Then.
It was a Tuesday, and I was sleeping in with ERC because it was my day off work, and he was senior engineer for a startup, and he could do things like that then. My phone shrilled, and I was fairly certain it was going to be work asking me in because someone had called in sick, but it was my friend, the Vidal Baboon (which is what Dr. Monkeyvirus was before he became a PhD.) He babbled something, I was still sleepy and muzzy-headed, and after about 5 minutes of talking around each other, he stopped and said, "You haven't heard?" This was 2001, when someone saying that to me meant I'd missed a good bit of gossip or scandal, not death, accidents or arrests, so I was annoyed, and replied "No, I'm sleeping!" He said "Turn on the TV." I still thought it was something like he was ON TV, so I staggered out. The sun was really bright, even with the blinds, and I turned on the TV. At some point, I hung up, and some point after that, I called ERC in, and we sat there in our underwear and watched TV for hours.
I guess this is one of the "where were you" moments of which every generation has a few. For me, an unreal feeling of slippage, of the transparent casing holding everything together in its rational place, skittering a few degrees off course, like the skin over a blister. Eventually you get used to the wrongness.
I guess this is one of the "where were you" moments of which every generation has a few. For me, an unreal feeling of slippage, of the transparent casing holding everything together in its rational place, skittering a few degrees off course, like the skin over a blister. Eventually you get used to the wrongness.