VOLUNTARY DRINKING OVERSEAS- II

Last Saturday night found me at yet another Voluntary Drinking Oversees party. Some people have said that the only reason I keep getting invited is because of my nappy hair but the truth is that these volunteers need a token African to feed, once in a while, because they have realized that they cannot feed the entire continent.

The reason I attend these atrocious parties is because they are excellent blog fodder. Your average volunteer is such a made to measure protagonist, for my NGO Bashing genre, to the point of being a caricature. He possesses vast amounts of self delusion that imbues his existence in Africa with a dramatic irony only paralleled in the Comedy of Errors. The volunteer is a Quixote per excellence- forever tilting at windmills; windmills of the protestant ethic, the American Dream, capital and all those Occidental measures of success.

He says to himself: I want to save Africa while in reality the thing he means to save is himself due to his inability to fit within the capitalistic construct that is his society.

The party last Saturday was held at an Ethiopian restaurant. The mood got a little uncomfortable when I arrived. It seemed unclear who had invited me. As things stood everyone had had issues with me and my blog post filed after the last party.

The Peace Corps girl from the look of things had forgiven me for what I said to her the last time: “The Peace Corps and al Qaeda share the same agenda—hegemony—but the Peace Corps fail because its troops cannot spell ‘infiltrate’. But angry at me she was nevertheless. She was angry because she didn’t get a mention on my blog, it seems that even a wee moment of ridicule would have sufficed. How was I to know that American’s cannot leave the ‘look at me: before and after flab/ clitoris piercing/ county jail, etc.’ mindset of their voyeuristic society at home?

When I said hello to BS (no points for guessing that BS stands for Bull Shit), a Canadian volunteer, she got up and hugged me. The table went quiet and you could hear three pieces of silver clang clanging somewhere in the deep recesses of her gypsy skirt. Woah… and then she kissed me so hard she roused Dakimu’s messianic complex (unto you stupid girls a dick is given!)

B.S introduced me to a new volunteer so freshly arrived that she was carrying around a brand new Rough Guide and Lonely Planet and was still goggle-eyed from hours of watching Lion King and Out of Africa. For God’s sake she had to peer into a well thumbed copy of (Generic) Swahili for Dummies to say Hakuna Matata.

“Kenya Hakuna Matiti!” I told her even though the restaurant’s cashier looked like Pamela Anderson’s new boob job.
“Hakuna Matya-tya!” She corrected me.
“Ohhh,” I mocked. “Hakuna Matya-tya is a song by Boney M.”

“For God’s sake Potash,” B.S interjected. “I am determined to keep you in white chicks so the least you can be is polite!”
“Keep the Trojan Horses coming, you mean.”
“Of course not, Potash… I could never compromise your integrity.”
“My integrity is like the ‘NARC Government,’ an oxymoron.”

“Whatever dude… “BS said and turned to the new girl (lets call her, er… New Girl), “Potash is gay.”
“What, but I thought you guys had a thing?”
“Here is the thing,” I explained. “In my writing, I am out rightly gay and that in a society where it is unacceptable to be so. Therefore being seen in public with a white girl creates a hetero-normative façade for me because everyone imagines us to be having vanilla sex both literally and figuratively of course. ”
“So there is no vanilla sex, in any sense of the phrase, going on?”
“Well, not at all, quite frankly, but she is gradually warming up to my idea of a threesome, with two boys obviously. The cool thing about that is we all win. She gets to live out her rape fantasy…”
“Come on Potash, I have no rape fantasies,” Interrupts BS.
I ignore her… people are so touchy about such of their sexual fantasies that society generally deems deviant it is no small wonder such things continue to be branded abnormal.
“So she gets to live her rape fantasies, the other guy and I do our thing and wipe the lube off with her arse and then we walk out wearing the heterosexual guy’s badge of honour: putting the Big O into orgy! It is cool for two straight guys to hit one chick…

Fuck, it gives me a mighty boner to recall all this…

(Exeunt Blogger& Co. to jerk off, frot et cetera!)

BLOG WEDNESDAY

Insane thing being this blogger being blocked out of his own blog for so many days. He is mighty drank now but all he wants to test if is his pals' internet connection works better in the mid of a heavy night of drinking. We appreciate that he has had nothing to say for ages!

Sitting here starring at the screen. On my ear the music is so loud. Maybe I need to numb myself. Spend a few days away from the semi colon, the hyphen- all those punctuation marks that I cannot use correctly and yet the world expects me to.

Like what is all this about? My business is words. That is what I trade with. Maybe it is not a rewarding occupation but it is inspiring.

No wait a minute. This business of words used to be inspiring. But it is not anymore. Maybe it is- in the deep down corners of my self- still fulfilling but I am not sure what I feel about it all on a day to day.

The thing is writing has become a job. It is no longer a passion- something I do because I can and love to do it- it is all about a word count now. It is all about deadlines that I cannot meet not because I have burnt out or that my creativity has hit its lowest ebb but just because I have to meet them and yet I have this image of a reckless slob to live up to.

So all the time, in my email these days, is one call for submissions to the next; some short story contest, anything. Yet I have entered none. I would have loved to be all published, worldwide, but that seems like a dream from a past long gone. A childhood ambition that so isolated from the person that I have grown up to be.

