Alan Jackson famously asked “Where Were You (When The World Stopped Turning)” in a hit single, and while the world didn’t come to a full stop on September 11th, 2011, we did witness the largest-ever full scale attack on America. 10 years later, much has changed beyond the collapse of the World Trade Center towers. Long lines for security at airports are the norm these days. Muslims have become Public Enemy #1. The terror alert system instituted immediately after the attacks still rears it’s head on occasion. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

I considered letting the site go dark today, but I thought that we’d be better off taking our eyes off of pop culture (sort of) and talking about where we were on 9/11/01, what we were doing, and how our lives have changed since then.

This post is dedicated to the memory of all who perished in (and as a result of) the attacks.

Blerd: I’ve revisited 9/11 and it’s immediate aftermath many times over the years. Both in blogs, where I’ve tried to create some kind of tribute posting every year, and in my own head, which is still traumatized by the memories that remain as vivid as if it was yesterday. From getting off the subway to the news that a plane crashed into the World Trade Center to watching slackjawed as the second plane slammed into the Towers. From the horror of watching people jump from the burning buildings to the absolute astonishment of watching the buildings collapse one after the other. The word that most often comes to mind-even after all these years-is surreal. The day seemed to pass by in some terrible version of slo-mo.

That’s about the only coherent paragraph I can put together now that I’m reliving the day and it’s immediate aftermath in my head. I just have this weird jumble of memories in my head. Finally catching the train home and seeing the looks of worry and fright on everyone’s faces.  Getting to survey the damage firsthand the day after the attacks (the police weren’t as immediately strict when it came to getting around relatively close to Ground Zero). Watching my fellow New Yorkers as they resolutely picked up the pieces, went back to work, reopened their businesses, and got back to living. The act was devastating-to this day I have nightmares about buildings collapse, and I don’t think I’ll be ever able to watch video footage of the crashes and collapse-I don’t know how any of the folks who actually lost friends and family in the attacks are able to. Bless their strength, though.

The thing I most remember about the day itself is walking outside the store where I worked to smoke a cigarette. Weather-wise, it was a perfect Tuesday afternoon-except for the fact that the blue sky had been almost overtaken by thick plumes of black smoke. I’m not sure how to explain why that seemed (and seems) to describe that day, but for some reason when I think of 9/11, that image comes to my head first.

I’m not even sure I can describe how the events of 9/11 changed my life. However, I can say with certainty for myself and many other people-not just in NYC, not just even in the U.S., this was one of, if not the, defining moment in our lives. It stripped the illusion of a very basic innocence (or maybe ignorance) from my life and not many days go by when my mind doesn’t flash back at least once to that day and the immediate aftermath.

Chuck: I remember being a kid and always hearing people say that they would never forget where they were or what they were doing the day JFK was assassinated. Being a young know it all with a bad attitude, I usually met that statement with something witty and poignant like, “uhhh yeah, ok”. I figured it was just something that old people said so they would have something interesting to talk about, honestly. Well, that all changed for me on September 11, 2001.

On that gorgeous fall morning 10 years ago I was pretty much on top of my game. 26 years old, good job, making good money, engaged and getting ready to marry an amazing girl in just 9 months….life was great. That morning I began work in Boston at 7:30 a.m., so my plan was to hopefully finish up by 1:00 and head out to see my girl to have a nice, relaxing day. Everything was going per usual until about 90 minutes later my cell phone started to ring. And ring. And ring. Very unusual for 9 am on a Tuesday I thought, but I couldn’t answer right away due to being busy with my work. My curiosity completely piqued at about 9:15, I answered a call from my sister. She was frantic….which almost immediately made me frantic. She was asking where I was, if was I at work, if I was in New York…. all these questions with a tone that held both fear and shock within it. My work at the time took me to New York anywhere between 2 and 4 times a week, so she kept asking me if I was in Manhattan and if I was ok. Finally she told me that 2 planes just hit the towers, and that she actually witnessed the second plane hit while watching the news. We both stayed on the line, shocked and not knowing what to say, stunned by the blow that obviously blindsided us. We got off the phone and I then went inside the office with some of the guys from work. We watched the horror unfold standing together in front of a 13 inch black and white screen with a bad antenna. When we would intermittently lose the signal I felt both relief and anxiety as I couldn’t take my eyes away although I wished I hadn’t seen what I was seeing. The next hours were spent trying to contact friends in New York, only to hear the operator tell me that lines weren’t available. I watched fighter jets fly overhead and I remember feeling like it was all just a scene to some movie, it couldn’t be real. It was an incredibly surreal day.

