September 11, 2001 is something I write about quite a bit in my book Hippopotamus Sea, and something I’ll not soon forget. I am a patriot and NYC is my most visited city in the world, outside of my home Atlanta, GA. I love NYC with a passion for all that it stands for, it’s arts, it’s diversity, its 24/7 commerce, it’s lights, its energy, its architecture. That a few mud hut dwelling piss ants were able to conduct a mission on it with as much luck as they did still baffles my mind.
In 2001 I had just started my first company. Fortune Staffing. I had placed an Auditor with Cox Enterprises and collected 17k within 3 weeks of hiring her, and I thought that I had arrived. Professionally, personally, everything. I’d been driven to start my own company out of frustration of working for someone else for so many years, watching them collect from my hard work, and I literally ripped a door off of my upstairs rooms hinges, created a desk out of it with a hammer nails and some 2 x 4s and I began making cold calls. I prayed, I begged clients and by my third week I had revenue. I’d started in August of 2001, and by the second week in September I’d collected and was feeling pretty amazing about my business skills at the ripe age of 23 or so.
I was also in love. The gorgeous 23 year old redhead model, who would that year be asked at my moms Christmas party if she was a Cheetah girl, was stunningly beautiful, and happened to live right down the street from me. It’s hard for me not to look back on this day with a bit of romantic nostalgia for my disease of addiction. I had woken up that day, made love to the redhead, smoked a bit of joint for a wake and bake, and was listening to the Regular Guys on 96 rock talk about a plane and then upon hearing that I turned on the news, just in time to see the second plane hit. And I knew instantly it was Bin Laden, who’d hit NYC years before and who we’d launched cruise missiles at in a knee jerk ineffective reaction years before. She drove to work and I drove to my house to tell my friend who was staying with me and we both sat up and watched the news for the next several days in a row if not weeks.
I’m sure I drank that night. I might have even done a bit of blow. I know I smoked weed. I hate to admit it but I let the fear in the media and the news consume me and I used it all as a reason to completely and 100% give up on my company. I look back on this and wonder how I could have let fear consume me as much as I did, but I did and I can not change the past. Instead of facing the realities of the economic slow down, I proceeded to stay as drunk and as high as I possibly could for as long as I could. I had divorced a year or two before and I guess my disease had been building up to a pinnacle. Unfortunately if you have the disease of alcoholism or drug addiction, you may go on for years, a somewhat functioning member of society, but eventually you will crack and go into a tail spin, and my 1st real tail spin as an adult coincided with 9/11 for sure.
I did a couple of good things before it all went to hell in a hand basket though. I took the red head to NYC when Giuliani asked for people to help by visiting NYC. Her mother mocked us as morbid, but I wanted to witness history. And we did. We witnessed families still in the streets crying, holding pictures of their dead relatives, asking if we’d seen them. We went to Hogs and Heffer’s and spoke to drunk fireman and iron workers, and commiserated and raged, and got wasted. We woke up feeling shitty and hung over and we saw soldiers in Time Square with automatic rifles, and at the airport, and we watched the news. We returned to Atlanta changed, sad, and filled with fear. We broke up. I drank it off.
Within six months I would close the doors on my business, have a serious cocaine habit, and be foreclosing on the first house I was so proud of buying at age 18. The economy would be about to recover, but I wasn’t. I was consumed by my disease. That was the beginning of the end for me. I was so fucking self-absorbed, I was mad at God for making 9.11 happen to me. As if the 3000 families of lost loved ones were not going through the same amount of pain as my self-centered ass was. But that’s an addict for you, not able to see the forest through the trees.
