BaharMeansSpring

I escape into the Iranian, click into daydreams of sezdeh-bedar in Virginia or New York -- while my research paper rots in a room beside me. So who is the Iranian of the day? What cheap thrills will be posted to help me browse my boredom away? Did that one London-based writer, with a refreshing dose of honesty, who makes a curious landlord, an ex-girlfriend, and British men in a pub come to life, did he write something for me today?

I wasn't supposed to be here, looking at Iranians who might look right back at me, from atop a wooden park bench or crouched beside the charcoal grill. It is past midnight on a Monday evening and paragraphs on my Guantanamo research paper still await me. In the morning, my professors will expect me. I don't arrive searching for serious answers to Iran's foreign policy, I just want to window shop the perspectives of a community.

I might leave the website reconnected to an old friend from Berkeley, or hungry from the photos of saffron rice at an Iranian party. An exceptionally cheesy personal advertisement might make me cringe or laugh -- depends on the day, the mood, the level of joy or velocity. I might remember that I want to return to Iran, but be too lazy to read all the words in a two part piece. If I want to procrastinate even more, I might click on a video link, hear farsi from the flat surface of a computer screen against a white wall, inside a school, millions of miles away from Tehran/Mona/Roya and the heavily polluted tree lined streets where I make immature faces at eating kaleh pacheh in the early mornings.

It doesn't boil down to barefoot children selling batteries and bouquets at stop lights, or bazaar shopping, visiting for a wedding/crying when I have to leave -- after all, even though I was away for two decades, I can still smile and say my name is Bahar...and then remember, that this is all a dream and that my research paper is calling, and with the high-tech speed of a single key, i can turn off the machine, get up, and leave.

That is the privilege with which I procrastinate and with which I escape. When I feel sleepy, all I have to do is x out of the screen and images of a homeland's barefoot poverty disappear. I can read about two million prisoners in the United States, then open a new screen and download music to match the flavor of my coffee. Reading/writing/thinking are too easy when the motor reflexes of my index finger control the course and content of what I see.

So when I am emotionally exhausted from imagining Tehran as a bombed out ashy cavity in the center of the millenium's next invaded country, with the privilege of not having to live the potential reality, I can just refuse to look at another headline or news magazine. From the face of a computer screen, nothing will force me to live the humanitarian tragedy-to-be. At a distance, we become allies and enemies/hypothesize other people's suffering/claim to also be aggreived/write/laugh/remember/and become shy about sharing poetry/ in the quick and easy world of information technology -- where you dont have to be, anywhere you dont want to be and I wanted to sit by the reflecting pool with Mona before it became too hot in Shiraz. But one hour has passed already, my paper is still rotting, and this whole time that I thought I was going to escape/procrastinate into the iranian.com, I realize now, it was the iranian in me that was wriggling to be free.

It was a life of half filled dreams.  Tea stained ceramic cups littered the windowsill, the cold glass muted the outside world, so that trees screech wild in the wind, branches convulse in the dry air, the sky falls like uncontrollable sobs of a delirious mourning mother, and all of the maddness would be silent, extremes in a quiet atmosphere, muted by a thin layer of glass.

She never listened to her own self.  Like millions of people who society expects to do what they are told, who society does not entrust with faith in their own intuition, she never opened her ears to her own maddness or dreams.  Behind the glassy eyes was a real human being molded into a perfectionist machine.  Like a sick scientific experiement of privilege, analytical skills, and indecisiveness, all she could remember was reading a line in a book on a New York subway -- again an extremely bright sunny day muted -- insulated by the air conditioned structure of the train.  The author, who himself had once enrolled at insane asylum, which was actually no refuge to begin with, had written that "the happier people can be, the unhappier they are."

The train headed into a tunnel, the lights flickered on and off, the world waited for her with great expectations, a dead grandmother talked to her in dreams, and all she could think about was how "the happier people can be, the unhappier they are."

In the dirty city, across the street from a shiny blue bank --  a bank brand new from punishing people with heavy penalities and fines, was a gothic church.  A place of worship littered with a circle of white cops, white cops with guns, batons, bullets and big iron-pumping muscles.  Two black men surrounded by six white cops with sterioids in their arms.  The steriod side of the street smiled steroid smiles and made steroid jokes.  The black men in their autumn jackets, holding their hands out of their pockets, in the autumn air.  Waiting.  Waiting for what?

Holding his wallet in his hand, his hand intentionally out in the autumn air, so that the police do not mistake a hand in a pocket for a hidden gun and shoot him in the name of habitually racist violence against black men and then rob the english language of meaning by calling it self-defense,

Who was in his wallet?  A christmas picture of a little girl watching cartoons on a saturday afternoon waiting for him to come home?

Or was she across the street too, watching him shrug his shoulders, standing tall, over six white rats in tight blue uniforms, with buttons bursting from too much fourth of july fruit salad or a lifetime of canned thanksgiving meals, their state sponsored laughter echoed into the city like a mean ghost hording and scavengeing the hollowed out hearts of people, stealing the air from breathing cavaties.

  Welcome to America!

Six white cops with steroids in their arms surrounding two black men with family pictures in their wallets.  At a place of worship, across the street from an expensive bank, and a downtown bus stop with Asians, Latinos, Christians, Muslims, and Jamaicans.  Everybody watched the black and white-ness of America.  The perpetual violence of America.  Welcome to America.

And at night, she could not forget, the next morning, she had to file papers and figure out a way to make money in a market economy maze, but all she could do was think about the six sterioid smiling po-lice, fangs coming out of their mouths, and two black men, standing with their hands intentionally out of their pockets.

bahar