Hello friends,

I am shocked to see that I haven’t been in touch since late June.

Shocked, but also not shocked. I don’t know if your experience resembles mine, but, for me, time has taken on some odd qualities this summer.

In the moment it feels like time is dragging.

Then, all of sudden, I’ll realize that a conversation that feels as though it happened just a week or two ago was actually a month back. Each minute of the day feels excruciating, and then again the weeks also seem to fly by.

I used to work on ships, and I can report that the dominant experience of the working mariner is that of wishing your voyage would end. (Going to sea is like going to prison, and all that…)

I remember developing the ability to enter into what I can only compare to a sort of fugue state, in which I disassociated from what the Buddhists might call my attachment to the idea of getting a port break. (Or maybe they wouldn’t. My knowledge of Buddhism is limited.)

I worked on the bridge, and my shipmates were always asking what I’d heard. Scorning them for their questions and gossip about when and where we might pull in, I just stared at the water and practiced not caring. The only problem was that, as much as this state helped the time pass, I found it difficult to do anything that required reflection or introspection, like keeping a diary or notes or even reading. The ease with which I can slip into a condition of wishing for large chunks of my life to just pass by, painlessly and unremarked, has worried me ever since.

Anyway, that is a good or at least acceptable segue to the essay I just posted. It might at first read like nothing more than one of the millions of anecdotes out there about “where I was when the planes hit.” But no! It is something more. Maybe not something a lot more, but something more. It is also part of something larger I am working on, about memory and the accuracies and inaccuracies of mine.

I hope you are okay, and that this essay diverts you in a worthwhile manner for a few minutes.

“The closer I look at my memories of 9/11, the fuzzier and more unclear they become, as if I am standing too close to a painting or a photograph and seeing not the overall image but the brush strokes or pixels that make it up.”

Click here to read more.