One never knows how distant events might affect the local situation. Some years ago, there were no decent yellow onions available anywhere we looked, even at Green Mountain on the main road to Mansourieh just below where the road from Fanar joins, and they always have the best. Though Lebanon is most definitely a place with strong produce seasonality, yellow onions are available year ’round, but not then. Not being shy, I asked the grocer why the onions were so bad. “Egypt” was the answer. It seems our yellow onions normally come from Egypt, and Egypt was in the midst of the Mubarak-Morsi-El Sisi transition turmoil, and onions or their export to Lebanon were affected (or the onion shortage was the cause of the turmoil, just like the pyramid-builder strike under Ramesses III three thousand years ago). Sometimes closer events manifest in the availability of exotic foodstuffs. After the July War in 2006, Guinness stout, a favorite of mine, and evaporated milk, a favorite of my mother-in-law’s, were suddenly easy to find. It seems UNIFIL was bolstered with Irish and some-yet-unidentified-but-suspected-to-be-West-African contingents and some spill-over of their respective commissary needs. And there are the less-subtle ramifications of air routes between Europe and points east avoiding military activity and sudden trade wars affecting US imports of European yarn and the price of tea in China.
Thus, when we were just about to leave the apartment on our long-awaited 75-day visit to Japan, via Doha, after some anxiety that regional tensions would erupt and disrupt our travel, our daughter called with the news that Israel and the US had attacked Iran, we immediately checked our flights. Not cancelled, so we went to the airport, got to the empty counter, and tried to be patient. Of course everyone in line was worried the flight would be cancelled, and an airport employee told us they expected the airport to close. Our friend sent us an update from planefinder that the plane coming to get us had left Doha. Great! We waited. Then he sent the update showing it had turned around. Then the airport staff told us. So, taxi back home, immediate reworking of plans for the next five months (a story for another day), and a summoning of the gang to convene at the neighborhood watering hole (Raseef) for a debriefing on the recent events with geopolitical and personal ramifications. That was when the storks flew about making strange noises. It struck me as biblical in a bad way; apparently they could hear the military activity down south in Dixie. This time, it was looking to be more a rotten-onion than a Guinness-and-evaporated-milk sort of deal, though not without recognizing with great relief that we did not get stuck in Doha and spend a couple of weeks in a sad hotel trying to book a camel caravan back home across the desert.
Some years ago, I realized I was sighing excessively, though there have been so many unfortunate circumstances that I do not recall which situation it was. It must have been during or after the constellation of misfortunes, the ‘thawra/revolution’ and concomitant financial collapse/currency devaluation/hyperinflation that overlapped the covid-19 pandemic and concomitant lockdown, that was itself exasperated by the port explosion and concomitant riots, followed by students no longer learning, and it was definitely before the horrors of 7 October 2023 onward and Nasrallah’s 2024 war. In any case, I promised my spouse to respect a 10-sigh-a-day limit. One might expect that limit so high as to be easily respected. Indeed, the median number of daily sighs during the post-thawra age is estimated as low as zero or one, yet within this vast duration of time, there have been epochs in which sighs attempt to emerge hourly or even more frequently. Thus, one day during this uncertain time, a time of war, however described (semi- or quasi- or tepid?), a time when we have become resigned to accepting the unacceptable, to expecting that the future cannot be predicted, to plan with both hope and fatalism, I realized that even before noon, seven sighs had already escaped. Though we were in peaceful, even serene, Koganei, in western Tokyo, within walking distance of the Kokubunji grand temple site, a place that emanates soothing multidimensional spirituality, news of the war, specifically of the attacks of 8 April, ‘Black Wednesday’ or ‘Operation Eternal Darkness,’ swept that serenity aside. In the news were images of targets, one of which I recognized, as it is less than a kilometer away on the other side of the university, on the old ‘inside’ road that was the only eastern approach to lower campus before the sea-side corniche, and somewhere I pass every few weeks. That is not quite correct: it is not the missing building that I recognized, as it was a pile of rubble, but its neighbor, thanks to its distinctively scaffolding. Sometimes, limits are exceeded.
My task was a minor contribution to a massive, once-per-decade, unit self-assessment document that was cobbled together from odds and ends, and once it leaves us will be filed to be read by no one, part of a bureaucratic box-ticking exercise no one values. Actually, it was several months ago, and I already have forgotten was my assigned task was, but as the only native language speaker available, I agreed to copy edit the summary, just in case someone asked AI to extract meaning from it (if you ever have to write something from which someone/something else must extract a summary, make the job easy for them/it). So, there was a now-routine description of the how our unit has faced difficulties from (begin boilerplate) the economic collapse, the banking crisis, the “thawra” (“revolution” {but it failed, so it should be called an insurrection according to my high-school history teacher, yet “uprising” seems more accurate}), and the recent 2024 war (for which there does not yet seem to be a consensus name {“Nasrallah’s Victory” has been suggested, which is interesting because “nasr” itself means “victory”}). Reading that blaming boilerplate, I realized it did not include the usual cliché that includes the contribution of the port explosion to our current non-ideal situation. I have to be a bit careful here. The port explosion was bad, but it is routinely wildly exaggerated as unhousing most of the city and its negative contribution (deduction?) being on par with the banking crisis and exchange rate collapse (the value of largest banknote in circulation has decreased from about $66 to $1.11, which was going to be a separate post featuring a stack of them and the aphorism “a million here, a million there, and pretty soon, you are talking real money”). Thus, I thought I had better include that and inserted “and exasperated by the 2020 port explosion.” Rereading, the “exasperated” seemed wrong. I knew it to be the wrong word, but it seemed close to the right one. My self-diagnosis, which includes many other observations, lapses in my once-perfect spelling among them, is late-onset mild dyslexia. I must have spent an hour scratching my head in confusion. When “exacerbated” finally emerged from the gray matter deeps, I laughed for a bit and decided to keep “exasperated” and vowed to use it always in hopes that it will spread.
Yes, but what does the corn and a rat pup have to do with the port explosion? One might recall the massive spilled corn from the damaged silos that shielded our sector of the city 4 kilometers way and the resulting rat population explosion. That may be a contributing mechanism. There are a few apparently unrelated, more recent events, the past two years in particular, that swirl about and almost converge. First, the 2020 Port Explosion did break quite a few windows in the building, and as some are hard to see from inside and out, there is still damage. Second, the building was chosen by our esteemed leadership to be “gifted” the wonderful non-refusable opportunity to be the second building to receive a radically new kind of HVAC system with central compressors outside that pipe refrigerant to individual room units. Anyone who keeps their ears open is wary of gifts from the administration. The favorite scare-mongering story is when some well meaning NGO wanted to donate money to replace the windows broken by the port explosion in a historic campus building. The problem was that the windows had already been replaced, but the roof needed work. The NGO insisted on funding the windows (try raising money for restrooms: who wants to have toilet stall named after their parents?), so the project was to replace the perfectly fine wooden windows with modern aluminum windows. Great. Thus, all faculty had to be relocated with laptops for the duration, and as usual, the duration was overlong interfered with the semester. Worse, the faculty left their offices as they were, and they were looted by workers. This story was suppressed, but computer RAM, books, personal possessions, and anything salable that would fit in a pocket (day laborer bags are searched) went missing. Third, the cotton plugs in the Friday section genetics lab students’ Drosophila vials were removed in an apparent act of failed sabotage (they finished with them the week before). Fourth, the purportedly 1980s vintage corn cobs in the general biology lab were shedding kernels (curious that decades-old corn was attractive to rats, I found the person in charge of departmental corn orders, and she said she replaced them only 15 years ago). Fifth, rat droppings were found in a research lab (and not laboratory rats, as the building has not maintained a rat colony for ten years).
