9/11: What I saw from Asheville

Yesterday I shared an excerpt from my memoir Keeping the Tryst, from the end of chapter 37.  That excerpt dealt with my life on September 10th, 2001.  And the last thing that I did before falling asleep late that night was to thank God for all of the good that He had brought into my life.  If the previous several months could have been that good, I had no doubt that the rest of my life could be just as amazing.  I was 27 years old, with everything ahead of him.  I was in love, I had a good job, I was writing for publication on a daily basis.  And on the night of September 10th I had started writing the script for my very first movie.

My eyes closed, and I was looking forward to another day of being grateful.

Here is another excerpt.  The final part of chapter 37 and all of chapter 38.

---------------

The phone rang sometime later during the morning.

I picked it up, and it was Mom.

“Are you watching the TV?”

I told her I was just waking up.  I asked her what was going on.

“A plane hit the World Trade Center!”

The first thought that went through my bleary head was that a plane had once crashed into the Empire State Building.  Maybe this was pilot error, like that had been.

“Yeah and a few minutes later another plane hit the other tower!”

~

Within minutes of turning on the television to see the World Trade Center, I called Lisa and made sure she was okay.  Then I went online and went to the news forum I frequented.  There was the shock and terror, giving rise to rawest anger, now being immortalized in real time as an online monument to the evil that men do and their victims.

I cranked up AOL Instant Messenger and found Ed was on.  Everyone in his office was watching the live coverage.

I was in the middle of replying to his previous message when the first tower fell.

~

What was supposed to have been a wonderful day for TheForce.net turned into a real-time reflection of the horror.  Josh posted a prayer.  The site’s forums within hours became a clearinghouse of information for those in the New York and D.C. areas, as users reported that they were okay while others were looking for fellow fans who had been in the vicinity of the towers and Washington.

We couldn’t locate some members of our staff who had been in New York.  Lisa and I had dinner with one of them the first night of Dragon Con, a week and a half before.  When we finally located Alena she told us that she had been on the street in front of the north tower, directly below where the first plane hit.  Alena saw it all happen.  She had then run for cover into a subway entrance and heard the debris crashing onto the street above her.

~

Maggi and Helen were enraged.  Maggi said things that one dares not share in polite company.  In her words were well reflected the wrath inflaming all good people of conscience.

~

I watched the coverage all day, up to being time to go to work.  I arrived at 4.  Only five potential customers came into the Best Buy that evening.  They shuffled in, looked around, and walked out.  Each of them had that “thousand-yard stare” in his eyes.  They appeared dazed and confused.  Like they had only come in to keep their minds off the wretchedness of the outside world.

Not a single item was sold in our store all night.

~

I returned home a little after 9.  Lisa and I talked for a long time.  I couldn’t remember the last time I had been so thankful to hear the voice of a loved one.

~

Chad was at his desk in the CNN Building.  There was nothing to post to the Sports Illustrated site that night.  Up until almost 1 A.M., it was Chad and I over Instant Messenger talking about what had happened.  We shared a lot of images we had found.  Like the San Francisco Examiner special edition headline that screamed out “BASTARDS!"

"I love you, brother," Chad said as he signed out for the night.

"I love you too, man."

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The last waking moments of a sane world

The following is an excerpt from my memoir Keeping the Tryst.  It appears just before the end of chapter 37.

~

September 10, 2001…

That night I was scheduled to work. And there were three things that I was eager to do when I got home…

The first was to call Lisa.

Secondly, I wanted to start work on writing the script for the movie.  Even though I had no grasp whatsoever of crafting a screenplay.

Finally, it was a big night for TheForce.net staff.  We would be up all evening getting a bunch of stories about the Episode I DVD release ready to publish at midnight Pacific Time.

Lisa and I talked for a bit, then I threw a pizza into the oven and while that was cooking I started writing the first lines of what I was calling “Sithery”.  It seemed as good a working title as anything.

I wrote a page and a half of what passed for a script, then logged into TheForce.net’s staff portal.  There were a couple of posts that I needed to have ready, and those were done.  I hung out online until 3 a.m. and saw all our work get posted.

