I'm home sick tonight, with a cold, and thought it was high time I wrote in this thing. I feel just completely congested and like I have the dryest eyes in the Sahara. Don't take pity on me, really. I have nothing to complain about. Really.

Yesterday was 9/11, as we all know. Last 9/11 I wrote my first blog, my best in my opinion and at the very least my favorite, and Blogger proceeded to "lose" it. It is unretrievable.

I began to think the other day about 9/11 and its effects. 90% of us were not in New York City that day, or in nearby New Jersey, and saw this all unfold on television. What does that do to our perceptions of reality? This horrific event, this thing is happening in our country in one of our greatest cities and most of us watch it on a box in our living rooms. There is an argument to be made, I think, that we may view it as a movie, or a spectacle because we are a people dependent on and expectent of spectacles. The messages, the images, were received through our eyes and a two-dimensional medium, and what does that do to us? I don't know the answer, it was just something I was thinking about the other day.

Today Johnny Cash and John Ritter died. I was a fan of neither, but am saddened by both. I recognize that Cash was a music icon and that his passing is unfortunate. I am shocked by Ritter's death. Just out of nowhere. I often have trouble with celebrity deaths because my mind just doesn't wrap around the truth immediately because I can still see the celebrity being interviewed or in a movie or on a show or somehow... their deaths seem fleeting and false. And there have been so many celebrity deaths this year. Bronson, Bonds, Hope, Hepburn, Peck, Mr. Rogers, Nell Carter, Maurice Gibb. There were many others. All highest-profile at the very last minute. There is such an odd connection between celebrities and the public. Such passings exist in a strange gray area... few of us actually knew the subject, but we have some kind of connection with him or her. It doesn't quite fit anything; it's its own brand of loss. Very strange, indeed.

Mr. Chips had a remarkable blog (at last check, it was two posts ago... the one dated Friday, Sept. 5th) that I just can't shake. I threatened to copy, paste, and pass it off as my own. The internal admissions are startling, though not so odd if you take a close look at the ease with which he blogs. It's like he continually thinks he's writing to himself, when he conversely does it for other people. www.jeffphilips.blogspot.com.