Joseph Zitt

(Sorry for the extended NoJoe… I’ve been crazily busy, both with the retail Christmas deathmarch and with too many projects of my own. Stay tuned for info on an upcoming San Francisco performance of my “Moses (for narrator and string orchestra),” as well as some book publications within the next few months. “The Book of Voices” is continuing as well, with 34 episodes online so far.

One of the biggest projects has been creating a book from my blog entries about my retail job, tentatively entitled “19th Nervous Breakdown.” Here is the opening chapter, written over the past few months:)

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It turns out that I was wrong about the ballistics of raw eggs.

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No one was at the front desk when I came into the gym on Sunday. I stood there for a long moment, membership card and picture ID in hand. Finally, one of the red-shirted trainers emerged from their back room and waved me over.

I showed him my card and ID. “I think someone has to scan these for me to come in,” I said.

He looked at them, then pointed one finger at the card. “Bang!” he said. “Have a good workout.”

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As the evening dragged on, several of us wondered aloud over our headsets once again why we were open so late on a Sunday night. Almost all of the paying customers had wandered off by nine, two hours before closing. The remaining swarm consisted mostly of jetlagged European tourists who would tend to wander about and not buy things, and of our regular denizens. Most of those were draped over our most comfortable chairs, either sleeping, staring belligerently at any who dared to approach them, or nattering to people we couldn’t see. They had made sure to mark their territory by moving their chairs from where we had left them, usually placing them in the flow of traffic. In the passive-aggressive way that seems to be becoming an American signature, they simply acted as if they were entitled to do whatever they wanted, to say whatever they wanted, and to leave as much of a mess as they could.

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The customer was fidgeting with a DVD when I came over to him. “Can I help you find anything?”

“Actually, I have a question for you,” he said. He spoke quickly, not quite agitated but clearly wired, and with an accent that sounded vaguely West African or Caribbean, though I couldn’t pin it down further than that. “What is the difference in relative mass between this DVD and an empty DVD?”
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Up on the music floor in our store, we can play music either from our iPods (if we have the album being played in stock and if it doesn’t contain offensive language) or with the CD player hooked up to the sound systems. Each provided us with possibilities and problems.

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I’m still here, but most of my writing and creative efforts are happening over at The Book of Voices. I have nine pieces up there, monologues from the points of view of Moab, Aaron, Sihon, Abraham, Jonah, Hazael, Shadrach, Judah, and God.

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I’ve begun a new writing project, The Book of Voices, which I’m posting to a new blog at wordpress.com. It’s a series of brief texts, written from the points of view of characters from the Bible.

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I’m blogging this from the elite WiFi lounge in the US Airways terminal at Newark’s Liberty International Airport — by which I mean that I’m one of a half-dozen or so people sitting on the floor. The wireless signal reaches one wall of the long corridor from the Sentinels of Indignity to the gates. This short stretch also has power outlets — though I had to keep an eye on one and dive for it the moment that the person next to me unplugged.
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I’ll be out of town for the next week, off in New Jersey for the Moses performance and the beginning of Passover. While I’ll have my laptop with me, I’m not sure about connectivity with it. The best ways to reach me, if needed, will be by my cell phone or my gmail address (my first name dot my last name at gmail dot com).