January 9, 2024

Joseph Zitt's [as if in dreams] 2024-01-08

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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Down the aisle from me, coworkers are joking about the UN. I don't know what they're saying, but I recognize the abbreviation. It sounds like "Oom," which rhymes with "tomb" (but not "comb" or "bomb." English is weird.).

We're told that the war has "shifted a stage" to something less intense.¹ People talk, and keep on talking. What's going downhill does so incrementally. What's getting better stays out of view.

Much of the news is of people caught in the crossfire: Two journalists riding along with a terrorist who was operating a drone.² A little girl in the car ahead of one that tried to ram some soldiers.³ Or was that yesterday? The days' news blurs. And, of course, all those people across the border whose homes and livelihoods have been destroyed. I look at my plans for my future here and wonder what could happen if events shift the other way.

A TV star and popular singer⁴ has seriously wounded across the border.⁵ I'm not sure what "seriously wounded" means. I've heard that people who just need amputations may be called "moderately wounded." But his father says that the singer will survive.

More released hostages stories are being told.⁶ Some were locked in hospitals. Some were in apartments. Some were underground. All were afraid. They formed ad-hoc families. They helped each other as they could.

Many hostages are still there. Our Army says that they know where the terrorists' coward-in-chief is.⁷ He's hiding among them, using them as shields.

I leave work early to meet with my dietitian. That's covered under my health plan. We get along well. She used to work at the mall near where I went to high school, though several decades after I hung out there.

She asks me if my eating habits have changed recently. People are stress-eating due to the war. Mine haven't. She tells me to keep an eye on the portions that I'm eating, and perhaps not get sachlav so often.

The clinic is a block away from my usual cafe. I go there when I'm done, out of habit. Rather than sachlav, I get soup. It's merely ok. But there are other things to try.

I get home and check my email. I'm reminded to continue work on a choral piece I'm writing in English, Arabic, and Hebrew. A friend used some techniques for his video, filming in Japan, that I had tried here. I can learn from what he achieved. And I have to make some final technical tweaks to Afternoon Prayers, then send it off for publication.

I mull what the title might be for the book of these posts when it's done. I like a phrase from an early post, "The Scimitar of Damocles." Or maybe not. It sounds like an old Steve Reeves movie.⁸

I'll have to wait and see how the war goes.

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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.)

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L'hitraot.