By Nicole Janson

Note: Some names have been changed due to national security concerns.
Have a story about an ex? Tell us here. Some of SMITH reader stories will appear in the debut issue of our print magazine.

I have loved Steven since we were both 16, over half my life. He was tan, dashing, barrel-chested like a 5’s movie star — even in high school — with this warm, Kennedy grin. I was a semi-goth, chain-smoking drama-geek, but our worlds intertwined when we were both cast in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

He played Lysander— the dashing, romantic lead. I played Mustardseed, also called Fairy #4. In the play, Lysander falls madly in love with Helena. In rehearsal, Steven fell madly in love with Jennifer Kaiser, who played Helena and had red hair. Nobody fell in love with Mustardseed.

But Steven and I became good friends. We exchanged letters all through college — he was halfway across the country, doing ROTC to pay for school. There were visits. Lunch in Chicago when he passed through to see his brother. Salsa dancing in Austin when I was there for work and he was stationed at Ft. Hood. And while we each dated others over the years, I always held my high school crush. He was so different from the bad-news-musicians I gravitated towards. He was kind, stoic and old-fashioned. I realized: This is the kind of man I should marry. But nothing ever happened between us.

And then one recent Friday afternoon, he emailed me:
Are you around? … I’m coming to NY to see friends. I just got called up to active duty. In support of current operations. Not sure exactly where or when, but I got a pretty good hunch.

He was still in the Army Reserves. I had no idea … panic …. I called immediately … His voice was steady, as always … How about dinner tonight?

I hung up the phone and it crystallized in my mind: I am conveniently single; Tonight’s the night.

I MEET HIM AT PENN STATION and I look good. We haven’t seen each other in years and for the first time, I feel beautiful and confident and worthy of him. He’s heavier than I remembered, more gray hairs … but gorgeous as ever; that warm smile, his strong arms embrace me.

One Italian dinner and bottle of red wine later, we are at my apartment. He’s going to sleep on the pull-out sofa. Kiss me, I try to tell him telepathically. I don’t want to make the first move; I want this to come from him. I start making up the sofabed. Again, telepathy: Kiss me. Nothing. Are you really going to make me go through the motions of making the bed, when we both know what’s supposed to happen next? This is absurd! You’re going to fucking Iraq — KISS ME.

But I say nothing and I smile and give him a pillow and we hug goodnight.

I lay in bed, wide awake, my heart pounding. Is this it? Should I get up and pretend to go to the bathroom? I feel the loom of Iraq, I think of him dying, I think of our 16-year history. I feel immobilized. Maybe he just never liked me. And then — a knock on my bedroom door. I leap up. YES?! He asks me if I have another blanket. This must be a move, right? Or does he really need a blanket? Is this how he plans to approach his military endeavors … a hesitant knock on the door of an al Qaeda bunker? STORM ME! TAKE ME NOW! I am so tired of this dance — yet I pretend to look for a blanket, knowing full well I have none. And, finally, I say, why don’t you just sleep in here. I barely finish my sentence when those arms which had, hours earlier, embraced me at Penn Station, are now hungrily enveloping my entire body. He kisses me — my lips, my face — there’s this relief, this freedom, in finally having the green light.

He backs me in to my bedroom, kissing me all the while … How long I have been waiting for this…

We make love.

It is horrible.

It is quite possibly the worst sex I’ve ever had. Steven is inept and awkward and the whole five minutes of it is so unsatisfying. But I can’t say anything — he is going to Iraq — I might never see him again. And, of course, in the final seconds, the condom comes off which he kind of fails to tell me until it is over.

As he’s holding me so lovingly after, all I can think is: I’m pregnant. As he traces lines on my back with his fingers, I imagine myself being interviewed by a CNN reporter as I stand on the port with a thousand other wives, waiting for his ship to come in … Holding a stupid sign in one hand: “Welcome Home, Steven,” holding his child in the other. He’s kissing my hair and telling me how beautiful I look and I think: tomorrow’s Saturday — will my doctor be in?

The next morning, he visits college friends, leaving his suitcase in my kitchen. I call my gynecologist.

I’m pissed. I’m pissed the sex was so bad. I’m pissed I might be pregnant. But I still love him. My doctor tells me it’s “highly unlikely” I’m pregnant, but prescribes Plan B to be safe. I spend the entire day trekking around the city to find a pharmacy that will fill the prescription. I buy saltines and ginger ale to ease my stomach as I brace for the vomiting that friends who had taken the pill warn me of.

I go home. I cancel my dinner plans. I look at the calendar. Highly unlikely that I’m pregnant … just to be safe. I take the first pill. Plan B is two pills taken at 12-hour intervals. They sometimes give you a third in case you vomit up the first. I stare at his stupid suitcase in my kitchen as the pill works its way through my body. I go to sleep. I wake up. I take the second pill.

Steven comes over the next morning. I killed your stupid baby, I want to say. But there is no baby. I’m being dramatic. I say nothing. When I see him, I melt. I love him. I don’t want him to go to Iraq. I want to take care of him. I want to make him soup.

Over lunch he talks about everything he has to do before he leaves. See his parents, cancel his cell phone … It is suddenly so real. That he might not come back. He kisses me and I kiss him back and he carries me into the bedroom.

The sex is still bad. I pretend it isn’t. I want to be close to him and this is the closest we can be. I feel a little like a whore. Not in a good way.

When he leaves, the goodbye feels real. He kisses my lips and then my forehead and we both start to cry. I want to tell him I love him even though I know I don’t love him the way a woman loves a man. I love him as a friend, which is really all we ever were. “Until next time,” he says. Until next time? What the fuck is that? I’m pissed again. But I let it go. Because he’s going to war.

At last count there more than 63 billion sites* about September 11. These 11 made us stop, click and think.

*slight exaggeration

By Michael Slenske

Michael Slenske writes SMITH’s Back Home from Iraq Column

What if - as ur-blogger Andrew Sullivan imagined recently for New York magazine - 9/11 had never happened? If Al Gore were president? If Al Qaeda unleashed attacks on 30 separate New York subway stops (instead of four planes)? If the war on terror were more than a photo-op in Afghanistan? Would any of us be any safer? Maybe.

But playing “what if” games five years ex post facto is a thorny proposition: 9/11 did happen. And whether the catastrophic events of that quiet fall morning did or did not unfold as we’ve been informed by the administration, the damage has been done. In part, because the blogosphere - much like the mainstream media - let its eyes (and words) drift away from the hallowed grounds - into the rabbit holes of TomKat, Plamegate, John Mark Karr, and others - over the past five years.

Luckily, there are a handful of personal media movers who’ve kept a constant vigil over the sites, and some who’ve risen from their ashes, to remind us what it is our troops are still dying for.

Where Were You?
Were you “nine months pregnant sleeping on a couch next to my mom,” “engaged in a sexual act and couldn’t go once you heard of the carnage,” or “in class…facing the towers” as they fell? No? Well, some folks were, and they shared those experiences on Wherewereyou.org , a user-generated project started by three teenagers (Geoffrey Hick, CA ; Lane Collins, NC; Marie Pelkey, VT) on September 15, 2001. Over a year the trio collected more than 2500 9/11 recollections from around the world, which are still as raw and powerful today as they were five years ago. Feeling left out? Don’t. The similarly titled Wherewereyouon911.com - which has collected more than one thousand personal stories since its December 2001 launch - is still taking submissions.

