Last night a couple frogs asked me to relate my experience on 9/11 so, here goes. I took the subway to my office on Broadway, literally 1/2 block away from the world trade center, to my design studio where I was designing games for clients like McDonald's, Toymax, Sony, the usual. If you ever worked in New York city advertising or design, it was an inside joke how everyone had Sony as a client. That morning I was designing something for this new start-up online digital magazine company, ironically, a company that still exists today, which is really rare.
Anyway, the building I worked in was originally built in 1870 or so (the building no longer exists, it was torn down, which is tragic because it was a beautiful old building, but it was constantly breaking and falling apart which is too bad) myself and another guy had the entire half of the west side of the top 12 floor as our design studio. We were really killing it, the dot.com boom had already collapsed, but we had struck out on our own and were doing pretty well.
I took the N/R subway line to work that day from my flat in Brooklyn. The trip took me under the water in the tunnels, and around through Manhattan into a subway station called Cortlandt Street, and you should see pictures of what the subway looked like afterwards. That subway station, over a century old, was the only station totally destroyed that morning. That Tuesday night was going to be the birthday party of a very good girlfriend of mine, I was going to head over to her and her boyfriend's place, he was a pretty up there mover in the New York literary world. I went into the World Trade Center to the Barnes & Noble and bought a book about something I thought she might like to give to her as a present that night.
My building had a tiny elevator stuffed into a former stairwell, like, you could only fit max three people in it, and I believe that that's where I was when the first plane hit. When I got to my desk I was not aware that the first plane had crashed into the building. Sitting at my desk and getting to work, I found it very strange that ambulances and fire engines and police cars were all on their way, like, ALL of them, it seemed, every single one of them on the planet. I went to my window and looked out but couldn't see anything. The WTC stretched all the way up into the sky, you could not see the top of it from my window, that's how close to the WTC my office was. Just up the street you could see Liberty Church, which later became Grand Central for all the posters and flowers and missing person flyers. But I noticed that usually all of the traffic down on Broadway below which was usually packed with yellow taxis was now packed with a bus and fire engines and police cars, so I went downstairs to try and figure out what is going on since it was also incredibly unusual. I left all my stuff at my desk thinking I would just head back up once I learned what the big emergency was. Boy, was I wrong. It turns out I wasn't going to see my desk again for another two or so weeks, and when I got back there, it would be only with the escort of an NYPD officer, this big hilarious black lady, and that my laptop, messenger bag, wallet, nice desk, everything would be covered in 2 inches of crazy neutral grey toxic dust.
When I got down to street level it was absolute chaos, the tension was palpable. People were either running or just standing there with their jaws open looking at the sky. At the front door of my building was a NYPD officer pushing people south and away from the building. The officer did not let me return it to the building. My wallet, my laptop was still up there. I got pushed south.
I ended up walking down to the Battery (an extension west and maybe south of Manhattan, basically where they dumped everything they dug up during building the WTC) near where the west side pedestrian highway starts. I was an avid rollerblader at the time (I used to be able to rollerblade down from 50th and 8th Avenue, Midtown, down through Manhattan and over the Brooklyn bridge and get to my flat at Prospect Park before my girlfriend could get there from the same office off the subway, LOL). The rumours were flying like crazy, people were freaking out. Our phones were only working intermittently and occasionally someone would say they heard that a plane had hit the Sears Tower in Chicago, that terrorists were storming the White House, or a plane had crashed into Congress. It was pretty wild. For the longest time most everyone just assumed that the plane crash had been a terrible, totally freak accident, that is, of course, until the second plan came in. I only saw it for maybe 5 seconds. A 767 just blazed right over my head and clipped the SE corner of the south tower. Everyone was screaming their heads off, people were passing out in fear, women were screaming or fainting. It was bizarre. I walked up the west side highway sidewalk and watched the north tower. It had a huge gaping wound. I stood there watching the towers burn. I could see the faces of people up above the impact point waving things, some of them hanging out of the building so precariously. I couldn't imagine what they were going through. As time went on and the smoke got stronger and sometimes the flames would appear and retreat from the windows, you would see people either accidentally lose their footing and fall or jump. It was crazy to be able to see the faces of the people falling.
