.: culture : mash :.

I don’t mean to turn this into the Leyla/father relationship blog, but sorry folks, that’s as active as it’s getting here for a bit. It’s a pretty big deal for me to have my 76 year old Dad stuck in the Motherland for over 4 months now, and have it extend another 2, on what was supposed to be a 2 month trip max.

For those of you who don’t know, my father has gone back home after over 20 years to sell his home and be able to retire with these funds back here in Los Angeles, his current home. This got a little sticky when he arrived in Tehran, to find that the government had seized his property, and he had to pay over $40k in legal fees to try to retrieve his property. Yeah, if that doesn’t make you patriotic, I don’t know what does. At any rate, as honest as I’m sure the mullah regime and federal court must be, it’s been a tough time even getting a judge to reside over my father’s simple case, as the appropriate judge has conveniently been on holiday for the past 2 months.

All this pending, the phone lines in Iran blow. Imagine trying to get a phone signal in Malibu… times like ten. So the main form of communication I have is email. Now I’m totally grateful for my father even knowing at his age how to use email. I mean he’s 76, my 55 year old mother barely understands the concept of a mouse. So this is a big deal, he can communicate. Granted his emails are usually either forwarded folk legends of emails telling me to not flash my headlights or use my cell phone at the gas station, but my father uses most the emails as a way of sending me pictures.

This morning, I logged into my Gmail account to find over 45 separate emails, each with one to three jpegs attached. About 4 of these photographs were of my dad and various unknown family members or friends, cousins I don’t know and colleagues I think look geriatric. In the bulk of these emails however, were over 40 pictures of Persian rugs. Yes, exactly … some were even pictures of rugs depicting rugs. I’m not kidding. I have to show you a sample of this, because the entire act is just so fucking puzzling.

Now remember… these are ALL rugs. I have to restress this, because he did so in every email.

A seductive stare:

Cyrus the Great:

An old bazar for selling rugs:

a $15K silk rug:

the store he saw a lot of this at:

And perhaps the most perplexing, the chicken children:

I don’t know what the hell this is, but I definitely want it.