Shitaphone Ve Oad...

By Dnoll


Yup, if you remember from a while ago the shitaphone, you know it isn’t good... We just had to do it again, didn’t we? When I went to bed on Friday night, I was feeling pretty good. I was really getting into Shul and was feeling real connected to Hashem and my community as well. We had just come through the High Holidays and I felt really great! I, maybe for the first time ever, really explored the inner recesses during Yom Kippur. Rosh Hashanah was also very inspiring. I was ready for the next year with all kinds of zealousness and zeal. I even did tashlich in the little mayan that feeds the Roman bath house ruins by our home. Sukkot!!! We were in J-town for the festivities and I davened at the Carlibach minyan in the Old City too; just for good measure but, I digress.

So, we have all been praying for rain and this year we were answered with quite a storm. This was a storm that not only wet the parched ground, but filled the coffers a bit too. I wasn’t really expecting it but when it hit, the storm was, in hindsight, more than just water. The energy was intense. OK, OK... Let me just share a little about my life here recently in the Promised Land.

Josh...

We are really trying hard to sort out the whats, ifs, buts, and maybes with that little tike. It started with frothing insistence on having my credit card for the appropriately named, WOW, online game World of Warcraft. Because Zach decided to start playing on the Israeli server with all his friends here, He changed the (shared with his brother) membership. This meant that Josh’s characters, that he had spent all kinds of time and money creating, were no longer accessible! So, rightly so, Josh wanted my credit card to purchase his characters back on the American server, where all his friends have been playing. At least that is the story that I can piece together from my, advanced in years and not experience,... experience.

I ended up giving Josh the card and the boys worked out some kind of a share the expense deal (yeah, I am still paying for both accounts but, maybe we will get to that a little later). Things were going fine for a while. The kids were just finishing Summer and starting to get back into school, which doesn’t really start until 2 months after it starts; don’t ask...

It was time to put the clamps on to encourage the most perfect of joints, the dovetail! We found it necessary to purchase a program that measures and keeps track of all that blurry eyed computer time! We were going to dovetail it all together and get things moving in the right direction, right out of the gates.

It was pure hell. And then it seemed to get better; but only seemed to. Josh downloaded a program to hack the password and then proceeded to... well; let’s just say it isn’t pretty.

Speaking about our life here in the Promised Land,

Zach...

We went to bed on Friday night, full and content, and were woken in the middle of the night by Josh (he does that fairly recklessly and consistently), “There is a flood!” We roused ourselves, as usual, and discovered that... there was a flood! I threw on my underwear and went racing around the house to see where it was coming from. I followed it up the stairs and into the bathroom. Nope it wasn’t the bathroom so; I knocked on Zach’s door. It was locked. I knocked again. “What...” came from behind the door.

“There’s a flood, open up,” I said. The door opened and Zach turned on the lights. Standing in my underwear, I looked up and saw, surrounded by a sea of floating flotsam and jetsam, a semi clothed girl retracting up under the blankets into the corner of Zach’s bed. I couldn’t deal... I ran out onto his porch and found the culprit of the shitaphone. The leaves had blocked up the drain, again...

We spent the next couple of hours trying to squeegee the water out the doors. I was soaking wet from the downpour of rain and wading through ankle deep water on the merpeset, Zach’s room, the hall, and all the way down the stairs and right through the living room.

Talk about a shitaphone, (flood or crap-call, depending on your mother tongue).
And what’s more, I hate it when Israeli’s say, “yeheah beseder...”

How about, “hang in there baby!”

Yalla

Popular posts from this blog

Am Israel Khai / עם ישראל חי

By
Image
  My Dad - He was the tallest man I knew of, not only physically, but mentally and spiritually. It wasn’t always very easy to talk with him, but when we did, and when I needed him, he was there for me completely, without any hesitation. He loved the garden, loved his wife, loved his children, and he loved his work. He was an urban planner that conceptualized a perfect society and implemented his and other’s ideas to build environments to sustain a perfect population of residents. And it worked, right up until the time when his job ended, 10 years before his forced retirement … due to corporate takeover. The American dream, of building from scratch a perfect world, a society that worked together for the needs of all its members, became sullied. Fear of not having enough and greed began to shake my father’s foundation of hard work and faith. My father grew up in a working class family, his birth father having left him and his mother when my father was only five years old. His stepfathe
Read more

Paper Plane

By
Image
The glee in her eyes told the story from the beginning to its end. Well, except the part where we all jumped into the air screaming… My young student stood at the back corner of the room, eyebrows pursed in concentration. She inched her way forward, begging my attention, with a paper plane she had folded; also begging… So, I agreed. She could throw it in one direction only, towards the garbage can in the opposite corner. She grinned before our lesson, and I knew she would try it. I breathed in as it flew, around one student, then another. It arced to and fro, ascending then dropping down, but (no way) just enough. Then it swooped up, stalled, and came down … exactly into the corner alcove… It landed perfectly into the trashcan that I had asked for, a hole in one. We all screamed as we jumped from our seats, TWO POINTS! And then our lesson began.
Read more

The Open Window

By
Image
It’s cold, and a love-couch. It must be the contact, the surface It’s got to be the shallow stuff, the breaking-the-surface thing That thing that sings its way into the bowels of the thing, that thing Tension that breaks and becomes self-realized. The stuff of source, which is never seen That thing Then, there’s   the other thing. The one open on the other side, of things That thing But, I keep looking at the glass between, the skim-off of cream at the seam Of that thing It lurks behind brain-matter, waiting to sing, that thing Like it never was, it disappeared without a trace Nesting Wrenches
Read more

