It's the dream that bothers me...

One might say that everything is back to normal. I'm listening to Jeno on 90hz.org spin his unique and magical flavor of free-form-funk, dishing up rhythms that remind me of wild nights a decade ago in the city that I'm now living in. The commute, if you can call it that, was always to a favorite tape that ran the gamut from 120 to 160 bpm (that's beats per minute). Homeward bound was more like Bob Marley speed, but that's understandable after you spent an entire night dancing on borrowed energy.

I'm not sure what's keeping me up now, I should be getting quite tired and although I know I could probably mosey into my bedroom and find a kind of solace in a little death, sleep rather, I've been putting off this final post, the summation, the report from dream land, not nearly as bold as Greco, simpler than that really, let's just say I'm keeping my word to Erez when he asked me, a few days before I left: "so are you going to write your thoughts?" I meant to write this the week after I returned; I thought it might be a good kind of therapy locked in the smoky chamber of my Portland hotel room. The summary, or the bottom line if you will, is impossible to do, and when my body and brain couldn't agree on either a time zone or desire for one, writing was unfathomable. I'm home now, and I've given up pretending that I'm in the oriental east, near the central Asian land of my home, or as near as I've ever been. Yeah, I gave that one up a while back, I'm here, with small mementos of my trip: a kitchen cabinet that smells strongly of tea I brought back from the shouk in Jerusalem, a couple kippas, one for my brother Ilya who I haven't seen yet since my return, books from the Israeli National Art Museum in Tel Aviv from the Femme Fatal and Reuven Ruben exhibits, a shofar on my dresser that Zach asked me to bring him back, the ticket stub from Mayumana and the double CD collection of Meir Ariel that still on my desk. I've played Metropolin more than a few times since I ripped it into my itunes and transferred it to my ipod, or as Oren calls it "the new American passport." Last night Rachel and her cousin Shai who is here from Israel came to see me, it was nice to hear a "familiar" accent; last week she roped me into giving Shai some pointers on digital photography for a job opportunity he has to become a photographer in night clubs for a new website. I don't know if I was terribly helpful, other than providing him an idea of the kind of gear he'll need in order to pull this off. I wish him luck, I mean come on, besides an assassin for hire I think my other dream job would be national geographic photographer. It really is the same thing when you think about it, one requires you point and press a trigger to "steal souls", the other includes triggers too, one's just messier than the other, you know?

Is it nice being home? I don't know, I think it is. I've been happily united with my turn tables and find myself mixing little flips of three and four records at a time. Maybe they'll congeal into a nice 13-15 record set that I may even record, rather than leave in the air like a Zen rock garden to be plowed over when I open the window. The cat is out of the bag at the office; my boss sent out an email that I'm leaving the company. The response has been rather interesting. Thinking back on the last 11 years of my corporate life I've only left 1 other job willingly, read: not being laid off, and that departure was rather sudden due to circumstances having to do with my need in the new position "yesterday". This change feels like a slight shift in career path, I mean I'm staying in the industry, but I'm changing sides, like defecting from the KGB to the CIA. You have to excuse all these metaphors and allusions to intelligence, I just came back from the movies, I went to see "The Good Shepherd", and well, I thought it was excellent, slow, and not to everyone's taste. I suppose you have to have an inherent love for all that cold war intrigue and espionage that nearly ended the world. Then again, seems like having the "red scare" was far more, in hindsight, tolerable than the unknown enemies of today. At least we knew then from which direction the missiles would be coming. Has our world become more complicated? Or are we simply falling into a kind of solipsistic belief that our world is more complicated and everything is so much more important? Isn't this just a digital replay of the analog world to some degree? Eh, who knows...? I'm really not writing what I should be writing about.

How shall we begin? The basics? Israeli's are travelers. Living in a country the size of, oh um, I don't know, Rhode Island requires one to travel to keep a kind of claustrophobia at bay. However, within this tiny spit of holy land you have numerous climates, forests and deserts, hills, mountains, large bodies of water and the potential that any rock you kick might turn out to be a piece of the ark of the covenant or missing pieces of gospel or mosaic law. That's one of the things that I adore about that country, the possibilities. My mother is fond of saying "look what they built in just 60 years", yes, 58 years to be precise, that's how old the country is, but the land and the native populations are much older. Yet the similarity to the United States, the mixtures, are astounding. We like to think of ourselves as a melting pot, but I ask you, where in this country do you meet a waitress that is half Moroccan, half German and speaks 7 or 8 languages? I heard her screaming in the kitchen, or more like whining at a Russian cook in Russian. She spoke Hebrew to Erez and dropped a few words of German when I decided to exercise what little rust there is in my brain of my childhood language studies. Yeah, similar but different.

