I heard New York Call my Name

My mom promised me when I was a kid that she would take me to New York. And she did, I was, oh, hmm, 22 or something? I don’t know, the World Trade Center was still standing anyway. We had fun, I made her see a Broadway play with me, Cabaret at Studio 54. I mean, how appropriate. That little dude from 6 Feet Under was the Emcee, he did a good job. And I did get to go into Studio 54, which is legendary anyway, so that was fun. I got a Cosmopolitan, it was 18 bucks! That’s insanity. But I mean, you have to do that. I wanted to do on a pub crawl in LA when I was 26 just because of the Bran Van 2000 song, but instead I went a few months after the hospital when I had a retrospective at 25 at UCR. I got to meet some wicked Americans, and drink beer with James Duvall and talk about the emotions involved in the acting process. I think he had just wrapped up May then. But enough of LA, except they have so many cars! Too many cars in LA. And those butt shaking women, holy crap, I still can’t do that. That’s talent.

Yes, but New York pre-911 was interesting. I mean, so many interesting things. We saw the Whitney Bienniale while we were there. We went to the Guggenheim. I mean, lots of cool places, I do love America. That’s the sad thing, we all hate America now, but it is a fun place really, with a lot of cool people.

I remember my mom and I noticed people kept saying my name. And Thirza is a weird name, not many people know it. But she and I kept hearing people say it EVERYWHERE, it was just like this utterance. I don’t know what language that was or why they kept saying it, but they did. And they said it perfectly, which is hard because people mispronounce it all the time. But no, they said it excellently, which is why it was so weird. She and I talked about it actually, we couldn’t figure out why that one city had so many people saying my name. I still don’t know why, I mean, I kind of know why in a grand cosmic sense, but I don’t know how they started saying it.

It’s a biblical name actually, you can find it in the erotic poetry of Songs of Solomon. It was a city. But apparently it also appears in this quote:
“When he [Satan] spoke of the sale of Magdalene’s property, I could no longer keep silence, and exclaimed: ‘How canst thou reproach him with the sale of this property as with a crime? Did I not myself see our Lord spend the sum which was given him by Lazarus in works of mercy, and deliver twenty-eight debtors imprisoned at Thirza?’” I don’t know if this comes from the Bible actually, I stumbled across it on a page debunking the Passion of the Christ by Mel Gibson, which I never saw because it sounds gross.

So, whatev man. Did I imprison debtors? Eh, probably, now.

I can feel the mood of the world changing, your surface thoughts have really calmed down, and that is good. In fact, I pretty much don’t have to read minds right now, I can just look at you and tell what is going on, and that’s good. I hate reading minds. I’m not looking at the news these days because it’s being used for disinformation still, only now it’s honest disinfo about what is really happening. But honestly, terrorism spiked dramatically during this war, it’s just most people didn’t hear about all of it.

The thing about what happened at the World Trade Center was it was an attack on the WORLD. Not just America. That place involved people of all nations, it wasn’t a solely American institution. That’s why we were all upset, it wasn’t just a slight on New York, it was a slight on all of us. Everyone had connections of some sort to those buildings, including Native people because Canadian Mohawk ironworkers built it, and cleaned it up, and are now trying to do spiritual healing on the site to help people move across. It belonged to us as much as any of you. But I think some of us were jerks when it happened, because we’d all been watching America do this global domination for so long so it was almost expected for that to happen. But I think eventually we realized that it was being used as a political tool, and then we got more serious about it. Because who ever plotted to destroy it, it did end up being used as a politically galvanizing icon. We watched thousands of people die in seconds, I mean, that’s harsh. It was the most widely distributed snuff film ever. And it had a ridiculous amount of symbolism being used, even the date itself. Of course it triggered people.

I feel badly that the people who perished that day were used to get everyone to agree to what’s going on now. I doubt any of them would have wanted their deaths to be used in this way. I mean, how many people have been killed since then using that iconography? Way more American soldiers themselves have died compared to the people who died at the WTC. And WAY more have been horribly maimed. I mean, was it worth it? What did it accomplish? We were all terrified, it was terrorism of a global sort, and using the name of fighting terrorism to continue it.

Anyway, yes New York, I did hear you, loud and clear, it just took me longer to stop it than I had hoped.