For some reason my personality somehow seems to think that major events, total chaos, panic situations or whatever are more normal than normal life. Handling a crisis or figuring out out what to do in an extremely tense situation is often easier then just handling normal life because it's all rather obvious. Probably a lot of GAW is this way. The difficult things for personalities like ours I think is figuring out the subtle and often irrational dynamics, say, of a dinner party or someone's friends who are fighting or secretly don't like each other or whatever, that kind of thing is hard. But a major crisis like 9/11, I just felt totally calm.
When the first tower fell everyone was so shocked. The building was barely smoking, the fires were isolated to one area, and it fell quickly, it didn't tumble over a bit by bit as the fires ate this or that. It just was gone in 10 seconds. That's when a sense of numbness kicked in. It was absolutely crazy, totally bizarre. My brain didn't think it was a demolition or anything. I had never delved into any of the architects for 9/11 truth - level stuff, obviously, etc, I didn't understand how buildings were even constructed really. It didn't occur to me that I had witnessed the crime of the century.
My best friend Richard at that time worked at Citibank, and I was worried about what he was going through and whatever, so somehow I figured to walk on over and down by the Chinese buffet that he and I used to meet at all the time. On the way over there I passed by the second plane's landing gear. Police were wrapping the scene with yellow crime scene tape as I passed by. I'm an avid plane watcher, and it's absolutely bizarre even now to just think about seeing some landing gear ripped off from an airplane lying there in the street.
My friend Richard was there waiting outside at the buffet, lol, he had the same thought, he knew I'd think that, even tho we obviously never planned it. Amazing. I was relieved to have someone to spend the rest of the day with. The police were by then expanding the perimeter even further, on up towards City Hall. There, people were already springing into action, they had gotten lumber from somewhere and were nailing together stretchers that they we're hoping they could use to bring out the injured or dead which they expected to find once rescue parties started operating in ground zero. Obviously the stretchers weren't used. It's kind of crazy to think about now.
Since the Brooklyn bridge basically starts there and we lived in Brooklyn, we walked home over the Brooklyn bridge. It was a quick walk. There were several people covered in dust walking toward Brooklyn along with us. They were walking like zombies . One black lady looked totally white, she was so covered in dust. We went to the Brooklyn Battery where we watched the second building fall. We stood there at the battery for hours grabbing pieces of paper falling from the sky. Mostly law books, all of them singed around the edges, but the papers were totally readable. Very weird. Some pieces of paper had handwriting on them.
My friend and I walked home and we sat on deck chairs on my roof watching the dust drift south from Manhattan. I clearly and distinctly remember seeing the E4B doomsday 747 orbiting Manhattan for about 15-20 minutes (I believe it was shortly after the first building fell but before the second one did, but I'm not sure), and the sky filling with the occasional F-15 fighter jets.
My downstairs neighbour a few doors away, a Jamaican gentleman, was one of the 343 firefighters. He was an amateur astronomer. I visited the firefighter memorial in Colorado springs to see his name in the monument there. Very weird to see.
I never had nightmares per se but tons of really bizarre, strange dreams, almost like the energy was infected with everyone else's. For the next month everything was so strange. It was fall, it was starting to get cold, and the city continued to operate, but kind of on mental autopilot, as if everyone was just walking around in a numb haze. I was just numb as anyone. Even though I had worked at his journalist and had seen dead bodies at crime scenes, car crashes, what have you, that was the first time I had actually witnessed a major event as it happened, totally caught in the middle of it like everyone else. It was bizarre to have watched people fall to their deaths, and to have basically been standing there while 3,000 people died. I could have been easily one of them. About a month later, as southern Manhattan started to open up again, I remember my first hockey game I played at the rinks in Chelsea Piers. I remember the captain of my hockey team, and investment banker I think, sitting there explaining how he had a corner office on the 104th floor of the North tower. He would 100% have been dead that day had someone not accidentally rear-ended him on the Verrazano bridge on his way into work. He looked numb. The first plane hit the towers while he was in the parkade parking his car. Just bizarre to see his face as he was coming to grips with the fact that it was just absolutely 100% pure luck that he is alive that day.
