9/11 and the story of people who weren't there

As I was channel surfing on a rainy sunday, I noticed a program on A&E or Lifestyle or one of those shitty channels women pretend to like 'cause the programming on those channels is supposedly "oriented towards women", and men pretend to hate for the same goddamn reason. This program was called "I missed flight 93". No, I said to myself, there's just no fucking way it is what I think it is. So I looked at the program info, and there it was. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, this program, I'm not kidding you, was a documentary based on accounts of people who, get this, missed the flights that crashed on 9/11.

I didn't watch the program. But I can imagine how it must have gone.

When Tom Smith woke up on September 11 2001, little did he know that today his life was about to change in ways that even he couldn't have imagined. He was flying to San Francisco. At Newark airport, he suddenly had a severe case of diarrhea. After spending the next two hours disposing of the sushi he had had last night into the Newark public sewage system, he went to his gate only to find that he had missed the flight. And then, Tom Smith's nightmare began.

The plane, which Tom Smith was not on due to his diarrhea, was hijacked. Islamic terrorists took over the California-bound jetliner and diverted it in Pennsylvania, intending to crash it into an unknown target, quite possibly a government building on the East coast. Tom Smith, if he had been on that flight instead of being perched upon a toilet bowl, trying to read a newspaper during the brief periods of calm between his violent bowel movements, would have been as terrified as were the other passengers of that ill-fated jet. And then, the passengers of the plane carried out an incredible act of bravery. All, except Tom Smith, who was at this very moment, debating whether it was safe enough for him to leave his stall and venture out into the world. The passengers of Flight 93 rebelled against the terrorists holding them hostage and brought down the plane in a Pennsylvania field. Tom Smith, not being in the plane, was not killed, thus, not being a martyr who had given up his life for his country.

"I couldn't sleep for weeks after that incident", says Tom Smith, when reminded of the flight he had never made it to. "I could have been dead. Thank God for Kobe's Japanese Steak House."

Friends of Tom Smith recollect the event that had changed America in so many different ways. "We had been debating on whether to go to China Panda or Kobe. It was a tough decision and a lot of factors were taken into account. But finally, Kobe turned out to be the correct choice since it wreaked havoc on Tom's digestive tract and made him incapable of boarding the plane, thus saving his life".

And people would have watched this program and marvelled over Tom Smith's luck and the poor performance of his gastric juices and the courage he surely would have displayed if he had been on that flight instead of lying curled up in a ball in the second stall from the left in Newark Airport's public restroom no. 5.

So what's next for the network? Do they come up with a documentary of people who heard about 9/11 on the radio and their harrowing experience? Or how about this? A documentary on people who were asleep on 9/11 and didn't know about it till the network did a documentary on them? Fuck, there are countless ways in which this event in American history can be milked to death. And I'm sure America's networks won't leave a single udder unsqueezed.