#fuck the english dude who developed the plan for this city without seeing the land showed up with his dumb colonizer team

[andromedasummer]

around about this time last year the protests on parliament ended violently but god is the impact still visible. the whole month they blocked access to one of the two cafe bookstores run by the uni where you can grab a coffee/food, your textbooks and a bunch of other literature. they broke a window and glass door, meaning after they cleared out the cafe still had to wait to open and their overtaking of the main bus station and train station meant a lot of people (myself included) couldnt come into uni and had to buy our 1st trimester textbooks online.

the bookstore at the campus beside parliament and the bus station/train station shut some months ago. the one at my main campus up the hill will be gone in a month, with the loss of tri one sales being what put them under. so there will be no physical place you can buy textbooks in the city all because those fucking moron protestors who think having to get a vaccine is what communism and fascism is so students have to spend god knows how much more money shipping the books in from other cities/countries. and sure i graduate in a few months but my brother is here another 4 years! this city is already the most expensive place for students to live! like, fuck!!!

[posijeff-blog]

Chapter 2, Young, Poor, and Jewish In my initial year at UWM  I took two semesters of Biblical Hebrew language under Dr. Bernard Grossfield. Some of that era of the tongue translated to contemporary conversational Hebrew which I was able to use in my daily dialogue with an elderly Palestinian coworker. I went on in the Religious Studies program to study with Rabbi Dana Evan Kaplan who I became friends with. At the time he was writing a book called, American Reform Judaism: An Introduction ( Rutgers University Press) which was to become highly esteemed in academic circles. I never wanted to move from Milwaukee but I knew it was time to travel. I narrowed my destinations down to India and Israel. Israel won out. I met Dana for lunch at Shaharazad restaurant to talk about it. He thought it was a great idea and cool that I had no plans and just a few loose contacts in The Holy Land.  At the time I had very little money. Dana told me exactly what to do. "Go to the old city. People are going to ask you if you are Jewish. Just tell them your mother is Jewish. You know more about Judaism than most Jews." "But I have tattoos. I don't even look Jewish." "I didn't say you were a good Jew" I knew he was right. I needed to turn this head knowledge into experiential knowledge. Without doing so there would be no insight into first hand experience as a Jew. This was education and investigative journalism at once. The more I gave whole heartedly of myself as a Jew, the more I knew about being a Jew, and the more of a Jew I became. Believe your own bullshit. Dana told me some very specific things that came to manifest in Israel. For example, I would meet a guy at The Wall named Jeff Seidel who would ask if I would like a place to stay and I could stay with a religious family and study with them. This came to pass and so did some other interesting things. My first stop was in Tel Aviv where I'd to stay with a punk rocker I met in a punk chat room. Our connection was a n anarchist punk band whose 1994 record I had by some Jewish Israeli's called Nekhei Na'atza AKA Renounce Judaism. Like  a lot of American punk bands, I thought they were fast and thought provoking but if they believed in what they politically espoused they were painting with some broad strokes. To a large degree it was just another shock tactic, one that got them recognition in Israel and on talk shows where religious Jews tried to "deprogram" them. Believe it or not, pre-911 Israel didn't have a lot else going on as far as a hardcore scene.When I arrived the guys at the squat treated me like I was some sort of ambassador. They really rolled out the cat haired red carpet for me. These guys were so crusty one dude's deadlock fell off. I got up from the chair at the kitchen table after my NesCafe and my butt had a mustache. Their record collections were really small and they were stoked to get some presents I had for them  them from the States like the new Shelter, a Sensefield/Jimmy Eat World split 7", EVEL (from Milwaukee), and the Destroy LA 7" from Pressure. They liked the Pressure 7" right away and were pretty open to the other music as well. After taking a walk one of the guys took me aside and told me seriously that that the world would be a better place if the US were blown off the face of the Earth. He wanted me to meet with this guy who he said was the king of the punks in Tel Aviv. I wasn't interested.   There was a lot of partying going on that night in the streets because The Maccabees professional basketball team ( part of the European league) just won a big championship title. I slept for a few hours then sneaked out with all my stuff. I slept on a jungle gym and wound up getting this rash called "wrestlers back" from that or the squat: a bunch of gross boils all over my back. I was low on money from the start so I decided to walk to Jerusalem and hitch hike if need be as I heard it was safe to do so. I calculated in my mind that it was only 40 miles which was way off. But the major roads were lined with grapefruit trees and orange groves. I didn't want to steal so I was eating warm, sun drenched oranges and grapefruit that fell off the trees. I hitched a  ride in a van after the first 15 miles and got into an argument in Hebrew with the driver. It seems hitch hiking in Israel is safe because you are expected to pay. I told him I wasn't going to pay him one shekel since we were going to the same place. He was pissed but didn't kick me out. The kids in the back seat were cool. An orthodox family, one of the young boys asked if I liked Tu Pac. No matter where I seemed to go on this journey Palestinian and Israeli kids seemed to share a love and excitement