Tel Aviv Diary March 23-27, 2016 - Karen Alkalay-Gut

Tel -Aviv Diary - March 23-27, 2016 - Karen Alkalay-Gut

March 23, 2016

After the Tsunami warnings today in Ashdod I decided there is no way to protect ourselves from all the things that can happen to us. I am not the only one = that's why I too got all excited by Barak's new start up in which you can make sure that help will come in case of a disaster. Press the button and all the authorities will receive a photograph of what is going on with you. Save yourself.

What do I do all day? Besides obsessing about the strange color and cut of my hair? I can't even remember, but it started off creatively with a couple of drafts of lyrics and poems. Then the seamstress to take in a few of the clothes that are falling off of me, then a bit of shopping, clothes, food, etc. Then a funeral, a poetry reading, a concert, and then house-cleaning.

All part of the tending of our garden that seems to be part of the desperation.

March 24, 2016

Zyggy Frankel's poem is often in my mind:

THE TERRORISTS

We operate from airfields we did not build,

smuggling explosives we did not invent
onto planes we wouldn’t know how to pilot.
Thank you, civilisation, for your blessings.

Terrorists are never creative. Always they destroy. The mentality has got to be different. I keep thinking of Taha Muhammed Ali's poem,He "Revenge.".He had all the reasons to wish for revenge but the human sympathy inherent in him made him think differently.

My dermatologist just earned a family safari in Kenya. I am as spotted as a leopard. It looks like a plague, I know this because we went to Akiko for sushi after and the people around the bar tried hard not to look at me. No way to disguise myself as a Purim reveler, even though one person asked if i was the author of the poem in the paper today. I was.

Turn the clocks back an hour tonight. I wish I could turn the clock back 3 days to when the Belgians got a warning about the attacks. Carrie Matthiesson managed to avert the one in Berlin in Homeland at the end of season 5. Actually I keep seeing the wildest imagination of tv series script writers come to life on the news.

March 25, 2016

Everyone in Tel Aviv seemed to be in costume. There were guys dressed like zombies, Luke Skywalker, Donald Trump, and the girls in thousands of variations - my personal favorite was a lady wearing a tomato costume - particularly when took her bike down Dizengoff.

March 26, 2016

We aren't talking about the wonderful costumes and the fact that the entire city became a place of celebration. What we're talking about is the soldier who killed the dying terrorist. Point blank. Went up to him and shot him in the head. It is against our morality, our ethics, our self image, our public image. Sorry - i think it was wrong but i think we're talking about a crazy situation and the rules are not as clear as they could be. You just cannot play by the rules when the other is not playing by the rules.

March 27, 2016

I'm trying to move over to another, more comfortable website, http://www.karenalkalaygut.com but i can't bring myself to do it. Why? Because each random thought will necessitate a title, become "an item" and here I feel everything changes from day to day, from minute to minute. It has to be a spontaneous effort.

So we return to the subject of the soldier. A guy I know who was injured in a similar situation says that if he had just shot the guy who looked suspicious he would have saved a lot of people.

To Karen Alkalay-Gut Diary

To Karen Alkalay-Gut home