Ten years ago, I started a little piece on my first website called “The Spout of the Day”. I ranted and raved, shared stories and information, and well, I blogged. There was no word for blogging back then. It was an “online diary” of sorts, I guess.

The original idea for my blog was just to record what I was thinking and feeling on a particular day, just like a paper diary. I think now that I’ve grown as a writer and know people actually read what I write each day, my blogging has changed. I write about things I know readers will relate to, little hallmarks of daily life, and opinions about politics and hot button issues.

But today, I’m going to do something different. I am going back to my original intention when I waited for the modem to squeal and I copied my “Spout of the Day” from AmiPro into Notebook-generated poorly written HTML. The point is not what others think. It’s about recording today as a real watermark in my adult life, because it is.

Today, for the first time in seven years, I will not watch anything on television about September 11, 2001. I want to remember this day. It’s like the first anniversary of a family member’s death that I won’t visit the cemetery. Each year, I've gorged myself on programs about that day. Especially now that I have a DVR, the History Channel, Discovery Channel, Learning Channel, reenactments, analysis, even a whole hour telling the story of one man captured in one picture who jumped. I watched it all. I needed it.

In October 2002, I actually went to Ground Zero itself. I was born in New Jersey, I knew my way, even though I was just passing through. I saw the WTC site this morning on the “Today Show” between a cursing base jumper and a story about “super lice”. It looks very similar to when I stood there six years ago. There is no proud crystalline spire touting the triumph of the American Spirit. There is a hole in the ground. It was gone when I came back from refilling my coffee.

Each year, I’ve ripped off the scab and opened the wound. I wanted to be sure it was still there. I wanted to feel like I had done my part to mourn for this country, especially for the people that died that day. I wanted to feel like I was part of something larger than I am.

But this year is different. Something has changed. As Stephen King said in (strangely enough) “The Dark Tower” series, “The world has moved on.” Please allow me to define that. It does not mean that the day itself has become irrelevant. It means that the day has become so much a part of the fabric of our existence that we feel it each day. We feel it when we fly, we feel it when we visit NYC (especially if you live there, I’m sure), and we feel it when we hear the debates about the war or how to treat the detainees.

I no longer need to put myself in the place of the people in those buildings or on those planes. I’ve done it too many times. I no longer need to examine the particulars of how the towers fell or how the bodies were identified. Those things have been seen and felt. Widows’ and firefighters’ lives have been tried on like an overcoat, but then we shed them because they don’t fit us.

We’ll never forget.

My 10 year old son, only a toddler on that day, said to me this week, “Two days until that horrible day.” He knows. He’s heard me tell the story of giving him his breakfast in his room so he wouldn’t see the real-life horror movie replacing “Sesame Street” that day.

I’ll also do something I’ve never done in a blog. I’ll drop the f-bomb. The morning of the attacks, a person in the WTC called in to the “Today Show” and got Katie Couric. She was pretty panicked. She asked the caller, who was trapped on the upper floors, “What are you doing?” She wanted to know what steps he was taking to get out, I suppose. He replied, “We’re fucking dying up here.” They never show that on the memorial shows. That single sentence is, and always will be, September 11^th for me.

But this year, I will not do it. I will not watch it over and over. I can’t. I’m empty of it. It’s gone from me like a poison that I can now only endure in still photos or the odd snippet of news footage on a random day of an innocuous month like February or May. Nothing new will be broadcast this year. All it can do is make me cry.

One final reason why I can’t do it this year:
My most beloved teacher died of a brain tumor in my first year of college. She was more than a teacher. She my clarinet teacher for six years. I stayed the night at her house. Her granddaughter was a close friend. She was my stand-in Gramma.

I never went to see her in the hospital. I sent her letters and cards, but my mother had gone to see her and she said she wouldn’t even know me. I didn’t want to see her like that.

Everyone deals with things in their own way. The glut of images is over for me. I’ll tell my children what life was like before things like 9/11 were a possibility. But I won’t watch it anymore. I’d like to try to replace the images of the Towers falling down in giant smoke columns with the image of the way they were, tall, proud and glittering in the sunlight of a perfect, blue-skied day.