Before I close, random aside, it totally surprised me that there wasn't a parachute that day. If I had an office on the 104th floor, I might have thought about sneaking a parachute into the bottom desk drawer. Myself and my friends used to go to this bar called the greatest bar on Earth at the top of the WTC and it was absolutely mind blowing how tall this building was. It just felt like there was no way that you could really depend on firefighters or other first responders if you had an office up there.
As with other of the really great comments here in this thread, 9/11 changed my life forever. In one day I totally lost my innocence. In one day I realized, holy cow, okay, it's clear there are things happening, forces at work in the world that I just don't understand. I felt embarrassed to be broad-sided like that. For years I lied to everyone that asked about where I was that day, saying something like I slept through my alarm, I decided to take the day off, I was far away from everything, but I just couldn't even think of a way to explain it to words what happened that day. It took me 10 years to tell my parents that I was trying to protect them from worrying about me by saying I was somewhere else.
Thank you for sharing this. We went to a funeral in Arlington for someone we lost at the Pentagon. The day was a blur, but I remember the funerals were one right after the other.
I am very emotional today. It has taken me many years to learn what an empath is- I am one. It feels like the "airwaves" are clogged with emotion and my body is an antennae. I don't know how accurate that is, but your description: "almost like the energy was affected with everyone elses's" makes srnse to me.
I am grateful for my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, who is always restoring my soul.
Wow. Yeah, all the stories are so gripping. It's so bizarre to suddenly be at funerals all the time, isn't it. Thank you for sharing.
If I'm an empath, I'm a terrible, seriously bad one. If I sense the emotions of people around me, I don't know that I do a real good job of processing it into anything useful. All I feel are a jumbled baths of images and unfamiliar emotions around me. It's like after 9/11 my antenna was completely wax for the next 3 months straight. My dreams were absolutely crazy off the charts, it's like I was receiving subconscious energy from other people and it was just all coming in a nonsensical stream.
It's only been maybe in the last 10 years that I've been able to get through 9/11 without seriously getting drunk off my ass. I remember a few occasions where 9/11 began as another sunny tuesday, and by 11:00 a.m. I had already hit the liquor store and bought a bottle of vodka, and it was gone by 5:00 p.m.. not good. I know how to process the death of a loved one, or a cat, or a car accident, something that happens locally in my life, but, it's really hard to mourn or process something that killed 3,000 strangers, you know? And radically changed the world towards tyranny?
I can't imagine having been in the city and witnessed what you witnessed... but yes, we were all feeling the grief of "what if that were our btother, mom, dad, sister...." The tyranny continues.
Windows on the World. I remember it well. I lost 12 associates who worked at General Radio up on 80 something floor.
My first hand view was of the Pentagon. I had just dropped my daughter off at pre-K 1 mile from the Pentagon. I got back home and my biz partner was at a NJ rest stop en route to NYC.
I turned on the TV in time to see the second ne hit. Then the Pentagon was hit.
I threw on my gear and jumped in my BMW and went screaming right back down Washington Blvd to go get my daughter. Drove right past the gaping and still on fire hole. No one I know saw a plane that day.
Except that asshole Malcolm Nance. I knew him. He’s a DS shill who still claims he was standing in the parking lot and watched the plane fly overhead.
Last night a couple frogs asked me to relate my experience on 9/11 so, here goes. I took the subway to my office on Broadway, literally 1/2 block away from the world trade center, to my design studio where I was designing games for clients like McDonald's, Toymax, Sony, the usual. If you ever worked in New York city advertising or design, it was an inside joke how everyone had Sony as a client. That morning I was designing something for this new start-up online digital magazine company, ironically, a company that still exists today, which is really rare.
