The calendar lies, really. It's not September 11th. We keep changing, like an particle jumping between eigenstates, from September 10th to September 12th, from reading movie reviews to reading casualty reports, from buying ice cream to buying bandages and batteries, from worrying about dinner to worrying about destruction.

I wrote that two years ago.

Last winter I came out of the subway, and ascended the stairs into unexpected snow. I love snow, city snow even, but suddenly -- there I was again. My heart racing. An ice grip constricting my throat. It wasn't snow, but ashes.

Oh no, I thought. Don't take the joy of snow away from me, too. I stood quite still, just watching the white flakes in the air, unable to move into the present, into September 12th, into 2004.

I wrote that last year.

This year, it's September 13th. Finally.

It's not that 9/11 has receded in my consciousness. I still deal with PTSD. It still comes back. Sunday I drove across the Brooklyn Bridge, and remembered the postal employees handing out water on the Brooklyn side. Sunday night I was grilling in our backyard, drinking a beer, looking up at the Towers of Light. That's where they were. There they are. And here I am.

So why is it September 13th? What's changed?

I'll be honest, things haven't been easy as of late. September's here again. The TV is showing us bodies again. Death, destruction, a million people trying to go somewhere, just to be safe. Again, it feels like there's so little I can do. Give some money, send some supplies, read the papers, write a blog post, get angry, get sad, get depressed, get numb.

But some things have changed. I've changed. Things are generally easier. I don't think about ashes that much any more.

And, this time, the nature of the disaster has changed. After 9/11, we confronted evil. Evil brought terror and death and destruction into our lives. We knew who the evildoers were, and as much as we grappled with what might have been done before, or what to do next, the object of our anger and rage was clear. Al Qaeda.

This time, there are no evildoers, at least not on a grand scale. One can't blame the hurricane, and I refuse to blame God. Instead, I rage against the incompetent and the corrupt. (What else can one call the elevation of Michael Brown to a position where lives are at stake?) Sins of omission are of a different moral order than sins of comission.

And this blog has changed. After 9/11, Ishbadiddle was a huge source of support for me. This little electronic community, mostly of friends, and some mostly pleasant strangers, and everyone trying to work through this together. Over time, that need faded for all of us, I think. And, over time, Ishbadiddle has become less of a group blog, and more of my own personal thing. It's not the community it used to be, and few posts receive comments any more. It's just happened that way, for a lot of reasons. Online communities evolve; more Ish posters have their own blogs now; there were too many heated arguments; people have lives. Lots of reasons.

But it's not my support group any more. Which is a good thing, I think.

After Katrina, I kept writing about it, trying to write it out, but feeling frustrated. Where is everyone? Hello? Is this thing on?

Of course, Rule Number One of Blogging is: Write For Yourself. If you're waiting for feedback, hit counts, kudos, a freaking medal or something, forget about it. Write for yourself, and if people read it, so much the better.

And, of course, just because folks don't comment doesn't mean they aren't reading, or even acting. I got an email from a friend -- a regular here, whom I won't name, as not everyone believes that charitable acts should be publicized. After this post, he and his family sent a bunch of supplies to one of the shelters listed. He wrote: "It isn't always easy to see the ripples we create when we throw rocks in the ocean. I imagine it is hard to know what effect a single person can have on a disaster as immense as Katrina with things as singular as blog postings."

And that made it all worth it. Really.

So, let me explain. No, that will take too long. Let me sum up:

Ish has changed, and I can't expect it to be what it was. (This isn't a please-post-and-comment guilt post, honest.)

I'll write what I want, and that's that. The response may be none, or it may be invisible to me (hi, lurkers!), but that don't matter.

And, finally, it's no longer a good idea for me to deal with Hurricane Katrina by blogging about it. I have a lot of other stuff to write -- a massive backlog of book reviews, for instance. You can all safely assume that I'm still concerned with Katrina and still doing something about it; I'll assume the same of all of you.

~~~

So it's September 13th. The air is clear, although I know it's not always. That sometimes the air is filled with anger, with ashes, with thunder. With things that cannot be understood, not easily. An airplane falling from the sky. The cries of the sick in an abandoned hospital, waiting for a rescue that never came. We take in this same air, we breathe it in, it becomes part of us. Toxic fumes, toxic memory, the exhalations of the dead, it's all in the air, inescapable, undetecable. And still we breathe in, breathe out. Still there's oxygen for our brains, our hearts, our very guts. There is song also in that air, and the breath of sleeping children.

Breathe in. How will you use that next breath? The world's inspiration?

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