I wonder if there is a pill that helps you stop giving a damn. I seriously doubt it, but some days I’d gladly take it. I can get distracted for a little while by a new car, job, or a really cool pair of sneakers. These things never quit fill the hole. I’d imagine this is how people get hooked on something like heroin. It probably fills that gap…for a little while. Then you’re right back to square one and a drug addict. I’d imagine ditto for alcoholism or gambling. There’s always something that appears to give a little relief…at first.

I guess it is in quite moments like this when no one is around and I’m not distracted by work or the needs of others that I get reflective. The days of existential crisis are few and far between lately. I thought for a while they may have gone away all together. If only I’d get motivated, I could lose 30 lbs, write the great American novel and get proficient on the guitar. The excuses for bowing out on these feats are numerous, but the most glaring reason. The one reason that fire never gets lit. The tiny little nugget of truth is this…these are only distractions. I’ve gotten pretty far along all those roads and realized being a skinny published author who can play a mean guitar isn’t really going to change a whole lot.

I know I’m not alone on this, or else every therapist would go back to school and learn to fix car engines. Every pharmaceutical company would shut its doors. Every bar would sit abandoned. No songs would be written. Emo kids would join the debate team, fat people would stop eating sugar, George Carlin would cease to be funny, tobacco crops would dry up and irony would be stricken from the dictionary. If it helps you sleep better at night, then just go ahead and pretend this in my problem and not yours.

Every year around this time my thoughts turn to Jake Jagoda. He lived down the hall from me in college. It was a few months after the attack that I learned Jake had died on 9-11. I’m sure our paths would have probably never crossed again in this life, but I cannot help but wonder what might have become of Jake if he had the chance. He had just started his first “real” job.

I couldn’t begin to express how bad I feel about the fate of the Jagoda children. Some families just seem to carry a heavier burden than others. All three of the children died tragically in Jake’s family. You can read the article here.

Jake and I weren’t very close, but I knew him enough to see he was a happy guy who liked a good time. He was that low-key kid that would smile, wave and go about enjoying the simple things most of us overlook. I have no doubt he enjoyed every minute he spent on earth. I also don’t doubt I’ll think of him this time next year, and the year after that and the year after that…

I watched “United 93” over the weekend. I guess the saddest part about the film is that no matter how well made it was (and it was) and no matter how much you cared for and routed for the good guys you already knew how it would end. Secretly a little nugget of me hoped they bonked the hijackers on the head with some fire extinguishers and leveled the plane back out to land safely to a crowd of cheering people.

We all know that wasn’t the case. What is so sad is we’ll likely never know what exactly happened. In some ways the entire day will remain shrouded in mystery for our lifetime. Eyewitnesses are gone and the survivors of the attacks are few and far between (or in the case of United flight 93 they are a group of zero). In some ways I sleep better at night thinking the whole thing was a well orchestrated government conspiracy.

At the end of the day though, logic kicks in. Despite how many civil liberties we have freely given up and how much money has been funneled into the war machine as a result of that day I doubt our government had much to do with it. Sure they turned a blind eye to some things but as far as a well crafted conspiracy…I have my doubts. Ask anyone who has ever used a VA hospital or waited in line 45 minutes for stamps and they will tell you how efficiently the government works.

Without some deep rooted conspiracy involving FEMA, the Masons and an alien syndicate, we have to accept the painful truth that it just happened. Sure it wasn’t a random event, but a well thought out and plotted attack using our own personal freedoms against us. At the end of the day it means these innocent civilians died for no reason. The attacks certainly didn’t win the hearts of minds of Americans nor did they drive us to embrace Islam. It did turn some of our shaky allies to run to our side and support us…initially.

In the end that was squandered completely. Instead of using unprecedented world support and sympathy to track down the one guy we all feel comfortable blaming for the crappy state of our post 9-11 world, we used this “Boogey Man” to justify occupying Iraq. Now thousands of American farm kids and Iraqi civilians are walking around missing limbs or worse yet buried for all eternity. I guess this is the foreign policy one should expect from a president-elect who never bothered leaving his own country.