the 4/19. On the anniversary of the 1995 Oklahoma City boming.

It was one of those regular days, I remember bits and pieces of it; I really do.  I was in high school, I had "gymmed" that morning and had Ms Ingram's History class, but then I had lit out.  I had frequently lit out, even though the schedule was great and I had the end of day Art class.

It was talk radio then for me, a Young Republican, an outsider, but one who was not engaged, but a learner.

Today I'm not so much of a Republican, more of a RINO, and the party these days hates a RINO.

But I heard the coverage, circa 10 am on talk radio, then later on CBS.  I took a break for films, cold things from the refrigerator and such.

It had just seemed so unbelievable that one would attack like; out of the pale.

A long distance view of the burning building, just like the first WTC bombing, a long distance shot and a talking head narrating the scene.

There were commentators that refused to say the name of McVeigh, saying instead, "He Who Will Remain Nameless". 

I had my own artistic vision of such nonsense, a robot achieving sentience and breaking quickly for something vital to his new thoughts, a kind of wild fling at freedom; the heroes were the ones that would hunt him down.  I envisioned robotic crap as being most of the crime they would fit; an advanced response to an advanced threat, even as cave men in the real world hurled their stones.  Oddly, there was no network automation such that the team would receive automatic notifications; some foreman or engineer had to call them, it seemed.

The networks that were even then on the drawing board were outside of my own artistic vision of the future; and further, inexplicably, there was kind of a prodigy character that was sort of everything, Superman, Cable, Doctor Manhattan.  I kept his backstory quite opaque; it was if he just happened, some sort of maybe even an evolutionary figure, one that had no limitations.  I had to make adjustments to that notion, that he was never truly in an kind of danger, just kind of annoyed at things, and ultimately he transmuted himself into a kind of sky-shield over the entire world.  They had statues of him, and one of the scenes, someone defaces it, and later, the character, after a little soul searching by the time of the end of the film, responds and it scares the beejesus out of the defacer.  He clearly didn't expect some high-minded super-powerful being to condescend to address such a minor nuisance; but the high-minded being did.

Those days, I drew it out, notebook paper, the old erasable pens; it was horrorshow.  Then I took to long form writing some years later, and then finally I began to tell the emotional points of the story in the form of musical phrasing, background noise that proved integral to the phenomena on the screen.  I remember of the long form, I had a cassette recorder for notes.  I walked around the back acreage, wild overgrown stuff, speaking into the tape recorder, saying phrases like "Engines of Hate", circa 1996 I spent a Spring Break writing a 150 page novella, reading The Stand by Stephen King, and intermittently cooking myself a hamburger and making a pitcher of sweet tea.  I'd take my sweet tea in an old early 80s plastic cup, sit at a little one-hutch office desk and take up my work.

My "work".