The Insurgency

Tonight I smoked up on the hill down the street among the vegetation, where it is very close to the sky, and a plane passed very low overhead blinking its lights in serene messages.

Tonight at work these Iraqi guys made an insurgency joke, because one told me he was from Baghdad (which was true) and the other said, "Yeah, he's a captured member of the insurgency," and laughed heartily, and I thought, "Whoa, that's the first insurgency joke that I've heard," although I had previously thought of insurgency jokes in my mind but they sometimes border on the sacreligious, so I do not say them out loud, especially since I work in an Arabic workplace. And I do not make terrorist jokes at work either, or 9-11 jokes, but my co-worker Ramin does, but he is allowed since he is Afghani, and has been here only since 2001.

Yesterday I came upon Ramin talking to himself in the deli.
"Who are you talking to?" I said.
"I'm rapping," he said, as if this was obvious.
"Oh. Never mind," I said.

Sometimes he claims that he goes upstairs to the storage room to pray (because Muslims take 5 prayer breaks a day, and they are 10 minutes each time), but then he really just climbs the ladder up to the roof and talks on his cellphone to his wife, and raps apparently as well.
He also handles monstrous and sharp knives all day, and it is kind of scary. "This one is a sword," he told me yesterday. "I could cut my hair with this." And it made me nervous.

And he is very vain and particular about his hair, which is kind of long (actually his haircut looks kind of like Jen S's did until B-Scoot remade it in a new image), and his car, whose engine makes outrageous roars when he leaves. It is just strange that he is married as well. I cannot make sense of it in my mind.

I was feeling like an old broad because I am going to be 23 in less than a month. "The reason you feel so old is because you're not married," said Wanda (she is 21 and has been married for 4 years). "Uh, no," I said. And I would never marry a minister or a cop. Because cops have to enforce the law, and I am not always a great lover of the law, and also they often beat their wives. And ministers have patriarchal world views and values. So no thank you. When high it is great to eat grapes with your eyes closed. That is all.