‘Your niece is rewatching the ‘68 depictions of Soviet filmmaking. Her favorite animation opens with a screenwriter preparing for suicide. […] The Soviet era takes space in your home in the form of comic relief. It blares from your iPad each morning through a pipe-smoking wolf in Ну,погоди and a sirening sing-song sound of Фильм, Фильм,Фильм. […] The principal’s apology. The politeness in being disposed of, in sorry’s that could never feed you; the cartoon wolf smokes a pack in a single puff, drinks the bottle, and lives.’

‘As the world navigates the uncertainty of a global pandemic, authoritarian power structures worldwide are using the fog of a crisis to strike at vulnerable targets, as they tend to do. Such is the case of the recent attack on Armenian border villages by the Azerbaijani   regime.‘

‘You want to listen to a sermon?” The voice from the speaker passes quickly racing through words to a beat. I catch every other thought, It’s fast and in its speed there’s peace. 

Babylon, capitalism, violence.’

‘I feel the material of my own taraz pieces. The soft velvet of a red dress with gold patterns. The textured metal of a silver collar necklace. I try to imagine wearing my sibling’s male taraz, wondering what I would look like in the rough woven colors of the carpet hat and vest. I do not find the courage to try them on.’

‘Sometimes I think about how Armenians are a chameleon people: Our colors change depending on the environment. Whenever I am traveling to Armenia, waiting to board the plane to Yerevan in Sheremetevo airport, and I see all the haggard looking grey men with dusty boxes and old shoes, smelling of sweat, on their way back home from months or years of working in Russia, and I look at their dark bushy eyebrows and I notice the worry in their dark eyes, I feel I am white compared to them. Almost as if the United States bleached me of the difficulty of living in the Soviet boss’s belly to be pushed around like an undesired, backward people.’

You’re in cowboy clothes                 You are standing straight                                 And below your waist
Is the way that leads                     To a heaven pure                 Tender and blessed.
                                  O, give it to me from behind,                                         Cowboy—beautiful.

‘I am the keeper of threads embroiderer of the caves of man my voice a torch, lit with song burning green with serpent’s fire my dance unties the knots men bind upon the jugular of those they call unclean.’

‘The toughest questions, the one’s worth investigating, belong to a group of queries I call “the unanswerables.” As mathematicians we can postulate, we can theorize, we can get drunk and talk about the cosmological constant, but in our little lifetime we may not ever have the answers. The irony is that I began to study math out of a sincere hope that one aspect of my life could have answers.’

‘Once you learn that, go forth and fuck shit up.

Now, please put your cellphones away and get ready the underwhelming of a lifetime.’