The physical plant was informed of our rat sighting and responded with poison bait, presumably warfarin, a vitamin K reductase inhibitor that causes blood-clotting factors to lose function by not having some glutamates carboxylated, resulting in massive hemorrhage. The reader is directed to the Wikipedia entry under “warfarin” for further, quite interesting, aspects. It takes a few days and its success is indicated by the distinctive odor of rotting corpse. It being a rat dying, one must look for some deep, dark, inaccessible place to which it crawled in agony. When it was found, extracted, and displayed in the corridor, it attracted interest: it was a formerly healthy, large male with glossy fur and was admired all passers-by without distaste. This being a biology building, one might think our appreciation of life would have us shun death, yet killing is our standard approach, and though no one is proposing renaming our department to thanatology or necrology, one understands how faculty tend to relish irony. A few days later, another rat was sighted in the genetics lab running across a pipe suspended (the pipe) from the ceiling during class. There may have been shrieking, as it was a live one this time. The poisoner was summoned again and the death watch (sniff?) began. The first sign of success was not the stench of death but a rain of rat pups from the ceiling onto students in class in the room below the genetics lab. One can envisage a consternation of horrified students screaming, but reportedly they collected and shared them on social media without shrieking. One was retrieved for me (see above), and when shown to a mouse-sacrificing graduate student (which engendered a discussion of our favorite methods: she was modern and favored administering overdoses of anesthetic, while I was classical and favored manual cervical dislocation on individuals and carbon dioxide asphyxiation in a plastic sack en masse), was estimated by hair growth as a 2-day old, with the assumption that mice and rats are similar, sharing a common ancestor only ~10 million years ago. One visualizes pups suddenly weaned and orphaned by their mother’s death seeking the care and solace of fellow mammals by blindly crawling toward light and warmth until falling to the depths of hell populated by thanatologists-in-training relishing opportunities to vivisect the very young.
Thus, one dead dad rat down, one dead mom to go. Someone asked the custodial staff to search the room, but not having much experience with rats, mom was not to be found. Nearby faculty, including yours truly, were then recruited. It was quite obvious that a rat would choose to nest in the space between the bottom drawer or cabinet shelf and floor of the lab bench along the sea-side windows, but which one of eight, and would we need crowbars and mallets to dismantle the cabinets? Looking behind the bench, we saw a hole formed by a missing corner of a black window, and under the sink, we saw cotton balls. Suddenly, it all made sense: the young he-rat setting out from the sewers along the sea valiantly searching for a homestead to raise a family; scaling a building and finding ingress into a dry, warm, nearly cat-free building with corn, water, and many nooks and crannies suitable for nesting; with a homestead found, winning a bride; the handsome young couple eloping and starting a family: while he gathered kernels and provided gametes, she upcycled cotton balls to build a nest and gestated, bore offspring, and nursed their young. Her body was found under the drawer next to the sink. Yet another exasperation by the port explosion we thought, but when trying to plug the hole in the window, it became clear it was a man-made, not blast-wave made, hole, a neat triangle cut from a corner, a neat triangle just like many we had recently seen while enduring the 11-month installation of our HVAC gift, during which no AC was available in a common lab reaching 40 C; our offices were mutilated repeatedly with drilling, window breaking, and weekly visits; power cuts when they drilled through floors without asking permission or realizing that in this part of the world, power lines are strung below tiles, with concomitant deep-freezer failure and lost of precious experimental samples; and noise, noise, and more noise until threats of axing the compressors were made independently by several of us accompanied by raised voices. And it continued interminably: the refrigerant piping was deemed too unsightly for exterior placement, hence it was placed along the ceilings of the rooms for the laboratory side and the central corridor for the office side, which required many holes in walls and transom windows. Unsurprisingly in the humidity of Beirut summers, the refrigerant piping condensed massive quantities of water that formed large puddle in the corridor. The pipes were sensibly in foam insulation, but still dripped copiously. Thus, paint-soaked cloths were wrapped around the pipes similar to middle-school paster-of-Paris activities, and when the black mold grew alarmingly, they were repainted and we were threatened with a gift of false ceilings, which we imagined would be an ideal place for both mold and rats.
If I have a chance, next time I will write “exasperated by unwanted gifts of the administration.”
On our way north to Seattle in transit to Chicago and eventually Beirut, younger got a recommendation for lunch, and as usual, it was extraordinary. The spicy beef flat noodles, the ones in the metal dish and plate were so good I will assert that they were the best food I have ever eaten in the US. They were something like beef chow fun, but I think using hand-pulled noodles with an amazingly balanced beef and vegetable sauce with Szechuan peppers. I was so impressed that I conveyed my thoughts to the staff. I am not by any means claiming it is the best food in the US, as I am far from being broadly experienced or qualified. And to be fair, I have not spent much time in the US in recent decades and it is hard to compare with memories of years ago. Terra Cotta Warrior in the Sunset, maybe 7 years ago, also really impressed me (and many things including the sow’s ear at Szechuan 2 {?} in the Richmond), and House of Nanking 35 years ago, and even that little Hunan on Kearny 40 years ago, back before I had much experience outside of Oregon (and when Oregon would not have attracted much culinary attention, though I was quite fond of the ham sui gok at Fong Chong and the original Macheezmo Mouse on Milwaukie Avenue). And it is not really fair to compare to something like a taco or chilaquiles. Oops, or burger. One might suspect a pattern of appreciating only Chinese food, but note the qualification of “in the US” excludes Japan, France, and Lebanon. We also had very good food at Tapas Angel in Seattle a couple days later, and the dosa at Bawarchi on Devon in Chicago was perfect.
Soon before travel, one may observe some discomfort, and though diminished over years to a mere unsettled disposition, a lessened interest in embarking on any venture demanding commitment, events sometimes conspire to reassert the validity of skeptically viewing the inherent uncertainties of air travel. The impending return home, its likely flight path, delays unto cancellation, and even truncation come to mind. The first time flying Abu Dhabi to the US in 2016 (see post “Highway to the Danger Zone” 20160713) included fraught airspaces: Syria, Iraq, Iran, Russia, and the Toy-Mongering Entity (Santa Free State/North Pole). Since then, the airspace of four of those five (and the new addition of all of Ukraine) range from occasionally hosting transiting weapons to closed, and even the layover and destination airports close unpredictably. Thoughts emerge of the no-fly zone expanding from Syria-Iraq-Iran-Russia to the entire Arabian peninsula (as in 2003), which would extend the 15.5 hour flight beyond possible. Worse would be interminable rerouting. We futilely try to choose reliable itineraries (“Halfway to Heaven” 20240704). Even worser would be an eruption of hostilities turning our one-day layover visiting friends in Abu Dhabi into a choice between long-term residency and a caravan across the empty quarter in summer. I had better stop there and accept the very nature of modern travel means things are up in the air and one must be resigned to fate.
“Should I Stay or Should I Go” (The Clash) also comes to mind, yet sooner or later is required, and the future seems increasingly uncertain.
Back in the day, during the interregnum/pax romana between college and graduate school, possibly what would be called a gap year these days (though it was more than one), a timeless formative period comprising blood, toil, tears, and sweat (and travails and turmoil), yet also allusively (and elusively), a portrait of the author as a young man, I made forays into public expression of ideologic/philosophic/spiritual matters. I cannot recall the incipit, but some inspirations came from working as a employee, without pay or benefits, at a former surgical research laboratory building in the local Veterans Administration Medical Center (a primary setting of my yet-unwritten great American novel to be titled A Typology of Lost Pet Signs), where every day was full of adventure, irony, etc. Sharps, blades, mice sacrificed on the alter of science, syringes, recombinant proteins, vital organs harvested, crazy scientists, strange graduate students, veterans of various US wars (including those on drugs {the wars, but I suppose also veterans}), radioactivity, federal bureaucracy, and excess funding: what could go amiss? Many [mice] died by my hands.
Some common disposable medical devices, such as syringes and needles that came sealed in a paper and plastic wrapper fresh from being subjected to ionizing radiation until sterile, were labeled “USE ONCE AND DESTROY.” With the corpses heaped below my hands, this phrase scintillated with refracted meanings, among them mortality, ecological doom, nationalism, and ritual purity. I received it as a message given unto me to promulgate to the masses. Hence the stencil. That being the timeless mid-80s, the masses tended toward misinterpretation rather than epiphany, thinking it was a reference to a favorite punk rock song or preferred romantic experiences, which might make sense in that for many then and there, as sex, drugs, and rock and roll was some sort of substitute spirituality, or at least having some overlapping emotional states.
