Joseph Zitt's [as if in dreams] 2024-04-11
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 several times during the night, not feeling well. I don't have any particular ailment. I'm not coughing, and I don't feel any aches or pains. I just don't quite feel right.
I'm also dreaming a lot, with the types of dreams that usually mean that I'll be sick the next day: long, mundane, and complicated, with a sense of things going wrong. Most of my dreams fall into a few categories: preparing for a performance for which I haven't written the music yet; moving out of a dorm or a specific other building and having to leave my books behind; being suddenly rehired at a branch of my old store, which in reality shut down a decade ago, and not having the codes or other information to do my job. The getting-sick dreams don't seem to fit with these. Once I wake up, though, I can't remember what they were.
My alarm wakes me at the usual time. I stumble to my desk and check a few messages. I send a WhatsApp message to the company channel: "I'm not feeling well. I won't be in today." Fortunately or not, other people had posted these phrases recently to WhatsApp. Rather than figuring out the Hebrew, I copy and paste them from where they had been said before. I wait until at least one person responds, then go back to bed.
I wake up close to noon, feeling better. I eat a quick cheese sandwich and drink some cold brew coffee.
The news is full of warnings and warnings about warnings. Some warn that Iran is getting ready to throw missiles at us. Others warn that Iran is trying to destabilize things by getting us to worry that they are about to throw missiles at us. Still others warn that they are trying to get us to let down our guard by warning us that we shouldn't worry about the missiles that they aren't really going to throw at us, because they really are.
Sitting there at my desk over the course of the afternoon, I keep thinking that I should go get some groceries. I have enough to eat today, but I don't like to let a day go by without encountering another person. A group of us had promised each other, some thirty-odd years ago, that we would make a point of talking to at least one other person each day, even if (since we all were in New York City at the time) just by going downstairs to buy a newspaper or a coffee to go. I've only missed a couple of days since then.
Late in the day, my landlord knocks on my door. He wants to get some of the junk out of our bomb shelter. The government is warning us to keep them clear, just in case. That's fine. He comes in. Over the course of half an hour or so, he removes several large bags of the random stuff that tends to pile up in those spaces. I offer to help, but he's OK doing it solo. We speak in Hebrew. As far as I know, he doesn't speak any English at all.
I remain at my desk. When he leaves, I go back to thinking that I should shower and go out to get groceries. It dawns on me that, by letting the landlord in, I have fulfilled my mission of encountering a person today.
So be it. I remain at my desk. Eventually, I make supper and get a few things done. Otherwise, I have done what I needed to do. I have spent the day catching up with myself, doing as close as humanly possible to absolutely nothing.
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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.