Ever wonder how an event a 1000 miles away can change a life?
Here's how 9-11 changed mine.
I had been married for a few months when my wife and I decided to settle down in Austin. We were working dead-end, nothing jobs. I was working early mornings in a stock room for Target, and she worked nights for the IRS. We had dropped out of college because we couldn't think of a reason to stay.
I had that day off, so I slept in until she got home. We made breakfast, and I put her to bed. We had just watched a movie on DVD the night before. Fight Club. I considered watching it again but decided not to because a cartoon I had wanted to see would be on that morning.
I turned on the TV.
Instead of the cartoon I wanted to watch every channel had the same thing- one of the towers of the World Trade Center had been hit by a plane. I sat there, enraptured by the devastation, watching the smoke pour out of the one tower.
I decided to wake her up when the second plan hit the other tower.
We sat there and watched it all unfold, unable to look away. She screamed when the first tower fell. I cried. We knew the world was changing. We knew things would be bad for a long time to come. Her brother was stationed in Korea. My sister lived north of the towers. A few months later she would leave New York for LA, moving across the entire country in the aftermath.
As we laid down that night, unable to really sleep, I couldn't stop thinking about the movie from the night before- Fight Club. A specific scene kept playing out in my head- the convenience store scene. Tyler had a gun to the clerks head, and asked him if he were to die right now would he have anything to say for his life.
The clerk said no.
I knew that was my answer too. If I had been in those towers, if I had died when they collapsed I wouldn't have anything to say for my life either. It wasn't enough.
I had fancied myself a writer. But I hadn't ever produced anything. The most I had ever done was in high school, writing character biographies and two page stories for my RPG group. We played a lot of Dungeons and Dragons.
But all that that was going to change. A month later I enrolled at a University near us. By January I was back in school full time while working a full time job. A semester later my wife joined me at school.
By chance, or maybe fate, the school was one of the tops for its fiction writing program (in the top 5 for the nation), and I threw myself into it. By the time I graduated I was a leader in my classes. While I spent the next years working equally pointless jobs, I kept writing. Getting rejections, but I kept at it. If you've read my other blog entries, you know how long I kept at it.
If I were going to die tomorrow, I would have something to say about my life. I could leave something behind that people would remember.
That still drives me to this day. Before 9-11 I had been the poster-boy for slackers. My biggest ambition was to wake up to watch a cartoon. Now? now I own my own house. I have a son. Now I want to write stories that touch people's hearts, that make them stay up way past their bed times to read just one more page. I want to leave something behind when I die that makes people say, "He really got it. He really understood things."
And that's how an event a 1000 miles away can change a life.