Engendering so many introspective interpretations, UOAD was my personal favorite, yet the reactions to and interactions from the “ESPIT” (ESPRIT was a nearly-now-forgotten brand {should that be “now nearly forgotten”?} that was selling simple, white, wildly over-priced {“but it’s a designer T-shirt!”} T-shirts, preminiscent {let us argue about the validity of this word later} of DKNY some years later, and closely resembling the stencil below) were most rewarding. “APPEASE YOUR SUPEREGO” and “SUPPRESS YOUR ID” were often misunderstood, eliciting confusion and confrontation, as did “BOYCOTT COCAINE.” Nancy Reagan wisely kept it simple for her target audience with “JUST SAY NO,” but when considering “JUST SAY YES” and possible responses, I faltered and chose sometimes unrecognized sarcasm with “DRUG FREE AND POLITICALLY CORRECT.” A fake Hard Rock Cafe Ho Chi Minh City was also successful, but when the real one finally opened, the intended riff on commodification of fake-revolutionary-to-yuppies failed. Please note the “DRUG FREE AND POLITICALLY CORRECT” is a proud relic of the first culture war, which was in full swing with Newt Gingrich in strong ascent, even if it was not yet named the first culture war. If one wants to understand the Zeitgeist of the era, I suggest watching Repo Man (1984) {with Harry Dean Stanton [see him also in Alien and Paris, Texas] and Emilio Estevez). I will admit it into the record below.
Respecting, yet wanting to avoid the aesthetic baggage of the WWII-era stencil cliché, a new font was needed. This was the first post-college application of my calligraphy (and paleography) course. Some thought was spent on calligraphy. I am not sure how to judge the alphabet now: I like the hints of pen or brush, the Q and U, but the D could have preserved more of the Imperial Roman strokes. After my father approved of the alphabet, I learned how to spray paint well enough. Black alone presented thinly, but alternating red and black worked well enough. Fortunately, not much was spent on T-shirts thanks to an acquaintance formerly military with an over-abundance from boot camp.
For the ESPIT in particular, not attending too carefully to misalignment and lifting creates imperfections that catch the eye. Too much, such as folds in the cloth, cause the realization it is a fake before the desired doubt. Aim for uncanny valley: wash and iron the shirt, keep the stencil flat and not stretched, but do not think to improve by switching to silk-screen: if it is too well done, a great many viewers will never notice the spelling change and not get it.
Recently finding some of my stencils (I am avoiding those so dated as to evoke more cringe than cogency), prompted me to think of new pithy ones, those common-yet-obscure, quasi-epigraphical phrases that prompt other interpretation, especially when written on a person. Mortality, politics, humor: irony. “Three score and ten.” “Best before 09/07/1998” (or your favorite date or time of day or day of week: “Best before Monday morning”). “Return when empty.” “DO NOT ENTER.” “WRONG WAY.” “RETURN TO SENDER.” “Intentionally left blank.” “YOUR LOGO HERE.” “May not be removed under penalty of law.” “KEEP LEFT.” “Rinse and repeat.” “THIS END UP.” “More inclined to guessing than accuracy.” “THE END IS NIGH.” “Do not resuscitate.” That might have to wait a few more years before scooters are banned and I feel comfortable wearing that out and about in Beirut traffic.
Here in Beirut, muhammara/m’hammara is common, associated with both Armenia and Aleppo. Every version I have had was different, the ones at Armenian restaurants best, and the store-bought stuff not good. The ingredients listed suggested it was made of bread crumbs, oil, walnuts and hot peppers. Breadcrumbs seemed to me to be cheap filler, but the walnuts, oil, and red peppers resonated. I think of pesto and tapenade. This unsurprisingly prompted me to attempt to make it. For obscure reasons unknown to me, at first I did not seek the guidance of recipes. First attempts were walnuts, olive oil, and the hot pepper paste sold at House of Olives. That worked, but was lacking. I tried roasting fresh red peppers with walnuts and olive oil, and though it was not presented as muhammara, a guest praised it as a dip. Thus, I decided to get serious and read recipes and decided to limit myself to roasted red peppers, walnuts, and olive oil, with pomegranate molasses, garlic, and a smidgen of salt, rejecting lemon juice, intrigued by the idea of black pepper, and peculiarly utterly horrified by the thought of tomato in any form. That worked quite well, but adding a nice, fruity, and not-too-spicy gochugaru makes it very popular.
Note on the peppers: The typical red bell pepper found here in Lebanon is dark red and very flavorful. It works well. The red bell peppers I found in the US were not the same. It could be the peppers are not left to ripen fully, or more likely the cultivar is not as strongly flavored. This is where the brand and quantity of gochugaru might compensate. One might find better choices at a farmer’s market. My wife brought me some Aleppo peppers from Green Mountain (the Syrian green grocer on the Mkalles-Beit Meri road just below the junction to Fanar). I had known of Aleppo pepper only as a ground, dried red pepper, but of course, they must have a fresh form also. They looked to have quite some flavor, very red and long. She asked them if they were hot. One said yes, one said no not really. I tasted one. It was hot, but tolerable, I thought. I roasted and peeled them. That night I woke with burning hands, and the muhammara was a bit too hot for the average palette, which prompted consuming it with some lebneh, which turns out to be our favorite now: seedy crackers with a dollop of muhammara and a dollop of goat lebneh. Living well is the best revenge. Next time, I suggested a mix of Aleppo and normal red peppers, and when I tried them, they had no spiciness whatsoever. The gochugaru choice could make it very spicy.
For about one kg, 4 cups, a lot for a party, make less for personal use:
Red bell peppers, 4 or 5, ~1 kg (~2 pound)
Walnuts, ~300 g, about 3 cup
Olive oil, 1 cup
Gochugaru, ~1/2 cup or more
Pomegranate molasses (dibs ar-rummane), ~1/8 cup
Salt, 1/4-1/2 teaspoon
Garlic, a medium clove, puréed
Wash and dry the peppers, roast them on foil or baking parchment in a hot oven (400 F/200 C), turning them as they blacken, until they collapse, possibly as long as an hour (I never paid attention). One can do this on the stove and presumably directly over charcoal. I let them blacken to make sure thy are cooked, but I have not noticed any smoky flavor as with eggplants. Put them in a bowl with a lid until they cool. Remove the stems and seeds from the peppers. Peel the peppers as much or little as your preference: I do not know why I do it, as I eat what I manage to peel, and when I leave more or less, I do not notice the difference. I think there is a common practice of removing tomato and pepper skins for purées. I only adhere to it when the peels detach easily. In contrast, I obsessively remove all seeds because I imagine them getting stuck between my teeth. Reserve the liquid. The liquid is clear and nearly colorless, yet very rich in feel and flavor. I use it to thin the muhammara if it is too thick at the end, but usually I just drink it when no one is looking to wash down all the blackened peels I furtively ate. I imagine it could be an interesting cocktail ingredient. The next time I have it and soda water available, I will try a red-pepper exudate with soda and ice. I am not sure any alcohol would help, but vodka might work. Process the peeled peppers in a food processor until as smooth as desired (chunky works), and remove them to a bowl without bothering to clean the processor. Having carefully removed all bits of shell and partition, process the walnuts. The walnuts sold here are somewhat different than what we commonly find in the US. They are a less bitter and even sweet, not as much as pecans, but would work as a pecan substitute for pecan pie. At one of the Armenian food shops in Bourj Hammoud, they had three kinds of walnuts, from Syria, US, and Armenia. They all were similar, the Armenian most expensive, and all seemed the same cultivar as what we get from Green Mountain, where they claim they are from the US. Process the walnuts somewhere between chunky and fine to your preference, but not to walnut butter. I thought to add the olive oil to help the processing but was afraid to have it turn to butter. If the processor is large enough, add the oil, garlic, salt, and pomegranate molasses. Pomegranate molasses, real pomegranate molasses, is made by someone’s grandmother back in the village in a big cauldron from only pomegranate juice and no other ingredients and is available only by a complex exchange network (similar to real bitter orange blossom water and the best makdous), is really nice. No added anything. If there is added sugar, it is not good. If the real stuff is not available, either do without or make your own by reducing fresh pomegranate juice by boiling to about 1/8 volume. Yes, the pomegranates for eating and the juice for drinking are usually from sweet pomegranates, not the sour kind used for molasses, but it is fine. The garlic and salt is to your taste, and the amounts here are on the low side. A friend finds it unsalted and having insufficient olive oil and dopes it up. I find with time that I prefer more roasted peppers and less walnuts. If everything does not fit in the processor, turn it all out into the bowl and mix by hand. Add the gochugaru and mix. I use the Haitai brand, as it is very nicely fruity and not too hot for other consumers. I have not discussed this ingredient with any Armenians or Halabis, but this is not about authenticity, it us about a popular, healthy walnut-pepper dip without fillers. If thicker than desired, thin it with the reserved liquid. This needs to be refrigerated and should be good for more than a week or so. When it goes bad, it will ferment or mold.
