February 1, 2024

Joseph Zitt's [as if in dreams] 2024-01-31

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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A coworker yawns in my boss's office. The descending tone, far back in his throat and muted, jumps in volume, reverberates, and hangs when it crosses the resonant frequency of the room.

Several of us are sleepy. The bosses have surprised us by ordering sushi for everyone. We gather in the conference room. Two large platters are on the table, one fish-based and one vegetarian, arrayed in beautiful symmetry. That's about twice as much food as the team can eat at one sitting. We do what we can.

We have a visitor from the other side of the world. He works with us from there, but we haven't seen him in years.

He recognized me in the elevator, coming in to work. He called me by name. I was startled. I'm not great on faces, especially if it's someone who I've only met once, half a decade ago.

Several of us had ordered lunches before we knew that sushi would be happening. The schnitzels arrive after we're already eaten. I'm taking mine home to eat tonight.

After lunch, I tab through the news sites. The faces of three more soldiers smile up at me in the usual triptych.¹ They're ours, lost fighting across the border yesterday.

When I return to the article later, it has added the picture of a fourth, who was killed in the initial massacre. His body had been stolen by the terrorists. And there's a new headline with a fifth, killed today.²

The article says that he was with "the elite Shaldag unit." I don't know what "Shaldag" is, but I'm guessing that it's an acronym. Almost all the Hebrew words that I encounter with four consonants with two "a"s between them are.

The one exception that I can think of is khashmal. It comes from the Book of Ezekiel, and describes something or other in his visions. No one is clear anymore as to what the word originally meant. When the people putting Hebrew back together a century or so ago needed a word for "electricity," they appropriated it.

At least that's the story that I've been told. I keep learning that stories that I learned when I was young aren't always accurate.

Digging further later, I see that I'm wrong about the name. It appears that shaldag means "kingfisher," which is apparently a kind of bird. They vary in size, but are fierce hunters.³

The word may go back to the Bible. If I recall correctly, the four-letter words there tend to be loaned from other languages. (Unlike English, we don't think of four-letter words as curses. When we need those, we often borrow words from Arabic. Or so, again, I've been told.)

I see that the city of Chicago has passed a resolution demanding a ceasefire here.⁴ That will probably have all the impact of a declaration by our parliament that Chicago must immediately stop making deep-dish pizzas.

An article in the New York Times⁵ points out that I'd misgendered one of the American soldiers about whom I'd written yesterday. Her first name was Kennedy, and I couldn't tell her gender from the photo. Mea culpa. The new article profiles her and the other female soldier killed in the drone strike. They were friends.

I don't manage to shake off the sleepiness at work. I leave early, and walk home in the pouring rain. I abandon plans to swim to the pharmacy and head straight back to my apartment, listening to a long podcast.

Once home, I change into dry clothes, check messages, eat the schnitzel, and try to finish this post. I keep falling asleep. It will have to wait until morning.

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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.