TAKHZIN DIARIES: Hypnic Jerk

Have you ever fallen asleep and had a rather lucid dream where you were all naked and tied, firmly, to a thick post? Then someone approached you with the intent of chopping off your penis with a large, battered and blunt pair of scissors. Just as the scissors were about to make contact with your favourite toy, your body made an involuntary twitch jolting you out of sleep. That is called a hypnic jerk.

“Hold it right there, Potash,” I hear the reader say, “Thanks for the lesson and all, and we totally get the picture, but your phallic obsessive dreams are not universal.”

Please, I say to the reader, pardon my Freud but it is all about the sex: its availability; the lack of it; the desire for it; the inability to rise up to the occasion of it. Now the fact that in your dream you are falling off your bike, does not make it any less sexual. Neither does the fact that, in your dream, you are actually falling off a ladder. Maybe that is because while for me sex is an act reduced to its basal functions, for you it is a means to other ends such as social climbing.

But if you will allow me to return to the matter at hand: Hypnic jerk. I have had at least three of those in the last six hours. That because, as I write this, I have been up and about for the last forty eight hours. Eight of those have been spent trying to raise some money for miraa and the other forty, chewing miraa. This stuff is meant to keep you awake, but would it really be a drug if its effects were predictable?

So what is happening now, is that a couple of uniformed policemen just walked into the base. Uhm, I think we have a problem here.... [Typist's note: Potash, your handwriting has become increasingly illegible, your narration incoherent and your habit of using the lit end of whatever you are smoking as punctuation totally unacceptable. I cannot read the rest of the paragraph.]

Er, excuse me while I pop my eyes back into their sockets. Man, miraa does that to you. Half the time you cannot see a thing because your eyes are dangling in your line of sight. Really does the writing no good and the fact that you need both hands to stick the twigs in your mouth, hold a cigarette, slip a wee bit of chewing gum or a groundnut into your mouth, sip on some Coke, et cetera. All at the same time. It is no small wonder then that sometimes I find myself holding two lit cigarettes. And that is just the fair moments. Better than this time when I lit a cigarette then flicked it casually into a ditch and stuck the used matchstick into my mouth. “Half life,” my boy Njeru said to me.
“Sawa,”I replied.
***
Tihiii, so what has a thatthingic jerk got to do with you 'smoking' a matchstick?
Eh?
What?
What, what?
Hypno... Hyphen...
Hypnic jerk.
Hypicnic jack.
Hy p nic. Hypnic. Dude, are you stupid or what?
Zimeshika...
Kuna vile.
Unatema saa ngapi?
Sijui... Wewe?
Ninakesha.
Sawa. Pia mimi.
Si tugawane tuongeze half?
Hapana
Utatoa soo basi?
Zii
Finje?
Doo
We Potash wachanga kuwa hivo...