Paranoid Pyramid

Yesterday a friend invited me to a night tour in Baghdad and to spend some minutes in a new café that you will be served by females. In Baghdad, cafés are still a man zone. Since ages, no female is allowed in Baghdad to sit in a café. So, being in a café that some of the workers are females seems enough privileged to pay it a visit at night and drink a cappuccino even if the price would hit nearly 4 US dollars a cup. My friend told me about a new DVD series that gaining fame in Baghdad, named "The Arrivals". The series is a documentary about how every disaster that occurred to us is programmed by some evil willed secret persons. One of the detail of this long series is about 9 September, and how it was programmed by those devil worshipers who they supposed to give this message: God's number is 10, so when we reach 9 we jump to 11, and you got to call 119, to ask to be rescued, but not form God.

I thought of what is left for the poor paranoid schizophrenics to believe in, and how large is the "culturally accepted" ideas that I must know so that I don't jump to diagnose a delusion, in the near future, hoping that I may go back to work.

The weather was great at night in Baghdad, and I went to sleep refreshed after that delicious cappuccino. I woke up the next morning and took Orhan Pamuk's Snow and headed to regulate some of my father's retirement papers. In the almost exactly two hours journey (the same time that took me before days to reach Karbala) I read about that granny sherbet conspiracy theory in Kars. Before two years, a couple of Turkish Army soldiers had strange symptoms that were diagnosed in Kars hospital as cases of food poisoning. Investigations revealed that they all drank that day from that granny sherbet café. For the past two years, and the secret agents of the Turkish Security were following that granny café, and following the drinkers of the sherbet for some time to see whether they were poisoned or not, so that, if some were poisoned selectively, another investigation might start on the goals of the deliberate poisoning of the sherbet. One had noted that all those who were poisoned were Turkish, not Kurdish but this note wasn't taken seriously for the simple cause that the Kurds and Turks are very alike to a degree that the granny would fail to discriminate between them and selectively poison the Turks deliberately.


After I went out the retirement ugly building, and set off to Al Mutanabbee street, I bought Al-Mada journal. Searched for "Studies on Hysteria" by Freud and Breuer for about 2 hours in vain, I ended standing near the Turkish Restaurant in Al Tahrir Sequare. Took the bus back home, held the journal, and red Ali Abdul-Ameer Ijam's column. He wrote about the political history of Iraq from 1948 till now and its very striking character of being always frightened form "conspiracies" of "enemies". The column was entitled: "Iraq Fascinated by Conspiracies". He gave many examples and ended saying "Iraq is not fascinated with life".

I reached home, ate the pomegranate my mom had advised me to eat to help curing my diarrhea, ate coffee and wondered how much it goes well coffee after pomegranate. I even thought about putting some few drops of pomegranate juice to the coffee. I re-held the novel and the journal. I re-read and contemplate. At last, I have this silence again inside me, as if snowflakes are falling slowly and calmly from my skies to improve whiteness and silence.