Kristen Breitweiser on HuffPo
If you’re the scorn of Ann Coulter you must be doing something right. At least that’s true in the case of 9/11 widow-turned-HuffPo blogger Kristen Breitweiser. Since spring of 2005 the “Jersey Girl” has filed extensive posts on everything from Giuliani intruding on the victim’s impact hearings at the Moussaoui trial (”Which family member did Guiliani lose in the attacks?”) to the NSA wiretapping program (”Our intelligence agencies held a treasure trove of intelligence on the 9/11 hijackers, intelligence that was gathered through their initially unencumbered surveillance. President Bush should busy himself by investigating why that information was not capitalized upon to stop the 9/11 attacks.”). Be sure to pick up her new memoir Wake-Up Call (complete with a note to Ann) this month.

The Art Project
Everyone has an opinion about 9/11, but how many communicated them via images? For those of the visual persuasion there’s theArtproject.net’s virtual exhibition, which gauged the artists’ response to terrorism (from September 2001 to December 2002). While closed to submissions, this provocative disastoplex (of paintings, sculpture, and photo installations, complete with image-based call-and-answer discussion boards) continues to prompt dialogue by remaining online indefinitely.

911Memorials.org
In the last five years over 250 proper 9/11 memorials (incorporating WTC steel) have popped up around the world, except, of course, at Ground Zero. This clearinghouse of 9/11 commemoration - from Shanksville to New Zealand - is courtesy of mountaineering guru Roger Rowlett, who keeps track of all the latest memorial news and scandals. In other words, Michael Arad and Larry Silverstein must hate it.

Flickr: Post 9/11 Project
In order to see “how life has changed - or not - since 9/11,” every year on the anniversary of the attacks this community group calls on Flickr members to share as many words and photos from their September 11 experiences as possible over a 24-hour blitz. Get ready for the deluge.

Paul Thompson and Matthew Everett’s 9/11 Timeline
The Wiki-like Cooperativeresearch.org calls itself “an experiment in open-content civic journalism.” The jewel of this spot is an extensive September 11 timeline - which pulls material from the 9/11 Commission Report, American Airlines employees and 80 new posts, among others, from the two researchers - and is now the subject of the documentary 9/11 Press For Truth. If you can’t slog through all 2216 entries in one sitting there are plenty of diversions on the CR’s wide-ranging Iraq and Katrina timelines.

The 2996 Project
Started by L.A.-based writer D. Chancellor Roe, the 2996 Project aims to “join together 2,996 volunteer bloggers on September 11, 2006 for a tribute to the victims of 9/11…by remembering their lives, and not by remembering their murderers.” Among the participants are National Center for Public Policy Research prez Amy Ridenour and hawkish blogger Michelle Malkin.

Firehouse.com
Firehouse magazine’s site posts audio, video, photo, and blog entries - from initial radio dispatches by a Brooklyn firehouse to news that 283 WTC rescue workers have developed cancer (33 have died) since the attacks - in their 9/11 news section. In the coming week the site will reopen their “Victim Database” and serve as a Ground Zero for first responder bulletins from the last five years.

Lawhawk.blogspot.com
“The rebuilding process has been marred by scandal, controversy, and squabbles over power. I just wish that the hole in the ground can be filled by something worthy of the site sooner rather than later,” writes this New Jersey legal buff who’s kept a hawkish vigilance (a 164-part series, in fact) over the ongoing “Battle for Ground Zero” since 2004.

IAVA Blog
“George Bush had better be fucking right” is how IAVA founder Paul Rieckhoff begins his war memoir Chasing Ghosts. With 2973 troops already killed in action, and 20,666 wounded it doesn’t seem like that’s the case. Fortunately, Rieckhoff, along with vet-bloggers “Mad Mike” Zacchea, Ray Kimball, and Perry Jefferies, is keeping the administration’s feet to the fire over a war in a country the President, himself, admitted had “nothing” to do with the 9/11 attacks. With any luck they’ll help us avoid a second “2996 Project.”

Projectrebirth.com
Perhaps the most widely known of the sites on our list doesn’t disappoint. Directed by Imagine Entertainment (Cinderella Man, The Da Vinci Code) president Jim Whitaker, Project Rebirth has been documenting the resurrection of Ground Zero - with six 35mm time-lapse cameras - since March 11, 2002. In that time the crew has assembled an extensive news archive - from recent pieces in the Times about EPA whistleblowers exposing the danger of the site’s dust to a 2005 editorial from Freedom Tower architect Daniel Libeskind. For overhead shots - of Ground Zero and the Pentagon - check out SpaceImaging.com’s “September 11: One Year Viewed from Space” feature. While they only offer a year’s perspective, its satellite, IKONOS, was the only hi-res commercial camera in orbit over WTC and the Pentagon immediately following the attacks.

Citizens K: The 10 Best Blogs By, From and About New Orleans—One Year After Katrina
By Cree McCree

Cree McCree writes SMITH’s Going Home to New Orleans column for SMITH, a chronicle of her return to her life after the flood. McCree left New York for NOLA in August 2001, escaped the city during the flood, and has returned to pick up her life as a flea market entrepreneur, costumier, and assemblage artist. She is a former editor of Yahoo Internet Life, a contributing editor at High Times and a frequent contributor to Offbeat.com.

Pre-Katrina New Orleans wouldn’t exactly be confused with Silicon Alley in the technology department. Sure, almost everyone had an email address, but having one’s own inbox was another story; hotmail bouncebacks were routine.

The post-K diaspora changed everything. Evacuees who’d never typed a URL into a browser spent hours jockeying on borrowed computers, trying to find missing friends and news they could actually trust. The neighborhood message boards at NOLA.com became essential reading, and the handful of local bloggers that existed before the storm swelled into a small army. Forged during the initial crisis, the New Orleans blog community – now more than 100 strong – has grown deep virtual roots during the subsequent recovery (or lack thereof).

New Orleans bloggers don’t just sweat over a hot hard drive, mind you. They whip up Creole specialties to share at Geek Dinners, downed with plenty of good wine from sponsoring vineyard Stormhoek. They even created their own anniversary event to commemorate Katrina: The Rising Tide Conference. Held at the local Yacht Club (a.k.a. Yat Club), with destruction still visible outside the windows, the three-day confab was designed to provide “a ‘real life’ demonstration of internet activism” with activities ranging from heated panel discussions to gutting the house of an elderly resident to downing shots off a water ski.

The community includes celebs like comedian Harry Shearer and author Poppy Z. Brite, who shared her trepidations about covering Katrina redux for the Boston Globe: “It’s flattering, but also intimidating as hell. Presenting our case to strangers in our neighbor to the north, America.” New Orleans also has some rising stars. Graphic artist Greg Peters, whose Suspect Device is published locally in Gambit Weekly, has found a big net audience for his wicked funny series on “what Louisianans now know.” And 11-year-old Kalypso Homan has legions of fans at YouTube, where more than five thousand people have viewed “Kalypso’s New Orleans“, her 12-minute video diary of destruction and rebirth. Kids are also the stars of the show at the crafty Katrina Kids Art Project gallery, not to be confused with the photo-driven and absolutely incredible New Orleans Kid Camera Project.

What began as a search for the Best Katrina Blogs produced some worthy candidates — most notably Pico’s Coming Home: Katrina Blog Project w/ Pics, a riveting photo journal ripped straight from the pages of his 2005 diary. But as I dug deeper into the local blogosphere, the project morphed beyond Katrina commemoration to the best post-K blogs tracking day-to-day life in New Orleans.

