Thursday, July 9, 2020

I step into our office building. The guard is carefully placing the stanchions around his desk. He isn’t using a measuring stick. By now, he knows where to put them so that they are precisely two meters from where he sits. This one is centered on the border between the tiles that runs over from just left of the center of the nearer door, and is a little further in than the far end of the desk. That one is halfway along the diagonal from the near end of the desk to the Israeli flag. A woman runs up to him, yelling and waving her blue-gloved hands. “Where are stairs? There are only elevators! Elevators lead to Corona! There is a law. There must be stairs.” The guard points to the door marked “Stairs.” The woman stomps away. In the office, I put my JoeBowl in the freezer. I would prefer to order something, but I’m not sure that that will happen, since it’s officially a fast day. The coworker who often does the ordering sends us a text message. He’s on the phone with a customer. We need to write down our orders and hand them to him so he can fax the list to the pizza joint. I decide to get a laflawach. It’s not the healthiest, but I get it no more than once a week. I start to write it down in Hebrew. I can think of a few different ways that it might be spelled. I write it phonetically in English. There’s a better chance that he’ll figure out what I mean. As I leave for the day, I take the JoeBowl out of the freezer. I immediately put it back in. I’ll eat it on Sunday. I hope that I don’t forget and bring another one. At home, I hang out online with friends, posting rock videos to a discussion thread. It’s kind of a party. We start with Jefferson Starship and branch out from there, linking, commenting, and giving bits of history. I miss being a DJ.