Ronn Owens on KGO 810 am ran a piece on 9/11 with music by Creed for the intro to his 9 am radio show.

Man, I cried. 9/11, it's like it happened yesterday for me. I still cry, I stil freak out, I still feel everyone's pain.

I never want to forget. I don't think we should forget. 9/11 happened and my life changed. No, I didn't reach for the nearest person and bond because I thought the world was going to end.

What happpened was that I realized that people hate us for absolutely no reason. That it doesn't matter what you do, people will hate you anyway. My naivete is gone, and I guess that's a good thing.

People around the world hate America, have always hated America. The New Yorker ran some essays awhile ago about what the Europeans thought about the founding of America in the late 1700's.

What's to interesting is that in the late 1700's, Britian and France feared America even then. We were a nation in it infancy and they feared us.

And what did they fear? They feared the revolution that Martin Luther started. They feared a country ruled by its people instead of by a divinely ordained monarchy. They fear this baby America, who said to the world that government by the people is the only kind of legitimate government that should exist.

How threatening this concept must be to the rest of the world, who are ruled by despots who claim some kind of sovereign right to rule through dna lineage or through god. Government by the people and for the people, what a revoluationary concept.

Do we get how threatening the american version of government, this thing called democracy actually is to the rest of the world? Do we get how we totally upset the balance of power in most of the countries of the world.

We've lived with democracy all our lives, we so don't get how foreign it is to the rest of the world. What we take for granted in the states, is a revolutionary concept in the rest of the world.

Government ruled by the people, government ruled by the workers, the people of the country, and not just the rich people. How frickin' revolutionary was that in 1776, and still so very subversive in 2003.

America threatens the world. We have done so since our founding, if those New Yorker essays are true. America is the abnormality, the nail that stands out and must be hammered down, the odd guy on the block, the freak.

Is it any wonder that they hate us? We threaten the usual world order. We are step-children of what Martin Luther started in his religious revolution from the Catholic Church in Rome. We are what the catholic church feared about Martin Luther, we are a country ruled not by some authoritian power from god, but from the majority opinion of our people.

God Bless America!

I had a writing group meeting tonight. I love my writing group. They know how hard it is to create a story, the struggle you go through, the insecurities you feel, all the BS you think about kin thinking your voice is not good enough for anyone else to read.

I love being with a group of people who are struggling like me to create, to reach outside of their regular lives and want something more, that something being a story that people want to read.

The act of creation takes will, takes everything you have from whatever you haven't already spent in your regular life just trying to survive and live, even though whatever you have left is just enough to get you to the next sentence, the next paragraph, the next story.

Writing should be the easiest thing in the world, but it isn't, because everything else gets in the way. To write is to have the strength, the will to create more than what you have, what you are.

To write is to struggle to do what no one else is doing, to fight against the forces of sloth, laziness, how about just plain exhaustion.

It's nice to be with a group of people who are struggling in the same way that you are, to know that there are other people fighting the same fight, and sometimes winning and winning well.

A friend from writing group just had a reading of his work in public, and people loved it. How cool is that? How cool is that to have people love your work?

Go Jon! You'll get your own column on SFGate.com some day. You are so much better than Mark Morford, who is irrelevant and doesn't even know it.

Another great Christopher Hitchens essay on 9/11, Don't Commemorate Sept. 11, Fewer flags, please, and more grit. Wow, I want to marry this man. He is so cool, so intellectual.

Okay, so he's a hard drinking, ciggiliscious smoking kind of guy, I don't care. I want to marry him. He is the ideal of the kind of brain power I want in a guy.

Kudos to the Pete Wilson show on KGO 810 am for turning me on to this article.

A great essay on the second anniversary of 9/11 from David E. Early of The Mercury News that I heard on the KTVU Fox Channel 2 news this morning, In California, feeling vulnerable.

A memorable line from the piece, "As a nation, we have not exhaled since Sept. 11."

Very true. I know I'm haven't exhaled yet.