My criteria? Rising Tide’s own stated goals, ones which are part and parcel with the mission of SMITH: Blogs that “dispel myths, promote facts, share personal testimonies, highlight progress and regress, discuss recovery ideas, and promote sound policies at all levels.” Those mentioned above are all down with the program. But the following Top 10—listed in alphabetical order—crest above the Rising Tide.

Slimbolala
http://slimbolala.blogspot.com/
“You might argue that this little bit of YouTubery is callous and insensitive. But I laughed really, really hard. As an official Flooded-Resident-of-New-Orleans, don’t I get some sort of special Right-to-Laugh-in-the-Face-of-Calamity exemption ticket?” You bet you do, buddy! That blubbery guy boogie-ing down in the devastation is a hoot. So is Slimbolala’s deadpan posting style: “In other very exciting news, our house (mostly) has walls. Walls! They’re the type of thing you’d generally expect a house to have, but for a long time, ours hasn’t. Now it does. Walls!”

sssssturtle
http://sturtle.com/home.html
All hail Richard—a man with a plan! Would that point three could go into effect immediately:
“3. Prohibit predictable stories by the press. If I speak to one more reporter who says, ‘Yes, I understand that you’re trying to get back to normal, but don’t you find it depressing down there?,’ I cannot be held responsible for my actions. Under my plan, there will be a residency requirement for all members of the press: no one will be permitted write a word about the city without having lived in Orleans Parish for at least a year.”

There’s N.O. pLAce Like Home
http://chicory.blogspot.com/
Memo from Gina in N’Awlins re “Ernesto the Pest-o”: “If the steering currents bring Ernesto anywhere close to us, they will issue the mandatory evacuation order this TUESDAY—Owen’s birthday AND the anniversary of Katrina. This totally SUCKS and I am pretty dang PISSED about it!” And with good reason. Check Gina’s 2005 postings “exactly as I made them—typos and all,” when they celebrated her son’s sixth birthday as “evacuees in Baton Rouge—without power.”

Think New Orleans
http://thinknola.com/blog/think/
The blog motherlode. These folks created the super-impressive New Orleans Wiki, a volunteer-maintained collection of articles about New Orleans, and also maintain a massive list of New Orleans bloggers. The site offers free workshops on Web publishing for community groups, and organizes volunteers to teach individuals how to blog.

Toulouse: Odd Bits of Life in New Orleans
http://toulousestreet.wordpress.com
Returning ex-pat Mark Folse started blogging about post-K New Orleans in Wet Bank Guy, where he continues to post slice-of-life gems like “Pride of Pothole.” But Odd Bits is where he really lets his freak flag fly. (See: “Middle Aged Men Gone Wild in the French Quarter” at Satchmo Fest). In true geek style, he consults the I Ching on his trusty Palm Pilot, where the Oracle’s latest prediction was rather ominous: “When the eighth month comes/There will be misfortune.” But Folse refuses to be daunted: “Perhaps it will be as simple as Lusher Middle not opening on time for my son, as it appears it will not, One can only hope. It is a city of misfortunes that we live in now, but as the ancient oracle reminds us, perseverance always pays.”

Your Right Hand Thief: Laughing off hard truths in New Orleans
http://righthandthief.blogspot.com/
When the Levees Broke, Spike Lee’s Katrina elegy, has been lighting up the blogosphere, where it’s caught flak from right-wing pundits for being “too black.” I’ve read many good rebuttals, but Oyster here summed it up best: “Lee didn’t focus on the damage in Broadmoor (a racially mixed neighborhood), either. As a former resident of that neighborhood, am I outraged? Do I feel left out and ‘discriminated’ against? No, because I could relate to the stories from other neighborhoods, including the Ninth Ward (whose white population Lee overrepresented, if anything). I could even relate to stories if – yikes! – a black New Orleanian was telling it.” His recent take on Mayor Nagin’s interview — “Wait a 60 minute, what did he just say?” — is a pointed ground-floor take on old swashbuckler Nagin’s high-perch perspective.

Back Home from Iraq with Army grunt-turned-film producer Korey Rowe
By Michael Slenske

Michael Slenske writes SMITH’s Back Home From Iraq column.

“I see myself as a person who’s a buffer between conspiracy theorist and military informant, so I thought my help on Loose Change would make it a better quality piece, something more mainstream people, who aren’t dove into conspiracies, could really watch and take in.”

It took two governors, four Congressmen, three former White House officials, and two special counsels two years to compile. They reviewed over two and half million pages of classified and de-classified documents, consulted 1200 sources in 10 countries, and spent over $15 million of the taxpayers’ money in the process. And on July 22, 2004, the 9/11 Commission issued their final report about the terror attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Is it possible that two twentysomethings from “a small hippie town that time forgot” could undermine that entire effort with $8,000 and a laptop?

Yes, if you ask ex-Army specialist Korey Rowe. The 23-year old from Oneonta, New York returned home from two tours—one to Afghanistan; the other to Iraq—to help his best friends, Dylan Avery (director) and Jason Bermas (researcher), produce the sensational 80-minute, Web-based documentary Loose Change, which seeks to establish the government’s complicity in the terror attacks by addressing some very tough questions: Why wasn’t Ground Zero treated like a crime scene? How did both towers “freefall” to the ground “in 9.2 seconds” in just under two hours? And where are the black boxes from American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175?

While the film is admittedly flawed and draws on some dubious new media sources, including Wikipedia, it’s inarguably sparked a new interest in the “9/11 Truth” movement. Since its April 2005 debut online, Loose Change (the first and second edition) has received over 10 million viewings, it was just featured in the August issue of Vanity Fair, and the final cut of the film is expected to debut at the Sundance Film Festival in January. “I’ve got four movie studios [including Paramount and Miramax] beating down my door to make the final cut,” says Rowe, who’s now got offices from California to London to handle his growing company. Last week SMITH caught up with Rowe—who’s been labeled everything from a traitor to a CIA operative in the past year—to see how he went from protecting the Iraq-Syrian border against Muslim insurgents to a self-described “conspiracy theorist” poised to take Hollywood (and the country) by storm.

Do you work for the CIA?
No, I do not work for the CIA.

Just wanted to get that out of the way. What made you want to join the military?
The fact that I was doing nothing. I was 18; I wasn’t ready to go to college yet. I knew that if I went to college I wouldn’t have spent too much time in class, I would have spent my time partying. I wouldn’t have gotten done what I needed to do. It would have been a waste of my parents’ money. So I decided it would probably be best if I joined the military—this was pre-September 11—Bush was in office, there wasn’t a whole lot going on, I didn’t foresee a war happening, I just thought it would be a good way to get out of town, man-up a little, and then move on with the rest of my life. Before I knew it, I just joined.

Did you want to go to war?
At first I did. I wanted to retaliate for September 11. The government told me it was Osama bin Laden, the government told me he was hiding in caves in Afghanistan, they told me he had killed a bunch of innocent Americans, so at first I wanted to go over there and defend just like everyone else. It was the hooah thing to do at the time.

What were you doing in Afghanistan?
My primary MOS [military occupational specialty] was 11 Bravo, which is infantry, frontline infantry. I was carrying a gun, humping a lot of weight on my back. That was what I did in Afghanistan full time. I was at the Kandahar airfield, Bagram, and Khost. But in Afghanistan I really didn’t do much. I was there for six months, pulled a lot of guard; I went on, I think, three missions. Never got any enemy contact, never got fired on, I watched it on my perimeter, a couple hundred meters out while someone else was getting shot at, but I never really got any action.