The Difference between Inspiration and Impulsivity

By
Image
Inspiration is an impulsive phenomenon. Or … the light of the impulse of the flame of inspiration creates itself into the opposite, the muck underneath, the foundation of wealth that resides under each dump. I beg to differ, however, since the place I think of when down is up, the happy-place. That place bursts into fireworks and phlegm, it soars into the unknown. I like it, and when it goes. It comes from nowhere, but lands now. It builds itself into stars and hiccups, slipping. Shine lands on foundation, as it calls and disappears timely. The plain of pattern stains tattoos onto film. Flatulence’ don’t exist, the grey-zone we believe. It rams into the animal in front and welds all pell-mell into the mohel. It never actually sings. In the spire of will, we want wafflery with it, neat squares to glisten and mine – digging deep in order to shine, the ton of milling and shavings pour down until still. The difference is nil, ton and void, since the arch flows up again then down. It is
Read more

Family Couch

By
Image
HEY, MOISHE! - click here  -  I wasn’t displeased about sitting in-between my parents – and I had the TV-clicker, so pressed it and began to watch. It was a convoluted revenge story developing, and I knew it. My mind fluttered between whether I was in control, or if my hand was being forced. We all watched for a few segments of time, and then I got bored and nervous. I fast-forwarded super-fast to the end. Then the bullets started flying. The screen we watched became systematically shredded, with fibers and smoke fluttering like worms in the wind, but still smoking from ashes flipping from behind. I suppose I was just angry. It was irrational, considering the love that I’d had. They looked at me in the dream like I was criminally-insane. Mouths hung wide and low with eyes pinned to my lapel, lower than my sight could even see. I mumbled nothing and moved back to the carnage, and stewed—then I woke up. It was good to remember, as I do now, building bridges and zip-lines straight down. A
Read more

Three Thumbs

By
Image
There’s a rule and two others that I found while navigating the Ramon Crater. Back in Boulder there was a devil’s thumb, but this was different. In the crater I rediscovered three of them, rules of thumb, rules to live by, and rules that were meant. The devil is fantasy, I always suspected, but the cultural paradigms sent down in time would never relent! So, in the crater, I stuck my head in the desert, into the sands of time, and I learned as much as I could, till mostly I was spent. And spent I was, coming up from the barren lands down below, on the globe we live upon. I kept learning long after sundown, the rules to live by … and, until now, not making a sound. Rule one I learned from my father, as we hiked in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, the highlands of California. We arrived at a campsite daily, with packs upon our backs, to find that others had left things behind. My family was small, only four with my mother and brother, but we learned that leaving a place better than when we c
Read more

Seed

By
Image
There’s a knowing left under the world that reminds me of me. I think it sometimes, this knowing, but it leaves soon thereafter, spitting nonsense into my memory of it being. The life it left always tilts my reservoir of love but never touches my lips up, never begs to begin. I sing, I dance, slamming it out unseen, but always tasting the wishing in which it began ~ image:  Etrog in Space, 10-2016  
Read more

Man, Woman, and the Arab Spring-board

By Dnoll
Image
The Middle East is getting hot. No, really, the air around here must be full of electric Kool-Aid or something. I mean, from the local hardware store, to the parliamentary building, and all the way downstream to my little family, we have been struggling to get along with each other for days now. For the last two weeks, the energy has gone up and down with rapidly decelerating acceleration, creating all kinds of interpersonal mayhem and sociological eddy current-crevasses. Even the dogs ran away and, for the first time since they have been our four-legged family additions, they had to spend the night in doggy-jail at the pound (at 300 Shekels apiece!). They just took off for a day on the town; I guess until the evil dog catcher snatched them from their revelry. Maybe it has something to do with the changing weather here in the Middle East, with sticky, sweaty, sloth-slug inclinations taking shape in our sub-consciousnesses. Or it could be the changing political climate that always invol
Read more

From Pickles to Bubble Gum

By
Image
  I fell for it again today, the inevitable trap set for unwary teachers at the high school where I’m ever so slowly becoming an educator, and along the way developing some great relationships with the next generation of young Israeli leaders. This year had been a tough one, having met with my students for only a short period of time before we left for the holidays, and subsequently unable to return. By the end of Sukkot, we had all wrapped up a wonderful holiday season with family and friends, eaten and drunken far too much, and were ready for one more day of rest before the start of the real teaching season began, Sunday morning, October 8. Then, school was cancelled. It was far too dangerous, you see, to send kids out into our world. It was far too horrible to even comprehend what had happened. Each of us went into reaction mode, protecting our families, our neighborhoods, ourselves and each other, listening for the latest news, preparing for the worst, both mentally and physically.
Read more

The End of Being a New English Teacher

By
Image
As a new English teacher I am required by the Ministry of Education to take a new teacher workshop for my ongoing training. It is bureaucratic business at best; at worst a sausage factory spilling out unknowns and just more mess. Oy, a student in 10 th just now texted me that her Moed Bet was scheduled for another Gush, to which, having stopped writing this, I replied: My schedule shows Gush B - lessons 1 and 2. But, no matter, whenever you have English, you will be taking the Moed Bet —English Lit., tests… wow. I just finished grading the rest, from both Gush’s pupils a pile of damn tests. That’s the hardest part of my job, I can attest, grading and writing, commenting and scoring … that is definitely the worst and the best. Actually, there ‘is’ that Zen that creeps in from the edge of the classroom, slinking in and only then becoming relevant—when students notice life moving in front of them, when they exert themselves into a realm of the living. Yes, there are other realms too, w
Read more