I have read a lifetime's worth of personal accounts of the attack. I have read calls for vengeance, calls for peace and have seen this issue addressed from nearly every other location on the spectrum of public opinion. I wanted to move on, and prove that this attack was not going to change anything for me. But the attempt was futile.

As hard as I tried, every topic I selected managed to meander back to the pain and emotion that was churned up that clear Tuesday morning in September when our world was forever changed.

I was lucky. I didn't lose any friends in the attack, and the closest I have come to anthrax appears to be in the form of the cranial anthrax that is warehoused in the imagination of our increasingly paranoid governor.

But agonizing for far longer than I am sure my editors were comfortable, I sat night after night in front of a blank screen struggling to break free from the grasp of the horrific images that still play in an eerie Technicolor in my mind of planes slamming into the sides of the World Trade Center.

I wanted to write about the current situation with the Minnesota Twins, but it all just seems so trivial. If ever there were a bad time for Major League Baseball to attempt to extort a new stadium from a state, this most certainly is it. On the verge of a national recession, there are few people who would like to see the team go, but I bet even fewer would consider a public bailout for the team in the form of a stadium to be a realistic priority right now.

I wanted to write a personal account of a 48-hour period last week in which one of my friends had a cocaine relapse, another had to deal with his girlfriend's miscarriage, and yet another lost out on his dream job. But in the end, while each of these events felt like a punch to the stomach, I was haunted by the fact that there are many, many people reading this who would gladly trade their pain for mine.

I even considered telling the epic saga of the man, the myth, the legend Tracy Jones and his band of mercenary butchers-for-hire/college buddies who gather each fall to help him process the hundreds of deer that come into his meat room in tiny Emily, Minn. But even my personal account of a writer turned deer hucker seemed self-serving and trivial.

I don't have any idea how long the events of Sept. 11 will continue to cast a pall over the works and actions of the American populous, but I am heartened by the words of Abigail Adams, wife of our second president. As this nation was still struggling for independence from another form of tyranny, she wrote the following:

"These are the times in which a genius would wish to live. It is not in the still calm of life, or the repose of a pacific station that great characters are formed. The habits of the vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties. Great necessities call out great virtues. When a mind is raised and animated by scenes that engage the heart, then those qualities, which would otherwise lay dormant, waken to life, and form the character of the hero and the statesman."

Now more than ever, we need heroes and statesmen to step forward and make sure that the events of Sept. 11 do not permanently take from us all that we have been fighting for since the very days when these prophetic words were penned.

Dybvig (e-mail: nate@spinfirm.com), 26, St. Paul, is a writer, public affairs consultant and former journalist who once ran for the City Council in Ely.