Echoes

Like I said, the museum was a pretty snotty institution. It’s got a LOT of objects it’s way famous for possessing, but nobody knew about the absolutely massive collection of Moche erotic pottery it had because the curators were totally embarrassed by this stuff.

Some examples:

Pretty hot shit, right? They never, ever put any of this stuff on public view or published it in any catalogues but - we legit had like several hundred pieces of Moche ceramics in the “dirty pots” category. Anyway, I was left alone to just do my job with regard to the database for several years, ok? And I figured, well, these’re accessioned objects in the museum’s collection - better get down to bidness. 

I catalogued every goddamn bestiality, necrophiliac, cocksucking, buttfucking, detached penis, and giant vulva drinking cup in that collection. I’d be like, 

A drinking vessel in form of a standing man wearing a tunic and cap. He holds an oversized erection in his hands and stares into the distance (note I did not say “like he’s hella-constipated”). The vessel has a hole at both the tip of the penis as well as around the rim of the figure’s head, thus forcing the drinker to drink only from the penis or risk spilling wine all over themselves from the top of the vessel. Red and orange slip covers the surface of the piece.

Pretty straightforward, right? Apparently the deep seated fear of these objects that the curators exhibited was meant to spread to me as well, but - no one ever gave me that memo, because I guess Midwesterners reproduce asexually. When the curators understood that I had catalogued all of these objects in addition to the other, non-sexy pieces in the collection, they were apparently livid, but knew they had no legs to stand on in terms of getting pissed at me for it. 

I visited the museum’s online public access database a few years back and - every single description I wrote of these pieces has been totally neutered to say something like Male figural vase. 

Because imagine that all of the Fellowship did swear to go with Frodo to Mount Doom. Legolas, Gimli, and Aragorn would have felt obligated to abandon Merry and Pippin to the orcs to go with Frodo; who knows how the Ring could have used that guilt to twist them. Gollum would never have had the same dynamic with Frodo, because he hated Aragorn. Gollum wouldn’t have been at Mount Doom to destroy the Ring. Aragorn wouldn’t have been there to take the Paths of the Dead. Minas Tirith would have fallen. There would have been no march on the Black Gate that cleared a path to Mount Doom by distracting Sauron.

When you're talking about the design of the boat, you say "it".

When the boat is still being built, your say "it".

When the boat is nearing completion, you can say "it" or "she".

When the boat is floating in the water you probably say "she", unless there is still a lot of work to be done (e.g. no engine yet) then you say "it".

When the boat is officially launched and operating, you say "she". If you continue to say "it" at this point you are not incorrect but suspiciously untraditional. You are not playing the game.

If you are referring to a boat you don't really know anything about you may say "it" ("there's a big boat, it's coming this way"). But if you know its name, it's probably "she" ("there's the Waverley, she's on her way to Greenock").

If you are talking about boats in general, you say "it" ("when a boat is hit by a wave it heels over")

If you speak about a boat in complimentary terms, it's "she" ("she's a grand boat"). If you are being disparaging it may be it, but not necessarily ("it's as ugly as sin", "she's a grotty old tub").

If she has a boy's name, she's still she. "Boy James", "King Edward", "Sir David Attenborough"? The pronoun is she.

If it's a dumb barge (no engine), you say it. But if it's a rowing boat (no engine), you say she.

I don’t have the fortitude to check out the comments today, but the post is here.

Eliya

I met Ziv in 2011 while growing up near Tel Aviv. We were both 14 and I saw her crying because her boyfriend had left her. Trying to help, I said, “Don’t cry. You are young, pretty and you will have a good life ahead of you.” She eventually messaged me on Instagram and we started hanging out together. I learnt quickly that she has the most beautiful soul and her love for me was like nothing I had ever experienced. Later we moved in together and we were together every day until October 7, 2023.

Part of my job was organising festivals and we spent many weekends with our friends, listening to music, drinking and having fun. The Nova festival, held in the Negev desert in southern Israel, was something we were all looking forward to. Even after we saw the missiles in the sky that day, we thought, “Ah, this is Israel. It is a normal day.” So we carried on dancing. It was only when I got a call from my aunt, who was also at the festival, that we realised something was not right. She was screaming, saying that someone in her car had been shot. I said to Ziv, “We should get out of here.”

We drove with Ziv’s nephew and his girlfriend, heading for the main road, but there was a police roadblock. We turned the car around and drove maybe five minutes until we saw a bomb shelter — a common sight near the border. More people joined us in the shelter, but we were all talking and joking. Although it was scary, we had seen it before.

Then suddenly the terrorists were outside the shelter and they were going to kill us. A grenade rolled into the shelter and exploded. Another grenade and we are fighting, picking up the grenades and throwing them out of the door. It was like this for 40 minutes until the terrorists fired a rocket-propelled grenade.

I don’t know how, but my mind was still working. Ziv fainted and I knew the only chance to save her was to bury her underneath the dead bodies. Two of those bodies were her nephew and his girlfriend.

The bullets were still coming into the shelter and I was shot in the leg, but then I was dragged out and loaded onto a truck. The last thing I saw was a terrorist pointing his gun into the shelter and firing a hundred bullets. I was sure Ziv was dead.

I was driven to Gaza and thousands of people were on the streets celebrating. I was more scared of these people than I was of the terrorists. The terrorists wanted to keep me alive, a hostage for negotiation. Those ordinary people wanted to kill me. They wanted the respect that would come from killing a Jew.