We like it with goat lebneh on seedy crackers or very thin Arabic bread (khubz marqūq) made on the sage. If I am eating freekeh (like grünkern), I add some next to it. I can imagine it would work as the base of some dressing for some kind of salad, potato, bean, pasta, green, or something. Enjoy.
A month ago or so, a friend told me he saw the drone, the enemy drone, flying above. “You cannot see them,” I told him, “they are invisible.” I knew because I had looked many times. He told me it looked like a small plane. I repeated myself as to their invisibility. He said he was standing by Penrose and people were gazing into the sky. “But they cannot be seen; you must have seen a small plane.” I was most certain about the matter, and though he did not tell me that I was wrong, he calmly described what he saw and heard. Their sound and sight are opposed: one need not listen to hear, but one can look yet not see.
Or so I thought until last week, when hearing a very loud one while on Hamra street, someone pointed at it. I both looked and saw. It looked (and sounded) like a small plane flying back and forth somewhere to the east, Zoqaq Al Blat or Basta. I cannot but correlate where they seem to lurk, if something high in clear skies can be said to lurk, and where the bombs fall. I took a photo (see above), but was told it might be a bad idea. I did not think an airstrike would be called down from on high, but one never knows. Now I have been told a story, and in Lebanon, when one is told a story, it does not begin with, “I have friend whose friend….” That would lack provenance, and this being a small country where everyone knows everyone, or at least knows almost everyone in one’s social class, the story begins (in this case) with, “I met L-, my classmate I had not seen in years, and she had lots of stories. Do you remember J-, our daughter’s friend in grade X, the one with the exuberant parents who—at the–when—? Well, the father was hiking way up on Mount Y- and saw an enemy drone, up there where there is nothing military, so he took a photo. Then his phone rang. It was the enemy (or enemy Arabic-speaking phone representative {apparently, the Arabic-speaking, enemy representatives speak Lebanese vernacular Arabic}), who asked him why he took a photo of the drone. He told them he was just admiring nature while hiking with his four friends and took a photo of the drone by chance. The enemy said, ‘Four friends? We see seventeen of you.’ That was the correct number. So, he asked if he should delete the photo, but was told not to bother. Then, his phone crashed and everything on it was gone.” And, probably even without the provenance, everyone believes the story. That is one of the essential lessons to be learned here: it not that all the conspiracy theories are false, it is that they are all true, even the internally contradictory ones, because that is really how things are in Lebanon.
Perhaps to be expected with such a constant droning, one becomes somewhat inured to the threat, and one’s awareness fades in and out. This has caused some surreal incidents. I was in our bathroom, and I heard a mosquito. I hate them. I wish extinction upon the entire family and large numbers of their relatives, even the whole order of Diptera. I pushed the towel against the threshold to prevent egress, turned on the brighter light, and looked. I could hear it, and every now and again, I would see it for an instant. While waiting for it to land where I could find and crush it, I realized I could hear the enemy drone in periphery of my attention. The hunted becomes the hunter? I finally got it and tried to ignore its larger cousin.
Sometimes one’s mind integrates incidental stimuli into pre-existing narratives. I like to read, and admittedly escapism is a prominent aspect of the pleasure. For obscure reasons (a long story for the future), dystopian science fiction is a favorite, and sometimes, probably for osmotic reasons (that there is so many of them), I also read military science fiction often. (And yes, these sub-genera are recognized.) So, I was escaping my dull, boring, uneventful life by reading about a future society in a middle of a militarized conflict in a dense urban setting full of displaced people with drones surveilling and directing airstrikes when I noticed the enemy drone was getting louder. Only then did I realize there was no escape.
Our angel of death, circling above, ever vigilant, reporting to its master, who knows us in more ways than we can understand, reminding us with its background droning to remember that we will die, as if it is unaware of our greater need to be distracted from such thoughts.
There is a long and rich history of difficult times causing the contemplation of mortality (for example, see “Between the Easters, 20220422, on “Komm Du Süße Todesstunde,” BWV 161), far more than could be given justice here. The exercise is left for the student (try Wikipedia on “memento mori” and “death deity” as entry points).
Discussing the incipient Malthusian future and concomitant collapse of civilization with a friend who discounts such apocalyptic population predictions as neglecting that in almost every country birthrates are declining (in some places so much that worries begin of local anti-Malthusian crises), and asserting that the end days are not nigh, he did admit that local apocalypses and local collapses of civilization are highly likely, and that we can view the genocide in Gaza as an example. Thus, the local end of days need not result in a global dystopia. What passes for optimism these days.
Which brings up a question: Globally, what population is environmentally sustainable, and what level of technology could be maintained, and what standard of living?
In my rough recollection, likely biased by my morbid worldview, sentient artificial intelligence in science fiction is most often evil, sometimes uncaring, and occasionally benevolent. Considering that the as-yet-non-sentient AI processing our big data for military or other, possibly more nefarious organizations such as multinationals, tax authorities, intelligence services, advertisers, “them,” our employers, donation-seeking charities, conspiracy-theorists and other kooks, SEO spoofers, health (and life and car) insurers, NGOs of all persuasions, and most evil of all, bureaucracies, we can be quite certain those drones are up to no good. From a snippet of a propaganda video on a news show and coupled to my dystopian SF reading, I perceived that the country down south (Dixie) has a digital and three-dimensional, real-time representation of the entirety of Lebanon, above and below, to sub-centimeter resolution, probably from microwave to near ultraviolet and including esoteric electromagnetic scans, from east to west, north to south, updated frequently by satellite and drone overflights and doorbell cameras, and integrating every known class of data, from license plate tracking, medical files (l am hoping my recent false-positive blood donation made them lose my trail), facial recognition, pet-ID chips, mobile phone location and usage, RFIDs in workplace IDs and commercial products, social media, texting, library records, US currency serial-number tracking, malware in every device, even unto those tags on mattresses “This tag may not be removed under penalty of law.” Maybe they can give us results of bronze-age sites, gas reserves, Roman-era coin hordes, the Holy Grail, and my lost car keys. Which harkens to recent faculty (all oppression is local) arguments about the ID scanning during campus ingress and egress: what an anarchist sees as a practice of the police state is comforting security to a proto-fascist toady, of whose type there is quite a surplus. In the case of Dixie, that surveillance drone is an assassin’s agent intent on death.
Strangely disoriented while driving home on Bliss recently, I suddenly realized what was different: cars were parked on the university side (second image). My exclamation to my spouse was met with a confusion on her part: had cars not always parked on both sides? Absolutely not! Well, to be fair, the phenomenon has been observed on the 100 meter segment down past the Boy’s Gate to the police station for a few years since the currency devalued so much that the ticket for parking (50,000 LL?) became less than the cost of parking in a parking lot (~$3?), and the gendarmerie cannot afford to tow cars. What used to pay for a good dinner (in this neighborhood) became less than the tip to the grocery bagger. Inflation and currency depreciation create much suffering, yet for those with mortgages (in local currency) and those with difficulty finding parking (and those paid in fresh dollars), there are some benefits. What was such a surprise was that it appeared overnight all along the 500 meter university side and continued down around the corner on the high school side, even directly below the sign forbidding it (third photo translated by Google {one wonders at the choice of the texts used to train the software}, perhaps better stated as “short-duration parking only for dropping off and picking up students, by decree 20476 of year 2018, c.e.” {of course, with online teaching, one might imagine assignments or virtual students being uploaded}).
