Again he describes a place as having different times, and Nadia comments that she’s not sure if the photography (is it Thiery Legalt being referenced?) looks like the past, the present, or the future. And when the cell phone signals are cut, it’s like the past again, but a present past, a present past extending into the uncertain future. Same place, different time.

Nadia wants to live whereas Saeed wants only to live. There is a difference, one involves spirit, the other calories. But you can’t live on zero calorie soda.

“Saeed prayed for peace and Saeed’s father prayed for Saeed and the preacher” prayed for the righteous to be victorious without indicating who that might be – typical. Or is it? How do we know who the righteous are? I mean it’s easy to tell when you’ve got nazi’s or something, but what about when it’s more subtle? Is everyone righteous or is nobody? Is there even such a thing?

Shame that the only time people often feel “a desire for peace, that peace should come for them all, for everyone, for everything, for we are so fragile, and so beautiful, and surely conflicts could be healed if others had experiences like this” is when we’re tripping on mushrooms. Imagine if we could do this sober? Or outside of art?

Wasn’t it a scene in An Unrestored Woman where one of the characters got in an accident with someone far wealthier than they and so they lay down in the street in absolute protestation for fear of what the retribution might be and meanwhile their daughter feels nothing but the shame in all of it. Similar scene here with Saeed nicking his car’s mirror on the “shiny black SUV”.

“probably less than a hundred [dead]”. It’s the casual, almost optimistic way this is said, as if less than a hundred was a great outcome.

“tongues of a planet that would one day too be no more” – great line juxtaposed next to the section on how everyone uses a cell phone (though Saeed is far more conservative than Nadia). One day the planet will be silent – again, though maybe that day is coming sooner than what the producers intended.

Hamid is being quite clear about the coming tragedy, that people are going to die and that knowing this makes us feel all the more powerless than if it had been a surprise. But wouldn’t death, like that of her cousin being blown to literal bits have been a surprise, or is the author suggesting the people who live here should think a lot more carefully about the fact they could die at any time?

I wasn’t expecting scenes taking place in (first) Australia and now in Tokyo. I wonder what is going on because both of those scenes seem to be connected with this troubling black void doorway / portal.

Funny seeing Saeed dress up as a woman to get into Nadia’s apartment. The trouble people will go through to be with each other – the more strict the rules the more elaborate the ruse.

Hamid is being careful to not rely on intertextuality such as naming the zero calorie beverage, the name of the dead Soul singer. I wonder why he’s doing this?

Is her “nonjudgmental female gynecologist” acquaintance providing her with birth control? Is this how Nadia is able to maintain independence- because the next line talks about dealing with men, aggressive men, aggressive men who were police so she’s talking about men and authority, and I imagine birth control in this country is even more unusual than a single woman living on her own?

Nadia’s family situation is like a precursor to what (might) happen to the city as it’s destroyed. She has no family, though the weight of carrying no family is greater than the weight of carrying a family. Funny how the loss of something makes it even greater. And all this because they are all too stubborn – family’s are like nations that way.

Oh yeah, I like Nadia. I can see why Saeed does too. She cool.

Mars, the god of war – no wonder they hear gunfire in the streets. Funny how you never think about people looking at the stars / planets through a telescope when you see images of Syria or Lebanon or Bosnia – all you see is what was once there, in the past, not the way things used to look, not like how we see the stars as they once were. One wonders what the stars look like right now.

The theater kept the name but was a new place yet was still the same place in a different time. He’s written about how time changes things, first how the bullets would speed up the crumbling facade in a day what would take decades, and now how the town has changed while still somehow being the same.

A lot of descriptions of place, the lot where the tree grows, the pale lady’s home in Australia, Saeed’s parents’ home (in the path of where gunfire would be in a time of war). I wonder why he’s paying so much emphasis on describing these places?

OK, that was beautifully strange – the man being born out her her dark closet then slipping out into the street below, all while the white woman sleeps in her gentrified and alarmed home. Something has entered / exited? A dark presence? Is he black or dark?

Beautiful image of the hawk building the nest so carefully in the tree while Saeed can barely get his own work together. And it’s also a good image since a bird building a nest speaks to the hope of mating, which is what’s on his mind because he can only think of Nadia.

Is he paying closer attention to Nadia’s birthmark than he is the class on “corporate identity and product branding”? Funny too how this class sort of mirrors the fashion choices – how we brand ourselves is more important to us than how corporations brand themselves.

Add he ties this all into how we are always existing in the middle of life, unaware (willingly or not) to the fact life will end. Liminal.