for Tu Pac. When I got dropped off I found a grocer and bought a bottle of water. I started walking toward sights I'd seen in books: the mosque with the gold dome (which holds the slab of rock Abraham was going to sacrifice Isaac on), The Wall. A conservative guy with a yarmulke, white shirt, and black pants was coming home from work to his apartment and asked me in a New York accent if I was lost. I told him I wanted to get to The Wall before sundown as it was Friday. He invited me up to their apartment where I got to meet his young wife and baby son who I got to hold and play with. He prayed over me and gave me a yarmulke which was not real effective because I had a shaved head. It turned out he knew my friend Raphael's relatives in New York and our mothers were both from Sheboygan. He showed me a a haunting photo of his mom's dad visiting his home town in Latvia that was totally reduced to rubble by the Nazi's. I'm not sure why the guy felt compelled to return. My mother's family is Lithuanian, from that same region of the Europe I knew next to nothing about at the time. The couple sent me on my way with a bag of groceries, mostly native oranges and Israeli chocolates. I was so happy to have food. When I got to the wall it was as predicted I met Jeff Siedel. I wanted to go pray but he wanted to talk to me about the Chicago Blackhawks who were not doing so well at the time. There were so many cute girls there. I looked kind of awful, like a sun burnt skinhead. But the girls were all really sweet and nice to me. Most of them wore long conservative dresses. A few of them kept asking me about my tattoos. There was a group of men praying with some old scrolls. This guy with a beard who was about my dad's age asked if I was married. I told him no. "Well maybe you just haven't met the right girl." "Yeah, well that's the whole trick isn't it." These people were OG. Seidel wrote a name and address on a piece of paper for me of an elderly man and woman who I would have dinner with and stay with. I got to the apartment which reminded me of a clean early 20th century apartment in NYC except cobble stone streets below, less sirens, and more sounds of people praying and singing. The meal itself took hours. I turned down the boiled chicken that was sitting out for three hours. But the wine was delicious. I was really poor at reading from the prayer books in Hebrew but they were patient with me, like loving grandparents. I asked the  man why in earlier times miracles occurred like parting of the red sea. People, as he explained were more in touch with nature, with God then. Even the most depraved person had a sense of reverence for that which could not be explained. Today we credit meteorology as a logical science, more believable than God even while fifty percent of people complain about the weather man getting shit wrong half the time. Perfect Deity, developing science. When it came time to bid farewell the next day I wanted to give the matriarch a hug but there seemed to be some rule against it. But I got a strong sense of love from them and some solid handshakes. They even gave me money. I hit the streets and saw the sights. The hottest chicks around were the Israeli Army girls. All these girls were my age and wore grunge styled army fatigues and held Uzis that were attached to a strap that went around there necks. I guess I have a little Ted Nugent in me. I don't know why but if you put a gun on an already hot girl she becomes totally hot. It's a weird phenomenon. I'm weird. I figured I may as well do something positive with my time. I saw a sign that said "Emergency Clinic" in English then something in Arabic outside the City's Jewish quarter. I had just gotten a CPR and first Aid certification from the American Red Cross before I came over. Maybe they could use some help with all the fighting. I didn't see any bloodshed but there was a really high tension in the air as Jews  interacted cordially yet cautiously with Palestinians and vice versa. I can imagine it was a similar "in the air tonight"  feeling prevalent during the American years of segregation down south. I saw some Arab kids playing with guns, hiding around the corner and shooting at one another. I wondered how long before they would be carrying guns for real. The thought bummed me out. I got to the clinic and it appeared to be run by Muslims because I didn't see anybody there except some shoes on what looked like a Moroccan rug. Out of nowhere two guy ran out of the clinic in white robes pointing Uzis at me. The head guy from the clinic (I was later lead to assume) walked up to me with a Chinese AK and pointed it at my forehead. Realizing I didn't speak their native tongue the head honcho asked what the fuck I was doing there. I told him I was just seeing if they needed any help. It was confusing to him. He grabbed my wrist and asked me what the Hebrew tattoo meant on it. I told him it was one of the Hebrew words for meditation from the Bible. Ironically I got it done in NYC by Tee Schwartz , a skinhead from Milwaukee. Honcho told his buddies to go back in the clinic and started talking to me about meditation. He said his brother was into meditation. He told me to be more careful  because he was about to shoot me. It was all good. To be honest, I did not feel scared for one second. I was on Holy ground. One of my last stops that day was at the Garden of Gethsemane, where Jesus was betrayed by Judas Iscariot. I saw Reggie White from the Green Bay Packers there which was awesome and I got my picture taken with him. Nobody else knew who he was. A few Israeli soldiers thought I was getting my picture taken with him because he was a black giant. They told me there was an even bigger black guy there a few days earlier. What the hell is wrong with these people? It's Reggie White! Seeing him made me homesick. I was already missing Milwaukee, my apartment, and my 13" TV set. I was leaving Jerusalem with more money I had arrived with on account of the nice people I met. I got a shuttle to Tel Aviv and flew to Amsterdam, then home.