What does the end of the world sound like?
Living in a big city, I hear strange noises all the time. Crashes, booms, roars, screams, sirens, and wild sex.
And just as simply, I ussually ignore them. I know living in any city is dangerous, much less DC. Here we all walk around with targets painted on our scalps.
Yesterday I drove by the Pentagon. It was the first time I’ve seen it since it was hit. You just can’t adequatly describe the feeling. It’s a massive building, on scale with skyscrapers and beyond stadiums. And as we rounded the road yesterday, looking at this building, just suddenly a hole appears in the building. Like someone reached in and ripped out a couple thousand tons of steel and concrete (and flesh).
I can’t imagine what the people on 395 South must have thought that morning as they drove parallel to the plane’s flight path, just a couple hundred feet away; and watched it plow into the building, in what must have been an explosion rivaling the World Trade Center itself.
So what does the end of the world sound like?
Every roar outside my window makes me wonder if some fanatic set off the nuke in their backpack. I ussally just look at the wall, waiting to see if it disintegrates. Some morbid interest occasionally drags me to the window to check. But would you really want to see a wall of….
death…
coming at you?
Isn’t this the kind of shit that drives people crazy in movies?
If I get lucky, it would be more like those movie scenes where all you see is an instantaneous white flash, and everything is gone.
It’s not as morbid as it all sounds. At least not to me. Growing up near Sampson Air Base, I’ve had these kinds of thoughts for as long as I understood war and death.