The day that changed everything.

My TV automatically switched on at 8 am to NBC's The Today Show. The first plane had already struck the North tower and Katie Couric was reporting it as small plane accident.

Shocked and confused, I telephoned my Dad, a retired airline pilot, waking him. I asked how something like that could happen. Having spent several years based out of New York, he told me that it couldn't happen.

But if it couldn't happen accidentally, that means it could only happen...deliberately?

I watched a second airliner plow into the South tower.

This. Is. Not. Happening.

I called Beloved and told her to turn on the TV, and filled her in as best I could. I told her I thought the attack stank of Osama bin Laden. She asked me who the hell he was.

For me, 9/11 was the day I finally realized that religion is the enemy of reason, and god is mankind's most lethal invention.

The Falling Man, photographed by Richard Drew