Speaking of maniacal assholes blowing up buildings, go read this account of the Oklahoma City bombing.
A couple of details I find particularly striking:
"I was busy at 9:02 am when we heard it. Or more accurately, we felt it. A jarring "thud ... thump" that rattled the frame and glass of our building. It felt like someone dropped a heavy load that bounced once on the roof of the building, jarring all of us inside.[... ]
He spoke of the heavy smoke that filled the air, people running frantically, not knowing where to go, and the debris cloud that swarmed over downtown, filled with what seemed like thousands of sheets of paper."
I was three blocks away from the World Trade Center, and I, too, experienced these things: the thick columns of paper billowing from the towers before they fell; the physical "thump" when the first tower came down, which I once described as "someone knocking over a dozen full bookshelves all at once in the attic of of a small house, only I was in a 60 - story building at the time"; and, of course, the cloud of debris, thick and flowing through the canyon streets of downtown Manhattan like a 500 - foot high flash flood.
When the Murrah building was bombed, I was working at a copy shop in Princeton, fresh from heartbreak in Mexico and rehearsing for a summer theater production of Much Ado About Nothing. I remember thinking that it would actually be better if the bombers turned out to be the Middle Easterners in the van, because the prospect of homegrown terrorists seemed much more troubling.
Stupid me.
How very strange it is to look back now at my younger self, oblivious to the future and the terrible experience I would eventually share with those in Oklahoma City that day.
[Via Mr. Sensing.]
