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A few days ago on a local Message Board that I frequent, someone started a thread to express their disbelief that 6 years have passed since the most recent attacks on the World Trade Center, and to share his remembrance of that day. This stirred a small bit of public reflection on the part of several members of that board, myself included.

For whatever it is worth, if anyone is interested, the following is a slightly modified version of my response to his initial post. I welcome your coments.

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I had been looking very forward to that morning, as were most Bob Dylan fans in the USA, because that was the day that Love and Theft was released.

It was his first album in 4 years, and followed Time Out of Mind, which had taken the Grammy for Album of The Year in 1997.

My plan that day was to get up, hit Best Buy or some other place of that sort that I knew would have the CD, and make a point to try to hunker down with some privacy and listen to it in its entireity.

My girlfriend and I decided on a lark to check out the new coffeehouse that had just opened on the Southern edge of Forsyth Park. It was The Sentient Bean, and if I am not mistaken, that was their second day of business.

When we got there, people were huddled in the back of the room around a small, 13-inch TV picking up a fuzzy broadcast signal with rabbit ears, and it was deathly quiet.

We were soon told what was going on. Everything is very hazy from that point forward. I know the first plane hit, but I believe the second had yet to show. We sat there with everyone else (some familiar faces, some strangers) alternately glued to the set and chatting quietly trying to make heads or tails of the entire situation.

At some point we both started to feel very queasy and anxious and headed home (which was about 3 blocks away). We sat in the living room glued to the set for hours, watching the entire thing unfold.

Try as I might, I cannot recall if I saw the second plane hit live, or if we caught it in instant replay. It was shown so many times that morning that it seems like one big loop.

I know I cried a lot that day, both for the victims (both direct and indirect), for the city, and for our country. But mostly, I cried because I could very clearly predict much of what would come in its wake.

Not the specifics, mind you, but the overarching shift in the entire world’s view of the USA and our view of almost every other country.

It was plainly obvious to me that in many very real respects we (as a people) deserved that blow. It was also plainly obvious to me that it would be hard to imagine it happening on the watch of a less competent “President.”

It wasn’t long before that insipid, insulting pablum about Islamists “hating us because they are jealous of our freedom” started getting bandied about by anyone with a combover in earshot of a microphone, and so much of the world who had felt TRULY sorry for the U.S. public began to just “feel sorry” for us for being such easily placated and controlled sheep - and for our government using their undue influence and power to annex/bully much of the rest of the “free” world into the same flock.

I picked up the Dylan album the next day, and listened to it virtually non-stop for the next few weeks while screenprinting, still in a haze.

Interestingly enough, people who obssess about a certain breed of literate, mysterious rock stars being oddly prescient about major upheavals in society (much the same as some folks find whatever truth they’re looking for in the Bible or Numerology) would repeatedly theorize about the “importance” or “meaning” of that record being released on that day, and find in the cryptic poetry of Dylan’s lyrics on Love and Theft many supposedly clairvoyant references to Islamic fundamentalism and the 9/11 tragedy — specifically on the opening track “Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum.”

i.e.: “Throwin’ knives into the tree”; “Two great big bags of dead man’s bones”; “Trustin’ their fate to the hands of God / They pass by so silently”; “Lots of things they might want they would never buy”; “Neither one’s gonna turn and run / They’re makin’ a voyage to the sun / His Master’s Voice is callin’ me”; “They’re lying low and they’re makin’ hay / They seem determined to go all the way”.

I never subscribed to that sort of myopic, messianic approach to Dylan’s admittedly impressionistic lyrics, which are famous for being open to interpretation, but I also can’t deny it’s a tantalizing thought that someone who’s been so amazingly plugged into the zeitgeist (at least a few times over the course of his long career) might have found himself picking up on some sort of clairvoyant stream of societal unconsciousness, “Fat Men From Outer Space”-style.

Two and a half years later, my band Superhorse was lucky enough to be invited to play live in the St. Patrick’s Day Parade.

That evening, after it was over, we headed to the American Legion Post on Bull St. (the birthplace of The Mighty 8th Air Force), just a few doors from The Bean, and along with the packed bar of drunken revelers, were able to have the bizarre sensation of watching brief snippets of our own rain-soaked, rock & roll performance on a float from earlier in the day cycled through every 20 minutes on CNN Headline News in between live coverage of the our fearless leader demanding that Saddam Hussein step down, and the U.S. military prepping for the first assaults on Iraq which would begin a few hours later.