when i was in new york in the late 90's i was sick... i had the flu from hell... my head was so full of sickness that i had no room to store memories... i had been on the road for 3 months working my way through the small towns and big cities of america... drinking all the way... yo ho ho... so by the time i was ready to hit new york it basically hit me... i went down in a screaming heap... i could hardly lift my head off the pillow on the bed of my cheap hotel... i was fukked up... but i did try to have a look around... i had spent so many years dreaming of the day that i would one day be able to walk the streets of new york city, and when i had finally made it, i felt like the city was about to swallow me whole...
i remember a few things about new york... i met my first real dead heads there, and we listened to some grateful dead on vinyl and smoked up a storm in their apartment... probably not the best thing for me to be doing considering what state my health was in... i remember going to wall street and doing the tour and going inside the stock exchange... looking down at all the traders like they we animals in a cage... i remember going to the guitar store that is in the video for paradise city by guns and roses... i remember going out on the Staten island ferry and looking back at the city...
what i don't remember is the twin towers... even though i remember looking back at the skyline from the ferry i cannot for the life of me remember the twin towers in my minds eye... it's like for some reason my mind has blocked them out... i didn't go up them but i stood at the foot of them and looked up at them... but nothing... no memories of those moments remain in my brain... and it drives me a little bit nuts... because it's something, now they are gone forever, i can never get back...
my sister was up in the restaurant having breakfast exactly a week before the planes hit... she flew back into new zealand and my mum picked her up from the airport and for some reason they both got really emotional when they saw each other... a couple of days later two planes struck the towers... my sister picked up her films that she had had developed and cried as she looked at pictures of herself on the roof of the towers with her husband and all their friends... while on tv they endlessly played the planes hitting the building... followed soon after by the whole thing tumbling to the ground in a cloud of hellish ash and dust...
it's funny the things that you remember and the things that you forget... i just wish that i had not forgotten that image in my mind... of something that was there and now is gone forever...
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