Dear Timi,
Here I am little brother. Incoherent I might be, but damn well I am right here. Right here where you and I spent long hours dreaming. Here where I watch one tear after the other dribble down my face and mix with the earth. Drib! Drib! My tears go, just like your blood did, for hours- from dusk to high noon- the day they stole you from us. Plucked you, that was a glorious blossom in the rocky garden that is my life, out.
It has been such a long time since. Far too many places I have been to, in the meantime, way too many things I have seen. None of them could make my memories of you any less fond. I might not spend hours starring vacantly at your grave. (Hell, they probably sold your cheap grave in Langata to someone else.) But in my mind, as a gentle thought, you have repose and every fair word that stumbles out of my pen I dedicate as an epitaph to you.
Then sometimes, when the road feels a tad bit to rough, I take a pause and shed a tear. And another… and another. Sit and watch the tears, like your blood, mingle with the earth. This earth that we always seemed fated to walk on but never own a piece of.
The pain gets much deeper whenever I return to this place. Not just the old neighbourhood but the Stone Zone, specifically. This place where we spent our days sitting and talking, pretty much watching the world pass us by, for lack of either gainful employment or leisure.
Sometimes, in mid-conversation, our imaginations would get the best of us. Then we would imagine ourselves as the greatest Kenyan writers of our degeneration and rush over to Mutua’s kiosk, take biros and foolscaps on credit and then spend five, six, seven… ten hours writing. At times we stood as we wrote, other times we knelt and then there was the times when we asked any one o the other boys to bend over so that we could use their backs as our desks.
Such anger as flew out of our pens no words, phrases, similes or metaphors I can invent today can best describe. When I think, and I often do, about the texts we churned they seem like dirges. Dirges to us. We the living dead to whom the future tense was a luxury.
Then the cans of Napshizzle would run dry. Our pens too. Then we would stagger, each to his hovel, slump on those sagging Vono beds and let the alcohol take us away. The next day, or night depending on how long or how much we had drunk, we would wake up, read what we had written and (maybe shamed by the emptiness of our own existence that stared us back through our own words) set it on fire.
We used to claim that the writing was cathartic, but how come it was, at the end of the day, the alcohol that lulled us? Is it because our drunken sleep was the place for dreams and the writing a place for making portraits of the frightful nightmares that stalked our wakefulness?
That though is not the question that bothers me the most but one of whether the goodness of time and life would have proved you to be the greatest of Kenyan writers? It is such a shame. Such a shame that I, who was given the time, life and chance to prove myself, failed. That is the reason why, after all my upstart journeys into the writerish world out there, I keep coming back here. Return to this place, brooding and prostrated by my inadequacies. Come here and mourn you, wishing that you instead of me had had half the chance that I have had.
I do not know kid, but I feel like all the writing is done. But for you, and all the little ones that looked up to us, I will keep trying. I will keep trying, not from the fanciful lairs of the bourgeoisie writer class, but from down here. This neighbourhood is, for me, both home and muse. If to write we were called to, pray I be the least of your avatars.
If to own a piece of this earth that we, merely, walk on be rightful, then let the words that ooze out of my pen run deeper than the blood that our ancestors spilled that we may have it.
Affectionately yours,
Potash
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Friday, September 25, 2009
BREAST STROKE
The other day, there was news about this cop who got drugged and the 25 mili or so that he was escorting got jacked. That reminded me of the sequel to my hangover review that I had promised a friend I would write but never came round to. Well, I actually did write it but never got a chance to put it up here and now it is all gone as it was in one of the notebooks that got drenched last weekend.
Anyway, I was talking about my experiences, and those of others close to me, with roofies- date rape drugs- here in Nairobi. One incident involves a cousin of mine. Dude called me up on a loose Tuesday night saying that he was in Tropez and if I was up to it, he could buy me ten beers or so.
I jumped into a matatu and headed his way. On arrival, I found that the guy had three Guinness bottles on his table and I am like, kwani umekuwa jaluo? Of course not, he replied, this one is mine and the other two are for those women. I think they both want me, he added.
No dude, what they want is your money, is what I meant to say. What came out was: Okay, where are those ten Tuskers? The guy suddenly started to act funny; you know all that I-am-buying-these-chicks-drinks-and-I-hadn’t-planned-for-it-business. Man, I hate it when boys act like that. I mean, here I was, bila bus fare nini nini, and I was not even going to get a consolation soda. Is sawas a guy, I said to him and spotting a guy I went to primary school with on the next table walked over and pulled fifteen beers or so out of him in the name of catching up.
Some point in the night, my cousin came over to me and told me that the girls had asked him to their house. Where do they live? I asked. Huko sides of Kilimani, he said. Can I come, I suggested, tag time like this? Is bila, he laughed, who needs a wingman when the eagle has landed.