Anyway, the building I worked in was originally built in 1870 or so (the building no longer exists, it was torn down, which is tragic because it was a beautiful old building, but it was constantly breaking and falling apart which is too bad) myself and another guy had the entire half of the west side of the top 12 floor as our design studio. We were really killing it, the dot.com boom had already collapsed, but we had struck out on our own and were doing pretty well.
I took the N/R subway line to work that day from my flat in Brooklyn. The trip took me under the water in the tunnels, and around through Manhattan into a subway station called Cortlandt Street, and you should see pictures of what the subway looked like afterwards. That subway station, over a century old, was the only station totally destroyed that morning. That Tuesday night was going to be the birthday party of a very good girlfriend of mine, I was going to head over to her and her boyfriend's place, he was a pretty up there mover in the New York literary world. I went into the World Trade Center to the Barnes & Noble and bought a book about something I thought she might like to give to her as a present that night.
My building had a tiny elevator stuffed into a former stairwell, like, you could only fit max three people in it, and I believe that that's where I was when the first plane hit. When I got to my desk I was not aware that the first plane had crashed into the building. Sitting at my desk and getting to work, I found it very strange that ambulances and fire engines and police cars were all on their way, like, ALL of them, it seemed, every single one of them on the planet. I went to my window and looked out but couldn't see anything. The WTC stretched all the way up into the sky, you could not see the top of it from my window, that's how close to the WTC my office was. Just up the street you could see Liberty Church, which later became Grand Central for all the posters and flowers and missing person flyers. But I noticed that usually all of the traffic down on Broadway below which was usually packed with yellow taxis was now packed with a bus and fire engines and police cars, so I went downstairs to try and figure out what is going on since it was also incredibly unusual. I left all my stuff at my desk thinking I would just head back up once I learned what the big emergency was. Boy, was I wrong. It turns out I wasn't going to see my desk again for another two or so weeks, and when I got back there, it would be only with the escort of an NYPD officer, this big hilarious black lady, and that my laptop, messenger bag, wallet, nice desk, everything would be covered in 2 inches of crazy neutral grey toxic dust.
When I got down to street level it was absolute chaos, the tension was palpable. People were either running or just standing there with their jaws open looking at the sky. At the front door of my building was a NYPD officer pushing people south and away from the building. The officer did not let me return it to the building. My wallet, my laptop was still up there. I got pushed south.
I ended up walking down to the Battery (an extension west and maybe south of Manhattan, basically where they dumped everything they dug up during building the WTC) near where the west side pedestrian highway starts. I was an avid rollerblader at the time (I used to be able to rollerblade down from 50th and 8th Avenue, Midtown, down through Manhattan and over the Brooklyn bridge and get to my flat at Prospect Park before my girlfriend could get there from the same office off the subway, LOL). The rumours were flying like crazy, people were freaking out. Our phones were only working intermittently and occasionally someone would say they heard that a plane had hit the Sears Tower in Chicago, that terrorists were storming the White House, or a plane had crashed into Congress. It was pretty wild. For the longest time most everyone just assumed that the plane crash had been a terrible, totally freak accident, that is, of course, until the second plan came in. I only saw it for maybe 5 seconds. A 767 just blazed right over my head and clipped the SE corner of the south tower. Everyone was screaming their heads off, people were passing out in fear, women were screaming or fainting. It was bizarre. I walked up the west side highway sidewalk and watched the north tower. It had a huge gaping wound. I stood there watching the towers burn. I could see the faces of people up above the impact point waving things, some of them hanging out of the building so precariously. I couldn't imagine what they were going through. As time went on and the smoke got stronger and sometimes the flames would appear and retreat from the windows, you would see people either accidentally lose their footing and fall or jump. It was crazy to be able to see the faces of the people falling.
