It's a website! Announcing my newest creation, culturalaxis.com for Cultural Axis Partners, LLC! (Uh, email me if you folks find any errors, OK?)

Today I watched the Pentagon burn. I just wrote a massive email to one of my personal mailing lists, but if I accidentally left you off (or if you're a casual observer of this site), here's the meat of it.

The Watergate building, where I work, is only a short way away from the Pentagon. They evacuated us shortly after the plane hit. I walked out the back, walked down to the Potomac (which is right behind us), turned left and saw the Pentagon burning.

It was one of the scariest things I've ever seen.

The Metro, the DC subway system, shut down. The streets were clogged with people trying to get home. The cell phone system was gone. Only a few calls could get through (luckily, I was able to phone my parents and my girlfriend to let them know I was alive). I set out on foot towards home and away from logical targets (the White House, the Capitol building, etc.). I wound up walking from the Watergate through Georgetown and all the way to Arlington Cemetery before I was stopped by the Park Police, who had barricaded off the area and were preventing all traffic, motorized and pedestrian, from coming anywhere near the Pentagon. I turned back and walked to Rosslyn, which is right across the Potomac from Georgetown. I got to the Rosslyn Metro station just as they started running trains again. The stop I use every day is Pentagon City, which is one stop past the Pentagon. Of course the Pentagon stop was shut down, as was the National Airport. We went straight through the Pentagon stop, which was completely black and dark. It was almost as if it wasn't there at all. I got out at Pentagon City, went up the escalators and walked right into a cloud of smoke. The entire area was hazy with brown smoke, and when I turned around I saw the smoke from the Pentagon, huge clouds of black, black smoke rolling up higher than the skyscrapers. I found a pay phone and called Jenny, my girlfriend, who is currently staying with me and looking for an apartment. She was at my place when the plane went overhead, about 100 feet up, headed straight for the Pentagon, and she was there when the explosions hit. She agreed to come pick me up, since the shuttle buses back to my apartment weren't running yet. I got back on the Metro and took it down to Van Dorn, where she picked me up with the help of one of our neighbors, with whom she'd been watching the events on TV.

I am now safe -- "safe" -- back at my apartment and running a basic nose count to make sure everyone I know is okay, and knows I'm okay. Today I saw things that I never thought I'd see, and felt things I never thought I'd feel. While I was walking, a plane would go by overhead, and for a second it'd be okay -- it's just a plane, planes go by all the time -- and then I'd remember what was going on, and my heart would stop. I would look up to the sky, just like the folks around me, and search the skies for signs of a plane. A couple of times I stopped and listened with complete strangers to an outstretched pocket radio, and we'd swap rumors and scraps of news, trying to piece together what was going on. You'd hear booms from construction sites and wonder if they were bombs, or hear sirens going by somewhere and wonder what was going on or if something else had been hit.

Today was scary. This week will be scary. God knows how long it's going to be before things really get back to normal, for all of us.

Weirdly enough, right now the radio is playing Pearl Jam. "I-I-I know that I'm still alive," Eddie Vedder is warbling, and I'm not entirely sure how that makes me feel. I'm still alive, but life right now is really, really strange. If any of you know of any job leads for web designers outside of the nation's capitol, I may well be entertaining offers.

Jesus. I hope y'all are okay.

Graveyards and cobblestones. My soul consists of two components: the young twentysomething high-tech modernist, and then there's the half that things like this really sing to. It's the half that longs for the mists over Washington state or the graveyards and cobblestones of small towns in England. Whenever one half maintains dominance for a prolonged period of time, I get profoundly unhappy. And I think that may have more to do with how bummed I've been for the last year-and-some: the slow atrophying of the romantic due to the daily necessity of the corporate.

I have got to get out of here.

I swear I'm not dead. Since my last post, I have moved, NerdUp 2.0 has gone live, I have done extensive work on a new site, I have beaten myself senseless at work, and I am now sick and wishing I were home in bed. Details at 11.

Developing themes. I wish I had these sites at work done, so I could show them to you. I wish I had just a little more done on the new NerdUp site done so I could show them to you (the new frontpage there is just a teaser). I wish I had some more of the new Cultural Axis Partners site done that I'm working on, so I could show that to you. I wish I had a lot more done on the Dreamsbay Magazine site, so there would be more of you to show all of this nothing to.

But I don't, so you'll have to take my word for it.

THANK YOU. Finally, somebody came to their senses about banner ads! This dose of common sense reported to you by our favorite now-defunct magazine...

Oh, Lord. This wonderful wish list is brought to you by The Morning News and "Andrew Lloyd-Webber." Hysterical.

Delightful anachronism. Man, I love coding by candlelight. Although from across the room, it looks like I'm engaging in some strange e-ritual. Which, in retrospect, I guess I sort of am. Hm.

Idiots. The RIAA still doesn't get it. According to this story on CNET today, "CD sales drop despite Napster's silence". How long is it going to take for these idiots to realize that said headline would more accurately read, "CD sales drop because of Napster's silence"?