I got out of work around 1:00, traffic leaving the city resembled the beginning of a long weekend. Rather than taking the trip out to see my future wife I went home and sat in front of my TV switching between channels watching the news, all day and all night. I couldn’t stop. It was as though everything was immediately different, a sense of innocence and invulnerability instantly lost. I didn’t know what to think. Would more attacks happen? Today? What was next? War? Everything changed. I came to realize a lot that day. I became more sympathetic and empathetic to things that were going on in other parts of the world. Things that have been going on for decades and centuries elsewhere, yet never here, I now took more notice of. My perspective on everything changed that day. Life wasn’t just all about going out, having fun with your friends, etc. etc. Not that those things are bad, but life got real that day, it got serious for me. It’s a shame to me that that growth and perspective had to come on the heels of such a tragedy, but it did.

The day remains so clear to me it is as though it happened yesterday. Every detail is indelibly etched in my mind like nothing else I have ever experienced. Maybe I’m just the old guy now. The guy who needs something interesting to talk about. Nahh, I know that’s not true. I’ll never forget where I was on September 11, 2011. Nor will I forget how I felt that beautiful Tuesday morning that turned into that tragic day. The world has changed a lot these past 10 years, but I will never forget that day.

Drew: I was young lad of sixteen when the terrorists attacked the WTC – that much I recall. I remember the entire day vividly, really – growing up in New Jersey with NYC a mere day trip away, my peers were exceptionally worried that the damage would spread to us in some way; not simply emotionally, but physically. Sadly, and I am hesitant to admit this, my immediate reaction was flippant, as most of my interactions were at that time; a teacher in an adjoining high school classroom stuck her head in to inform us all that a plane had been flown into the World Trade Center. Stuck in my own little private high school bubble, it didn’t occur to me that anyone could have malice against the United States; without any context, I simply thought a grevious accident had occurred, and I turned to the kid next to me and muttered “must’ve been a woman pilot!” Yuk, yuk… yuck.

But the day wore on, and news came to us fast and furious; the administration eventually gave up on curriculums for the day and sent us all home. I was confused, and hungry for answers; the realization of large-scale, incalculable tragedy crept up on me slowly, instead of hitting me all at once. It took ten days for that to happen: I sat alone in my darkened room on 9/21/2001, watching the “America: A Tribute to Heroes” telethon, and while Pearl Jam and Bruce Springsteen stirred my soul, it was U2 who did me in with a heartfelt rendition of “Walk On” from their latest album. The feeling of incredible loss swept over me, and I sat there, and quietly wept. I didn’t know a soul who perished on 9/11. I just knew, in that one moment, that we’d taken a blow, and that this mournful, yet resilient ballad was helping a sixteen year old who didn’t yet know how to cope with death and tragedy was helping me access how I felt about it. My beloved Bruce would later do an entire album devoted to the national grieving and healing process, and that helped put emotions in sharper focus for me; in the following months, I’d see displays of patriotism both galvanizing and disappointing – I’d watch human kindness peak, see preachers reverently pray for healing, hear of endless waves of volunteers lending their bare hands to rescue efforts, but one of my two best friends at the time was an Indian girl, and I’d see the effects of unchecked patriotism and ugly misdirected rage every day. In an age where “post-9/11” has become a recognized and viable adjective, all I know is this: somewhere in the four minutes it took for some band to sing some song, I grew up.

Dr. Gonzo: I was a junior in college at the time. Like every other morning, I woke up and hopped in the shower. We had one of those shower radios, and as usual, I tuned to a local AM talk station, KDKA. In the brief time that I was in the shower, I”d heard the news of the Pentagon crash as it came in, and then learned of the WTC attacks. In the rush to get to campus, I didn’t get to see much on the TV. By the time I got to class (Rhetoric and American Culture), everyone was talking about the morning’s events. After maybe 5 minutes of discussion, an announcement piped into the entire building that campus was shutting down, and classes were closed. The scene outside was now pandemonium, as was the case in every US city. I went to the campus radio station, where our news directors were dutifully reporting until we were all forced to leave the building. I just remember the feeling of utter chaos and fear in the now crowded streets and sidewalks of the are surrounding the University of Pittsburgh’s campus. People on their phones in a panic, people dazed, people whose horror was palpable. I arrived at our apartment to find my roommate and two of our friends huddled around the TV, as one friend desperately tried to get a line to his family in New York City. Having at that point not seen much of the footage or gotten too much information, this is where the gravity of the situation hit me. Fortunately, his loved ones were safe and sound. But like most people, we sat there transfixed, trying to make sense of the day’s events, struggling to comprehend that this was actually happening. Although we couldn’t turn away, the budding media critic in me was trying to wrap my head around the constant loop of the planes hitting the Twin Towers over and over again, now from a different angle, now in slow motion. I couldn’t help but think that the endless repetition of that visual was doing more harm than good (indeed, in the weeks and months following, I became increasingly disillusioned by the trivialization of patriotism as a corollary to consumerism) . When we finally peeled away from the TV, I turned again to KDKA, where local folks were sharing their reactions analyses, their anger, fears and confusion. This localized the tragedy for me, especially considering Pittsburgh’s proximity to Shanksville, PA (the site of Flight 93’s crash). This weekend, Shanksville is actually dedicating Phase 1 of a permanent memorial at the crash site. Has it really been ten years?