For some reason my personality somehow seems to think that major events, total chaos, panic situations or whatever are more normal than normal life. Handling a crisis or figuring out out what to do in an extremely tense situation is often easier then just handling normal life because it's all rather obvious. Probably a lot of GAW is this way. The difficult things for personalities like ours I think is figuring out the subtle and often irrational dynamics, say, of a dinner party or someone's friends who are fighting or secretly don't like each other or whatever, that kind of thing is hard. But a major crisis like 9/11, I just felt totally calm.
When the first tower fell everyone was so shocked. The building was barely smoking, the fires were isolated to one area, and it fell quickly, it didn't tumble over a bit by bit as the fires ate this or that. It just was gone in 10 seconds. That's when a sense of numbness kicked in. It was absolutely crazy, totally bizarre. My brain didn't think it was a demolition or anything. I had never delved into any of the architects for 9/11 truth - level stuff, obviously, etc, I didn't understand how buildings were even constructed really. It didn't occur to me that I had witnessed the crime of the century.
My best friend Richard at that time worked at Citibank, and I was worried about what he was going through and whatever, so somehow I figured to walk on over and down by the Chinese buffet that he and I used to meet at all the time. On the way over there I passed by the second plane's landing gear. Police were wrapping the scene with yellow crime scene tape as I passed by. I'm an avid plane watcher, and it's absolutely bizarre even now to just think about seeing some landing gear ripped off from an airplane lying there in the street.
My friend Richard was there waiting outside at the buffet, lol, he had the same thought, he knew I'd think that, even tho we obviously never planned it. Amazing. I was relieved to have someone to spend the rest of the day with. The police were by then expanding the perimeter even further, on up towards City Hall. There, people were already springing into action, they had gotten lumber from somewhere and were nailing together stretchers that they we're hoping they could use to bring out the injured or dead which they expected to find once rescue parties started operating in ground zero. Obviously the stretchers weren't used. It's kind of crazy to think about now.
Since the Brooklyn bridge basically starts there and we lived in Brooklyn, we walked home over the Brooklyn bridge. It was a quick walk. There were several people covered in dust walking toward Brooklyn along with us. They were walking like zombies . One black lady looked totally white, she was so covered in dust. We went to the Brooklyn Battery where we watched the second building fall. We stood there at the battery for hours grabbing pieces of paper falling from the sky. Mostly law books, all of them singed around the edges, but the papers were totally readable. Very weird. Some pieces of paper had handwriting on them.
My friend and I walked home and we sat on deck chairs on my roof watching the dust drift south from Manhattan. I clearly and distinctly remember seeing the E4B doomsday 747 orbiting Manhattan for about 15-20 minutes (I believe it was shortly after the first building fell but before the second one did, but I'm not sure), and the sky filling with the occasional F-15 fighter jets.
My downstairs neighbour a few doors away, a Jamaican gentleman, was one of the 343 firefighters. He was an amateur astronomer. I visited the firefighter memorial in Colorado springs to see his name in the monument there. Very weird to see.
I never had nightmares per se but tons of really bizarre, strange dreams, almost like the energy was infected with everyone else's. For the next month everything was so strange. It was fall, it was starting to get cold, and the city continued to operate, but kind of on mental autopilot, as if everyone was just walking around in a numb haze. I was just numb as anyone. Even though I had worked at his journalist and had seen dead bodies at crime scenes, car crashes, what have you, that was the first time I had actually witnessed a major event as it happened, totally caught in the middle of it like everyone else. It was bizarre to have watched people fall to their deaths, and to have basically been standing there while 3,000 people died. I could have been easily one of them. About a month later, as southern Manhattan started to open up again, I remember my first hockey game I played at the rinks in Chelsea Piers. I remember the captain of my hockey team, and investment banker I think, sitting there explaining how he had a corner office on the 104th floor of the North tower. He would 100% have been dead that day had someone not accidentally rear-ended him on the Verrazano bridge on his way into work. He looked numb. The first plane hit the towers while he was in the parkade parking his car. Just bizarre to see his face as he was coming to grips with the fact that it was just absolutely 100% pure luck that he is alive that day.