And in Iraq?
In Iraq I went from the southern tip all the way into Baghdad. I road in the back of a truck from the southern tip, through the desert into Al-Hillah, took the battle of Al-Hillah, which was pretty crazy; it looked like a Vietnam movie. Then we moved further north into Baghdad, where we were in Medical City. I was stationed in an emergency room door for about a month and a half just watching these bodies of children and their families come in. Then I moved north into Mosul, swung west into Sinjar, on the Syrian-Turkey border where we had to watch for insurgents coming across the border.

How did that experience change you?
I went from being some kid who had no idea about anything in the military—I didn’t even know what the infantry was when I joined, I just told them I wanted to shoot stuff and blow stuff up—to being a communications specialist for my commander. That was really when I started to see the bigger picture—when I started working for higher commanders—seeing how things ran.

When was the first time you heard from Dylan Avery about what he was doing with Loose Change back in New York?
After I got back from Afghanistan he started to talk about the idea that 9/11 was an inside job, and started letting me know about some of the information he had come across. It was between returning from Afghanistan and redeploying for Iraq that my mind started to click on. I was like, “Wait a minute—I was in Afghanistan three months ago, and now I’m going to be in Iraq in four months, I’ve got to invade another country, where is this going?” Then—and I hate to say this—I saw Fahrenheit 911, which to me is a terrible movie. But a lot of it made sense in the pretext and military build-up to Afghanistan before we were actually attacked. When I walked out of that movie I was like, “Wow, that messed with my head.” Right before I deployed for Iraq I had the inclination that something was seriously wrong. But then it didn’t matter because at that point I had to go. My unit needed me. I was the company RTO [radio telephone operator], I was running communications. It didn’t matter what my personal beliefs were. I just had to go over and shut my mouth for another year.

So why this film?
Loose Change happened by accident. The whole thing started out as a fictional screenplay about me and Dylan and another friend of ours finding out 9/11 was an inside job. It started out as a comedic action film with us being chased by the FBI and all that. But when Dylan started researching the screenplay he found out the attacks really were an inside job, so we made it into a documentary. I see myself as a person who’s a buffer between conspiracy theorist and military informant, so I thought my help on Loose Change would make it a better quality piece, something more mainstream people who aren’t into conspiracies could really watch and take in. I call it the gateway drug because it can take someone totally green to the information—who believed Muslims carried out 9/11, that the World Trade Center was brought down because of jet fuel, and that the Pentagon was hit by a plane—you put them in front of this movie and 80 minutes later they are going to question it at least. Bottom line: they’re going to question it. It makes people think. It made me think, so I wanted to make other people think.

When you got back from Iraq did you know you wanted to go work on the film?
No, I went back to work. I was training. That’s what you do. When you’re not deployed you’re in the rear either fixing your gear or using your gear. I was stationed in Fort Campbell, Kentucky the whole four years besides the time I was overseas. When you’re back from overseas you get a month off, you clean your gear, and then go fight again.

Didn’t you ever stop and think, “Wait, Dylan is just a kid.”?
Yeah, several times. I thought, I’m in the military, I know stuff. But Dylan was way more informed than me. Like I said, I’m getting the Army Times, I’m getting the AFN, and now it’s out, it’s reported that the government spent millions of dollars spinning false articles to newspapers across the world. So who’s to say the Armed Forces Network and the Army Times aren’t chockfull of bullshit.

How prevalent is that mindset in the Army?
That they know what’s going on?

Yeah?
It’s 98 percent. It’s a fantasy world those people live in. I mean it’s really something. I call them infected. They can’t come back to civilian life. They’re like, “You can’t get out of the Army, you ain’t gonna get no job, you ain’t gonna do nothing. You gonna work at Burger King. What are you gonna do at Burger King? You still wear a uniform; you still get a hair cut at Burger King. So why don’t you just stay in the Army, join up, sign again, get $6,000.” If you don’t re-enlist they just make you sit in a chair. They made me sit in a chair for a week. Sit in that chair until you re-enlist. I just sat there. “You want me to sit in this chair,” I said, “I’ll sit in this chair for a month, because in a month I’m out of here.”

When you came back was there anything that really bothered you about the American public?
Yeah, their ability to believe the B.S. they see on TV. They’re so in tune with their television and CNN and Fox News and the New York Post. They watch the news and the news reporter, whoever it is, forms an opinion for them. Take the release of the Pentagon video. CNN had been bashing conspiracies all day because people kept writing in about conspiracy theories. They build it up for two hours, then they show the video, then Jamie McIntyre, who we actually use in our video says, “All right, there’s the plane, you can see it, there’s the vapor trail, and there’s the explosion. They only shoot in half-second frames; it’s the only shot of the Pentagon. We’ll be right back to cover more of this. This is undisputed proof that a plane hit the Pentagon.” They go to commercial, and instead of coming back and going to Flight 77, they go to American Idol. They just implant the idea, there’s Jamie McIntyre saying he sees a 757 flying into the Pentagon, and then they switch to American Idol. So then when someone says there’s no plane that hit the Pentagon someone else can say, “That’s not true, I watched CNN this afternoon. Jamie McIntyre saw the plane, he showed me.” People believe anything because it’s on CNN.

What do you think about the Popular Mechanics cover story about “Debunking 9/11 Myths”?
That’s a good article. It covers some good information, but it directly takes away from some of the facts. It states that NATO scrambled planes at one time that could’ve intercepted the planes, but couldn’t because they couldn’t reach them in time. That’s bullshit. That article reports they only would’ve had to have flown at 24 percent of their full-blower, and an F15 flies at 1800 mph. You’re telling me when the first plane was hi-jacked at 8:20am, until 9:45, when the plane was flown into the Pentagon, you’re telling me that not one F-15 could be scrambled and taken down one of those planes. Not to mention the [“Debunking 9/11 Myths”] piece stands on the Nova theory (the “Pancake Theory”) that one floor collapsed on another floor creating a succession of collapses where the towers fell. If that’s true, you have a 75-story office building untouched by fuel, fire, any debris whatsoever. You have a 30-story chunk above that, which is also untouched. You have the 78th to 82nd floor, which is on fire. Think about that. You have a 70-something story office building, untouched, unscathed by fuel. You’re going to tell me that the steel supposedly weakened, fell on one floor, on top of another floor, on top of another floor, for 78 floors, reaching the ground floor, and fell in 9.2 seconds. 9.2 seconds is the exact rate of freefall for a building that tall, which is 1,368 feet tall. If you take Galileo’s Law of Falling Bodies and you calculate the distance by the time it takes to fall, it’s 9.2 seconds. That means that all those floors fell without any resistance from any of those untouched floors below it. It’s completely impossible. Not only do you have to do that, you just have to watch the collapse of the towers. You can see the bombs going off. It is so obvious. It’s an umbrella theory. You blow up the top to conceal what’s going on beneath it.