Thus, what is momentarily a surprising transformation in daily life becomes the new normal and hardly remarkable. The street parking is but one of many recent changes, some startling, some oddly familiar. People living on the street is reminiscent of what we see in the US (like Portland in 2021), we had already seen piles of garbage and litter everywhere during the garbage crisis of 2014, the sudden absence of beggars (not the expected development when one’s neighborhood is overwhelmed with refugees), the post-Thawra resemblance of the weekend neighborhood to a ghost town suddenly so busy one cannot find space on the sidewalk (just like the boom-times except a very different demographic), that within a few days most men are wearing black shirts, that the country is making international headlines daily (again), that traffic again as busy as it has ever been, the loud booms (but oddly much quieter than in 2006: improved munitions?), that cars are driving without regard to street direction, and the scooters, the scooters, the scooters. Yet the most disturbing is that much worse than the local neighborhood transformation is the cause. Yesterday, a graduate student in my online course asked if he could be excused to clean the rubble from his house (from which they had recently safely fled) resulting from the airstrike on the adjacent building: he showed the view from the window (remnants of which were strewn on his bed) of his bedroom of the pile of rubble formally known by its inhabitants as their building. Today, a friend described how her roof collapsed from the shockwave of a nearby bombing (while they were sleeping at her sister’s in a safe neighborhood). Last week, we encountered a student who had fled the suburbs to an enclave in the mountain (which also became a target), and when asked how his house in the suburbs was, replied, “I don’t know.” Today, he told me twenty of his friends died in his village on the border. I just learned my graduate student had her building destroyed. Change comes here and there, in bits and pieces, and then one realizes suddenly that it is the new normal.
These cats convey some of the misery of being displaced. Brief consideration of their accommodations, appearing to me to be somewhere between economy class and New Zealander racing yacht crew quarters (or a Central American prison {or that ill-chosen Amtrak trip from East Bay to Eugene}), explains their easily anthropomorphized expressions. Unlike students in a stultifying class (or adults in a business meeting), the duration is not defined. They were out-and-not-about to advertise their need for a new home, something more spacious than congested Mahatma Gandhi street, and hopefully luxurious, befitting their glamorous upbringing, somewhere with shag-carpet scratching posts, balconies overlooking trees full of birds, warm laps, and mice. When I expressed admiration of their kempt appearance in difficult circumstances to their human pro tempore, he explained their transient status. We took a photo and made an attempt, failing, but a few days later, they were no longer on display, having found a home.
Animals serve where ethical prohibitions disallow people. Thus, I do not post images of the displaced/unhoused/war refugee/homeless/IDP (take your pick in the musical-chair rotation of the current, correct, not-yet-pejorative term {when I was a child, I heard hobo, tramp, bum, vagrant, then transient [which seems so abstractly technical that it should have persisted], then pan-handler [more a professional or occupational description, yet such distinctions were often not deemed important by non-specialists], and then, possibly under the influence of the culture wars, unhoused, roofless, unsheltered, and now IDP, dehumanizing as only an acronym [properly an abbreviation, as it is spoken as the letters] can be, something suggesting military illiteracy, bureaucratic burial, rearranged viscera, or improvised devices}: my favorite is “camper,” which I encountered first in 2021 in Portland describing the shocking number of people living in tents downtown, to the extent that in order to walk from near Pioneer Square to Old Town {where back in the day there were many of a different profile} to visit Oregon Leather Co {where we met a Libyan employee who was quite interested in talking about Lebanon}, we had to walk in the car lanes because the sidewalks were occupied): I will use “campers” here to describe the families living on the street, some in tents, some in cars, some under overhangs, and some sheltering against southern walls open to the sky (it has only rained once and lightly, but we hear the drone, that Angel of Death {subject of a future post} incessantly).
We have altered our preferred morning route to work: transiting the land side (sea side reserved for long walks) of the corniche by the gas station meant we would walk through the living rooms (let us not discuss restrooms here) of several camping families. I am not sure of the appropriate etiquette of finding oneself unexpectedly in someone’s living/bed/sitting room (campsite), so I find it best avoid it. One would assume that campers prefer their limited privacy to my fleeting company. We found a slight detour leading to a side gate avoided campsites. We also have squatters (that could be pejorative, but I know of no other term) across the street in eight or so floors of the abandoned, windowless former hotel. Blinds have preserved our privacy, and the new neighbors have incrementally installed curtains, yet there is an average of twenty people on the balconies facing, so we have abandoned ours.
An accompanying phenomenon is that the vastly more numerous inhabitants in the neighborhood came with motorized vehicles, thus the already impressive creativity in parking (and scooter neglect of traffic laws: directionality, pedestrian only, minimum driver age {it must be at least twelve}, speed limits [if indeed they exist here], and number of passengers {five and a half is seen [the half accounting for visible pregnancy]}) has surpassed all conception, and the amazing part is how entire street-sides have been expropriated suddenly en masse such that one has to recall with some effort whether cars parked there previously or not.
May this end soon and all return to find their homes intact.
Hopefully, persimmon season persists long beyond September through October. This local variety is ripe without a trace of astringency when the whitish opacity is gone and they are translucent with deliquesced interiors. One can use a spoon or try the spider method of pulling off the sepals and sucking the gelatinous interior.
The image resonates in a peculiar way today. Bukowski’s Ham on Rye has a scene (most memorable and vivid with Zeitgeist) in which he is treated in the Los Angeles public hospital for acne vulgaris that also comes to mind. Since the violence suddenly accelerated, blood has been in demand. Being popularly O-, I thought to contribute my blood peacefully in this time of war. I am now over age yet sufficiently unmedicated to be exempted from disqualification, and I do not enjoy it, but for the July war and the port explosion, I stepped up. Last week, my recent cold safely weeks in the past, I learned that our university hospital had no immediate need (probably that most war casualties go elsewhere and the big need for locals are for stitches and keeping out of shock), so I bided my time. Yesterday afternoon, the call went out on Wazzap to report to the blood bank before 4 pm or wait until the morning. It was 3:40 pm on the far edge of campus, so I set a brisk pace that delivered me with a few spare minutes and a sweat-soaked shirt. The person in charge, not a physician, welcomed me and went through the drill. They no longer care about people having lived in UK. Everything was fine until she checked my file as a previous donor and told me that although my 2020 donation was fine, my last donation, in 2022 (for a terminal colleague) was rejected for a positive STD result, an unknown SEXUALLY TRANSMITTED DISEASE, otherwise known as a VENEREAL DISEASE, possibly contracted by INTRAVENOUS DRUG USE, and this result should have been communicated (verbally) to me, as some are treatable, all infectious, though it could be a false positive, and I should come back tomorrow to discuss the situation with a staff physician. You might imagine the diverse, surprising, unpleasant, and confusing thoughts this announcement engendered, a minor one was that she was announcing this quite LOUDLY near other staff and donors, some of whom turned to look. Having been married for decades and not having worked with human clinical samples for longer, I assumed my hepatitis B vaccination, the one that caused a positive antibody assay that stalled my work permit, was the reason, or possibly, a false positive. She showed me what she could see in the file, which had HIV and some others explicitly negative, but I could not see it very well and was somewhat distracted by those diverse what-if thoughts. She did not seem to know what the tests were, what specific STDs the entry comprised, or why I had not been informed in 2022. But they did not want my blood anymore, so I left physically unscathed.
I checked online as to what might be the suspect STD assay. Hepatitis B, Hepatitis C (but I think that was listed explicitly as negative), Hepatitis E (but is not a STD), syphilis, possibly cytomegalovirus in some localities. Some were nicely without alarming ramifications (false HB, CMV), some very much with (HCV). Spousal discussions were not fraught, but there are enough other trials and tribulations on our plate as it is. Sometime in the wee hours, I had disturbing recollections of two events in 2020-2022. One, the more disturbing, was getting blood drawn for my “annual” physical and noting that the Vacutainer collection device, the part stuck in my arm, already had blood on it, not mine, and I had not seen it opened from its single-use packaging. This was in the post-thawra financial collapse period when one could imagine someone reusing medical disposables for any number of reasons. I recall being angry that I did not make a fuss or report it. The other was that for our first AstraZeneca (remember the covid-19 era?) vaccinations in a hospital across town, the syringes were preloaded, and perhaps recycled beyond (before?) their intended single use, and the practitioner left my arm bleeding copiously. With these grim thoughts in mind, I did not sleep well, but did decide to return to the blood bank and find someone who could unlock the file and explain the possibilities.