I was held for 505 days. In the tunnels was the worst — no light, no sleep, beatings, being stripped naked so they could laugh at us, no food, no water. There was a wonderful day when we realised we were so far underground that there was damp on the walls. We would lick the walls. At least we had a drop of water. I put my trust in God. I knew they would not break me.

The days blurred into one, but when we heard a rumour that Donald Trump had been elected it made my group of four hostages very excited. Two weeks later our captors told us three of us would be released. Just three, not four. I was lucky enough to be one of them but knowing one of us was still in captivity filled me with guilt. Alon Ohel was freed eight months later.

Then I saw my family. And Ziv. She was alive. It wasn’t real, but it was. Of course then I found out what had been happening in the world. The marches celebrating the murders and rapes, babies being slaughtered. The only reason people can mock is because we are Jewish. If it happened to other people they wouldn’t.

Even after I was released I didn’t allow myself to continue with life. How could I see a doctor or start my therapy when the other hostages weren’t free? The 20 remaining living hostages were released last October.

It has taken a long time but Ziv and I now try to think about the future. I bought an engagement ring before October 7 and have now had the chance to propose. We will marry this summer and build a family with many children in Israel, in the land where they tried to kill us. For me, that’s the biggest victory of all.

Ziv

The bomb shelter we were in on that day in 2023 — on Route 232 near the Kibbutz Re’im — is now known as the shelter of death. The first grenade exploded and the sound, the smell, the dead bodies… not even bodies, arms and legs and blood. I was scared like I have never been scared before. I peed myself three or four times.

The last thing I remember is holding Eliya’s hand and him covering me with dead bodies. I think I heard him scream, saying he’d been shot. Then one of the terrorists began shooting into the shelter — a machinegun. So many bullets. I could feel them hitting the bodies on top of me — thum-thum-thum — making the bodies shudder and move. And then nothing.

I woke up at 11am and the attack had started at eight. There was me and six other survivors in the shelter, and we had no idea what was going to happen. Would the terrorists come back? We sat with our dead friends for seven hours until we were rescued and taken to a hospital. I tried to call my sisters and they said they had seen a picture of Eliya. I thought they were lying, trying to make me happy, but then I saw the picture on the news. He was alive but he was in Gaza — a hostage.

I cried myself to sleep every night but each morning I would tell myself that I would make sure Eliya came home. I was part of the delegations travelling around the world, telling people about October 7. When he was finally released and I saw him again, after 16 months, he was so thin, my Eliya, and like a ghost.

When I was a child I heard people talk about the Holocaust and how much people hated Jews, but I thought that people had changed. Then I saw marches all over Europe, defending what had happened. People would stop me in the street and say Hamas is not a terrorist group, they are fighting for human rights.

Of the people who were murdered, we knew 48 of them. [Official figures put the death toll of the October 7 attacks at 1,200.] My nephew and his girlfriend are gone. I suffer from PTSD and still have nightmares. When I tried on my wedding dress, there was nothing, no happy tears. October 7 changed us, it changed everything, but we have hope. Our wedding is going to be our moment. It is our present from God.

Working in retail is really fun, and the times when major fuck-ups happen, they can be either anxiety-attack inducing, or make it possible to get through the rest of your god-awful shift with a smile depending on the customer. My all-time favorite absolute fuck-up is as follows:

This kind woman is just doing her thing. She scans her membership card from her keychain. The register beeps to acknowledge the scan. We continue as usual. Neither of us notice right away, but after I’ve scanned a few more items, I hear a very quiet, “Um,” from the lady, very polite. I look at her. She is looking at the screen of my register, blinking. I, too, look.

And lo and behold. There is a charge of over four-thousand dollars ($4,000) worth of garlic bread staring us in the face. There are no words for a minute. We’re just… in awe. How did this happen? How the hell did this happen?

She didn’t even have garlic bread in her cart.

I sputter a partial apology - I was incapable of forming actual sentences in the moment - and try to void the garlic bread. Since there was no garlic bread to scan, I try to manually remove $4,000-some from this transaction.

Well, the registers don’t like it when you try to void off more than five dollars ($5) from a transaction, so naturally it pings my manager for confirmation, but she’s not by her pager.

At this point, both myself and the lady are just… dumbfounded. She’s not even mad. I’m not even all that embarrassed. Both of us are just looking at the screen. There’s a bit of laughter, but it’s mostly just… confusion.

I have to call through the whole store for my manager on the intercom because she’s not answering. She shows up, ready to override and void it, when she too, sees what exactly is being voided.

“What… did you do?”

“I genuinely. Have literally. No. Idea.”

She voids it, and I go to finish the transaction and tell the woman her total (minus the garlic bread). My register pings. It tells me that she hasn’t scanned her membership card. Odd. I distinctly remember her doing that. The woman goes to scan her card again, and I notice that her library card is stuck to her membership card. I tell her gently, and she separates the two and scans her card.

My manager, hovering nearby still, sees this and says, “I think it mistook the barcode of her other card for garlic bread, and the remaining digits were read as the price.”

And that’s when the laughter really came over us. There were no hard feelings at all. In fact, the woman was incredibly glad that the receipt still showed the garlic bread and the voiding of. I will remember it until the end of time, my only regret in the entire situation being that I didn’t take a damn picture, because she has proof and I don’t. But I swear to God it happened.

Between this and the Georgian state rep who thought US House Reps confirm Cabinet positions, I'm afraid these are simply not intelligent people running for office.