The Blair Witch Project also looked real to people who were in on the documentary preceding it. It totally worked. The first time you watch it, it grabs you. But Loose Change isn’t meant to be fictional. It’s a watchable film, but what do you expect people to do with it?
What I encourage people to do is go out and research it themselves. We don’t ever come out and say that everything we say is 100 per cent. We know there are errors in the documentary, and we’ve actually left them in there so that people discredit us and do the research for themselves—the B52 [remarked to have flown into the Empire State Building], the use of Wikipedia, things like that. We left them in there so people will want to discredit us and go out and research the events yourself and come up with your own conclusions. That’s our whole goal, to make Americans think. To wake up from the 16 amps of your television to watch something and get a passion in something again. And that’s what America has always been about. From the Vietnam protests…it’s always been about a passion. And now we’re trying to build that passion in people, to wake up, to stop watching television, to stop reading the crappy newspapers, and go online and find those de-classified documents, go find the scientists that aren’t young filmmakers, but the ones after Steven E. Jones at BYU, who has steel from the World Trade Center and has conducted tests on the steel and it’s come to the point, over and over again, that what they [the 9-11 Commission] say can’t be true. That it had to be brought down by controlled demolition. Our whole goal is to wake Americans up to do something about it.

What do you say to people who’d say you’re doing this to make a dollar?
You should see my dilapidated house in upstate New York. I drive a Ford F-150 that has a tape player. We sell DVDs, we make money, but we just give the shit away because we don’t want to be war profiteers. We’re not about making money on the whole thing—we’re about getting information out. That’s why we’ve turned down seven figures, more than once, from people looking to buy our film and put it in theaters—because they don’t care about it. They only see the moneymaking aspect of it. We want to make sure it’s handled correctly. That the movie gets out 100 per cent accurate when it comes out in theaters, because it’s obviously not now, and that it’s projected in the right light so people aren’t threatened by it. If we coordinate 500 theaters across the country to start playing it, it’s going to start a wave. We’re going to have a whole weekend of events on 9/11 just to raise awareness among New Yorkers so that we can try to get an independent investigation to look back into the facts that every news agency in the world has ignored. Americans are going to be pissed.

Words and images from an awesome world of female muscle
by Kristen Kaye

Iron Maidens: The Celebration of the Most Awesome Female Muscle in the World chronicles my real-life exploits plunging into the world of women’s bodybuilding as the playwright and director of a theatrical extravaganza featuring 25 of the world’s strongest and most muscular women at New York City’s Roseland Ballroom. My job was to turn the one-night-only “Celebration of the Most Awesome Female Muscle in the World” into a high art happening that exalted women’s strength in both the physical and intellectual realms.

Although I was too naïve and young (23) to worry that I had only six weeks, little budget, and wouldn’t see the performers until two days before the show, I did start to get a bit concerned when I realized that my adaptations of writers like Alice Walker were going to follow skits like the “White Lace Affair,” featuring a smoke machine and a bodybuilder in a white lace thong bikini. I also began to wonder what, exactly, was the nature of female strength anyway? Could Alice Walker and the “White Lace Affair” come one right after the other? We would soon find out.

There was so much I didn’t know: for instance, the controversy over judging women’s bodies that threatens to split the sport in two (is it better to have muscles big and hard, or soft and feminine?); the effects of steroids (not good!); and what it’s like to wrestle men for a living (more common than you might think-and so readily available on video). But with performance night fast approaching there was no time to reconcile the tangle of contradictions-the show must go on. And on it went, evolving into the most complex, unbelievable expression of female strength I’d ever seen. Here are some excerpts from the book and images from the night of the show.

All photos by Bjorg Magnea. Captions by Kristin Kaye.

Linda Wood-Hoyte as Cleopatra posing with Marc Antony
On trying to plan the show:
“I lay back on my bed trying to imagine how the whole thing would turn out. I pictured a single spotlight on a black-clad actress reciting an Alice Walker poem. Then I saw Norman Rockwell’s poster of that scrawny little boy standing before a Mr. Atlas poster and wondered what image we could use for a girl. Was there one? A nice little homey scene, a bedroom, cozy lighting, a girl longing to have muscles, in front of her mirror? Should we start the show with that?”

Christa Bauch as the “Ice Princess”
On finding the essence of female bodybuilders:
“If I had to help these women offer the essence of their being and express the true voice of female power, then I first had to find it. Without actually seeing them until just before the show, I had to get each interviewee to reveal an aspect of herself that even she rarely glimpsed over the phone. I’d gotten the idea for the question I asked them from my conversation with [the show's producer] when she explained that I had to help the women transmit the magic of their femaleness. The question: ‘What is your femaleness?’ ”

Paula Suzuki in “Control”
Bodybuilder Dawn Whitham on “femaleness”:
“Everyone thinks having muscles destroys your femininity. My muscles make me hot. But femaleness and strength is not just a physical thing. It’s a combination. Mostly it’s just something you are. I’m very independent, smart, and business-like. I have a career. I’m a personal trainer. I can bench 400 pounds and fix my own car. I also ride a Harley. Sexy things and the mind can go together too.”

Hannie Van Aken as a “Biker”
On an oft-heard performance theme:
“Hot. She wanted to be hot. Who was I to say that wasn’t her true inner nature? What was I supposed to do as a director? Make her hotter? Advise for red lighting rather than pink? I didn’t know what to do. Wasn’t I supposed to come up with new images of female strength?”

Karla Nelson as “Miss America”
On the dilemma of the perfect female muscular physique:
“One hundred pounds and 500 cc breast implants later (giving her about a D-cup), Dawn found herself placing well in competitions, but outside the Top 5. Judges told her that her look was perfect, but her breasts were too big. She would fight with them about what the right size of breasts was, exactly, and found that flat-chested and big-breasted women alike were not considered winning material. Neither was considered an example of perfect symmetry.”

Doughdee Marie and Fritz perform a duet
On trying to plan the show:
“Standing before my show chart with 20 spots empty and five filled-White Lace Affair, Red Riding Hood, Biker Chick, Stripping Miss America, Lifter-I began to wonder was this really the voice of female power? Did stripping constitute strength? Could men be in the show, even if they did get beat up?”

Thea Bennington as “The Godfather”
Bodybuilder Dawn Whitham on reactions from others:
“A part of her got off on the attention-whether positive or negative-because at the end of the day she never wanted to be the person in the crowd whom nobody noticed. Most of the time she could hack it, but there were days when, say, she just wanted to go to the Stop ‘n’ Shop and get some half-and-half for her coffee, when a person with an ‘Oh my god, look at her!’ would tick her off. ‘I don’t get pissed about what I’ve done to my body. I get pissed about how unintelligent people can be reacting to it. You’d think by now the world could accept that everybody is different, but people are afraid to be different. At least allow others the freedom to push their own boundaries.’ ”

Colleene Colley setting a national lifting record at the show
On what it was like competing as a girl:
“Colleene had been a pioneer competing against boys at the age of 15 in 1980 in Georgia. She beat them, but felt guilty because she knew they were humiliated to be beaten by a girl. She started training with weights to make herself stronger for basketball, but found she had a natural gift for lifting, a gift that wasn’t nurtured at her own school. She had to go to a gym 23 miles away to train because when she went into the weight room at her high school, the boys’ weightlifting coach eyed her and warned, ‘I hope you don’t plan on lifting any weight.’ By 1993, Colleene had already won ten national titles and three world championships.’ ”

Paula Suzuki in “Control”
On seeing a group of female bodybuilders:
“One look at the group and you saw people reveling in being reunited. A second look, and you saw mythic images of strength. Literally larger than life, they seemed untouchable, powerful in being exceptions to the rule. Yet look again, and you saw the hint of nervous girlishness that lingered in their ever-ready smiles and eyes that quickly scanned each other’s bodies; you could have mistaken the scene for a high school bathroom on prom night.”

