December 22, 2023

Joseph Zitt's [as if in dreams] 2023-12-22

Hi. I'm Joseph Zitt. I moved from the US to Israel in 2017. This is my newsletter about more-or-less daily life in my city in the shadow of war. You can select these links to subscribe or unsubscribe. There are more links at the bottom. Here we go...

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I wake up in my bed, in yesterday's clothes. My suspenders have unsnapped and gotten tangled. From what I can reconstruct, I must have dozed off at my desk while finishing last night's post, then sleepwalked at some point to my bed.

I get up and drink an entire bottle of water. I didn't think I was thirsty. My family tells me later that the air has been very dry, with desert winds coming up the coast.

Once my eyes can focus, I finish and send the post, some ten hours later than usual. Sorry about that.

I'm up and ready to go out earlier than usual. I head to the mall. I miss a bus from the stop near me, so I walk downtown to catch one there.

Guitar music flows from a sound system across the street from the bus stop. It doesn't sound like it's coming from a store. I eventually zero in on a busker, sitting on a stool in front of the bank, his guitar at the proper classical angle, playing into an amplifier. He's good.

I sit in the first open seat past the center doors on the bus. A man with a walker gets on after me and stands in the open space opposite the doors. He leans over to me and says something quietly, gesturing vaguely with his hands. I can't quite hear what he is saying. I tell him that. He repeats it twice more, then says more loudly, "Don't you speak Hebrew?" Of the possible answers that drift through my mind, the easiest to say is "No."

Outside the mall, a half-dozen teenage boys jump up and down in a group hug. I don't know what they're celebrating.

The café at the mall is crowded. Standing in line, I see from a display that the discount for soldiers and security people has gone down from twenty percent to ten.

Later, I see that McDonald's has discounts for them ranging from fifteen to fifty percent. The electronic signs change too quickly for me to see more details.

I had thought that the small food shop where I got my sugar-free date butter had only cut back its hours at the start of the war. Now I see that it is completely gone. Bummer. I'll have to see if other branches have survived. I recall one in a mall in the next town. I know how to navigate through the mall's crazed double-helix design¹ to find that shop, even without their navigation app.²

I look at various items at a stationery store. I see that they have our flags, about a foot long, with "Together we will be victorious" emblazoned on them, for ten shekels. The phrase is only two words long in Hebrew, so it fits better than the English would. I think of getting one, but can't think of where I might use it. If I carried around a shoulder bag or something like it, it might be good to have one stashed away, just in case.

I only buy a pen. The cashier looks surprised when I smile and say, "Thank you. Shabbat shalom." She smiles back.

The produce signs at the supermarket now specify which items are locally grown. Some members of my family tell me that that will soon be required by law. Some say it won't. All the produce that I buy today is local.

A poster outside the supermarket, as tall as me, says "Bring the hostages home now." It has an image of farmland without people, with a teddy bear sitting against a fence.

A friend of the family tells us that yesterday's shrapnel also fell in four other places, including next door to where she used to live. That's about six blocks from my house. Yow.

Video appears online of a teacher in a nearby town getting the children in her nursery school into a shelter during the sirens.³ It's nap time. The alarms awaken some of them, but not others. She goes back and forth, scooping most of them off the floor and carrying them in, often getting two at once. Others waddle in after her. It's quite impressive. She gets a lot of responses.

Five new kindergartens are scheduled to open in our city in the upcoming year.⁴ Each of them is going to be named for a kibbutz or other area that was attacked. If the parents or children ask about the kindergarten's name, teachers can tell them the story.

One of the soldiers from the battalion that mistakenly shot three hostages visited the mother of one of them. She had invited them to visit in the letter that I quoted yesterday.⁵

According to a report, he told her, "We received your message, and since then we have been able to function again. Before that, we had shut down."

She responded, "Amazing, that’s what I wanted."

The war, and especially the corresponding social media blitzes, are stressing out the online platforms' attempts to moderate what's posted. There are reports of issues at both TikTok⁶ and Meta⁷ (Facebook/Instagram/Threads and whatever else they're up to). Neither humans nor AI appear able to scale enough to deal with this many posts.

Time magazine has an extensive report on the media battle.⁸ Our attempts to spread the news (or propaganda, depending on how you see it) of what's happening is made more difficult by the large number of people with phones posting and streaming what they're experiencing across the border. Other countries are also creating armies of bots to spread messages.

The article quotes a press aide who has been the face of some of our messaging: "We're used to a reality where history is written by the victor. It's not the case anymore."

Part of the article brings back vicarious memories. It refers to General Eisenhower's move to let media broadcast from the newly liberated concentration camps in 1945. One classic broadcast, preserved online, was by Edward R. Murrow, when he first entered Buchenwald.⁹ My father claimed to have been driving Murrow's jeep.

Meanwhile, Eurovision, the annual contest to see which country can create a more convincingly airbrushed version of ABBA, is getting hit from both sides. Some are pushing England to drop its representative, who has made remarks against our country.¹⁰ Others are pushing the contest to drop our country entirely.¹¹

When I get home from the mall, I see that I have email from tech support at the company that makes the hub that failed me yesterday. They have clear instructions as to how to power-cycle it. I'm optimistic. Meanwhile, I'm now pretty certain that, with my cloud-based workflow in creating these posts, I can do it from anywhere that I have an Internet connection. That's good to know.

At Kiddush at the House of a Hundred Grandmothers, the community's singing is notably stronger. On the one hand, they have several new residents. On the other, some are under the weather.

It appears that they're having a bad reaction to their recent COVID vaccines. They had been getting the Pfizer vaccine but had switched to Moderna. The basic anti-COVID stuff in each is the same, but there are enough differences in other bits that some people have been experiencing dizziness and other minor symptoms. These have been short-term effects and not serious, but were disconcerting until they figured out what was going on.

It rains a bit during supper. On my way home, the sidewalks are shiny and a bit slick. Fewer people are out than usual.

In the park, a dog on a leash ambles up to me. Its human is talking on her phone. I see that he isn't aggressive. I stop and let him sniff me. The human looks up and seems alarmed, but relaxes when I smile at her. The dog sniffs my hands and pants, gathers what information it needs, and returns to her. I wander on.

As I type this, I hear a thunderstorm begin. I like the sound of rain, but it may mess with my Internet connection. I hope I'll be able to post this by the usual time.

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Feel free to forward the newsletter to other people who might be interested.

Here’s an archive of past newsletters.

You can find me via email, Bluesky, Mastodon, Facebook, and, just out of inertia, X/Twitter. There's more about me and my books, music, and films at josephzitt.com.

The newsletter’s official mailing address is 304 S. Jones Blvd #3567, Las Vegas NV 89107. (I’m in Israel, but if physical mail comes to me there, it’ll get scanned and emailed. I don’t expect that to happen much. If you want to send me physical mail, ask me for a real address.)

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L'hitraot.