There are so many small "warmths" to remember from my trip, from the flowers that Michal brought me on my last night in Tel Aviv to the phone call from Rela on my first night in Jerusalem, consequently, if you're reading this Rela, do say hello, it's ok, the blog doesn't bite back, I promise. Although the weather didn't reflect the hospitality, it was ok, sometimes you need a contrast in order to fully appreciate where you are and what you have on hand. Like I said, other than prevent me from doing something insane like buying gear at Diezengoff mall and heading into the Negev backpacking, it didn't deter us too much. Speaking of which, when I say that Israelis love to travel, point and case: at the mall there are a pair of outdoor shops, smaller versions of our REI or Any Mountain, there was a class being held on traveling through south America. All the attendees were late teens to early 20s, I imagine fresh out of the Army or soon to be released, and ready for a little adventure, the broadening of their horizons and perhaps the necessary soul searching to decide what to do at the University upon their return. Frankly, I like this system much more, other than the bit about having to serve in the military, and even this I understand to a degree, the idea that at 18 one has to decide what they are to become seems a little strange. Here I am in my early 30s and still trying to decide what I'm to become by living between the two fires of my corporate existence and moonlighting in the academic world. Sometimes I wish one would widow me so I could fully embrace the other.

These are the memories I think I want to keep in my pocket, or maybe like a candy cane or a package of mints: kube soup in Jerusalem, the way that Shosh says "Aliya", Michal's laugh, listening to Irina call Erez a goat in Russian for waking her up and making her go to see Mayumana with me, the feeling of breathing air for the first time when you finally exit Yad Vashem, the color of the Mediterranean around Caesarea, the sunrise over the Dead Sea, Yoram's stories about San Francisco in the late 70's, Misha and Nella's panic room, Erez's fluidity and planning, the country western bar in the middle of nowhere but really near Ashdod, the B'hai temple at night, the fact that it snowed in Jerusalem the day I landed, Kippa man, the Yemmenite witch doctor, a Mitzrahi dance club, Israel's whiskey a-go-go, grilled haloumi sandwiches from Aroma, Nili's charming sarcasm and how she allowed me to smoke in her place whenever I was jonesing, the candles of the children's memorial, Guy's sense of humor and cinema knowledge, Shai's love for food and his attempts to describe Rachmo, Eilad's generosity for the aforementioned tickets, Itimar's stories of his first apartment with Erez complete with rats busses and psychotic lunatics, Yafo by night, the old city at night, cab drives with their free opinions and occasional historic tirades, the sun behind the olive columns at Rammat Rachel, floating floating and floating in salt, 2 hours of nearly clear skies without rain at Masada, labone with olive oil and zatar and even the shop keeper in the old city that said "all san franciscans are cheap" when I didn't want to see his shop and goods. Yeah, even he's an integral part of my memories.

I can't do it, I can't really say what I think about that place, I'm not done with it, that's for certain. I've always held this theory, and here you have to forgive me for being a romantic, I assure that I'm completely dead inside, my room mate in Russia for the last two years, the illustrious James Boobar, professor of heavy metal novel writing and Dostoyevsky, will attest to this fact. However, I've had this long standing belief that falling in love means that you are forever sacrificing an integral part of your heart, or soul, some small corner of you is no longer yours. Now you're not completely bereft of this morsel of being, no, it's just stained with another person. There is that smell, the smell of other people, hell at times, thank you Sartre, but this hell can be the most exhilarating sensation that starts in your nose, travels down to your mouth in tiny traces causing you to salivate. It then courses in vapors through your stomach where it twists with hunger even though you've just eaten. The particles now in your blood stream venture out at bullet train speeds into your appendages until you find your toes curling in your shoes, trying to grip the ground in case Newton was wrong. That stain that is the result of "other" may very well be possible in regard to "place". I know a part of me is forever wearing the dirty cobble stone streaks of three summers in St. Petersburg. Although my liver and my lungs cringe at the thought of spending another four weeks undergoing cruel and unusual punishment, the stain needs to remember where its odor comes from. Well I have a new stain, one that will probably need a "refresher". There are still so many parts of the country that I haven't seen and am dying to see: the Golan’s, the Galilee, the Negev, the Red Sea, Éclat, maybe I'll venture out into the Sinai if things simmer down a bit, or finally make it up to the temple mount and take that close-up of The Dome of The Rock. Whatever the case may be, I'll be back.

Ben asked me if I had done any writing while I was over there. Blogging as we all know is a way to avoid writing, or the kind of writing that we at times need to do. In my case the writing I refer to is editing, and specifically editing Not Us Not Them. It's sitting here on my desk, I dug it up, for the specific purpose of editing it. No Ben, I didn't write much, or not at least the kind of writing that translates into poetry or new material, but I think I helped myself find the need to go back in time and finish something I started.