a nightmare of an origin story
they say never forget but how could you?
25 years ago today i was working at a thankless job at E! Networks on the Miracle Mile.
i was so broke i didn’t have a car so i would take the red line, as it was called at the time, to wilshire & western and either took the 20 bus or the 720 “express” west down wilshire to my job where i edited the closed captions for programs like Wild On or the Howard Stern Show.
i hated my job so much, but i loved the people around me and this thing called Blogger had just started. so during my 15 minute breaks at work and during lunch i would write fantasy stories about how i was an undercover superhero who rode the bus in Los Angeles and at night secretly fought crime with a few others who had been kicked out of the fbi.
together we called ourselves the xbi.
it was not very good. but it was my way of coping for how my life had turned out.
i called my site the busblog. on september 11 it was less than a month old.
people weren’t crazy about my dumb stories, mostly because the few who read it knew me and knew i was just a slacker, not a fed.
but they did like was when i took pictures out of the bus window and showed the world Los Angeles from my poor bachelor little perspective.
the morning of 9/11 my mom called me from Chicago at such an ungodly early hour i thought it was a dream
AMERICA IS UNDER ATTACK she said TURN ON YOUR TV. STAY AWAY FROM ANY FEDERAL BUILDINGS
i said i would, but i went back to sleep. it was like 6am.
a few minutes later i woke up thinking, “did my mom really call me that early?” so i got out of the bed and went to the living room and turned on the TV and the first channel had a live camera on the twin towers and within a minute or two i watched the second tower get hit by a plane.
it made no sense.
if it happened today we would say it was AI, but back then things on live TV were typically real.
i watched for a few hours and listened to Howard Stern’s radio show, who was broadcasting from New York, then i got on the red line to the bus to the job.
there wasn’t a lot of work to be done because no one knew what to do. so i blogged. something id do a lot over the next 25 years.
“here in Hollywood it is very eerie. i work at an entertainment network, not the FBI. there are televisions everywhere in this office. all of them are tuned to different stations. i have one on my desk right next to the computer that i write you and my boss is telling me that im tuned to the wrong station, that I should be on CNN where they are showing an Afghani press conference.”
i titled the post “cheap shot heard around the world”
that day i made a photo essay where i addressed the terrorist mastermind in a photo essay telling him big deal, two buildings, whatever.
all while knowing it was more than a whatever.
we were probably going to go to war with saudi arabia, who had the most amount of pilots who did the thing, and it was ordered by bin laden who was also saudi
when bush said we were not going to war with his old pals
that instead we were gonna blow up afghanistan i did another photo essay, but to those kids, who somehow were getting caught up in this madness.
both of those photo essays got a ton of traffic not because they were great but because for days and weeks we were all obsessed with this. there were few answers and no one could trust the white house.
if theres one thing i remember from 9/11 it was that it was the first time that we wanted to trust, and we knew we shouldn’t, but we did
and even that turned out to be a poor decision.
ironically all that traffic led to the busblog becoming popular, and it led me to running LAist, overseeing the blogs at my favorite newspaper, which all led to… hear in LA 25 years later.
i wish the path hear didn’t start so horribly.
for the next few days E! changed their programming to be mostly Wild On… the show produced by our friend Paul Haddad who discovered Brooke Burke.
the suits had decided TV viewers who didn’t want to be overwhelmed with the terrible news of the day might want a distraction.
Brooke in her bikini travelling the globe was an excellent respite indeed.