Millie Carter as herself
On industry reaction to female bodybuilders:
“To say female bodybuilders have “enjoyed” exposure might not be exactly accurate. Industry magazines and webzines have had a history of confusing female muscle with sexuality. In the August 2002 issue of the prominent bodybuilding magazine Muscular Development, Colette Nelson, the then two-time U.S. champion, was featured in an article called ‘Extreme Sex.’ The writer wanted to know what her favorite position was and whether anything was ‘off limits, like her ass.’ He also confirmed that Colette had a ‘hot, phat body primed for either pumping up or porking or both.’ Not all articles have such a provocative slant, but when journalists aren’t extolling the virtues of female muscle, they tend to debate its value.”

Paula Suzuki in “Control”
On fans at competitions:
“Crowds gather at bodybuilding competitions for the same reason that crowds gather at any other kind of event where something unique is on display: to view fine specimens that have been cultivated to rarefied levels. At the National Physique Committee Nationals in Miami in 2003, competitors could just as easily have been a fine porcelain dish at an antique auction or a cat in a cat show or a horse at the track. The crowd exhibited the same zeal for competition, obsession with sporting details, and passion for judging fairness. But instead of shiny, fluffy coats on cats with a refined skeletal structure or one-of-a-kind pieces of old china from a special collection with only a few remaining pieces in the world, bodybuilding fans happen to think perfectly proportioned bodies with exquisitely large and delineated muscles are next to godliness.”

Gabriella Szikszay as the “Egyptian Princess”
On female bodybuilding bonding:
“They were no longer anomalies toiling away alone in the world. Instead, there was a palpable sense of relief and jubilation in being united with others like themselves—and not under the mantle of a competition. Together, they were celebratory victors of their daily small battles with dieting and lifting that weight one more time, while wondering if they look like what the judges want and suffering people’s stares and remarks. Together, these women were a mighty clan.”

Go figure. I was talking about how hard it can be to define “personal media” with SMITH writer and newest blogger Kathy Ritchie in NYC’s Bryant Park. I was saying something like, “I know it when I see it,” when personal media came to us in the form of a guy asking if he could take our picture. If you’re Kathy who has heard, “Did anyone every tell you you look like Angelina Jolie,” so often it makes her lips burn, this is not an unusual occurrence. If you’re me, unless I happen to be getting, say, married, the camera does not find its way to me with such enthusiasm.

Shoot away, dude, we said, and wondered: What’s your story?

Meet David Zimand, a working portrait and fashion photographer and creator of a Flickr stream featuring portraits of people he spots in Bryant Park. Every day, he explained, he takes intimate photos of people in Bryant Park and posts them here. So far, a little more than 70 people have clicked through to see the photo of the striking blond women who leads his photo set. To find Kathy and I—we need more clickthroughs immediately, friends!—scroll over to page 4 of his set of what’s now about 200 shots. Hint: Kathy’s the one who defies Dorothy Parker’s maxim that “Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses.”

Each month, Sara Reistad-Long thinks of something she wants to learn, then charms her way into a family business so she can be taught by the best—and recount the story of the passion behind the profession.

A portfolio by Ian Spanier

Women & Guns began with an assignment to photograph five individuals who carry guns for different reasons, a probation officer, a grandmother/professional cowboy competition shooter, an ex-LA gang member, a bounty hunter and a domestic abuse victim for Marie Claire magazine.

A year later, I made some photographs of a U.S. park ranger for another story, “Women with Dangerous Jobs.” As my research on the subject of women and firearms continued, my curiosity grew. I heard about an annual event called “End of Trail,” held by the Single Action Shooting Society (SASS), where men and women dressed in full cowboy regalia adopt a 19th century alias and compete in shooting events on a huge field in Corona, CA.

I went to the event hoping to find perhaps one or two additions to my portfolio on this topic and ended up photographing 11 amazing women. This launched my project in earnest — I have made 30 portraits to date. Each woman I have met and photographed has inspired me further. What I have come to find is that this project has less to do with the guns themselves and more to do with documenting an amazing and colorful subculture. I have since met and photographed collegiate shooting champions, ex-police training officers, and hunters, among many others. These women are among all of us, you just may not know it. I hope to publish a collection of these portraits in book form.

The women you see in this portfolio and on my Web site all bear arms for their own reasons; my personal view on guns is neither pro or con, nor relevant here. My intention is simply to offer an introduction to these women-mothers, grandmothers, daughters, and sisters. I spoke with some of the women for hours, others for just a few minutes. Some carry guns to protect themselves or others, some carry to provide for their families, some for sport and some to prolong a way of life. Along the way, the stories behind each woman and each gun revealed something about who she is, and the way she lives.

BOOTHE JOUVET & JENNIFER “FOO” BASS
Boothe is from Farmer’s Branch, TX, a small town north of Dallas, where her family’s neighbors were once the notorious Barrow family of Bonnie & Clyde (Boothe says her uncle still has a Barrow gang gun). She grew up with guns and finds having them around “just plain normal.”

Jen (”Foo” as her friends call her) is a sixth-generation Floridian who was raised with firearms around her whole childhood, and now sleeps with one under her mattress. By age six, her parents made sure she understood that guns are “a tool and a weapon.” At age 20, Jen moved to New York and her father bought her a 22-caliber Taurus, telling her that “no daughter of mine is moving to New York City without a gun for protection.”

Boothe and Foo both work in the film industry in L.A., where they met and realized they had guns in common. They like to go to the LA Gun Range, and sometimes venture out to Joshua Tree to shoot stuffed animals in the desert-just for a little change of pace.

PENNY “DIM WATER DUTCHESS” RICHARDSON
Penny, from Dayton, Ohio, is shown here at the End of Trail, an event organized by the Single Action Shooting Society (SASS). Each spring in Norco, CA, hundreds of men and women dress in period clothing and set up a Western town, complete with old-time reenactments and showdowns, as well as shooting competitions and displays of skill. For a terrific taste of the End of Trail, check out the society’s Web site.

“MIKI MOOSE”
Miki, also photographed at End of Trail, hails from Jackson, WY. I only had two minutes with Miki, before she had to go finish shooting in a competition. It was a fun challenge to quickly pull some character out of a intriguing woman. Realizing I had interrupted her competitive focus, I jokingly said, “I bet you would like to shoot me,” and so she did.

Sharon “Black Heart Belle” Johnson
Sharon, from Gilroy, CA, shares the lens with her beautiful chestnut-colored horse Monte. Sharon’s specialty is shooting balloons with a single-action pistol with one hand and steering her horse with the other. As soon as I saw her, I had to meet her. Like many of the women I photographed that day, I only had a quick session, what I hoped I captured was her amazing, quiet strength.

Renee Wilterding
Renee wears many hats: law enforcement training officer, self-defense instructor, assistant teacher in a biology master’s program, photography student, former police officer, mother of four. She is a hero, and she also is a victim.

While she working for the San Bernadino Police Dept., a call came over the radio about a kidnapping. She was traveling toward the station and spotted the perp. A chase ensued and culminated with a one-on-one battle. Renee was beaten and bloodied and eventually passed out during the brawl. Her partner caught up with them and tackled the man. When the perp then started to get the upper hand on her partner, Renee drew her weapon and placed it on the attacker’s temple. The man finally gave up.

Renee retired early because of post-traumatic stress disorder resulting from the incident. She told me that the attacker’s father saw the whole incident and later wrote her a note thanking her for “not killing my troubled son.”