Thus, on my way home for lunch today, I visited the blood bank. I explained the situation, and unlike yesterday, multiple personnel were knowledgeable as to precisely what was tested and how (antibody vs antigen, antigen against what part, etc.). The physician in charge was there. Here we shift to a collateral aspect of teaching so many pre-medical students: she was a former student. Some faculty go to other hospitals, as anonymity lessens potential embarrassment. I explained, surprisingly without that potential embarrassment, that I wanted to understand my positive assay, as if it were HCV or syphilis, delaying treatment until symptoms would be irresponsible. She asked me if my urine was dark (a symptom of HCV). I explained myself again, patiently and emphasizing the salient points of having no symptoms of any such in the last two years or earlier and suspecting the HB vaccination. Such patience is something I have learned from teaching so many pre-medical students over so many years. It turns out that “STD” is their euphemism (not an obviously successful one to me) for syphilis, something my needle scare did not explain. Meanwhile they checked my file and said that their records showed that my 2022 donation was negative on all infectious agents assayed. Good. I suggested to donate blood if they still wanted it. At this point, they were rightfully concerned with why I was told a false result (though it was not clear to me if they cared about the very non-private, potentially embarrassing aspect of how I was told, but medical staff can be like that). The screen they showed me had a different format than what I saw yesterday. After about thirty minutes, it was understood that their preliminary syphilis assay has (or possibly had then in the post-thawra period) a high rate of false positives that the more accurate secondary assay resolved. So, I donated.
Just after my spouse set off in the car for the mountain, I checked Google maps for the location of a recent airstrike. When I saw the map, I quickly called her to advise on possible passable routes, as the map showed many road closures on the main routes in and out of the city: south toward Sidon and the airport, east toward the Beqaa and Damascus, and north toward Jounieh and Tripoli, just where malicious airstrikes would be targeted to create maximum panic and chaos. Too many to be accidents, though scooter drivers have recently recklessly dramatically increased in density, passenger, and attention to their phone screens concomitantly with decreased regard to road directionality and my bodily integrity. At least drinking and scooting are not a phenomenon here. One would like to expect a two-block walk between a church and university would not endanger one’s life and limb. But no road closures, or even jams, were seen by her or reported in the news. Yet another spoofing by the ‘Zraelis?
So much can change in so little time. Our entry floor was polished to dangerously high gloss recently, and I captured this on the phone. I did not think it would improve by ToonCamera, but it does. The shadows on the walls are rendered beautifully. In the time since, so much has changed as to be surreal. The calm, quiet life is forgotten: taking the public bus to Dawra for a dosa lunch and walking back(!), evening strolls on the corniche, a drink with colleagues at Raseef, coffee on the balcony, and naively believing the future is predictable. The number of people affected by the war has increased a thousand-fold, Sunday morning in the neighborhood has changed from ghost town to IC pick-up chaos, schools are closed or full of refugees, families are living in sidewalk encampments, the drone and rumbles provide constant reminders of the violence nearby and the atrocities further south.
On the subject of the meaning of “institutionalized” (see post 2024/04/12), the employer/institution has recently instituted measures to decrease the permeability of its perimeter, already highly militarized relative to US campuses. Incremental, ratcheting security checks, such as having always to show university-issued identification, then the reissuing of said identification with radio-frequency identification (RFID) installed, then concomitant “in” scanners to register each individual’s entry, then, their unexpected corollary “out” scanners (the cover story of the panicked mother calling past midnight about her daughter {who had purportedly fallen asleep studying} was widely met with rolling eyes), and, in these days of heightened security in face of potential rushes en masse of internally displaced persons (IDPs) hoping to squat (in sense of inhabiting uninhabited housing {or even inhabiting non-residential structures}, breathing fresh air, finding toilets, drinking free water {a nearly unknown experience here}, or just to being in open space), now having closed gates whose postern pedestrian entries are only unlocked upon above-said, RFID-tagged, institution-issued identification being displayed from extramuros (reminiscent of action-adventure movies circa 2000 and having to visit certain high-security venues such as the US consulate in Lebanon {itself reminiscent of action-adventure movies circa 2000, at least since the October 2019 “thawra” [“revolution”] which now seems as long ago as peak action-adventure cinema}), has instituted yet-another, heightened security measure: a feline-retention plan (FRP) in the form of broken glass affixed atop the perimeter walls, a palisade of broken beer bottles. As the thought that the perimeter could prevent entry of a determined person or group is manifestly absurd (a hand-wielded maul or small car would suffice to breach the ramparts), and posturing/theatre would need something more obvious, the only rational conclusion is to dissuade the only campus residents who ever venture atop said walls: the cats (and being clawed, understand the meaning of bared sharps). Thus, I decided to institute a friendly FRP in the form of an upcycled hummous container placed next to the drinking fountain (provocatively in sight of IDP passersby).
The inspiration from comes from a childish prank on my part. On my way home one night after a bit more wine than my wont (or was it whisky?), I saw a cat sleeping on the tray of the fountain, as cats love perches. I thought to startle the cat by turning on the water as it lay sleeping, as my expectation was that cats tend to abhor being splashed. When I opened the spigot, the cat immediately awoke and, as if it had chosen that roost in hopes of gushing water, rapidly turned to drink. From lap of fountain to lap at fountain. That epiphanic moment (only a 45 minute walk from Rue Damas {not the one of Saul, but}) resulted in me placing and filling and replacing and refilling and refilling in the following weeks, and not only did the water level diminish daily, it started being refilled by others. And then I saw pictured cat, possibly the epiphanic cat itself, lapping away. We think of cats begging for food, but we do not think of them asking for water.
Apologies for obscure allusions and grateful reuse of Neal Stephenson’s neologism “extramuros,” not for the first time, as it applies very well here.
A couple of mornings ago our daughter texted, asking, “are you in jordan??” It seems she checked where my iPhone was, and she got the image above. She was worried the war had started and we had fled Beirut, a not unreasonable conjecture, and with so many flights cancelled and the airport being a likely target, the way out, a discussed exit strategy, would be a taxi to Masnaa, hoping for a visa, a different taxi to Damascus, possibly the same taxi to the border, certainly a different taxi to Amman, taxi to the airport, and then, Royal Jordanian window seat flying over Jerusalem directly to Chicago. We did not embark on that journey, instead, we had slept at home. I could have told her that my mother-in-law’s dog ran away with my phone. The ‘Zraelis have been spoofing GPS signals since October, presumably to disrupt Hezb’s drones, and there are all sorts of stories of local misdirection. A colleague’s son’s airbuds were at the airport, a food delivery ends up 10 km away, et cetera.
On the theme of the title, I can remember the TV show. I was probably only 5 when we watched it, and I did not enjoy it much: a mood of dread, suspense, mystery, and hopelessness, perhaps the mood of the cold war and Mutually Assured Destruction leaking into popular entertainment. We have other worries now.
On previous journeys to North America, the considerations concerned cost, convenience, and comfort. As there are no direct flights to Chicago, the choices manifest as the airline-transit-route. The European choice is conveniently short, but Europeans are expensive and sometimes go on strike (and the times are usually wretched). The Asia Minor hub scores well on cost and time, but coup d’états do occur (and no wifi access). The Persian Gulfies have good prices, good food, but if things go wrong, they can go wrong in a big way (it never rains, but it pours). Note that clearing US immigration in Abu Dhabi to arrive in the US (San Francisco) as domestic can be worth the 16-hour flight. This time, what with regional military activity, the Europeans could not be trusted not to cancel flights, flying between Occupied Palestine and Iran seemed fraught, and the novel choice of Royal Jordanian emerged as best. The flight from Beirut to Amman should be very short, but only MEA flies over Syria, so the other carriers take the long way around the Sinai (it took an extra long detour, presumably due to military activity). The transit was pleasantly modest and uneventful, lulling me into forgetting about military matters. Thus, when sleepily navigating the seat-back screen and seeing we were above Jerusalem, I awoke fully with surprise. I had assumed fight paths over Occupied Palestine were permitted only by its occupied national carrier. Looking out the window, it did not resemble Lebanon much: arid not green, flat not mountainous, and long beaches not interrupted by bluffs. I did not observe any military activity from the aisle seat. Many thoughts, even some degree of contemplation occupied my mind, not the least of which being that it was the closest I would ever be to the Abrahamic Holy City. A haiku:
A few nights ago, discussing some disquieting aspects of our employer and colleagues, my colleague used the term “institutionalized” in a way new to me. He referred to those colleagues whose lives are so dominated by the employer-institution that their lives (and minds) are affected profoundly, even pathologically. Examples were those university employees whose entire lives have been in close orbit: not only were they educated at the university, their parents were employed there, their children are educated there, they reside on campus, appear to have no desire to retire, ever. They cannot even imagine. They see retirement as sitting on the sofa staring at the walls or watching television. The university having a hospital, some were born there, and quite a few will die there also. To those readers far away across the seas in other countries with pension systems, not wanting to retire may seem peculiar and unlikely. Peculiar to you and me, but very common in this part of the world. The Lebanese have a lump-sum, indemnity pay out in lieu of a pension (the recent ILO agreement may change this). Staff must retire the year they turn 64, yet faculty have no set retirement age. One might consider the case of the professor in his early eighties who finally decided to retire and died several months later. My tentative interpretation that he sadly refused to retire until his end days were undeniable was roundly dismissed in favor of “he so loved working that retirement killed him.” That he had had several heart attacks and was visibly slowing had nothing to do with it. Another explanation for few wanting to retire is that for elderly faculty, work is not easily distinguished from retirement, even from an adult day care or retirement facility: In the morning, we have coffee and gossip with our colleagues, then we spend a bit of time sharing our wisdom and telling stories to visiting (paying!) youngsters, and then we eat in the cafeteria, have some more coffee, stroll about the grounds, and get a bit drowsy. Perhaps sneak in a nap, or work on the memoirs or write a few emails if we are feeling productive.
