I'm thinking about leaving New York. In part, it's an extension of my job malaise thing. Five years is a long time. In fact, I think if you're an Executive Director beyond five years, people don't think about 'loyalty' and 'stability,' they think about 'desperately clinging' and 'going nowhere.' So it's definitely time for a change in that department. And, I wouldn't mind getting out of the non-profit gig altogether. I doubt that my skills would be considered transferable in the for-profit arena, but who knows. So yeah, I'd like a new job.

And leaving New York? In part it's pragmatic. I work, I go to the gym, I hang out in coffee bars, I hang out in leather bars, I go to the movies. I could do that anywhere, and I wouldn't have to be spending upwards of $1500-a-month to keep a roof over my head and for public transportation to get to and from work. And then there's September 11th. I heard on NPR this morning a story about the report that McKinsey & Company did on how police and fire department operations could be improved, a sort of 'lessons learned' analysis. So FDNY radios are switching to UHF bands like police radios, and also getting boosters in sky-scrapers, like the police have, and FDNY commanders will be airborn in police helicopters, and a coordinated central command operation. At no point in the story did they say, "So next time..." but they might as well have. Now, I don't delude myself into thinking that I or my various haunts would be on any terrorists hit list. The possible exception would be the subway system, but even there, I rarely go north of the West 4th Street station. So I'm not imagining myself being maimed or killed. No, I just don't want to go through that again.

Y'know how people slow down for traffic accidents? I speed up. I don't look. I don't want to look. I don't want to have some horrible image burned into my psyche. We had no cable television where we were living in Brooklyn, so I saw just about no video footage of the planes hitting the buildings, and the people diving from windows, and the towers coming down. But beyond that... I mean, there's lots of talk about how New Yorkers pulled together, and how kind and empathetic we all were towards each other in the wake of the tragedy, and that's all true... but there was also the drama. For a week or more following the attack, you would see people walking around wearing surgical masks. At one point, I was sitting in a restaurant and a guy came in and sat next to me wearing a military issue looking gas mask. (He took it off to eat.) Granted, when the wind was blowing your way, you could smell the acrid smoke from the still smouldering debris (all that jet fuel). But c'mon. I concluded at the time that the gas mask/surgical mask phenomenon was a good thing, because it was nothing more than drama queens self-identifying, so you knew who to stay away from.

Once was enough.

Now LAX and the Golden Gate Bridge have been mentioned as targets, and these sound likely to me. But somehow I doubt that there are detailed plans of Fort Lauderdale thumb-tacked to the wall of some (government subsidized) apartment in Berlin that's home to an Al Quaeda cell. Los Angeles I could deal with though. It's such a non-interactive city in general. I imagine people would stay home and watch tv throughout. It definitely won't be Texas though. Not when stuff like this percolates up with alarming frequency.

So what about the argument that we've made it impossible for a similar terrorist strike on our shores to be pulled off again? I don't buy that. I think the Presidents military interventions have most likely crippled the Al Quaeda network, but terrorist organizations are usually pretty decentralized, operating in cells, and who knows what some little group has in the works. I remember--and funny this hasn't been mentioned lately--the discovery of what was essentially a bomb factory in an apartment in Brooklyn several years ago. (About 10 blocks from where I was living at the time.) The fledgling Department of Homeland Security is a colossal waste of resources. I hope that it either goes away or is significantly scaled back after November elections. The problem is hardly likely to be solved by more government. And in the unlikely event that there was another attempt to turn a jetliner into a missile, I don't doubt that would be thwarted not by the Keystone Kops airport security measures but by airline passengers following the lead of the brave group that brought the plane down in Pennsylvania. It was passenger intervention that foiled the shoe-bomber guy.

When the Special Guy and I meet up in DC on Friday, I'll explore how flexible he might be about making a move somewhere.