AAHHHH!

By Dnoll
Today started off just about normally. I got up, had some coffee, got into a fight with my wife, kissed and made up, said goodbye to the family and walked to work. Once I got there, all seemed to be normal. Everyone was busy with assorted tasks like moving the latest order of filters, taking out the garbage from the maafiah (bakery) where they make incredible bread and cakes, and talking about who knows what since most of the communication is all in German amongst the members of Beit El. Then, towards the end of the day my coworker Gideon ran down stairs to say, “meshewho po bishvilcha” (someone is here for you). I ran up the stairs and… AQUARIUS WOMAN!!! Oh no. now she is going to rattle on and on about who knows what. I did a quick one two on her to try to get her to leave my workplace but she would not budge. She wanted to be reassured about the dog. She wanted to make sure that we still called him… shoot, I already forgot the name that some little girl gave him the week that he was in the Caesarea coffee shop. In the end (at least that is what I thought), she gave me a pill for worms to give to the dog (after he eats), and I left to go back to work. Out of the corner of my eye I saw her walk over to Gideon, who was working on one of the CNC machines and thought nothing more of it. Bad idea. About a half an hour later another coworker, Phillip came down the stairs and said that something very interesting was happening upstairs. A woman was struggling to communicate something to Gideon in Broken Hebrew and English. Aye Ya Yaey! I go upstairs and Gideon and Yochanan (my boss) are engaged in some kind of conversation with her. About 45 minutes has gone by now and I find that I need to translate to them what she wants. I am thinking, wait a second, what is going on here. The people at Beit El are so nice that they will just listen for as long as it takes to this woman. She is meshugaah! (Crazy).What is the deal here. Luckily she didn’t understand Hebrew to well (she has only been living in a Hebrew speaking country for about 20 years) and I was able to quickly give some advice on how to get rid of her. Oy Vey! I can see that at some point this may need to come down to some chutzpah on my part. Maybe lesson 2 on how to be an Israeli. Neereh!

Laheteraote.

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

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

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