But maybe I have refused to grow up. Refused to accept the fact that I am at that place and time when opportunity knocks on your door and you have to prove yourself. Show the world that you are all what you claim to be.

Maybe I am too scared to rise up to the challenge. It takes more than talent to be a writer. In fact the greatest asset is discipline. And that, of all my failings, is the greatest.

Now wouldn’t that explain why I am doing yet another lame blog post? See it my way: I have to put up a blog post every Wednesday, yes I have to, and I have only twenty minutes today to do it. Well, when I got started I had less time in which to do it… but then I didn’t have to do it, see?

Now where is that booze?

HETERO-NOMAD

1200hrs, Thursday May 31.

What I have been doing for the last 16 hours is drinking. Now I am wandering about- my autopilot engaged against any inclination to do a KQ 507 into the nearest bush- in search of a place to crash.

I stagger past Mama Hannah’s simu ya jamii

“Wee Malaya ya mwanaume, leta pesa yangu!” Yells she

“Kubaff!” Exclaims I

What I owe her is a mere sixteen shillings for a call I received last year, but you would think I owe her a Kay for using her vagina to masturbate.

I empty all the change in my pocket into her leprous palms. It all comes up to the grand total of Kshs 23/-

Oh, I need a matchbox. I grab back three shillings and buy a box of counterfeit Rhino Kubwas from Jamo wa Veve in the next stall.

“We umbwa hii, Kwani umefilisika tena?” Mama Hannah anzias me again. I reach into my shirt pocket produce a fresh pack of premium band gaffs. I light up slow and easy like as though Potash was James Bond’s middle name.

Pulling out my gaffs a piece of paper drops out of my pocket. Oh, shit, a bus ticket. I am meant to be catching a 1300hr bus to Somewhere. Damn I must have forgotten.

“Shika hii ununulie mzee suruali ya ndani” I tell Mama Hannah and throw a fifty bob at her and jump into a passing matatu.

Moja moja mpaka tao. I patia the kange a soc and tell him to keep change. You know how we do when we have a little change: share it all around.

1345hrs

The bus is late but so what; this is Africa- the bus leaves when it leaves. I am on seat number er… “wee kaa chini, Kwani Michuki ni baba yako… hapa tunabeba pesa; watu wanapanda ndege!”

I look for a free seat but cannot find one. I squeeze myself in between two enormous mounds of luo femininity. Two pungent strands reach out from beneath their armpits and grasp me firmly by the olfactory nerve. I pass out.

2130hrs

I am jolted awake by the bus crew: “Wee Kwani unafikiri hii ni lodging?”

Strange sounds all around me; new smells assail me. The air is humid- like in a seaside town. Maybe there is a lake nearby… maybe.

I step out of the bus. It downs on me that I am drunk. The only two brain cells still alive in my head are telling me that it has been sixteen years since I got laid. Sixteen, for God’s sake! I need a brain transplant.

Some tall dark guy waves at me: “taxi… taxi!”

I am not sure even why I am here. No wait a minute; I am not even sure where I am.

“Potas?” the guy asks.

Oh la la, I think to myself. Wherever I am at least there is a reception committee.

“Gari iko upande huu baba.” He continues.

I follow him thinking: Whoever it is that I am here to see must give me the full God treatment- I am that and a rib of goat.

The Chariot I would hope for is no where to be seen. The tall dark guy ushers me into a rickety tuk tuk.

Fuck. Even Cinderella got to dream till midnight!

2156hrs

The tuk tuk hits a pothole and grinds to a halt. All around me I see shadows coming alive. They could be anything, mungiki, Five-o, or a horde of other windmills that my inebriate imagination tilts at.

A door opens somewhere and lights up a section of the pothole and, with it, silhouettes

like a moonbeam through a shapely pair of legs. And maybe there is a pair of legs but I do not see them yet because I stagger into a warm and receptive bosom and even as its flagrance tugs at my gonads I am dragged into the embrace of a lavishly furnished room.

Dinner is served. Prepared with love I would serve but certainly not with my savage palate in mind. I cut to the nice part. Not sex silly… the booze.

Damn, it is Malibu and coke for fucks sake. What a waste- I was weaned on Napshizzle, you know.

2230hrs

A bottle of vodka has materialized from the ether. I am lying on clean white linen with a cold drink on one hand and a warm breast on the other. I am in heaven. In the next building some fucker gets sent to hell. Why the fuck do people keep beheaded everywhere I go?

***

Okay, I am tired after a long weekend on the road and I just might not get to tell you about how I ended up with a pack of condoms, lubricant and an anal sex manual. Oh and then there is the lesbian chick who, even though she has enough personality to feature on my blog, doesn’t appear on the scene till Sunday night. In a sense then the full story of the Hetero Nomad will remain untold unless someone buys me a bunch of beers tonight and I get to write about my long weekend by two lakes.

It would be nice to mention two things about the Lesbian: We hang out, drinking, till 0100hrs when we realized that we were useless to each other. So we parted ways everyone retiring to a lonely night of self abuse. (Well, at least that is me speaking for myself.)

The other thing about her is that we hang out in a dusty Nairobi bound bus on Tuesday. And guess what, if you thought that you had to go to the Island of Patmos or some mountain to find revelation then you haven’t had anything yet. This chick and I hang out for, as she put it seeing that I was too drank to count, seventy two hours before we found out that we had one thing in common: We both love breasts!