event in 2001- though what I have come to belive he actually meant was something more like- WE ARE ABOUT TO CHANGE EVERYTHING- SO GET WITH THE (NEW) PROGRAM- AND SHUT THE HELL UP!- or something like that.

Everyone should remember where they were when the towers fell, even if they were totally wasted, which, I may have been, I'm not sure. I know I was in L.A. house-sitting for a friend, I had been up all night working on a piece of music that I just sort of pulled out of the air. It didn't have any lyrics on the morning of 9/11, but it was cool, and I was tired, so I went to lie down with the radio on KPFK (Check out www.kpfk.org for all the news they don't give you on FOX NEWS) Exhausted I almost fell asleep instantly- almost.

On the radio they were talking about how a plane had hit one of the Trade Towers. I nearly missed the whole thing completely due to my sleep deprived state. For a moment I was pretty certain that I was just dreaming...I mean, if a plane had really hit one of the towers, then it'd be on like every television station in the country, right?

So I got up, went back out to the living room, flipped on the tube, and- HOLY CRAP!! I had got up in time to see the second plane hit, at which point it was clear to anyone with a central nervous system that this was definitely not an accident. Being the liberal-lefty that I am the first thing I said was, "What did we do?" I don't know exactly what I meant by that, but hey, I hadn't slept for like twenty-four hours, and I sure as shit wasn't going to sleep now.

Like nearly everyone else, I just stared in horror for a period of time. Then I popped a tape into the VCR, because...well, because.

At some point I know I called my wife, who was about a hundred miles away. Honestly, I don't know what we said to each other, but really, what does one say?

I thought about my buddy whose house I was watching. He was somwhere in the Anza-Borrego wilderness camping. "He doesn't even know this has happened" I thought. Imagine that.