Tehran.

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Somebody told me: “Oil is raining on Tehran”. 


The war was driving me crazy, the television flashes and black and white explosions over and over and the broken gray concrete and rebar and chards of glass and scraps of clothing. Somebody said: “What about the cats and dogs?” 


I’d been doom scrolling for days as the Middle East caught fire again and I felt sick so I took a toke turned on Clapton and sweet relief flowed through my body and I came back to reality. I got off the couch to see if the Snow Drops I planted in late Autumn at the base of the huge Hemlock tree outside my front door had come yet. But not yet. And I turned to look at Point Mountain to see if there was a first blush but not yet either and I turned to my dwindling wood pile  and carried four logs inside. 


The feeling was overwhelming. I needed the Goddess. Over these past days my energy was drained and sucked from me by the doom scrolling and I tasted blood and bone and burning steel and rubber in my mouth. It had depleted me. As if in a day and a night I aged ten years and I felt old and fragile. Paper thin. 


Yesterday when I watched the missiles fly and the smoke and the talking and the shouting it all became a jumble and I found myself deep down the rabbit hole. I was in the Facebook YouTube universe and the hours passed. Hours and hundreds and thousands and millions of us  scrolling and watching the war. Watching the screen, more screens, more screens, the heads talking and frowning and exclaiming and talking again and again and again always talking. And more explosions. And then more talking about what they’d been talking about and then showing what others were talking about. The world was a trope and a cliche and meanwhile down in El Salvador in the Terrorism Confinement Center called CECOT, big enough to contain the population of Binghamton, men with heads shaved housed in cages forced to kneel on the concrete floor for hours, deported and imprisoned, no trial, kneeling on the concrete floor in El Salvador. It was making me sick so I stopped scrolling and J J Cale’s thick bass and swampy blues guitar flowed over me and made me feel better. 


And then I called my old friend Yaser. I wrote about Yaser in another story called Asheville and its a good story. He’s is a force of nature, ambitious to leave his fingerprints on the world. Out of the ashes of Gaza and Palestine, Yaser came to New York. We met in Brooklyn around the corner from Underhill Avenue. It was the late nineties. 


He hardly spoke English. His family were successful rug merchants in Gaza until shut down. Palestine property was confiscated and many lost their livelihood.  During the Intifada when Palestinians in an act of desperation, hurled rocks and stones at the soldiers. Yaser was caught in the turmoil. He was shot in the head with a rubber bullet as he pulled wounded from the street to safety. But he survived. “Here Andrew”, and he pushes my finger into his skull, it feels like a plumbing fitting. 


When I knew him in Brooklyn he was quiet, almost taciturn, with a gentle smile, a musician trained in Jordan, he played the violin, oud and darbouka drum But now he sought work in the back waters moving phone cards and cigarettes sometimes over state lines. Though separated by a generation and great geographic distance, we bonded as friends and brothers. 


“Andrew, my brother, how are you?” He always said that when I called. I was easily old enough to be his father and I loved him as if I were. He told me he’d moved from Roanoke to Charlottesville  and purchased a warehouse. He was starting a new business importing Moringa, a popular medicinal plant from Morocco. Yaser was now an enterprising citizen with a grown son in America. 


Then I said: “Yaser, what about the war?”, and he said, “Andrew I have been at war all my life. Forty of my family have been killed in Palestine.”


_____



The next morning somebody sent me a text: 


“Hundreds and hundreds of geese just flew over. 

I went outside to get some firewood and heard them, 

one V after another, 

at least ten flocks of them. 

I lost count”.


And then somebody other sent me a text too:


“The first thing I did this morning 

right from bed 

was go outside to feed the birds. 

The only thing I heard were geese. 

Flocks and flocks, one after another, all day long. 

It’s been beautiful and amazing like a new awakening.


And John Prine was playing in the background and I just thought about all the good and the sadness and the joy and I sat down in front of the woodstove and things were all right again for a while. But it was raining oil in Tehran. 






 


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