1.
In his September 1939 journals, Albert Camus wondered where the war was. “Where does this absurd event show itself, except in the news bulletins we have to believe and the notices we have to read?”
In May 1940 he wrote, “The Stranger is finished.”
I doubt the truths of The Stranger, a book about blaming the fact you killed an Arab on the sun being in your eyes.
2.
I make coffee. Betsy and I feel like shit. Leo is fine, he just has pneumonia. We try to figure out if this current sickness is left over from the Covid, the cold, or if it’s the flu. We fail to understand. The current sickness is too much to hold in our heads or the bobbling head of the household. We don’t remember when our sickness started. We no longer know how long it’s lasted. That’s the way the sickness makers like it. For those who build the sickness, business is booming.
3.
I haven’t been this pissed off at America since March of 2003, and back then I was pissed off at everything. I can’t stop thinking about how things might be different if Bernie were president. Joe Biden stands up there in old glory. World War will be his “joeissance.” He talks about the “rules of war” like war is a game of Sorry! But nobody follows the rules when they play Sorry!, not really, you just kind of move around the board. This is what we mean when we say Trump & Biden are the same thing.
The worst voices of all are those like mine. Those I 100% agree with. Those who know the god’s honest truth.
4.
In the dumpling place, I hear two artistic-looking white college students ask themselves, “If they know anything about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” They don’t. They text their friend Matt, who should know. Then they talk about the new season of Big fucking Brother.
Last week Leo, my six-year-old son, asked me if there was, “War that wasn’t Star Wars.” I loathe the beautification of war in Star Wars, but these days I shake like Ben Kenobi when Alderaan explodes.
Matt is still typing, the college kids say, slurping their soup.
Matt is still typing when the dumplings arrive.
5.
I am drawn to music that offers surprise attacks. The first Roger Sessions Piano Sonata. The cello in the second movement of Mozart’s “Dissonance” String Quartet. The final timpani in the Adagio of Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony.
When I clip the YouTube video of that final timpani, I notice it ends at the “9:11” mark.
6.
Betsy has a dream Jewish children are writing in sidewalk chalk Oseh shalom bimromav, Hu ya’aseh shalom aleinu, V’al kol Yisrael V’imru, and then Palestinian children come and write their prayer for peace, too, and the children leave their chalk drawings and walk off hand-in-hand.
In the dream Betsy knows the Palestinian prayer for peace, but when she wakes up, she doesn’t.
7.
I read the news. I buy the actual newspaper and tell myself I will only read news at night. I download news apps I’ve downloaded before, because I’m told by the App store I can just open.
Those who don’t read the news make me choke even more. They are usually the ones with central air conditioning.
8.
When there can be no peace is the time for peace.
9.
Yoram Kaniuk on, I think, the vastness of land in the United States:
“We drove along dirt roads between cliffs and blue and brown mountains for about five or six hours until we reached an isolated ranch surrounded by hundreds of acres of pasture and cows. I went to the foreman and as he gave me a tour I thought, I could put the entire State of Israel somewhere here in the middle of the ranch.”
10.
Always the drumbeats of war. The A1 snares of Taylor Swift. The below the fold snares of Gang Starr. The pots and pans of screamo bands that broke up in 2006 for unknown reasons. This war feels like those demos, a tape taped off another tape taped off another tape taped off another tape taped off another tape.
11.
Fred Moten:
After September 11th American imperial policy took no time off to mourn. We could have no share in that. No matter how much like that whatever we do is, no matter how many times we did things like that before that was done to us.
12.
I dream Hamas has gathered us in a cowshed and sent us against the walls. There are thousands of barns in this field and we wait. Hamas fighters enter our barn. They kill the cows first. I have my arms around my California cousins, my Florida aunt, my eyes are closed and I’m humming, I see the figure five in gold, I see the figure five in gold. They spare me. They spare my aunt. They kill my cousins. I’m in an airport Starbucks, removing the “ham” from an Egg McMuffin. I see a Pakistani woman holding a Guyanese child. The child is dead. The mother wailing. I recognize them from the barn.
13.
The poet Erich Kästner, in 1930:
“One day in the year 2003 a thousand airplanes fly from Boston loaded with gas and bacteria to kill all of humanity, because this is humanity’s only way of achieving the goal of world peace.”
14.
Matt is still typing.
15.
Sahir Ludhianvi, which, right now, sounds behind the times:
War is itself a problem.
It isn’t the solution to any problem;
Today it will offer fire and blood,
And deliver hunger and want tomorrow.
16.
We go apple picking. We eat donuts. We enter the maze and get out of it. Leo rides a pony named Betty. He slides down the slide. He pumps on the swings. The rapper Billy Woods, watching his child swing on the swings, realized, “anything in the world could happen to him.” But the things happening to children right now are not things that will happen to my Leo. They somehow don’t even feel, right now, like the things happening to an African American like Billy Woods.
During the car ride home, Leo tells us he had a dream Ryder and Chase were having a contest on the swings. I get a little excited. I think he can sense there’s war outside of Star Wars. “Are Ryder and Chase enemies?” I ask. “No, Daddy” he says, “you know Ryder and Chase are the same.” So he does understand war.
I'm in the dumpling place talking with the two girls about Big fucking Brother.