Before I close, random aside, it totally surprised me that there wasn't a parachute that day. If I had an office on the 104th floor, I might have thought about sneaking a parachute into the bottom desk drawer. Myself and my friends used to go to this bar called the greatest bar on Earth at the top of the WTC and it was absolutely mind blowing how tall this building was. It just felt like there was no way that you could really depend on firefighters or other first responders if you had an office up there.
As with other of the really great comments here in this thread, 9/11 changed my life forever. In one day I totally lost my innocence. In one day I realized, holy cow, okay, it's clear there are things happening, forces at work in the world that I just don't understand. I felt embarrassed to be broad-sided like that. For years I lied to everyone that asked about where I was that day, saying something like I slept through my alarm, I decided to take the day off, I was far away from everything, but I just couldn't even think of a way to explain it to words what happened that day. It took me 10 years to tell my parents that I was trying to protect them from worrying about me by saying I was somewhere else.
Thank you for sharing this...I am sure these are not pleasant remembrances...this was tragic in SO many ways...
Thank you for sharing this. We went to a funeral in Arlington for someone we lost at the Pentagon. The day was a blur, but I remember the funerals were one right after the other.
I am very emotional today. It has taken me many years to learn what an empath is- I am one. It feels like the "airwaves" are clogged with emotion and my body is an antennae. I don't know how accurate that is, but your description: "almost like the energy was affected with everyone elses's" makes srnse to me.
I am grateful for my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, who is always restoring my soul.
Wow. Yeah, all the stories are so gripping. It's so bizarre to suddenly be at funerals all the time, isn't it. Thank you for sharing.
If I'm an empath, I'm a terrible, seriously bad one. If I sense the emotions of people around me, I don't know that I do a real good job of processing it into anything useful. All I feel are a jumbled baths of images and unfamiliar emotions around me. It's like after 9/11 my antenna was completely wax for the next 3 months straight. My dreams were absolutely crazy off the charts, it's like I was receiving subconscious energy from other people and it was just all coming in a nonsensical stream.
It's only been maybe in the last 10 years that I've been able to get through 9/11 without seriously getting drunk off my ass. I remember a few occasions where 9/11 began as another sunny tuesday, and by 11:00 a.m. I had already hit the liquor store and bought a bottle of vodka, and it was gone by 5:00 p.m.. not good. I know how to process the death of a loved one, or a cat, or a car accident, something that happens locally in my life, but, it's really hard to mourn or process something that killed 3,000 strangers, you know? And radically changed the world towards tyranny?
We're all connected. Some are more aware or sensitive than others. Maybe a part of the Great Awakening?
I can't imagine having been in the city and witnessed what you witnessed... but yes, we were all feeling the grief of "what if that were our btother, mom, dad, sister...." The tyranny continues.
I watched the 2nd plane on a small 17 inch tv on my office in NC with some coworkers.
Your words made me understand what it looked like and felt like from a personal perspective. Thank you for sharing.
Thanks for sharing, cats. .It must be mind-blowing to have witnessed the cabal attack on us first-hand . . . Godspeed fren.
WOW! Catsfive, it may be time to write a book!?!
Windows on the World. I remember it well. I lost 12 associates who worked at General Radio up on 80 something floor.
My first hand view was of the Pentagon. I had just dropped my daughter off at pre-K 1 mile from the Pentagon. I got back home and my biz partner was at a NJ rest stop en route to NYC. I turned on the TV in time to see the second ne hit. Then the Pentagon was hit.
I threw on my gear and jumped in my BMW and went screaming right back down Washington Blvd to go get my daughter. Drove right past the gaping and still on fire hole. No one I know saw a plane that day.
Except that asshole Malcolm Nance. I knew him. He’s a DS shill who still claims he was standing in the parking lot and watched the plane fly overhead.
Fuck that guy!
I suspect he's highly compromised. He's closely tied to Brennan.