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Note | Sep 11 2002

At the risk of revealing what a quasi-intellectual dickhead I am, I couldn’t care less about 9/11. It’s unspeakably tragic that three thousand people died, but this world has no dearth of unspeakable tragedies. Why should this particular tragedy matter so? In my more cynical moments, I think it’s because the victims were Americans, the visuals were spectacular, and the action was televised live.

I don’t mean to insult those who grieve, nor offend those who lost loved ones. There is enough suffering in this world for everyone to have a turn on the wheel. Several turns, in fact.

More than anything, I long for perspective. There are things I don’t understand, can’t grasp, have trouble taking in. I know, in much the same way I know that water is made of two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen, that we are rapidly ravaging the planet while simultaneously starving half the world’s population and burying the rest in an avalanche of junk.

Meanwhile I write about my housing woes and my fickle heart. Previous to this, I worked on a series of pieces, which I intend to return to, about various jobs I’ve had.

Something doesn’t compute.

Last week, on the day I moved, I stood in the bathroom of my now former apartment and looked out the window at the big tree out there. Several balloons had once been stuck in that tree: first two, then somehow three, then two again, then one. Now there were none. Suddenly, and this was new, the final string was gone. Three floors down, in the yard, I noticed the makeshift ladder I had once used to climb into our yard from the neighbor’s roof. I had locked myself out that day, and one of my neighbors, a man I’d never met before, had loaned me this flimsy ladder-like object—two long two-by-fours held together with three skinny cross pieces—so that I could scale the wall that separates our buildings and climb down into my yard. From there I planned to take the fire escape onto my roof, enter my building through the hatch up there, and simply stroll into my apartment, the lock of which, it can now be revealed, I never locked.

Everything went as planned until I got onto the roof and opened the hatch. Looking down I found myself peering into someone’s apartment. A retractable ladder, partly unfolded now, hung into the space below. Where was I? I looked around and realized that I was standing on the wrong roof; mine was one over. This roof had a hatch just like mine, only the hatch opened not into the hall, like mine, but someone’s apartment.

I tried to pull up the ladder, but couldn’t manage it; it was built to be pushed into place from beneath. Leaving the hatch open, I went down the hatch of my own building, got a pen and piece of paper from my apartment, and returned to the roof. On the paper I wrote: “Sorry to open your hatch. I’m your neighbor in 281 and got confused. I tried to pull up the ladder, but couldn’t swing it. No harm meant.” I dropped the note into the apartment and closed the hatch.

Standing in the bathroom, I remembered these things—the guy who helped me, the climb down into my yard, discovering the wrong hatch, watching the note I’d written drift into my neighbor’s living room…

It’s something that happened, and I remembered it.

I honestly don’t know what my point is.