Thus, institutionalized. My earlier understanding of the word was limited to the sense of asylums. I recall seeing Ken Kesey’s “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” in 1975. Being a child in Oregon, where the book and movie were set, there was much attention, and I learned a new meaning for “being committed” (not the one guidance counselors meant, I think). One of the scenes that stayed in my memory is when Jack Nicholson’s character incredulously discovers his companions entered the asylum voluntarily and could discharge themselves, unlike his character, who was committed. That is the limited meaning I had consigned to “institutionalized.” This new meaning hearkens more to Doris Lessing’s “Prisons We Choose to Live Inside,” and I find it apt.
This comic caught my eye and triggered the memory of first seeing it as a child in National Lampoon, possibly when it was published in 1970, but I would guess that I found a back-issue a few years later (feels like fifth grade). I get a big kick out of it. It could have been some recognition of the absurdities of the cold war, then at its height, but more likely some nascent (and life-long) fascination with argumentation, here a mockery of propaganda that skewers the absurdities of the then- (not that it has diminished) shrill ideological accusations.
Satire often survives its Zeitgeist of origin. These cartoons, many blogsworthy, are on the window of a certified public accountant, and what with the Sino-Walmart Pact (cooperative?) supplying most of the formerly-known-as Free World with cheap consumer goods made by — I had better stop.
There is a steep west-southwest gradient in the Manara neighborhood from trafficked, new, upscale, to desolate, unkempt, forgotten. Saudi embassy and luxury flats to empty public schools and abandoned buildings. A few hundred meters down the gradient from here, smack in an almost no-man’s land, a blank area in my mental map, I found this cat napping on its throne. It brings to mind that just like politics, comfort can be local.
These last few weeks have been a strange time caught between horror and hope, fear and fatalism. The final approach to the Beirut airport (BEY) is about half a kilometer west over the sea, and every time I hear a plane, somewhere churning in the back of my mind is an analysis of whether it is a normal jet delivering passengers or a military jet delivering munitions. In one of the first few nights of the Gaza war, there was an electrical storm, and not expecting any weather, I awoke trying to determine if it was the airport being bombed, which everyone expects will be an early event.
Sound can travel very far under some conditions and over water. Jets, explosions, and thunder can sound quite similar at the edge of hearing. Especially at night, I catch myself listening to very distant rumbling. It is sometimes shelling in the south, yet fortunately, it is usually an arriving passenger jet far to the north whose low rumbling slowly becomes recognizable, dissipating the feeling of dread and memories of the July War. I need to take some inspiration from this cat.
This part of the world has a profusion of barriers, obstacles, walls, et cetera. Growing up in a rural (almost wrote “feral”) area, what we would call barb wire fences, electric fences, and cattle guards were to prevent domesticated animals from passing. Locally, human equivalents are profuse, though the only electric fence I have seen was at the southern border to Dixie (local euphemism), and I was not certain, but I changed my mind and voided my bladder elsewhere to be safe. Cattle guard equivalents are those red-and-white, tire-shredding, spiked beams on rollers waiting at checkpoints. Walls are even more common than cyclone fences, and for good reason: a pair of pliers or stout snips allow a cyclone fence to be dismantled in minutes, and a five-meter concrete wall and supported steel hoarding can exclude determined rioters for weeks.
It brings to mind the Berlin Wall, which I visited first a decade after it ceased to function. Some sections still stood, and I would see stacks of the segments in Kleinmachnow on my way to work. Stored for emergencies? For resale in the middle east? One might recall some brave words of day. Presumably, JFK had it in mind with, “Ich bin ein Berliner.” Thatcher had it correct with, “Every stone bears witness to the moral bankruptcy of the society it encloses.” Reagan, not my favorite, but here rising to the occasion, “…tear down this wall!”
On this subject of anti-human barriers and more broadly, human bondage, Gaza comes to mind. I imagine the structure surrounding Gaza has different technical designations by different parties representing various ideologies or squirming attempts to not. Perhaps “border structure,” “fence,” “barrier,” “separation,” or “boundary,” but I will call it a wall or enclosure. Thatcher’s words need a simple correction to, “Every stone bears witness to the moral bankruptcy of the society that closes it.” Hard to imagine how JFK’s statement would modernize, as he was speaking on the side of the free.
Discussing these ideas with a colleague, the January 2008 breach of the wall separating Gaza and Egypt by Hamas came to the fore: it was audacious and non-violent (I believe), and the Gazans came out in enormous numbers to exercise their rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness by shopping for groceries. I said, “can you imagine if on 7 October, Hamas breached the enclosure and all the Gazans emerged in the hundreds of thousands with their belongings and tents and reoccupied their ancestral villages, squatted Tel Aviv, and claimed refugee status under the appropriate internationally recognized conventions? He said, “Maybe next time.”
EU and US consulates have been sending increasingly alarming emails to their nationals residing in Lebanon. The US has escalated its typical, low-level admonitions to be careful, and now urges us to depart as soon as possible. I have heard there are as many as 50,000 US citizens, mostly dual-nationals, residing here. That would be quite the logistical challenge to ‘vacuate, considering that, unlike during the July War, taking a taxi to Damascus or a bus to Istanbul is not an option.
The Dutch presumably have many fewer (nice oxymoron) citizens here, so few that they can invite them all to Koningsdag and Sinterklaas receptions. They have communicated their concerns very clearly, even for we non-Hollands-praaters [?], with color-coded maps. The first, received 7 October, looked to be the usual advice. I have not been in the red for some years, other than that the freeway to the airport south of the city tunnels under the red. We were possibly thinking of visiting Rashaya the day after, and Baabek later with foreign visitors, but with the change of climate, experiencing the Palestinian and Pan-Arabic honk parade blaring triumphally through our neighborhood, and hearing the southern shelling from the summit of the Shouf Cedar Reserve, we refrained.
The plot thickened, the red spread, and most recently, a phase-shift occurred in the safety-danger matrix such that the entire country, including the Dutch embassy, is “niet reizen,” meaning, I suspect, based on my langsam-und-einfach German, to mean, “do not travel,” and presumably, also, “do not there reside.” Most alarmingly, the last email included an English translation. It makes me wonder if the Dutch, when speaking to people who are not listening or seem not to understand, raise their voices and speak slowly in English, just like in the old movies.
Some years ago while reading of Europe in the 1930s, I recall wondering why so many did not flee Germany as it became increasingly obviously dangerous. Simple denial? Was it like the frog in the slowly heating pot? Was it like the professor in the slowly reddening plot? Or, being humans, tied to employment, family, home, and habit? All the above for me, but the denial is weakening.
A beautiful scene in a beautiful place. I begin to understand how the garden is designed to present specific vistas from particular vantages, and that they are carefully crafted, plant by plant, and respecting the changes through seasons. But the sudden girl in the kimono making a guest appearance makes it accidental art. A little past local noon, with the predicted afternoon rain arriving early, and more importantly, departing early, everything was peaceful and filled with beauty, except the mosquitoes, who were filled with my blood until I swatted them to smeary smudges. Just after taking this, I felt something on my bare legs and found at least five feasting at once. No pain, no sound, no irritation, just gorging. Now I understand why shorts are not popular despite the heat and humidity.
