RESURRECT DEAD ON PLANET JUPiTER

Trust my foresight

My girlfriend, Liza is in New Hampshire. I’m in Philadelphia. Long ago - relatively speaking - I had a girlfriend, who in the summer, lived in New Hampshire. I used to take the train up there to visit her. She lived on some land that had been in her family for about as long as land can ‘be’ in a North American family. She lived in an old one-room school-house. The time I spent up there is some of the most important time that I’ve experienced in this lifetime. I’ve been happier, I’ve been more captivated, I’ve seen places far more beautiful and I have felt love stronger than I did in New Hampshire; but I don’t think I’ve ever been more relaxed. Not relaxation in a physical, hedonistic sense, but truly relaxed. My time there was like a massage for the soul.

But anyway, this post is about something different. This is about what I wrote on August 9th, 1999. That day, I turned in my final paper in my class on human evolution at the University of Penn museum of Archeology and Anthropology, walked straight out of the building, jumped in a taxi and went straight to 30th street station. There I got on a train to Boston. Just outside of New York, I looked out the window at the Manhattan skyline. I saw the World Trade Center towers and wrote in my blue spiral notebook:

NY fucking city. The greatest city in the history of humanity. There it is as it always is. And as it will be until its covered by water or destroyed by terrorists.

Two years and a month later, September 7th, 2001, I was on my way back from Maine. I remember looking out at WTC1 and 2. It was night. They were glowing in the sky. I was amazed that the city was still there.