Friday Walk in Baghdad - COM #11 Entry 1

Today, I decided to leave the house and go around Baghdad. I know, this sounds like the premise of a horror movie, after all the title says “ Friday Walk in Baghdad”. A great title for a horror movie, the only thing better would be if it was the 13th.

Source Giphy

Anyway, I went down my apartment and took a cab because that’s the first step of taking a walk for a fat man: taking a cab. I decided to start my day by going to a riverside Shisha place, because that’s step two in walking for a fat man: finding a place to sit and smoke.

Now, Iraq has pretty heavy traffic in some places and we got stuck at one point. Traffic is a very boring thing to go through, just hours of nothing, your mind drifts off. Next to my cab, there was a woman driving while breast feeding her twins. What an appalling sight, a woman driving a car. Seriously though, the woman had her two babies sucking on each nipple with their heads resting on the steering wheel. I kept imagining what would happen if she had to take a sharp left U-turn, I mean the baby on the right would go flying out of the window, right? All things considered who wouldn’t like to see a baby flying out of a car with a nipple in its mouth? I was also wondering if that woman was to get caught on the news, would the area where the nipple used to be get censored or not? That poor woman would live the remainder of her life known as the “1 nippled woman”. Imagine the New York Times fancy reporting for that would be “A monster with 1 nipple on one breast and a third eye on the other so she has a greater sight of her baby flying through the air holding on to her nipple as his toothless mouth holds on to the unknown future of laxness”, depends on the writer really, we could always have that ultra feminist who’d refer to this as “Abortion, Section B”. And what I’m saying is: when you’re stuck bored in traffic your mind wanders off to some really weird places.

I snapped out of my wanderings when the woman noticed me staring at her breasts for half an hour, so I reverted my eyes elsewhere, and I noticed 4 kids riding a horse that is attached to a carriage of sorts. The carriage had a man with 20 gas cylinders around him, the man was smoking a pipe, an effin’ pipe! It was at that moment when I realized that Isis wasn’t the only reason we have explosions in the streets.

One of the things that happen in streets known for their traffic is beggars, and as we were waiting we came across one. A woman who was maybe 20 years old came to my window and asked for money. I barely had enough for my “walk” so I told her that if she would come over, clean my apartment I’d pay her 35$, a bit too much for the service, especially that I live in a very small studio apartment and it’s always clean but I really wanted to help her out. So I made her the offer to which she said “fuck off, I make 5 times that money In four hours here asking people for Money”. So I asked her the obvious that we’re all thinking “are you hiring?”. She put her hands in her pocket and gave me a business card with her email and a small promotional paper and said “apply here” then walked away. The card reads her name and below it said “entrepreneur” with her email address. The promotional paper read “rent us your baby for 8 hours a day and you’ll get him back along with 80 bucks” that left me not knowing if I chose the right line of work. I mean she had offers and everything in her business “lend a baby for a week and you’ll get 1000$” along with offers for TV appearances for the kids. That woman was a walking child trafficking gang, which I like because it shows that business in Iraq is picking up, capitalism for the win!

The whole thing reminded me of things I needed money for; my nephew tried to force in my GTA disk into the PlayStation which resulted in breaking both and all the baby stuff around reminded me that I should probably get a baby sized coffin for him.

It’s been almost 2 hours and we’re not nearly halfway through the traffic, ironically if I had taken a walk I’d have gone through the traffic by now. So I got out of the car, crossed the street to the other side and took a cab back home. And that was the story of how I took a Friday Walk in Iraq.