Every major event in my life has some sort of musical association tied into it. I for the life of me cannot tell you what I listened to that day, possibly because I didn’t listen to any music at all. There aren’t even songs that remind me of 9/11. It’s kind of bizarre to me that the biggest American tragedy in my lifetime is completely dissociated from any sort of musical memory. But there you have it.

GG: I was on my first real business trip to Houston on 9/10/01. It was only supposed to be a two-day trip. My two kids were infants. Brian was just 2 years of age, while JJ was less than a year old. I was already bummed about having to leave the family. It was very awkward being in Houston while the tragedy was happening. I remember feeling empty and helpless. I’m sure I would’ve felt helpless back home too, but not empty. Houston-ers just looked at the TV and kind of went on with their life. The entire city did.

My 9/11 experience was all about getting home. That two day trip turned into a five day trip. We couldn’t fly back home until the weekend. I’d never been more than a few hours away from my kids since they were born. It felt selfish to so worried about my family. It still does even looking back. On Thursday of that week, my buddy Cactus Jim (who I went on the work trip with) and I ventured out to a WWE event, which was the first live event in the US since the tragedy. It was a weird experience because many people were scared to be in the building. People wondered if being the first live event in the US made the building a target. I know I wondered about that. But instead it was a fine show. It wasn’t really about wrestling as much as it was about trying to get back to normalcy when you really couldn’t. Not after all the heartbreak in New York. But you could at least try.

The show opened with the wrestlers coming out with emotion on their face. And Lillian Garcia gave one of the most stirring performances of the Star Spangled Banner that I’ve ever heard. Maybe a lot of it was time and place, but I never get shivers when I hear that song. That night, I did.

Jay Kumar: I’m trying not to get too caught up in all the 9/11 memorials this year, but it’s hard to miss them. It’s tough to relive all the emotions that were flying around that day: Fear, confusion, sorrow, anger. Living in the Boston area, it wasn’t as freaky for me as I’m sure it was for folks in NYC and DC that day 10 years ago, but it was pretty damn close. I was working at a dotcom in Cambridge, Mass., at the time. I took the train into work and had just settled in for a day’s work, when at about 8:50 a.m., my co-worker Ric comes over and says, “I think something just happened in New York.” He was listening to Howard Stern as he did every day, and in the middle of a typical discussion about Pamela Anderson’s boobs, Stern and his crew just stopped. Turns out they had a perfect view of a plane crashing into the World Trade Center. So we switched from WMBR, the MIT station that we usually listened to in the mornings, to WBZ-AM, a news station, and sure enough, they were reporting that a plane hit the tower. Not long after, another plane hit and we knew this was more than just a messed-up accident.

And of course, everything unfolded from there. Our boss Tom had a cable-less TV in his office, so we were watching ABC when the towers fell. Even in fuzzy black and white, it was one of the most disturbing things I had ever seen live. We were of course trying to get as much information as we could from sites like CNN.com, but Web traffic was overflowing at that time, as you can imagine. The irony was not lost on us, as we continued to listen to the AM radio for our information. Then we heard about Washington, and Pennsylvania, and speculated amongst ourselves that maybe something would happen on the West Coast later in the day. I was supposed to do an interview that afternoon with a guy at some dotcom out in LA; he called to reschedule and I asked him what the mood was like out there. Kind of a mixture of fear and uncertainty. Everything was happening so fast. They sent us home around noon, so I took the subway to North Station to catch a train back to Beverly. It was like rush hour. The place was packed like it was when I usually arrived there at 6:30 p.m. every day. I got home at 2:30 and spent the rest of the night like everyone else, glued to the tube for the latest. They were showing all the different clips of the planes hitting the towers and no matter how many times I saw it, I had to watch it again. It was just so unbelievable. It was tough to reconcile the oddness of the whole situation; my wife and I had just found out she was pregnant and we wondered what kind of fucked up world we were bringing a child into. The next day, I went to work because what the hell else was I going to do? Everything was really somber and low-key. I went to the gym and there were the usual 5:30 a.m. workout freaks there like myself, going through the motions. It was comforting, really, to do that.

Ten years later, it’s amazing how much the world has changed, from the multiple wars being waged by U.S. forces in the Middle East to the constant paranoia over homeland security. I was a very cynical person before 9/11, but I’m much worse now. But I have to temper that attitude because I have two daughters who don’t understand cynicism, let alone why someone would fly a plane into a building. So I’ll spend this weekend going to their soccer games and enjoying some of the good stuff that came into the world in the last decade.

