Astonished Head:

Just another day in line at the Neuronal Soup Kitchen.

This morning I took a different route from the ferry dock to my office, crossing over the West Side Highway on the new pedestrian overpass at the east side of Ground Zero. Once on the other side of the highway I walked past the only remaining bit of aboveground structure from the WTC complex: a scraped and truncated section of a concrete stairway, leading nowhere. I tried to figure out where the stairs would have been, and if I had ever used them. But I couldn't imagine it, not really...they were in the general area of the old Borders bookstore, but they could have been for service use, hidden away behind the retail facade, tread only by maintenance workers.

I also passed by the entrance to the new PATH station on Broadway, which opened recently. When I lived in Jersey City, I took the PATH from Exchange Place to World Trade, and rode the towering escalator from the station, seven stories underground, to the mall concourse. It was one of the longest escalators I've ever seen...I always wanted to hop over the rubber handrail and slide down the smooth metal between the up and down escalators, but some stern engineer somewhere had decreed the placement of round discs of metal along the slide at precise, testicle-crushing intervals. So I never tried it, and now no one else will, either.

I paused for a moment before the surface entrance to the new station, sheltered by its swooping gull-wing roof, and looked at the stairways leading down into the station...down into the pit.

Nope, I thought. I'm not going down there.

I was a bit surprised by that, although I suppose, I shouldn't be. Ever since September, I've had creeping flashes of bafflement, pointed bursts of anger, all accompanied by the low-level gut-hum of anxiety that, it seems, I will have for as long as I am anywhere near this island. Bastards.

Nope. Not going down there. I remember when "down there" was filled with a million tons of burning steel and concrete, and with thousands of people rendered into tons of flesh. No thanks.

Some days, I really hate here.

Other days, I just dislike it.

And, sometimes, I miss my old apartment in Astoria, and think about getting a pied � terre for the two of us, since so many of our friends are still in the city or close to it. Maybe in Battery Park, where the rents are still low...then I remember why the rents are low, and why I left, which brings up the problem of still being here.

Then, I think of another option: hey! I could just relax. Two years is a long time to be on edge. I do believe I'm getting fed up with it. Enough, kidney-borne adrenals! Enough, stress-producing glands! Enough, unbalanced neurons! Enough, enough, enough! I'm tired of this.

I used to be more fancy free, a little light-loafered fellow was I...or, maybe that was just the drugs of my youth, masking the depressive mania that seems to have been my lot for quite awhile, now. Who knows? I don't, and perhaps that's the problem...a problem of self-definition, I think, and--dare I abdicate responsibility, here--just when I might have been on the verge of breaking the repressive chemical habits of my childhood due to simple aging and maturity, along comes another external event to wallop me upside the brain, filling me with trauma-induced physiological echoes that crested and harmonized with those of my childhood that were just starting to fade. My body and mind are used to this sort of stress; I grew up bathed in it...not actual disaster, mind you, but what's the difference between the catastrophes of a child and those of an adult? What we can imagine becomes our worst fear, and a child's world isn't composed of terrorists and skyscrapers and falling bodies, but of parents and broken toys and punishment.

But there comes a point when something has to give, and by God it's not going to be me. I may have been helpless before an advancing column of gypsum powder-filled smoke and a rain of steel, but that's not happening anymore, not here and now, and it doesn't make any more sense to be imprisoned by that experience than it does to be imprisoned by the helplessness of the Childe Head, who was not so much astonished as he was bewildered.

Onward! Upward! Or, failing that, sideways, over to the left a bit, then a hop up onto the ledge and through that window there, so we can get to the new staircase, which leads Upward! And Onward!!!