On Friday I've let my car to my friends that go to the weekly demonstrations in a village in the west bank. Every Friday around 20 Israelis join the demonstrations in the different villages, out of a pool of around 50 Israelis overall that go from time to time. I got the car back at evening, stinking from leftovers of skunk water shot on the demonstrators by the army, and with some leftover of snacks. Usually when you let a car to someone in Israel it comes back with some empty bottles and stuff left on the seats or thrown somewhere, but this time it was just a bag of snacks.
I didn’t use the car on Saturday, but on Sunday morning I discovered I had a flat tire, because of some nail, that may be related, and may be unrelated, to the presence of the car in that village, that was stuck into it and deflated it slowly. My father replaced the tire while I took his car to take a friend to the airport, and when I came back I wanted to go to the tire shop, and my father suggested the one near Ramla. He suggested to join me, so we entered the car together, I was thinking we might have some lunch together later.
We drove some meters and after the corner my father said that maybe we can pass through the post office and the copy shop for picking up some stuff. Yeah, whatever, I said, still kind of daydreaming about the soon-to-come masabaha. At the post office I waited for a moment outside while he checked what’s going on, and then he came back saying it’ll take some 10 minutes, meaning, naturally, an arbitrary amount of time, which got me mad, and after some shouting I ran away with the car.
It’d be useless to convince him that he only suggested to do his duties while we were already driving, just after we went out of our street, because he did not feel secure enough to ask for it before we left, using a form of subtle passive-aggressive coercion, as he’s a firm zionist; and by zionist I do not mean the narrow, political term, but the more general psychological/metaphysical standpoint, that is, the view that the existence of certain objects in reality, events that occur in reality, actions committed by certain people which lead to the existence of these objects and to the occurrence of those events, and clear statements concerning such actions and their predicted results, cannot be seen as related to cognitive processes in the minds of the persons stating those statements or carrying out those actions. A form of radical dualism, if you wish.
They fixed the tire in the tire shop and I went directly for the masabaha, which was wonderful. The next day I discovered I have to change it again cause it deflated. I went to a different tire shop, with four guys: the boss, a middle-aged Mizrahi Jew who does the negotiation and the billing, a younger Mizrahi Jew whose job is to watch facebook videos with boss on the boss’s smartphone, a young Russian Jew whose job was to push the lever a few times to lift the car a bit, and a teen-aged Arab whose job is to actually do everything that’s needed to be done with the tire.
As this tire shop was near home, I called my father asking him if he’d like to go for lunch together. So we went to Cup-o-joe, an Israeli chain of cafés offering choices of clean, a bit pricey, and tasteless ingredients (olives, onions, eggs, cheese, potato, avocado, eggplant, tomatoes, chick peas), loosely grouped into dishes with Mediterranean names (Italian, Greek, Tunisian, Israeli), and served in several forms (the ingredients in a salad with bread, the ingredients in a bread, the ingredients in a toasted bread, the ingredients in a pan with bread), all with the same tasteless taste and mediocrely over-priced. My father called the waitress (“girlie”) and slowly ordered, without any eye-contact, while murmuring and trying to complain and answer his phone, still while she asks about the bread (cereals, light or focaccia). After eating a bit he called her and told her that usually he gets butter with the bread. She said, do you want butter? I’ll go get some butter, and went to bring some butter. We finished eating, he paid (they made some mistake and gave to much change back, and we did not bother to correct them) and left.
