For reasons I can’t fully explain, I occasionally find myself lost in one of my 9.11 phases.
This entails YouTubing “9/11” and “Towers” and watching the nightmare all over again. It entails digging beneath my bed for the scrapbook I kept at the time; reading through my 2001 diary (yes, I keep a diary) and thinking, thinking, thinking about the lowest period of my life.
If there is one thing that makes me feel oddly, well, good, it is this: HIJACKERS SURPRISED TO FIND SELVES IN HELL. It’s the lead article from the following week’s Onion—a piece that had me crying tears of laughter … and still does. It perfectly expresses the time period; the mood; the feelings of New York—and does so utilizing the brilliant tool of humor.
This is my favorite passage:
“I was told that these Americans were enemies of the one true religion, and that Heaven would be my reward for my noble sacrifice,” said Alomari, moments before his jaw was sheared away by faceless homunculi. “But now I am forced to suckle from the 16 poisoned leathern teats of Gophahmet, Whore of Betrayal, until I burst from an unwholesome engorgement of curdled bile. This must be some sort of terrible mistake.”
Exacerbating the terrorists’ tortures, which include being hollowed out and used as prophylactics by thorn-cocked Gulbuth The Rampant, is the fact that they will be forced to endure such suffering in sight of the Paradise they were expecting.
I don’t know who, exactly, wrote the piece. But the man/woman is brilliant.
