March 8, 2024

Joseph Zitt's [as if in dreams] 2024-03-07

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...

---

I wake up early and go straight to my desk. I haven't sent out last night's post yet. By the time that I finished the first draft, my eyes were too tired to proofread it. Unexpectedly, it's the longest post yet. I think of cutting it down, but can't figure out quickly what to remove. So be it. I give it the usual edit passes, then post it all.

I spot an article on an archaeological site used to create purple dye from snails for clothing worn by priests and royalty. While the web address is mundane, I like the headline for the article itself: "This Ancient Factory Helped Purple Reign."¹

My family sends me a WhatsApp message about a moment at the House of a Hundred Grandmothers:

"A tall soldier in uniform came into the dining room at lunch today. He had come to visit his grandfather, the resident who had donated the prayer books. He's young, doing his regular army service, and has 3 months to go until his discharge. He was greeted warmly by the residents."

I'm surprised to read an article on obesity here.² I haven't noticed that much of it. People here strike me as generally fit and slim. I may just be comparing the people around me to what I recall from the States.

We still have, officially, a couple more weeks of winter. It's been unusually wet in much of the country. That's mostly good. Our unofficial gauge for how we're doing in terms of water, the Sea of Galilee, is close to as full as it can get.³

As we walked to the clinic yesterday, a relative noticed an early sign of spring. Blood-red flowers had started falling from the trees, creating splashes of color on the sidewalks.

While we look forward to warmer weather, the flowers that bloom in the spring (tra la)⁴ could be an omen of further catastrophe across the border. Health experts are warning that the chances of epidemics could get worse in the coming months.⁵

The "New Contract" movement is celebrating getting positions on our city council.⁶ It's a group formed by the people behind the massive protests that we had in this country before the war, and which have started up again.

A line-up of political celebrities came to the party's party, including the new mayor, a previous mayor, and a former prime minister who is now a leader of the political opposition on the national level.⁷ They have high hopes, Hopefully the new council members won't mess things up for those of us who aren't young, ultrarich, and aggressively anti-religious.

It looks like we will be in Eurovision after all.⁸ Apparently the Powers That Be have decided that our song's new lyrics are bland enough that they won't cause music fans to spill their cocktails. I hope the original version, with the "political" lyrics, also gets released, or at least leaked, perhaps as an acoustic B-side. That is, if B-sides still exist in a world that has forgotten about 45s.

I spot a moment of dance as I head out of work today. A couple walks toward the office building, hand in hand. Without saying anything, or any cause that I can see or hear, they raise their hands in the air. The woman spins in a full circle. They lower their hands and continue walking as before.

Spring is in the air. It's the weekend. Let the cartoons begin.

---

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.