Satisfied, I went to the sofa and crashed hard.  And before going to sleep I found myself feeling pretty good.  I had my own place, a job, and an amazing girlfriend whom I cared for deeply.  I was writing a script for a movie.  And my words were being read by tens of thousands of people each day.

I thanked God for giving me so much.  And then drowsiness took me.

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Labor Day weekend 25 years ago...

This weekend in Atlanta is the annual Dragon Con.  I'm remembering the first time I went to that.

It was another Labor Day weekend, twenty-five years ago.  The night before it started, my Star Wars website TheForce.net published an interview that I did with "Weird Al" Yankovic.  I left my apartment in Asheville the next day and drove three hours to my girlfriend's place at University of Georgia.  We got to Atlanta and walked around Dragon Con a bit, then we hooked up with another TheForce.net staffer named Alena.  We wound up having dinner along with a few Dragon Con guests (the actress who played Vasquez in the movie Aliens was a few spots down the table from us).  Alena was a really sweet young lady, she was host of the site's new weekly video feature.  We then went to a little gathering where among other people were Peter Mayhew who played Chewbacca (VERY giant but soft-spoken man) and Jeremy Bulloch (who wore the Boba Fett costume in the original trilogy).

Later that night at the convention I represented TheForce.net with a presentation on midi-clorians: those weird germ things that George Lucas had introduced in Episode I.  There was this girl in a Princess Leia costume who kept interrupting me as I was talking, and I kept thinking "she's like Annie Wilkes in the movie Misery".  And that's when the idea for my first movie hit.

We were at Dragon Con the next day too.  Following a panel discussion about the upcoming The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, Lisa (my girlfriend) and I got to meet John Rhys-Davies, who has been in a lot of movies and would soon be seen as Gimli the Dwarf.  A short while later my girlfriend and I shared a booth at Planet Hollywood with Paul Blake, the actor who played Greedo in the first Star Wars movie.  A very nice chap.  I asked him what did he think of Lucas changing the movie so that Han Solo didn't shoot first.  I'll never forget his response: "I think it's absolute BOLLOCKS what George did!  Why did he do that?  Han was perfectly justified in shooting me, I was about to kill HIM after all.  Why did George do that?  I'll never understand it!"

It was a great two days at Dragon Con.  And then the next day on Sunday my girlfriend and I went to church where she worshipped while growing up.  An hour or so after that we were on our way to Atlanta to see a performance of the musical The Phantom of the Opera.

I'm sharing these memories, because they are among the last, most precious memories that I have about the way the world used to be.  Before everything changed a week and a half later.

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Memories of the giant turtle

My memoir Keeping the Tryst has been getting around some.  I confess, its biggest audience seems to be composed of people who have known me, friends and family.  It's gotten some other purchases, though it's far from being a "bestseller".  Still, I've been happy.  And one never knows how far a book will get in the larger scheme of things.  A lot of books started out selling small but went on to bigger things.

One of the most consistent remarks that I've gotten about Keeping the Tryst has been about my memory.  This book covers half a century of the lifetime of an American boy, and it does so in at times almost microscopic detail.  As I said in the first chapter, I have no idea how it is that I remember some things so vividly and clearly.  It just "is".  Sometimes I feel like Billy Pilgrim, the protagonist of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five: unstuck in time.  One moment I'm here in the present and the next I'm anywhen else down my timeline, and sometimes it's as if I can see a little bit ahead, too.  The memories come often without anything precipitating them.

Like this latest one, that has me stumped about why it should come to mind many decades later.

A few nights ago I remembered something that I saw on television, at an age so young that I couldn't pinpoint what year.  It had to do with a giant green turtle and a beautiful woman with glowing green eyes.  It was a movie.  And for some reason it made me sad, like it had a tragic ending.

I knew that I wasn't imagining this.  It's something that has crossed my mind a number of times over the years, without warning.  This was a thing that I had seen with my own eyes and it must have been before I ever started school at the age of five.  And it was haunting me.

Why?

The other day, the memory came again.  And finally, at long last, I plugged what little I knew into Google and braced myself for whatever might come.

Well, it turned out that I was not the only poor soul who had gone looking for the giant turtle and the girl with glowing green eyes.  Many others had too.  And so I followed the trail...

