Atomictumor

Nine years ago, when October was born at U.T. Hospital, things were really different. I hadn’t even begun to see this different life that I’m only now beginning to understand how to love and appreciate. You know, be thankful for.

The Missus called me from the obgyn’s office and said it’s TIME. It’s time, I thought, TIME. I’ve got to go!

Back then I had a champagne colored Toyota Cressida that the Missus’s step-father had sold me for $500. That was every penny of the money I got from an insurance settlement due to a fire that melted a Millenium Falcon, an AT,TT (one of the dinosaur looking walkers), an X-Wing and sundry action figures. $500 was good money for this very played with collection, let me tell you. That was some bolt of lightning that struck Mom & Dad’s storage shed. So here I go in the $500 Champagne bottle of Cressida straight out of the 4th and Gill neighborhood headed for the hospital and some kind of experience Obi Wan never talked about in Star Wars.

Evidently the Missus’s amniotic fluids were gone, so she had to deliver right then. I remember the nurses sent me out when the anesthesiologist came to numb her up. I went down and smoked a cigarette. When I came back up the Missus looked like she could shoot lasers out of her eyeballs. The epidural had only numbed half of her. I think she couldn’t feel her left leg, but the right was froggy as ever. I went and smoked another cigarette.

Obviously all went well. The Missus ate roast beef afterwards and eventually we drove home in the $500 Cressida. The biggest understatement of the year would be to say we weren’t prepared for the coming days. Our lives moved quicker than a Harry Potter action scene and maybe I’ll tell you about that some other day.

Right now all the kids are waking up and I want to wish a Happy Birthday to my October.

I love you, October.

Talk Like a Pirate Day is upon us, and as a lay Pastafarian, I’m preaching the message behind the holiday.

Yes, its true, we all like to dress up with our eyepatches and earrings, and talk about ‘booty’ on this special day, but lets all go back to the reason for the season:

Thats right, we’re saving the world.

For more information on our beliefs, the church has assembled this handy presentation.  Enjoy!

Five years later, I still hesitate to say that I’m not really somebody who gets extremely freaked out on the 9/11 thing, and as such, don’t really say much about it. Yes, it was a huge, horrible, traumatic loss of life, and yes, it lead to some damn heavy stuff in the country (and abroad), but life for me personally hasn’t changed much. More expensive, maybe.

So, while I’m babbling about something that I have a lot of unformed thoughts on, here we go. Lemme tell my story first, because this inevitably becomes one of those “what were you doing when…” kind of things.

I was at work on that morning. I worked as a desk monkey doing second tier tech support for a DSL company in Oak Ridge. I had been there since 6, doing essentially administrative work for the morning (making sure people weren’t slacking, which I’m gifted at, while hiding my own considerable slackatude), when they asked me to do a ‘tech talk’, which basically means theres too many people doing nothing. So, I rounded everybody up and took them outside to have a smoke while we talked about any questions they might have. I had quit smoking myself a month ago, so I was thinking of myself as pretty selfless.

Yep.

Walked back in to about 17 emails from various people about a crash. The wild speculation all over. The guy sitting across from me was talking to an irate customer in Atlanta, when the customer saw the TV, mumbled something about her daughter being in there, and hung up.

Weird day. Made weirder by the rumors going around, that the Capitol had blown up, that the White House has been hit, that nukes were involved, that the Pentagon got hit, that Oak Ridge was closing the gates. Of course, all the information we got was second or third hand, because we couldn’t get to any web pages to find out what was going on. The folks at home watching TV had a lot more info than the technologically advanced hub of a call center.

I’m the type that tries to find humor in stressful situations, and to that end I had a screenshot for the longest time of CNN’s webpage, huge header saying that United flight so and so crashed into the tower, right below a nice big banner ad for “Rock Bottom Savings on United flights, now through November!”. Unfortunately, I didn’t take that screenshot with me with I left that job a year or two later, or I’d stick it here.
Finally I started hearing reports that Oak Ridge schools had been closed, so I told my boss I had to get my kid and split.
The place closed for the day about an hour later, I heard, which was significant in that it, like Waffle House, never closed.

On my way out, I drove by Y-12, and saw two white SUVs parked in front of the closed gate, with what appeared to be the biggest damn guns I ever saw poking out of the tail end. Lots of mean looking guys, also with guns, walking around the jeeps. I kept driving. This is no place for a long haired armchair radical like they guy I was in 2001. This is a time for John Wayne! For strong jawed, sparkle eyed men to swoop us up like the children we were and explain that its all going to be OK, to show us the world still works like it did yesterday, that we’ll get up in the morning with no smoke in the sky, no national uncertainty and depression, no mysteries.

I digress.
Got to the preschool for the then-3 yr old MastaG, and found that his teachers were watching the news. By then, one of the towers had fallen. He still remembers the building with the smoke to this day, and he says he was the only kid in class that watched it, with an understanding of what had happened. While I wasn’t so sure then, I’m glad he was watching it now, but I’m not sure why. Maybe because he has a story.

Finally, we made it home. We took off to GAC’s folks house, because it just felt weird being the three of us in the face of something like this (four, if you count that she was a month pregnant with Pigpen). Got some Steak and Shake. Watched the sky, empty of planes, surreal. I recall hearing that the mean temperature dropped some 3 degrees because of that.

More speculation. Terrorists? From where? Bin Laden’s name came up quickly, both on the couch and on the news.

—

Five years later on a quest to free the Middle East, where did this get him? Wars in Afghanistan, Iraq. Escalation of violence in Palestine and Israel. Thousands and thousands of deaths. More militarization around the world. More western boots in the Middle East than ever.

