If you’re old enough, the common conversation opener during today is “What were you doing the day it happened?” On 9/11 I was out with my buddy, Zipper, mowing the Visiting Nurses Association (VNA) out on Prim Road in Colchester, VT. Just now I looked back at the location on Google maps to sort of revive my memory. I remember it as hilly and sweeping, but this is not the case at all. The lawn is a thin, level patch aside the road, not much at all to have to take care of. I had gone out there for a little extra cash but had already been sucked back into restaurants due to a massive drought in August of 2001. No grass to mow or weedwhack. The daily phone call from my boss, Ned, the owner of Lawn Guru Landscaping, telling me to stay home, “There’s nothing to mow” he would say in his weird half whisper half drawl.

A strange man who owned the business as a side hustle, Ned’s full time job was as a mortician. A short, bald, thicknecked and furry wristed former logger that I nicknamed Uncle Fester, who kept a huge makeup kit in a giant tackle box in his Ford Aerostar minivan. He would often work alongside us on jobs then receive a page and then tell us, “I gotta go pick up a body.” The next day he would reveal the gruesome details to us. “There was an old woman who had been in a bathtub for three days” and so on. He was an odd duck for sure. He made a lot of money but for whatever reason lived with the chainsmoking, bee sting allergic foreman, Jack, in a one level ranch off Swift Street that had a crematorium on the property away from the street. A terrifying and stark, drab building with an abnormally high and shiny stainless steel chimney jutting high and at askew angles as if souls had fought to climb out. We went there often to dump leaves or brush into the ravine in the back and Jack would ask us inside for a cold beer. A malignant smell of burnt hair and flesh lingered around the place and gave me constant shivers up my spine.

All the tools and trucks were stored in a barn behind Ready Funeral Home on Shelburne Road and when we loaded up the trucks in the morning, I watched as all the black clad ushers would finish smoking butts and then shuffle inside. I always thought about what a weird job that would be to stand around and solemnly nod as people came in to mourn the dead. I always thought about the movie Phantasm II with the Tall Man and his army of telekinetically powered, psychotic, blood sucking orbs. Somewhere inside Ready Funeral Home there was a hidden basement with frozen lockers full of dead bodies, a device with a giant needle created for draining bodily fluids and adding formaldehyde, and people in there stitching up mouths from the inside. It was just too creepy to think about.

I took the job after being a line cook for many years and being lured in by my friend who talked it up. “You get up early, you’re done by four everyday.” The pay was pretty good too. Ten bucks an hour compared to the $6.75 I made at the time at the Trattoria Delia where I had toiled for three years pan frying veal scallopine and tossing up all the famous pastas.

Ah yes, the delusions of grandeur, the visions of sugar plums dancing in my head. Riding atop one of those big mowers. Getting a nice tan. Having actual lunch breaks. It all sounded great.

The reality was that all the guys working there longer than me were the mower operators and when I started they handed me a weed whacker and I went about each day absorbing the vibrations and dust for eight hours. On occasion I got to operate the little gas powered push mower for the sidewalk lawns around condominium complexes but that was it. I had no car and biked a couple of miles to the funeral home in the morning, so by the middle of the summer I was shredded and tan. On the way home I would stop by my favorite bar, The Three Needs, have a few, go home to eat dinner and then be asleep before ten.

On the day of 9/11, after we had mowed the VNA, Zipper and I went to get a sandwich for lunch. En route we listened to Howard Stern, who was still on the radio at that time. There was talk at that moment of the tower attacks but we were both not paying big attention to it and both thought it was a rerun episode from the Oklahoma city bombings in 1995.

When we arrived at the gas station to grab sandwiches, we saw the whole nightmare, the videos of the planes flying into the buildings, over and over again, on the small television they kept there. It was an impossibility at the time to imagine someone doing this but despite the horror I felt I also instantly thought about how our own country had done this to so many other countries throughout history. Zipper, who was a weekend warrior in the Army National Guard had a very different and much more aggressive approach. “We need to go kill those fuckers,” he said aloud and received nods and cheers of agreement amidst the other customers waiting for their lunch.

Odd and unsettling for sure. A strange blanket of paranoia, patriotism and fear for a long time to come. And then of course, the war that lasted 20 years. 20 goddam years.

I harken back and leave you now with the chilling, haunting, prophetic words of Hunter S. Thompson, who wrote this in his ESPN column one week after the attacks:

“‘We are At War now,’ according to President Bush, and I take him at his word. He also says this War might last for ‘a very long time.’

“Generals and military scholars will tell you that eight or 10 years is actually not such a long time in the span of human history — which is no doubt true — but history also tells us that 10 years of martial law and a war-time economy are going to feel like a Lifetime to people who are in their twenties today. The poor bastards of what will forever be known as Generation Z are doomed to be the first generation of Americans who will grow up with a lower standard of living than their parents enjoyed.

“That is extremely heavy news, and it will take a while for it to sink in. The 22 babies born in New York City while the World Trade Center burned will never know what they missed. The last half of the 20th century will seem like a wild party for rich kids, compared to what’s coming now. The party’s over, folks. The time has come for loyal Americans to Sacrifice. … Sacrifice. … Sacrifice. That is the new buzz-word in Washington. But what it means is not entirely clear.”

Read the entire article from his column here.