After some obvious interpretation without any knowledge of Japanese (and likely guesses as to it being 5 years old and massing 14 kilograms), I tried Google translate, as it has an image function:
All my thoughts about the poor dog and upset owners have been swept away. I am stunned. All I need is a pair of GoogleGlasses, a headset for audio, and a connection, and all the deep mysteries will be reduced to trivialities. I worry it will be like what happened one day, long ago, when I was working in Germany and suddenly understood what the young lab ladies were saying. It was not about whether free will is an illusion, or Nietsche or Wittgenstein, it was about Fleischsalat bei Lidl heute nur neun und neunzig. If I could turn it off for advertising and on for important, meaningful things like lost pet signs, I could focus on the pathos. Note the similarity of language to a lost pet sign in Outer Sunset, San Francisco two years ago, “Do not Chase or Call Out.”
Tonogayato Gardens, Kokobunji, Tokyo, a designated Place of Scenic Beauty. A southern border of large bamboo recalled in my mind an ancient Egyptian funerary text, guidance into the afterlife.
What one sees when stuck in traffic. Seen on the road from Jisr al-Wati to Madhaf: I was instructed by my incredulous spouse to capture the image. It apparently translates as “do not be envious my dear because religion is dripping from my butt.” Requests to have this explained have met with mixed success: all agree it is not proper to mix religion with posteriors, but whether the sense is that the speaker is so overflowing with religion that it leaks from every orifice (my cup runneth over [Psalms:23:5]?), that spirituality is akin to bodily waste, or something else is a mystery. Some were confused, some were shocked, some said there is a culture of drivers with outrageous statements on their vehicles, and some said it would not be safe to drive with that in some areas. What there might be to elicit envy was unclear.
Update: Despite passing unnoticed by my most knowledgeable Arabic speaker, someone who translates books, another explained that without the vowel marks (as Arabic is usually written without them), the word “religion” is a homograph of “debt,” and the statement makes sense: it is about the expensive vehicle, though it is not clear whether the shocking play on words is intentional. A blasphemous meaning is only in the mind of the reader?
Abu Shadi’s mashrooha (two), spinach and cheese (and bits of white onion and hot red pepper), fresh from the oven, on the sidewalk table for lunch. Holes in the walls do not come better than this. We are privileged to live so close. Now open late night as well.
Najib Ardati Street, Manara, Beirut. Notice the bokeh around the far extending arm of the awning: I would not have thought an iPhone 7 camera could do it.
Our new favorite place to eat in our city of many countries. It qualifies as a “hole in the wall” because it is very small and upstairs from the small shop on the Dawra central roundabout. If you are ever in Dora/Dawra/Daoura, you can have a fantastic South Indian meal for a very low price: A masala dosa (spiced potato mixture in a very thin crepe made of fermented lentil dough with sauces and tasty extras, water and chai, for less than $3 per person. Occasionally on the spicy side, it is almost more than I can eat. I want to try other items on the menu, but the dosa is too good to skip.
The economic collapse has sometimes subtle manifestations. Very recently while enjoying the relatively free-flowing, markedly reduced vehicular traffic about town, something I will greatly miss should fuel become inexpensive again, I noticed blank billboards. Back during the boom times/the glory days/the wonder years/the golden age, the sides of the road were super-saturated with billboards unto absurdity. After seeing over one hundred billboards for mortadella in a few minutes, I would have been willing to eat some just to not see the same image again and again on the autostrat (what I hear it called, though I do not know from which language it originates). The first was taken in Raouché, and the second nearby.
To the left of the text through a photograph of a broken wall peers the portrait of Gibran Khalil Gibran. It might be a reference to the port explosion. This is on Sursock at Mar Nkoula in Ashrafieh, a short walk from Boulangerie Patisserie Ghattas, whose fantastic lenten kibbeh was our raison d’être to be in the neighborhood.
The whole chapter, 14 by 17 inch (larger than A3), Strathmore layout bond (only paper I had sufficiently large and smooth), Noodler’s black and Fox Red (my normally well behaved Chinese stick ink feathered surprisingly, and this is the first paper on which Fox Red did not), Pilot Plumix with sharpened nibs, following the half uncial from Jacqueline Svaren’s most excellent book “Written Letters” (mostly), about two and a half hours of writing, and the text of the King James Version. This was probably the longest text I have written without a spelling mistake, but I will not claim a miracle because it is the second attempt. The miracle would be that I did not dot any of the letters “i” or ever use a modern form of “n.” As an apology for raising my voice repeatedly to my former quasi-boss. One of the unexpected benefits imparted by slow, word-by-word, letter-by-letter, stroke-by-stroke transcription is that one perceives qualities that might pass unnoticed by mere reading. For me with poetry, I notice alliteration and meter better than reading aloud. Here, having to decide on the layout revealed that the chapter is in three parts (thus, a three-column layout was chosen): nominative of “I,” nominative of “charity,” nominative of “we” (mostly), and a closure.
Instead of individually writing many cards with calligraphy, I thought to save time and increase the scale. It most certainly did not save time, but there was much learning (I started in early September). This is the third linocut, oil-based relief ink (red with a bit of blue) printed above a layer of metallic gold acrylic (transillumination?) on watercolor paper card stock. The acrylic was painted on A2 paper that was then cut to A5 for printing. The third verse of “Deck the Hall” for the text, ecumenical, yet very seasonal. The longer outcome is that I will try woodcut printing and integrate my hobbies of calligraphy and bookbinding vertically. Perhaps paper making, ink, and moveable type will become appealing.
On Jeanne d’Arc between Sidani and Makdissi, Hamra. Very interesting script. I do not recognize the phrase or understand well the intention, yet it brings to mind that the fabled Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times,” could be rephrased as, “May your life be filled with glory.”
I imagine her doing merengue and the cha-cha-Chihuahua at the Copacabana a long way south. Not much humor in these situations, but that Manilow song was played so incessantly that summer in ’78 (45 years ago!) that it pops into my head each and every time I hear the name “Lola.”
That exclamation mark expresses my astonishment well: in all my many decades exploring the diverse typology of lost pet signs, this is the first, even if incomplete, found pet sign. Please note that it is unrelated to the underlying call for volunteers. I might liken the found pet sign to a sighting of the holy grail, a posited proof, or a fragment of the true cross. I searched the area for more complete signs, but the trail was cold. My estimate is that it takes months for such signs to reach such a fragmented state, and I have abandoned hope. Chicago.
Even sadder than the thought of a cat getting a haircut is that this is posted (Berteau and Honore) almost a mile away from the last seen location, which is on the other side of two very busy four-lane roads. I advocate attachment of an AirTag to the collar before the microchip.
I saw this poster and thought of Beirut. Not so much is different, though I would change the rankings and add a few more than remove: in Beirut, the weather is fine (though people complain when it is not perfect), yes about “Dibs” (saving a parking spot that is legally public), potholes (though low priority), cars in the form of traffic, not bikes but scooters, beggars not bums, not rats (and we mostly like the many cats), the mess of dogs yes, not Cubs’s fans (not sure what the equivalent would be: riots, honk parades, politicians?), and trash absolutely, especially when it is not collected. Crime would not be worth listing, rather noise, corruption, banks, inflation, power cuts, banks, shortages of fuel, medicine, and bread, bureaucrats, banks, conspiracy theories, beggars, car bombs, banks, other’s sectarian parties, foreigners of “insert-your-most-hated-country-here,” and banks and politicians and banks again. But we love it.
Apologies to Johnny Sampson (I did buy some postcards)
Spying what I presumed to be a local library at a small-town Minnesotan church, I thought to expand my library with theological discourses or church-lunch cookbooks. Unfortunately for me (not suffering material privation), it was a local “Blessing Box.” I had to admire the selection.
Is how I know “JUST WALK OUT,” but the idea is the same, even if broadly stated: “cops if your quick” and lucky. Almost all are complete mysteries to me. Roux 420 shows here twice. Notable entries, “PIRACY IS COOL” and “Pickled prince.” Somewhere in North Center, Chicago.
This was summer 2021, Sunset (as a previous Inner Sunset resident, this being west of 19th, I almost wrote “Outer Sunset,” but our host greatly preferred “Sunset,” as “Outer” meant quite a few blocks closer to the ocean), where the plastic sleeve is to protect from the fog/descending mist/marine layer characteristic of that microclimate. What caught my eye what information was included and what was not: why would the microchip and reproducibility be salient, but name and dietary preferences be not? I believe this is the first lost pet sign I have seen suggesting it be recorded with a handheld device by the concerned reader: “Take a photo of this flyer.”
