Joseph Zitt's [as if in dreams] 2024-01-29
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...
At five minutes to five, we hear booms in the sky.
Voices pop up from our office cubes. "Booms?" one asks. "Yes, booms," another replies. "OK." We think for a moment that they might be thunder, but the booms don't have the longer rumble and decay.
My family hops on WhatsApp. They also heard them at the House of a Hundred Grandmothers.
News sites confirm that there were ten rockets, all south of us. We didn't hear any sirens, but they did go off in those towns. No one was injured. Shrapnel fell in some places. One site has pictures.1 Another says that it hit a car.2
Despite the rockets, the prime minister's office says that they're making progress planning to bring the evacuees from the south back home.3
The New York Times reports that much of the material for the terrorists' rockets is coming, inadvertently, from us.4 Even the best missiles fail ten to fifteen percent of the time and fall to earth without exploding. People across the border have been scavenging what they can, pulling out the parts that are still good, and building new Frankenrockets out of them. Since our missiles are a lot larger and more sophisticated than what they use, one of our duds can turn into a whole lot of new tubes of boom for them to throw at us.
I write all this down at work, while waiting for stuff to process. At home, when I connect to the cloud, it isn't there. I suspect that the internet, or possibly the power, at the office has glitched after I left.
I proceed to write it again. I remember most of it.
Another storm starts up. My power glitches. Fortunately, at home, I'm working from a laptop. Everything but the computer itself restarts. I don't lose anything.
Still, I worry that my internet connection will fail as water pools up around the cable under the garden. I'd better stop here, and post.
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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.