Journalists, aid workers, children, taboo targets in previous wars, now in as much danger as soldiers, if not more. Any rules of combat, designed to maintain civilization in war zones, are out the window. Iraq run by thugs, death squads who’ll give a family hours to leave the neighborhood or die. More credence than ever given to Saudi Arabia and Pakistani ruling thugs, just because they’re not in our way. Maybe if we shake hands with one devil, we’ll be able to smite another.
I have a hard time thinking that he didn’t see this inevitability when he committed mass murder out of nowhere. Is he crazy? Is he one of these endtime wierdos, thinking that its his duty to bring on apocaplyse for the good of whatever silly diety? We have some of those on our soil, too, and they’re all pretty freaky.

Sun Tzu said “Know thy enemy and know thyself”, and thats something I’ve always subscribed to. I think that differentiates me in a lot of ways from some people, because I have a hard time sticking to the ‘patriot’, ‘with us or against us’ way of thought. Fact is, these people kill westerners (and Americans) because they hate us. They hate us because our foreign policy has given their leaders the opportunity to raise these people from crib to now in an atmosphere where America is evil, and is determined to take something from them. The only time most of these people have seen that stars and stripes was on the business end of a bomb in Libya, or Lebanon, or Iraq.

Nothing changed on 9/11 for them. These people wanted to kill us this much back in the 80s.  I remember digging into my ‘Weekly Reader’ back in the 4th grade and reading about Muammar al-Gaddafi saying something to the extent of “The rivers will run red with the blood of Americans”.

As a fourth grader, hearing the leader of a nation say something about my blood like that is an eye opener.

The only difference for us is that they slipped through the defenses on 9/11.
They’ll probably do it again. If not them, it’ll be another home grown terrorist. The means of easy mass murder is legion if a mind is twisted to that kind of thinking.

Anyway, as wierd as it is, I’m almost loathe to post this (partially because it doesn’t deal at all with what affected me personally the most about this, which is the budding start of fascism in American politics).

I don’t normally get into this kinda stuff on the ‘tumor, but today’s an appropriate day for it.

There’ve been lots of muttering for years now that Oak Ridge really needs something for the young adult crowd to do; nightlife, bars, clubs, something. Reading Eave’s review of 80 East really brings that to mind, because while I had a bit of hope for the place, it appears that its going to be catering to the same over 50, high dollar crowd that the rest of Oak Ridge’s independent shops and restaurants tend to cater to.

I was pondering this stuff while reading a Metro Pulse last night, and daydreaming of how cool it’d be to have some sort of hip-underground district for somebody in the 20s-30s to relax. Some of my favorite towns, like Asheville, or Guelph, Ontario, have this elusive something. You can walk around, stop for a burger in some mom and pop greasy spoon with metal signs all over the wall, and then take off for a beer in some bar with the drafts written on a chalkboard. After that, you head over to the local (independent) bookstore for a cup of coffee while you peruse the local history section.

Something I’ve found about these towns, invariably, is that these bookstores HAVE a local history section, and a good one. There’s a fierce pride in a city that has these undefinable parts of town, and its precisely for that reason, that you CAN’T define it. Chattanooga is starting to pick it up in the area on the north side of the Walker Street Bridge, where new parks and shops have started thriving. You see people walking around feeling that they are part of something bigger than they are, that they belong in a town that has a shared identity, and no matter what economic background, or where they’re from, if they live there, they’re part of the group. Almost a subconscious hive mentality.

Which is the type of mentality that’d help Oak Ridge a lot, and one that I don’t think they have.

Now, I’m not necessarily advocating head shops and baby slings to fix all of Oak Ridge’s ills. However, the town is culturally dead. Yes, it has an art museum. No, I haven’t been to it. Further, I’m aware that we have Jackson Square, which has ENORMOUS potential, but is hampered by the fact that there isn’t a place, other than Big Ed’s, to cool your heels, and that most of the shops there appear to be offering services (insurance, haircuts, law offices), which takes potential retail space away from making the joint a shopping haven.

Another part of Oak Ridge’s problem here is the fact that theres no consistency. If the art museum was within walking distance from Jackson Square, and the library, and Bissel Park, and the Time Out Deli, and Mr. K’s, we’d have that part of town I’m talking about. The center nucleus of businesses would grow, and the people heading over there to walk around, hang out, and give some identity to this faceless town would appear.

THATs when you’d have something to do.

Now, I’ve been spending all this time talking about the problems, but not offering much in the way of solutions. I fear that’s going to take a serious effort. Some could say that Arnsdorff’s town center might fix it, but thats depending on
a) The jackass ever getting it done, and
b) The place not having an artificial, plastic feel.

I think the appeal of these districts in other towns is in the fact that they’re using buildings that are 40-50 years old. Its going to be hard to duplicate that in a new construction environment. No, the new square is going to be something like Turkey Creek, at absolute best, and more than likely a glorified strip mall. I’m not holding out much hope for it.

No, theres not going to be a hero on a white horse come riding in to save Oak Ridge business, and in turn Oak Ridge entertainment. And I lump the two together, because an active town is an entertained town, and in the year 2006 what gets a person out of the house is somewhere to go, and walk, and windowshop. Its a place where you sit outside with a cup of coffee and watch something other than a parking lot, and turnpike traffic. Its shops where you’re recognized for being part of the town, and you feel rewarded for supporting it.

We need to build something ourselves out of Oak Ridge. We need to start by recognizing and promoting what we have. We need to consolidate what there is into a place where foot traffic can bring in people in. It needs to be in an existing part of town, to do homage to what has been there before.

Now, surely I’m not the first person to think of this before, and not the first person to look at Jackson Square as the obvious place for it.  So what happened?