It led to one Michael Summers, proprietor of the Dangerous Universe website.  And with his post from 2000 titled "Dream of the Big, Huge Turtle" the final link in the long chain going back to my childhood snapped into place.

It was a movie after all.  Its title is The Bermuda Depths.  And it was broadcast on the American television network ABC on January 27th, 1978.

That was a few months shy of my fourth birthday.

I read the article on Wikipedia and found out more...

The Bermuda Depths is a science-fiction/fantasy/horror film, starring among other people Carl Weathers (who was in between the first two Rocky movies) and Burl Ives.  It's about a young man who grew up on Bermuda, meeting a girl named Jennie when he was younger, and after some time away comes back to the island.

I remembered that much, too.

And then there was that monstrously enormous turtle.  That more than anything else is what made the impression on me.  It was a terrifying spectacle.  I remember there being a fight with it toward the end of the movie.  And I think that in a way the turtle won.

I have memories of watching the final scenes and crying.  I cried a lot, as a child. I was very sensitive.  Sometimes I would cry listening to a song.  It just needed to sound sad enough.  Songs that don't faze me and haven't for a long time since then.  The Bermuda Depths made me cry, and I don't know why.

I suppose that I'm going to have to watch this, sometime or other, maybe in the near future.  I did a looksee and it's available on DVD at Amazon for thirteen bucks.  Maybe when I do see it, the real last pieces of this movie that has at times haunted me unbidden will fall into being.  Perhaps then I will understand why memory of it has lingered and persisted for going on fifty years.

If I do see it, I'll make a post about it.  But then again, I wonder if I really should watch it.  There should be a bit of mystery in one's life.

However this goes, my memory has a name now.  And I know that I wasn't imagining it.

EDIT 07-18-2026 02:06 AM: I was so startled by discovering that I hadn't hallucinated it that it didn't occur to me until just now that there might be clips of The Bermuda Depths on YouTube.  But there are some.  So I'll post that link and lure others to also partake of the madness.

(Turtle picture generated with Google Gemini)

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Perfect memory incident for 06/13/2026

Tonight it's another case of perfect recall come unbidden.  I've been told that how this translated into the writing for my book is pretty astonishing.  Sometimes I feel this is what it was like for Billy Pilgrim, the unstuck-in-time protagonist in Slaughterhouse-Five.  One moment I'm here in the present, then Bam! I'm in the past, reliving the moment.  And sometimes it's like flashes of the future come too.

So here's the latest trip back in time...

I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing on this night in 1992.  I was in Virginia Beach, there to see a friend I had been known in middle school and high school until she and her family relocated (her father was a Methodist minister and he was given a new church to pastor).  My sister and I had come to see Dana graduate from high school.  Anyway, that afternoon my friend and her family, and my sister and I went to the beach and had a great time.  We got back to their home and had pizza for dinner.  Then Dana's brother and I spent an hour just chillin' and watching an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation (the episode was "The Masterpiece Society").  After the show we entertained ourselves, like a particularly cutthroat game of UNO at my friend's kitchen table.

Then the next morning we said our goodbyes to each other and my sister and I found our way back to US 58 and the six hour drive home.

I bought a Super Soaker while we were in Virginia Beach.  I still have it.  It's in perfect working order.

For once a pleasant memory.  I should try to evoke them more often.

Edit:  I forgot to mention how that evening I was wearing my favorite The Far Side t-shirt...

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My scary memory, again

As of five minutes ago I have finished drinking my first cup of coffee since 8:20 p.m. on March 5th, 1993.

If we were to take a time machine back to that moment in the kitchen of the house I grew up in, that's what you would find me doing.

I am sooo not kidding, folks.  As I say in the first chapter of my book, I have no idea why I remember some things with such pristine clarity.  It's as if I'm reliving them in the here and now.

The coffee I had then was a French vanilla brew.  This time it was a mocha-something.  Be kind, this is the very first coffee I've bought on my own so I'm not sure about a lot of things involving the stuff.  But last weekend a good friend told me I need to get some coffee and real tea into my diet.  She said it would improve me mentally.  So, we'll see where it goes.

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