March 14, 2024

Joseph Zitt's [as if in dreams] 2024-03-13

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 note for newsletter readers: I'm shifting my schedule around. The posts will now be coming out in the morning (my time) rather than after midnight as they had been. The dates in the title thus will be the dates that the posts describe, rather than the next day when they come out. After over 150 in a row of these, I don't want to skip a date.)

In the produce aisle of the supermarket downstairs from work, a little girl yells "Aba!" and runs toward me. Colliding with my leg, she wraps her arms around it and hugs me tight.

A woman down the aisle wears an embarrassed smile. I smile back at her and shrug. She calls out, "Come here! That's not your father." The girl steps back and looks up. She sees the wrong face. She runs back to her mother.

Later, I hear the woman call out a long, despairing "Nooooo..." (For some reason, people here often say "No" in English.) I look down the aisle. The girl is standing near the cucumbers, munching on one of them.

The refrigerator for cold drinks doesn't have anything that I want. I see something new on the bottom shelf: two cans of a berry-flavored seltzer. I take one.

When I check out at the self-service register, the seltzer doesn't scan. A message pops up on the screen. A worker comes over. She picks up the can. "You can't buy this on its own. It can only been bought in a six-pack." I tell her that I found it in the fridge with the other individual drinks. "You can't buy the one can." So why was it in the fridge?

She puts the can down on the shelf for unscanned items and walks away.

As I scan my last items, she reappears. She asks if I'm done scanning. I am.

She scans the can again. She gets the same message. She then scans a can that she's holding. It's an energy drink that is always stocked in the fridge. She then types a secret code and scans a badge on her lanyard. The register beeps happily.

She picks up the can that I wanted and puts it down among what I have scanned. She says "Bon appétit," and disappears again.

In the office kitchen, I wash off the produce that I've gotten (a red pepper, cherry tomatoes, and an apple) at one sink. A very tall coworker at the other sink washes his own vegetables. One of my bosses insists that we do this. She says that farms here use a lot of pesticides.

The other boss walks in. "Ah, the healthy eaters. You two are very much alike, except that he is tall and you are wide."

At the end of my lunch, I drink the seltzer. I'm disappointed. It tastes rather like children's bubble bath, infused with chemicals emulating fruit. Not that I have ever drunk bubble bath. I'm just guessing.

Looking for a map of bus routes in my town, I run across this article from several years ago on how the system changed radically just before I got here.¹

It's quite interesting (if you find this kind of thing interesting). I see that it expected a "large office and commercial center" to be built where the old bus station had been, Right now, the spot is a parking lot next to apartment towers. A poster on the site shows what such a center might look like, but as far as I know, work hasn't started on it.

From the image, it looks like much of it might be underground. I don't know if any of the subway lines planned for the apparently-distant future might connect there.

I'm told that it will include a new city library. They'll put up a paradise by unpaving the parking lot.²

One of the train stations that was shut down at the start of the war, when the city near the southern border that it was in was evacuated, is opening again.³ Trains are only running south from it, on a limited schedule, but it's a start. I went through the station on my grand trek, but I don't think I stopped there. I'll have to check my footage.

Our National Archives have been shut down for a while after a cyberattack.⁴ They don't want to reopen them until they're secured better. Since so much of the budget is going to the war, though, there's no funding to fix them.

An article from last year says that only a tiny percentage of the materials in the National Archives were available to the public even then, and that the reading room had been closed for a while. I don't know if that has changed since then.⁵

Our local news site reports that our city has the highest rate in the country of high school graduates ready to enter the tech fields.⁶ That means that they had taken "5 units of mathematics, 5 units of English plus five units of science and computer and physics." Unsurprisingly, the top cities tend to be from relatively well-to-do areas in the center of the country.

The study was sponsored by the Trump Foundation, but that group has no connection at all to The Donald.

In news you'll probably hear nowhere else, a car was damaged yesterday when a rhino at the local safari park freaked out over people watching it.⁷ The people inside were shaken but unhurt. Despite the resemblance and behavior, the rhino also appears to be unrelated to The Donald.

As I walk to the mall this evening, I hear wheels following me, but can't quite tell what they are. I step out of the way. A young boy goes past on a bicycle with training wheels. An older man, on roller skates, holds onto the boy's shoulder as they roll in tandem toward a distant bench.

As spring approaches, the weather is ambiguous. I'm wearing a light hoodie over a short-sleeved shirt. In line ahead of me at the food court's sushi joint, a teenaged girl wearing what may be the least clothing allowed by law chats with a friend wearing a parka.

Earlier in the day, and on the way to the mall, my earbuds give me trouble. They had had trouble communicating with my phone. Now the left one has failed completely. I get a new pair.

Heading home from the mall, not wanting to fuss with the packaging, I put the old pair on, since at least I can listen to effectively monaural podcasts. The earbuds work flawlessly. I doubt that this will last. Now, when they do fail completely, I'll have replacements ready.

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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.