April 5, 2024

Joseph Zitt's [as if in dreams] 2024-04-04

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...

---

A woman zooms ahead of me through the doors to our office building. She rushes up to the front desk and demands to know where a particular office is. I haven't heard of it before.

The worker looks off into the middle distance, thinking. He takes a moment longer than the woman would like.

She turns back toward the front doors. "Oh, not here? OK. Sorry to have wasted your time. Bye."

She zooms away. The worker calls out. "Wait! Second floor. It's on the second floor."

An elevator opens. Another man and I get on. The woman rushes in just as the doors are closing. She doesn't look at the buttons.

The man is much taller than I am. A deep baritone voice drifts down from over my head. "Which floor would you like, ma'am?"

She turns toward the button panel, slides her sunglasses down her nose, and jabs button 2.

The man gets off on the first floor. She gets off on the second. She stands right up against the doors as it rises, to be sure to be the first one out when it gets there. She is.

She looks at a listing of offices on one side of the floor, then pivots and looks at another. As the doors close, I see her slam an office door open and stomp through it. Her appointment must be important.

---

As older people say that younger people say, I want to give a shout-out to one of my ongoing inspirations. When I am reminded that I have been writing here for a little over 180 days, I feel a bit tired, but the no more commas period blog just posted her seven thousandth consecutive daily entry.¹ Yow.

I had the honor of editing an extremely limited annual edition of her posts for a couple of the early years. Her posts make me miss San Francisco.

---

Cooking cholent takes a long time. So might reading this article about it. If you start reading it now, you may be ready for a heaping bowl of cholent by Shabbat afternoon. The article's quite readable and in-depth: longer than anything I’ve posted here, with more footnotes.²

---

An article from a few days ago quotes a report from our government that questions whether there really is a famine across the border and whether the supposed government there is manipulating prices to make it look that way.³ Interesting, although it appears to contradict all the other news coming out of there.

---

An experienced journalist discusses how difficult it is to report unbiased news from this area.⁴ He says that a "tectonic shift" in news organizations such as Associated Press is repressing fair reporting about the war and related issues.

---

While Eurovision has agreed to include our song in the contest, security people are tense.⁵ They think our team, and especially our singer, will be targeted for attacks. Our intelligence group is giving them more protection than ever before.

Meanwhile, reports say that DJs at Eurovision parties are being asked not to even spin any of our songs. They think they also might attract attacks.⁶

We've figured out the people and sounds that might attract terrorists. Maybe we should also test pheromones.

---

GPS appears not to be working around here again.⁷ The Powers That Be are shutting it down to make it harder for attack drones sent against us to figure out where they are. We reportedly bombed an embassy in another city that was hosting some terrorist leaders. Some people with missiles aren't happy about this.

Home Front Command is recommending that we set our locations manually in their app, so the right rocket alerts reach us.⁸ I already have.

Local media, helpfully, is reporting on other tools that one can use to get around if GPS is out.⁹ These might be useful for those few drivers here who don't simply point their cars in the general direction that they're going, then try to drive through whatever has the chutzpah¹⁰ to get in their way.

---

Local folks were (according to Google Translate) "amazed" to see an abandoned car on a street on which I often walk to work.¹¹ You don't see them much around here. It looks like someone drove the car up onto a sidewalk and crashed into a wall, then walked away.

The police say that since the car isn't blocking traffic, it isn't their problem. The city promises to get around to removing it.

The original article has a photo and video of the car. Later, the news site follows it up with another article showing the removal of the car, from several angles.¹²

I guess around here, even with lethal errors across the border, systems being shut down to avoid missile attacks, and artists worrying about being assaulted by vicious mobs in Sweden, this still qualifies as a slow news day.

---

The woman who usually works at my favorite burger joint isn't there. Another man, who I suspect is her son, is at the grill.

I plan ahead what to order, in Hebrew. I get through most of it OK. When I request one item, he looks confused, then says in English, "You want fried onions?" I do. He says it back to me in Hebrew. I realize that I had been slightly off on some phonemes, and had asked for "translated onions."

Most of the people at the tables are speaking English. The young men speaking Russian who were at the table next to me last week are still there. The breeze still blows their smoke away from me.

I see that the eatery next door has closed. I had been curious about it, though I can't recall what it was. The signs are down. The storefront is packed with seemingly random objects and rubble.

When I get home, I see that I have gotten my royalties from the publisher of several of my books. In the past year, I earned one dollar and twenty-two cents. Yeehaw. My career in the arts is secure.

---

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.