I’m almost 5 years sober now, and ten years removed from walking Ground Zero in 2001 while the rubble still smoldered, and the smell of fear covered NYC. I’m glad we got him. I am very grateful I am a changed man. Feelings are not things. Fear is man-made, and as a great man said and I’ve experienced first hand, “The only thing to fear is fear itself.” It’s so true for me. If I had just had faith, in myself, in our nation, in our overall economic prosperity I would still have that first business, but I let fear rule me and I let my disease take the wheel. It is what it is and I won’t make the same mistakes again, but I can’t help but regret it as I wake up still in a job search, considering my options in 2011, having been laid off 3 times in the last 3 years. Still, 9.11 was the vanguard of so many valuable lessons for me.
Not least of which was to cease fighting. For me, this has been so crucial. I simply can not allow myself to get so worked up and angry at people I’ve never met and have no control over. My anger after 9.11 led me to get in bar fights to no end, and I assure you, I beat up and got beat up by zero Taliban. But damn it if I didn’t pick a multitude of fights, stitches and all, fire off rounds into the air over in great dramatic bravado, and even get arrested for carrying a concealed weapon once all for the anger I held and the possibility I might be able to do something about a threat to our country. Very lofty thinking…that I make a difference. I made a difference to my arrest record. I still have a simple battery on my record from about a month after 9.11 and I’ve lost a few job opportunities to that bullshit. So there was that immediate anger, as we know in the program, much better left to be a luxury of more normal men, but also the political, conspiracy theories, or just watching the world and getting angry at say the conduct of our troops, or the deployment of our troops into different areas. The misuse of troops even. As if the greatest minds in the free world weren’t thinking this stuff through, they needed me to get angry, and sit at a bar and effectively bitch over it. I mean, what a colossal waste of time and energy.
In sobriety I’ve learned to really cease fighting everything and everybody, even politicians, generals and intelligence agencies, which have much more information than I do when making such critical decisions. I have to let go and let God, with my disease, but also on things like this that conjure so many emotions both good and bad, and just have faith, that God, who took us out of the fucking caves 50000 years ago, will somehow manage this crises, without the input of ole JB’s best counsel. I mean I know it’s hard to believe the CIA doesn’t need my advice, or the NSA doesn’t appreciate my strategic input given all my video games experience in Real Time Strategy WW2 ‘s, but apparently they do not. And more than that, even if they did, I would still have zero control over how things are going to turn out. On the macro, I am a grain of sand, and tear in the ocean, a pebble in the universe. I’m one of 300 million citizens, and one of 7 billion on Earth. Instead of thinking I have any amount of control at all, this has all been a lesson in humility, and in having faith. All I control is my attitude, and how I react to things. I am utterly powerless, except for in the micro, in my mind.
The United States economy is still kicking, however many trillions dollar less we may have collectively, but I would do well do keep the lessons, both personally and nationally as I face the decisions of starting a new company back up, joining the Army, or waiting for one of these offers to materialize. Number one, no matter how bad it looks, commerce and enterprise will continue. We may have 16 trillion in debt, over 40 million on food stamps, and more on SS and Unemployment, and if the government were to go broke, revolution would be a just a Rodney King episode away, but still, here we are, 10 years later still surviving. On the upside, I think even the Socialists have realized you can’t continue to print money. Uncle Sam’s bound to get things back in line in this next election, and face up to the dept we’ve amassed over the past 10 years expanding every branch of federal government and two wars. We still do have 110 million people in the country that are fully employed, and yes unemployment and underemployment are huge, we are still conducting business. We have to, commerce and enterprise are what made us great.
I have faith now, instead of living in fear. I pray for God’s will instead of giving into panic, and he tells me to keep writing, keep staying sober, and keep facing challenges rather than run away. If shit does hit the fan collectively, well then, God will still be there. The same God that pulled together the events of the American Revolution and guided Christians through WW1 and WW2 will be around to look us all over here.
Everything is temporary and all I’ve got is today, so one day at a time brother. And don’t take yourself to damn seriously, there wasn’t much I could have done then, or now. I’m just not as important as I used to think I was, haha, THANK GOD!!
Jared Bryan Smith
JB Smiths Blog - Author @ books4free.com 