On This Date

I don't have a story to tell. I was living in Boston, jobless and confused. I heard it first on Howard Stern; until I logged on to my dial-up connection, I presumed it was tasteless schtick. A few hours later, I got through to a friend in New York. She was standing in the middle of a supermarket. The shelves were bare.

I listened, quite often, to this song, which came out before that day and yet manages to capture the mood of that era more accurately than anything else I've ever heard.

It's strange to think that there are second graders who weren't alive that day. It's stranger still to realize that something so massive could ever recede into the distance.