Chapter 3 - Arrival Purim: Lod to Ramallah 2004

Out of the window of the airplane over Israel there is  the sea. It lies beneath, that crescent of the coast caressed by the Mediterranean. Blue, powder white blue, sand beige, green. Such a genteel, soft, giving, arrangement of colors. Strange; such an organic combination of colors, lay low like the colors of a flag, and yet no nation has claimed them. Too pacific of a color combination to waive while men die.

How strange that with that much ocean one never thinks of the ancient Israelis as a sea faring people. Those stories in the bible always talked about wilderness, about rolling pastoral hills, a whole lot of sheep, the cities and the desert. If it was the water, then it was about lake Tiberius or the river Jordan, but never the Mediterranean. Except for the mention of Leviathan in the deep ocean, the only thought of the ocean as a place to store monsters.  Why? The Phoenicians where up in what is today Lebanon, and the Philistines were in Gaza. Leaving Israel in the interior, inland, while others wandered the seas. Casting their view upon each other with contempt, as they gazed in different directions.

My white knuckled, white skinned wife She closes her eyes from fear of landing. She sets her jaw waiting for the impact. Plane on tarmac violence.

The plane descends on Ben Gurion Airport, or NATBAG as the locals call it with a snicker, in the town of Lod. They lie and say that it is Tel Aviv, but it is pretty fucking obvious from the plane window it isn't fucking Tel Aviv.  Stagger out into a shitty little airport, we stagger down the stairs into the open air; cold wet wind cloud air.  While we have no bags, we are still the last people off the plane. The other passengers had leapt up to the doors, climbing all over each other, biting each others ears, just to get off the flight. This included the security detachemet assigned to us. My conculsion is they had as bad a flight as we did.

My instinct was to let the crazed  people go first, because they clearly felt they needed too, and besides all that was waiting for me on the ground was a rectal search. Probably not a rectal search performed by a cute girl with small hands. It would be some pissed off student ready to give my possibly radioactive prostate a massage with a giger counter. No lube, no kiss.

Luckily no such probe occurred and it was silly for me to think it could. The logic is simple, if there was a bomb in my ass it would have gone off in midair, and not now on the ground. My ass was now only a danger to myself. For Security, the danger was now no longer me,my ass, nor anything harbored in my ass.  The possible existential threat to the State of Isreael was now in someone elses ass.

Chapter 2 2006 Lod: From Be Gurion to Kiryat Shmona

Close your eyes Jack. Can you see it?

The sky is powder blue porcelain, with a single white line scraped into it. In the distance there is the sound of thunder, but there are no clouds, thus that clatter is not thunder. It is only fire in the sky...

It is really easy to get onto a flight, just call up the night before and buy a ticket. With all of the talk about planning, it is less expensive to just pick up the phone and fly tomorrow.

If Facist American Television (FAT) News calls; Jack you have to jump. All the linen clothes go into the silver sleek hard body Italian suitcase. Throw in the sunblock for the stylin shaved head, throw in the bug repellent because Israel is full of mosquitos. Throw in the hobby tool kit because it works for most jobs  and that bullshit low-end leatherman from dad, just for luck. Throw in a few moda pills, pills are great. Take a long look at the wife, at her soft alabaster skin, her thin red lips, her round sweet breasts, her closed eyes and mouth lying sleeping in bed and at the fractured shredded marrage you are trying to put back together. Then its a car service, crowds, and a flight to Ben Gurion. Yippe.

Chapter 1 the ray gun

the ray gun

When her small plump hand held the Geiger counter to my crotch; disappointingly, it did nothing. A disappointment for her because she couldn't have me dragged off, rectally searched with cold hands, beaten, questioned, and put on 24 hour news channels to be rectally researched by the even colder hands of journalists. One little wave of the magic gieger wand and you are a hero. All you need is weponized uranium under somebody else’s nuts. It is just that easy.

What if she held it up to my crotch and the meter went wild. Jail time, court trials, news paper articles, my bewildered face on the front of Haaretz with the headline ASSHOLE with atomic crotch found on EL AL. At the very least it would have meant that my dick was radioactive and that can't be good (could it be?). 

Still it was a disappointment for me. It is natural to expect a little more from my penis.

Jack, my friend, you want your cock to have all this hidden power, to rise up behind revolutions, swelling  to destroy civilizations, to raise cities to the ground, to violate (repeatedly in a rhythmic fashion) the laws of time and space. You want your balls to be packed with plutonium (weighty balls no?) ready to fire forth and split the atom. You want your penis to be viewed by future, post-apocalyptic civilizations, through some transspacialtemporalsmegomaniameter and you want those people to say WHAT A DICK!

Jack you want it to blow out like a raygun.

Epigraph

 Remember Moses said to his people: O my people! Call in remembrance the favour of God unto you, when He produced prophets among you, made you kings, and gave you what He had not given to any other among the peoples.

O my people! Enter the holy land which God hath assigned unto you, and turn not back ignominiously, for then will ye be overthrown, to your own ruin.

-Quaran 5.020 - 5.021

I do not know whether I have anything to say, I know that I am saying nothing; I do not know if  what I might have to say is unsaid because it is unsayable (the unsayable is not buried inside writing, it is what prompted it in the first place) I know that what I say is blank, is neutral, is a sign, once and for all, of a once-and-for-all annihilation. 

-W, George Perec

But even if these suspicions were unfounded, what risk would there be in my passing them on to you? You will burn this letter and I promise to burn your answers. 

The Nun, Denis Diderot