So this is the only thing I’m going to write about the Big Anniversary, and it’s not even really about it. Or rather, it is about the anniversary, it’s not primarily about 9/11.

I can’t stand any of it. Probably many of the op-eds and reflective NPR essays and tributes and mediations and the whole lot of it are sincere and well-crafted and fine, but they all grate.

I don’t want to hear anymore what lessons we’ve learned, or how 9/11 proves the political views you’ve had for five years are right, or how different everything is, or how vulnerable we all feel, or that there’s some lemonade-from-lemons moral in it all about the American Spirit. [As I’m type this, I hear someone on the News Hour misquoting Nietzsche on how you need chaos to give birth to a dancing star. I switch to music.]

I keep hearing or reading “remember” — we’re all gearing up (the news tells us) to “remember” 9/11. We’re supposed to remember all the people jumping out of skyscrapers because it beat burning to death, and the buildings falling over and over and over, and the black cloud over lower Manhattan, and the phones not working so you couldn’t check with friends downtown or family outside, and then Broadway in midtown ghastly and barren in the middle of the day, and bodies pulled out of rubble on the evening news for weeks afterwards. Well, you know, I hadn’t forgotten; nobody had forgotten.

Can we just leave it alone? Let all the people who lost someone remember that person however they see fit, rather than having this kind of national Hallmark holiday where we all revel in how solemn and profound we’ve all become since then? It feels like watching a corpse dressed up in a clown suit and paraded around.

Now I’m going to be a massive hypocrite and post this on a page where at least a few dozen people will probably read it, instead of just tuning it all out and going on with something else, and produce one more cheap, stupid piece of public flotsam about it. Well, yeah, I guess I am. But I feel silly talking about anything else, because that’s what’s on my mind, and this is where I get out what’s on my mind, and I’d rather get it out than shut up until something else replaces it. Maybe that’s everyone else’s problem. Whatever, back to your regularly scheduled, non-9/11 content.