Mike A. :September 11th started off like any other normal workday for me back in 2001. I got up extra early to get ready as I had a 50 minute drive to work at the time from metro Detroit to the Blue Water area in Michigan. It was a rather uneventful, typical Tuesday morning for that first hour once I got to work. Then shortly before 9AM, rumblings started that “something horrible” had happened in New York. Word quickly spread and, of course, everyone around me in the office was dropping what they were doing to check news sites on the internet. The earliest reports simply painted this as a tragic plane crash into the World Trade Center, which was bad enough. But it quickly turned even worse when the second plane hit and the picture began to become crystal clear, this was not an accident. This was a coordinated attack.

Obviously, those who were in New York that day have a perspective and emotions none of the rest of us can truly share, but it was an event so stunning, so unreal, it’s didn’t matter where in the country you were as it was going on, you felt absolutely helpless and in shock. How could this happen in America? Who was doing this? About a half hour later, the Pentagon was hit and at this point a fear came over me I had yet to experience in my life. Work was done for the day at this point, no one could carry on as if things were normal and attend to their daily duties. There was anger, confusion, anxiety about exactly what the hell was going on. Our country appeared under attack, and where would be the next hit? Thoughts instantly turned to loved ones, and how unimportant anything we had to do in the office that day truly was. All we could do was sit and wait for the next horrifying report, and pray it would stop.

There was no way to concentrate on anything else at that point, especially once the Twin Towers collapsed. The office was closed early, and my most vivid memory of 9/11 was that long drive home. It was dead quiet. Eerily so. I-94 was usually a busy freeway, but I remember how little traffic there was on the road and even more so, the empty skies. All air traffic had been grounded and the silence of that drive still sticks with me to this day. I doubt I’ll ever be happier to get home and see and talk to family and loved ones as I was that afternoon. The evening was spent watching the news reports and footage endlessly, and trying to process what the hell had happened. But I can still see that drive home in my mind today, empty roads and empty skies that just added to the foreignness of that day, and the knowledge that everything we were used to would never be the same.

Stephen: As one of the youngest members of the Blerd team (as far as I know), my recollections of the tragedy of 9/11 may be a bit less mature, though that is not to say they did not change me. I think we all matured a little that day. I remember the morning well: standing in gym class when the teacher came in and told us we needed to go to the TV because a plane had crashed into a building in New York. For some reason (probably because the truth was so unthinkable), I assumed he meant a small single-prop plane — a Cesna or similar sports craft — that some pilot had lost control of. Sad, yes, but a relatively minor accident. But soon the horrible actuality glowed back from the run down tube television suspended in the corner of the room. This was something much worse. In my young pop-culture addled mind, all I could think of were the countless disaster movies I’d seen. This was Independence Day, a crass comparison I realize now, but the only one that made sense to my 14 year old brain.

The loss of life and innocence that day was staggering, though I am fully aware there have been many other great losses over the past decade. But the one aspect of 9/11 that has stuck with me, more than the sorrow and the heartache and the loss, were the acts of selflessness that emerged that day. Growing up in Appalachia, New York City was a bit of a bad word. Out of ignorance (or maybe jealousy), the general sentiment seemed to be that this was a den of poverty, chaos, over-crowding, selfishness, fear, materialism, and liberals. The denizens of mega-cities like New York were not like us down to earth small town people. They could care less about their neighbors; how could you when you have millions of them? Movies rarely helped, with my view of the city shaped by such classics as Home Alone 2, which depicted everyone but toy shop owners and crazy bird ladies as uncaring assholes. God help those poor city folk, I’d think.

So as New York rose above the ashes, lifted on the shoulders of the millions who I was convinced could never be bothered to help another soul, my naive misconceptions began to crumble. It was an important epiphany for a ninth grade small town West Virginia boy to make: to realize that people are people, regardless of where they live or how they choose to live. We are all capable of both the most inconceivable horrors, just as we are capable of healing the wounds left by them. And so, ten years later, while the shadow of those lost will forever cloud some small corner of my mind, my focus this weekend is on the light that shone forth in the darkest of days, and can still shine forth when people setting aside their differences and reachout a helping hand to their fellow man.

Tom: Supposedly, the most memorable sense you have is that of smell. But, I remember events from the music I associate with them–for better or worse.Spirit in the Night’ is every family party. ‘Longview is 6th grade. ‘Intergalactic’ is college move-in day.

Then two weeks after starting college there’s no sound. I have no musical memory of September 11th. There was a group of us that sat quietly on the lawn. Someone screamed. She was bit by a squirrel.

That weekend I went home. My friends and I sat on the beach in silence. Someone brought a radio but we never turned it on. The next music I remember is Billy fucking Joel. Looking like shit. Playing his drunken heart out. Two FDNY stood front row looking totally spent and arms draped over the others shoulder. They weren’t quite crying and they weren’t quite smiling.