January 1, 2024

Joseph Zitt's [as if in dreams] 2024-01-01

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. You can also read this email online here. Here we go...

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At the stroke of midnight, rockets from across the border launch into the air. Iron Dome counters. Fire bursts in the sky, with corresponding sirens and booms. Nothing that falls hurts anyone. They're not the fireworks we would have wanted, but at least they're a sort of unplanned collaborative celebration. Happy New Year.¹

I don't see or hear any of this. I'm in my bubble, in a basement slightly to the north. I keep writing. I see the clock on top of my bookcase change to all zeros. A year has ended. A year has started. Yay.

I follow my holiday tradition, making sure that all my hard drives are backed up. I watch a moment of TV and fall asleep in my chair.

In Times Square, we're told, electronic billboards show bright messages supporting our country. On the ground, protestors demonstrate against us. The New York Times says there are thirty.² The Daily Mail says there are three thousand.³

A massive drone show in Korea doesn't happen.⁴ A drone show in Dallas does.⁵ We shoot down a couple of drones near our northern border.⁶ They don't appear to be synced with the partying machines.

A tsunami strikes Japan.⁷ The Queen of Denmark is stepping down.⁸

As I write this, midnight hasn't hit a few time zones to our west. Some celebrations will succeed. Some won't. The calendar will sail inexorably on.

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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 at that Las Vegas address, 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.)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

L'hitraot.