Sharon Perry Schmucker
I found this ex-NYPD police lieutenant in a random way: while on a golf course in Florida. I was in a foursome that included former NYPD Police Chief Eddie Dreher, who, upon hearing about my project, said, “I’ve got one for you.” Sharon’s defining gun moment came when she was working on the narcotics beat in East New York City when a drug bust went bad. The perp whom the NYPD was chasing pulled out a semi-automatic Mac 10 and proceeded to shoot at Sharon. But, in a “divine intervention” moment straight out of Pulp Fiction, he missed. Apparently, a bulleted outline of Sharon is still on a metal door somewhere in East NY. Sharon, who splits her time between Queens, NY, and New Hampshire, is an elite member of the NYPD, and was offered the prestigious honor of a commendation to the FBI. Her son, also a narcotics officer, came to the photo shoot and couldn’t boast enough about his mother’s achievements. Although retired, Sharon still carries a gun for protection.

Women Hunters of Hardy, Arkansas
I took this photo of the Women Hunters [womenhunters.org] association one early, chilly (15 degrees) Sunday morning in January 2005 in Hardy, AK, a town with a population of 578, one stoplight and one Mickey D’s, which is where they met before their last hunt of the season.
They are a multigenerational group, ranging in age from eight to fiftysomething, and included one pregnant woman among their ranks. The women told me that they not only hunt for sport but also survival. They hunt so they can stock the freezers and feed their families.

Julie Horne, Park Ranger
United States park ranger is one of the most dangerous jobs in America. Ranger Julie Horne can be found serving and protecting the Organ Pipe Cactus National Park in Arizona-the only place in North America where the Organ Pipe Cactus grows. Keeping an eye on a plant may seem simple, but keeping an eye on Mexican drug runners crossing the border is far from it.

The Mexico-Arizona border where she works has the standard border set up of a two-lane gate for cars. Beyond that, all that’s keeping the drug runners from crossing the border is about 100 yards of fence that’s already full of car-size holes. They threaten Julie’s life every day. They know when she is home. When she is on duty. When she sleeps. Or goes for a jog. When they make it across, they drive through the park, sometimes dumping garbage-that, in addition to border jumpers, who often collapse and die due to dehydration (it’s a two-day walk to the closest town), pollutes the desert and kills the Organ Pipe Cactus.

A few months before I photographed Julie, her fellow ranger and friend Kris Eggle (http://www.kriseggle.org/) was murdered by a Mexican drug lord. Horne protects herself, and the plants, with an M-16.

Kathy Forster
Kathy is a bird hunter who finds the beauty in guns. She’s skilled in “checkering”-the fine art of adding details to a gun’s barrel, typically hunting rifles. I photographed her with her prize possession, this lovely shotgun, with its twisted metal and fine detailing making it a unique specimen.

Her basement in Portland, OR, is an amazing and chaotic collection of her and her husband’s guns, bullets, and other knickknacks and boxes of who knows what. Although skilled in hunting and training bird dogs, she’s less infatuated with the kill than with the thrill of the outdoors. “I like being in nature, walking with friends, and a faithful dog,” she says.

Eight-Year-Old Hunter
This young girl is a member of the “Women Hunters” group from Arkansas (seen in frame 7). Just before I took the group’s portrait, she had killed her first deer. She’s only eight, though already a serious young girl. She’s here today with her mother, who says in Hardy, AK, hunting is simply a skill a young woman is taught. For her, guns are a matter of tradition-and survival.

Read more reader stories about exes.

Mary Elizabeth Williams is the host of Table Talk, Salon.com’s community hub.

Even in the most platonic of relationships, it’s common courtesy to throw each other the bone of mild flirtation now and then. A little wink or a nudge to say, “It’s not going to happen in this lifetime, but we’re a male and a female here, and in another reality, we’d be smoking hot.”

I should have stayed away. I should have fled into the arms of the nearest fraternity brother the moment he mentioned his undying devotion to his girlfriend back home. Does anybody ever do that, especially at 19, when they could instead torture themselves breathing the same air as their unattainable object of desire?

I met Patrick the day he bounded into one of my college classes, looking more cheerful than is generally acceptable before 10 a.m. I had a history of falling for troubled artist types; his sunniness was an intoxicating change of pace. We quickly became friends. Friends, in this case, meaning that I drained away a portion of my academic career trying to seduce him, while he treated me with all the ardor of a noogie-wielding big brother.

I might have been able to get past his devastating good looks-the broad shoulders, the big smile, the unjustly beautiful eyes. But the clincher was that he was genuinely sweet-generous, friendly, and profoundly goofy. He never cheated on a test, never cheated on the girlfriend, and steadfastly rebuffed the temptations of all but the mildest vices. Needed somebody to quiz you for an upcoming exam, let you rant about a tyrannical professor, or buy you a consoling Friday night beer? He’d never let you down. Needed an outlet for your wildly overblown lust? You were on your own.

I never doubted for a moment that he enjoyed my company. I also never got the merest signal he entertained even a mildly dirty thought about me either. I’ve had male friends my whole life. Even in the most platonic of relationships, it’s common courtesy to throw each other the bone of mild flirtation now and then. A little wink or a nudge to say, “It’s not going to happen in this lifetime, but we’re a male and a female here, and in another reality, we’d be smoking hot.” I gave him every possible opening. He gave me bupkis.

Eventually, he headed to another university. At an end of the semester party, I watched him from afar as he dazzled the assembled group with amusing banter and talk of his next big plans. It dawned on me then that he was destined for greatness, while I was a working class chump from New Jersey. I must have been delusional to think he’d ever noticed that I’d been throwing myself at him all this time. He was, simply, too good for me.

I considered that this would be a fine time to get roaring drunk and openly declare my worship, but something held me back. Game over. So in one of my first moments of true maturity, I put on a brave smile and gave him a big, chaste kiss on the cheek. “Good luck,” I told him. Then I ran out of the party and didn’t stop running until I got home. I never saw him again.

In time, I got over it. I flirted, I dated, I had flings and real relationships. I even had the good sense to eventually fall in love with a guy who loved me back. And marry him. Years went by without a thought of Patrick. Then a few months ago, I got an email from fellow alumni, about a proposed reunion for a group of us who’d spent a semester abroad together. Patrick hadn’t even been part of the group. Yet when I opened that note, the college memories came rushing on back. And his face was the first thing that popped into my mind. I pulled out an old photo album, and there he was, smiling right at me. He really had been that handsome, that authentically warm and charismatic. What had happened to him, I wondered? What corner of the world was he ruling, in his inevitably benevolent way?

Such questions are what Google was made for.

I typed in his name and instantly got several hits, including one for the company he now works for. I clicked on it, and a moment later, heard the sound of myself gasping. There was a photo. The thick, wavy hair that I once fantasized about burying my face in was all gone. The smile was replaced with a stern, businesslike grimace. The eyes were still piercingly beautiful, but the spark behind them was gone. I couldn’t tell if this was a moment of victory or tragedy. True, any hold he may have ever had over me was loosened the moment I saw that picture. And there’s some bitter comfort knowing that the hottie who rejected you has morphed into a shlub. Yet I mourned the loss of him too, that lovely, happy man who’d disappeared into a scowling drone.

It probably wasn’t really that awful. This was a corporate photo, not Glamour Shots. And I’m not exactly the same miniskirt-wearing Bangles wannabe I once was myself.

