Joseph Zitt's [as if in dreams] 2025-06-24
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...
Tuesday's first missile alert sounds at about 5:15 AM. I haven't been asleep long. My sleep patterns have devolved to cat naps when I can get them. I think I had dozed off a few hours before. I'm not sure if I had had an absurd dream in which a leader of another country was claiming that we were about to have a ceasefire.
I get a drink of water and head downstairs. The nearer shelter fills up quickly. I make the mistake of sitting near our most annoying neighbor. He launches into a mumbled narrative having something to do with his granddaughter, Dean Martin (again), and a physiotherapist. (I'm not sure if the Oxford comma makes that better or worse.) I finally have to tell him that I have no idea what he's talking about.
The alert ends after twenty minutes or so. We head on out.
The second missile alert sounds at about 5:33, just as we reach the elevators. I instinctively wave my arm in a circle above my head and bellow, "Yalla, nashuv. (Come on. we're heading back.)" I'm not in charge, but no one appears to be. I'm just tall with a loud voice.
They've updated the Home Front Command app. In addition to showing text on the screen, it reads the alerts out loud. I use the English-language app. It also shows Spanish. Unfortunately, it uses the same text-to-speech engine for all text in Latin characters, so it reads the Spanish like a fledgling local newscaster who has never encountered Latino names. The alert sounds something like "In greasy a whora Alice pacey o protta jeedo masser canno." (I can't get at the actual text when there isn't an alert happening, so I've asked ChatGPT to guess what the actual Spanish would have been.)
We return to the shelter. I sit at the far end of the room from the Dean Martin guy who, perhaps intelligently, hadn't moved.
I don't see any staff there. On most other nights, I think I had seen a nurse from the Continual Care section. I later hear that they're really short-staffed tonight. There's only one nurse there now, after working a double shift, and he has to stay with them.
We hear what may be a loud boom nearby, but no word of impact. We do hear, however, of a direct hit on a building in Beersheba, with four dead.
We get the all-clear at about 6:05, and head back to the elevators. I'm not in a particular hurry, so I let others take the first elevators up and wait for the next time that they open. I get on the elevator with two people going to the second floor and another who is traveling with me to the third.
After the people for the second floor get off, the elevator starts to rise again, then screeches and stops. The destination panel goes blank. It begins a rapid, controlled plummet to the basement, with things outside it clanking along the way.
The doors open in the basement just as we hear the third alert, at about 6:10. That explains it. I suspect that the elevator system is networked into Home Front Command. We ride back up to the main floor and head back into the shelter.
More people are there. The sun is up. The dogs who come in with neighbors want to run around, but don't. The alert doesn't last long.
I have enough time, when I get back to my apartment, to use the bathroom before I hear the fourth alert, at about 6:35. I head back down, then, after the all-clear, back up.
I get as far as my kitchen before I hear the fifth alert, at about 7:12. I take a moment to pour a cold brew coffee before heading back down. I pass the cleaner along the way, pushing her cart toward my apartment.
Sitting in the shelter, I ask my family in the States where their nearest bomb shelters are. They don't know. They realize that maybe they should. It's been a long time since foreign aircraft have attacked the East Coast, but relatives remind me that our grandfather was an Air Raid Warden in Philadelphia in World War II.
I Google my most recent hometown, but the one hit for "bomb shelter" is for a café with that name. Probably not useful.
We figure that this will be the last alert for a while, since missiles arriving now would have been fired just before the 7 AM ceasefire deadline. It's like they're having an end-of-season clearance sale on armaments, so they don't have to store them away for next time.
That's it for alarms for the day. I go back upstairs. The cleaner arrives soon after, followed by the breakfast cart.
I sleep, off and on, during much of the rest of the day. I leave the TV news on. I hear that at some point, either Iran or we have launched something at the other, who has retaliated. Nothing comes of it, except that each gets to claim that the other has violated the ceasefire. No surprise.
I hear the eloquent POTUS say before live cameras, as shown by subtitles, “We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know WTF they’re doing.” The audio shows that he didn't use the abbreviation.
I have my usual online Hebrew lesson today. My teacher and I talk about how each of our cities have been facing the crisis. (Vocabulary words: rehabilitation, disabilities, evacuation, underground parking.)
I stop down to Continual Care after the lesson to swap out my daily stick of medications and visit family. I help out as I can. More workers come in as staffing returns to workable levels.
We gradually get word of things resetting and resuming. The airport is to reopen. So are schools. Restrictions on gatherings and workplaces are lifted. The dining hall is to be open again for breakfast.
People take breaths, though perhaps not deep ones. We're reminded to keep our shelters clear and accessible, and to keep ready whatever we need to grab when we run down to them. Just in case.
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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.
“Ingresa ahora al espacio protegido mas cercano”