While driving to work, I saw a man sitting in a Soukline truck throwing a tissue from the window. We passed a couple of streets and I saw the same guy saluting and smiling to his fellow colleague, the one armed with a big green trashcan and a dangerous metal limb, which he will be probably using to pick up the tissue tossed earlier by his beloved friend. What a fucked up contradiction!! - I need my coffee now
Where Were the Gatekeepers?
At 6:06 in the evening on August 4, 2020, I was in my office, streaming a stand-up special while I worked through some financial paperwork. An unremarkable afternoon, the kind Beirut teaches you to treasure precisely because nothing is happening in it. Then the room shook. First like an earthquake. Then harder, until the walls themselves were drumming. I heard what sounded like aircraft. In Lebanon, that sound has never meant panic; we grow up hearing jets break the sound barrier over our heads, and we learn, the way you learn anything you cannot control, to keep working through it. That is what pacification actually feels like from the inside: a sound that should stop your heart, filed instead under background noise. This one did not stay background noise for long. I ran to the window and saw a white cloud rising over the port. Before I could work out what it was, I heard the real sound. The second one. I watched a shape climb into the sky that some part of me recognized be...
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