Then I read the bio. It got worse. Apparently, he appears frequently on MSNBC, CNN, and the evil suckage of bandwidth that is the onanistic variety hour of a particularly facts-challenged, right-wing blowhard. Prior to assuming his current position, he worked in the office of one of the most morally inept, taxpayer-dollar-wasting, conservative gasbags of the past decade. Oh, and he’d married his college sweetheart.

I’d gone searching for Cary Grant, and found Dick Cheney. Had this buttoned up tight-ass always been lurking within the affable lummox I’d once adored? Or had he been the victim of some soul-scarring accident somewhere around the Clinton era? Would he be different now, if he’d ever once kissed my liberal lips? I felt like I was in my own private version of Star Wars. One day you’re besotted with a handsome Jedi knight. The next thing you know, he’s a mouth breather in a black cape.

I had to know just how bad it was. I clicked around a little longer, reading transcripts of his television appearances. Amazingly, even though he had some seriously dubious affiliations, he didn’t come off extremist or scary, and he definitely didn’t appear to be another cynical obfuscator for the regime. He even had, on more than one occasion, come down quite firmly, ass-kickingly on the team of righteousness. He was just a guy whose ideals had put him in a particular place, very different from my own. He hadn’t gone completely over to the dark side. He just wasn’t my Prince Charming anymore either.

I could look at him now and see him as he was, an imperfect middle-aged man with a receding hairline, still living, as he had all those years ago, according to his own firm ethical code. If he so desires, he will no doubt one day bowl over the red states as easily as he once did me. I believe in his life he’s made some questionable decisions. He was right about one thing, though. We really never were cut out for each other.

As I caught up on his life today and the things he’s accomplished, it was clear that whatever his choices and however unflatteringly he may have aged, he’s undeniably a smart man. Smarter than I’d given him credit for. Though I’d always believed he was completely clueless about my feelings, he’d probably known all along exactly what they were. This was, after all, a time in my life when I had all the subtlety of a horny, frequently inebriated college student. He’d just been decent enough to let me think he’d remember me as his pal, not the love-struck obsessive I really was. Decent enough not to use my infatuation to feed his ego. It was I who’d been the clueless one. No matter what he’s done in the intervening years, he really was a good guy. But he hadn’t, it’d turned out, been too good for me.

Chapter 2: Life on the Strip in the New Normal

Check out Chapter 1 here.

On the eve of the historic mayoral election, our correspondent still isn’t sure which way she’s swinging, but says it takes more than a flood to break the spirit of the cats in her many hats.
By Cree McCree

Cree McCree left New York for NOLA in August, 2001, escaped NOLA during the flood, has returned, where she has picked up her life as a flea market entrepreneur, costumier, and assemblage artist. She is a contributing editor at High Times magazine and a frequent contributor to Offbeat.com.

MARDIS GRAS HAS COME AND GONE, along with the St. Patrick’s Day parade (both Uptown and Downtown versions), the Italian parade, the Irish-Italian parade, the towering food altars of St. Joseph’s Day, and a scaled-down version of the Mardi Gras Indians’ annual St. Joseph walkabout. So for a brief period between now and the big French Quarter Fest that immediately precedes Jazzfest, things are pretty much back to (ab)normal in New Orleans, or the New Normal, as Times-Picayune columnist and rising national media star Chris Rose calls it.

For me, the New Normal is life on The Island (as Chris calls it), which I like to call The Strip: the high and dry band of land right next to the Mississippi River, stretching from the far reaches of the Bywater and Marigny through the Quarter and all the way Uptown, which for the most part escaped major flooding and remains more or less intact.

Less is the operative word, even in The Strip: Home mail delivery happens one or twice a week if you’re lucky (and no magazines at all in the still-forbidden 701 zip zones of Orleans Parish). Garbage pick-up (maybe) once a week if you’re very lucky. No recycling until probably forever (and it still feels weird throwing bottles and cans and papers away with the boiled shrimp shells). Lots of traffic lights are still out, replaced by the ubiquitous four-way stops where distracted drivers glued to their insurance adjusters on mobiles bump and grind their way to meetings with their contractors. Stores and restaurants are open but with limited hours, scaled-back menus, and skeleton staffs. Translation: you can’t make a 10pm beer run to Sav-A-Center, or get a pizza delivered from Rocky’s, or pay for breakfast with plastic at Slim’s.

But these are minor inconveniences. Our place, House of Boo (named for the cats that rule our roost) was only grazed by Katrina’s winds and not victimized by the Army Corps of Bunglers, whose man-made levee breaches flooded most of the town. We didn’t even have to toss out a moldy refrigerator to fester in the streets, thanks to the foresight of my husband, Donald — who may be the only person in New Orleans who emptied the fridge of food before evacuating. (Donald also put “Terrorist Target” high on his list of reasons to leave New York City for New Orleans, where we moved into our house on August 11, 2001. But that’s another story.)

When we came back home after two months of post-K exile in Asheville, North Carolina (which ain’t exactly the Superdome), most of the plants we’d dragged inside were dead. But our lucky “money” plant was still alive. And, more importantly, so was Tig — the outdoor cat we’d left behind, who reappeared miraculously right after I stopped searching for him online at PetFinder.com. (”Moron!” he meowed. “I’m out here, on the deck!”) Everything else was exactly the way we’d left it — not a speck of mold besmirched our artwork or Donald’s extensive collection of avant books and records or my stock of vintage clothes and costumes — which would soon help me spawn my most successful season ever as a Mardi Gras costumier.

So am I wracked with survivor guilt? You bet; though I swore off Calvinism years ago, there’s still an inner Methodist that says I don’t deserve my good fortune. But I also know that what Donald and I do — make music, make art, and keep the underground economy bubbling with flea markets and community sales — is a vital part of the recovery process. I also believe that those of us who don’t have to spend our energy gutting our houses have that much more to give to a city that’s given so much to us.

What’s astonishing is that people who are gutting their houses are right there in the trenches with us. The vast majority of my friends and fellow artists, even those who lost everything, are back in town and rebuilding their lives. There’s Brett, who made a harrowing escape from Mid-City at the height of the shoot-and-loot insanity and not only lived to tell the tale but is making it in into poetry. Wendy, a UNO communications prof who salvaged nothing from her Lakeview home and is staying sane by teaching a meta-class in post-K narratives and baking up a storm in her Uptown rental. Jimmy and Sue Ford, who gutted the first two floors of their flooded house to accommodate a home elevator for their two wheelchair-bound teenage sons, who suffer from muscular dystrophy — and didn’t let the heavy labor slow them down. Sue still rocked the Muses parade as the leader of the all-girl Mardi Gras band Pink Slip, Jimmy still served as Grand Marshal for the Lyons Marching Club, and the Fords still hosted a Mardi Gras bash for out-of-town friends in their new, vastly improved digs. That’s the thing about rebuilding; as long as you gotta do it, you might as well do it right.

“Everyone has a story” is true to the nth power in post-K New Orleans, and I’m going to try to bring you as many of those stories as possible as the weeks and the months go on, along with my personal take on the bigger picture. With so much at stake here, the big picture really does matter.

And I still don’t know who is getting my vote for mayor.

 
Next chapter: The harrowing misadventures of Mid-City poet Brett Evans and his fellow “Cavalier Assholes,” who were too hungover to evacuate … and got swept into Waterworld.

Previously: Check out Chapter 1 here.