It's been over four years since Number Six, (and a couple of years since Artcrime was replaced with a redirection to my home page), yet according to my ISP's logs it still gets around 1500 requests each week.

Artcrime was a way of letting off some steam, an outlet for my anger over a broken political process.

But now everything is broken, not just politics.

To illustrate "everything is broken", imagine a Florida voter who drives his Firestone-shod Ford Explorer to his dot.com employer, only to find that the Sircam virus has mailed his personal and confidential documents all over the world, including the termination notice he saved in his "My Documents" folder. Only anthrax or an airliner could put him out of his misery.

I'll have more to say soon. Until then, I leave you with some short fiction I wrote on the evening of September 11th, when I was still trying to get my head around the day's events.

Paulie

It sounded like thunder in a clear blue sky.

"What the fuck was that?" Paulie asked.  I pressed the barrel of my
gun into his neck as his head turned slightly to the right.

"Shut the fuck up, Paulie," I said.

"No, really.  Something just hit the World Trade Center."  I looked
across the river to the city, the buildings pushing up against a
brilliant blue dome.  There was an ugly black plume of smoke pouring
from the North Tower.

"Son of a bitch..." I said to myself.  Not to Paulie, though.  Paulie
was a dead man.  That's why I brought him to the river in the trunk
of my car.  That's why I had a gun to his neck.  He owed Sal fifty
large -- $50,000 -- and was seen walking into One Police Plaza,
probably to sing an aria for the Organized Crime unit.

I'd get ten large for the hit.

"Fuck, I gotta call my niece.  She works in the South Tower."  Paulie was
sweating a lot for a dead man.

"Shut the fuck up, Paulie," I said.  I should have whacked him, but I kept
watching the tower, watching two streams of smoke, one from the side sheared
east by the prevailing winds, the other on the lee side rising behind the
tower before combining with the other plume.  The impact had released a
spray of paper from the affected floors, looking like the confetti that
falls on Broadway during a ticker-tape parade.

I was just a kid when Mama took me to Broadway for a ticker-tape parade.
The astronauts that landed on the Moon rode in an open car, fat-assed
NYPD pushing everyone back to the sidewalk.  I was holding my Mama's hand
when the guy next to me had his head pulped by a Manhattan phone book
thrown out a 52nd floor window.  That's what I was thinking about when the
second plane flew overhead.

It was low.  It was too low.

"Shit, it's going to hit," Paulie said.  His voice was brittle, snapping
like a dry twig over the word "hit".

It looked like it would miss at the last second, but the pilot banked the
wings and the plane hit to the right of the center of the South Tower.
There was a gout of fire on the side facing us and an even larger fireball
on the far side.  For a moment, it seemed as if the Sun had gone out.

"Son of a..."

"Hail Mary, full of grace..."  Paulie was praying softly.

I lowered the gun from Paulie's neck.

"Get the fuck out of here, Paulie.  You got a free pass today.  Go call
your niece."  I dropped my cell in the grass next to him and walked back
to my car.  Instead of Stern on the radio it was news.  Bad news.

I was home in 20 minutes, Saddle Ridge.  Marie was on the couch, CNN and
bourbon at 10 AM.  I watched the towers collapse before I called Sal.
His cell was off and I hung up on his machine.  He wouldn't be happy that
I let Paulie off the hook.  I could have used the ten large for whacking
the deadbeat.

Then I remembered where Sal was supposed to be that morning, leaning on
a stockbroker that owed him 100 large.

In the North Tower.  At 9:00.