THAT DAY

I'm reading Marjane Satriapi's "Persepolis" books. She grows up during Khomeini's Iran. Never fits in. She escapes to Europe, but nearly dies on the streets there before she finds her path...

All day, Marjane's harrowing journey blends in my brain with the news: the nut-case presidents of Iran and the US trading threats! Will it be war?

THAT NIGHT...

NOTES

• I'm female, misunderstandings with Iranian boyfriend = I just read Marjane Satrapi's PERSEPOLIS duology.
• Iran = me. Habits block change, just as the mullahs disqualify all the reform candidates in Tehran's elections, turning them into a joke.
• Invasion doesn't lead to Iraq-style chaos = breaking my habits may be good!
• Not a feral adult cat, a lion cub! = less mature, but with more potential than I thought.
• Pet the cub, not scratched = following my urges and hunches is safer than repression
• Iranian boyfriend = conventionality, habit. Marji marries mainly because you have to in Iran. Her dad gave his blessing though he knew the marriage would fail. "You had to learn." He sensed she needed to return to Europe--a born artist, just too constricted in Iran.
• Trapped in class = soon I start a speech class required for a degree.
• All the problems and failures early in the dream (to find a dance with the right music for me, to leave boyfriend and go for the girls I really want) all look trivial compared to the crisis at dream's end.
• Murder(s?) = recently read David Brin's Kiln People and Nina Kiriki Hoffmann's short stories "The Skeleton Key" and "Haunted Humans." All three have murder victims who survive as ghosts of one sort or another.
• Friends go limp, no visible wounds = in "Skeleton Key", the ghost narrator can unlock a soul from its body so they can converse on the astral plane, though it's risky--the body goes unconscious and could stop breathing. But it's worth it to name her murderer. So...
• My boyfriend and friends gone limp = sides of me paralyzed! Out-of-body, not dead! They may return with new information.
• Murder around 16th and Harrison = Near the shooting-site is a huge cubist mural by Chuy Campesino, one of the very first large murals in the Mission. Or was. A new owner painted it over! Why, that's articide! Lawsuits. Last I heard, it was gonna be restored--again suggesting mere coma, not death...

Pretty Zen virus, huh?

A NOTE EXACTLY ONE YEAR LATER

I just went by the shooting-site in the dream. That giant historic cubist mural was supposed to be restored. But instead of removing the paint as city law requires, the new owner has defiantly painted a second layer over it--paint the dull red of dried blood!

Well, I guess that puts a second bullet in that mural's head. Articide in broad daylight--and it looks like he's getting away with it.

DECADES LATER

Online I found mentions of this mural but not a photo; the watercolor above was just my hazy impression of it. Recently I found a photo of "Lilli Ann" in Street Art San Francisco: Mission Muralismo (2009). I was startled how I'd gotten the colors about right but the shapes all wrong. Curious how a tiny songbird in the upper left of the abstract original grew to dominate my memory!

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