Polite
I saw the guy a month later but by then I had heard about four different versions of how he had been seen staggering home at midday on a Wednesday afternoon wearing lodgo slippers. (Si you know those slippers: one of a pair is blue and has the front part chopped off and the other is red and has a hole drilled in the sole). I sikizaed the dude kidogo and he kubalied to give me the full 411. like that tu bila ati kachumbari and mob things.
It is like this.
The chicks were hookers he had meet huko in the bar. Kidogo, after he has bought mingi pint, they were like: do you want something something. Like hell yeah, he semaed. They negotiated and after two more Guinness each, sealed the deal at 2 Gs for both of them. So when he told me that he was going to their place in Kilimani, he had lied and was actually going with them to a lodgo.
The idiot, horny and drunk, broke the first rule of picking malayas: never go to your place or theirs (that is wherever they suggest). They told him that they knew of a 4 soc lodgo sides of River Road. He agreed. They jumped into a cab. He remembers the cab guy asking him whether he was sure of what he was doing and him telling the cab dude to suck himself.
At the lodgo, he gave one of the hookers a thousand bob to pay for the room and he does not remember getting a receipt or his change back. They went up to the room and one of the hookers, quickly, undressed and jumped onto the bed. The other stood behind him and pulled off his pants. The one on the bed grabbed his penis and pulled him towards her.
The one that had undressed him joined them in bed and started to rub his back. You look like you can handle us, big boy, she said to him while pushing a finger up his anus. He looks like he will hurt me, the naked one said, still not having let go of his penis. You have to make us wet first, the other one said. Yes, turn me on, the naked one said to him while pulling his face towards her breasts. The only way to turn me on is to lick my breasts.
***
And he licked them and whatever else she had rubbed on them.
***
Heavy pounding and yelling outside his door is what woke him. It is eleven o’clock, whoever was outside barked, we want the bed sheets.
***
There was no one else in the room with him and he had absolutely no recollection of having sex with one woman, leave alone two. And he hadn’t.
***
The last thing he had seen was breasts.
Till today, he is haunted by breasts.
Anyway, I was talking about my experiences, and those of others close to me, with roofies- date rape drugs- here in Nairobi. One incident involves a cousin of mine. Dude called me up on a loose Tuesday night saying that he was in Tropez and if I was up to it, he could buy me ten beers or so.
I jumped into a matatu and headed his way. On arrival, I found that the guy had three Guinness bottles on his table and I am like, kwani umekuwa jaluo? Of course not, he replied, this one is mine and the other two are for those women. I think they both want me, he added.
No dude, what they want is your money, is what I meant to say. What came out was: Okay, where are those ten Tuskers? The guy suddenly started to act funny; you know all that I-am-buying-these-chicks-drinks-and-I-hadn’t-planned-for-it-business. Man, I hate it when boys act like that. I mean, here I was, bila bus fare nini nini, and I was not even going to get a consolation soda. Is sawas a guy, I said to him and spotting a guy I went to primary school with on the next table walked over and pulled fifteen beers or so out of him in the name of catching up.
Some point in the night, my cousin came over to me and told me that the girls had asked him to their house. Where do they live? I asked. Huko sides of Kilimani, he said. Can I come, I suggested, tag time like this? Is bila, he laughed, who needs a wingman when the eagle has landed.
Polite
I saw the guy a month later but by then I had heard about four different versions of how he had been seen staggering home at midday on a Wednesday afternoon wearing lodgo slippers. (Si you know those slippers: one of a pair is blue and has the front part chopped off and the other is red and has a hole drilled in the sole). I sikizaed the dude kidogo and he kubalied to give me the full 411. like that tu bila ati kachumbari and mob things.
It is like this.
The chicks were hookers he had meet huko in the bar. Kidogo, after he has bought mingi pint, they were like: do you want something something. Like hell yeah, he semaed. They negotiated and after two more Guinness each, sealed the deal at 2 Gs for both of them. So when he told me that he was going to their place in Kilimani, he had lied and was actually going with them to a lodgo.
The idiot, horny and drunk, broke the first rule of picking malayas: never go to your place or theirs (that is wherever they suggest). They told him that they knew of a 4 soc lodgo sides of River Road. He agreed. They jumped into a cab. He remembers the cab guy asking him whether he was sure of what he was doing and him telling the cab dude to suck himself.
At the lodgo, he gave one of the hookers a thousand bob to pay for the room and he does not remember getting a receipt or his change back. They went up to the room and one of the hookers, quickly, undressed and jumped onto the bed. The other stood behind him and pulled off his pants. The one on the bed grabbed his penis and pulled him towards her.
The one that had undressed him joined them in bed and started to rub his back. You look like you can handle us, big boy, she said to him while pushing a finger up his anus. He looks like he will hurt me, the naked one said, still not having let go of his penis. You have to make us wet first, the other one said. Yes, turn me on, the naked one said to him while pulling his face towards her breasts. The only way to turn me on is to lick my breasts.
***
And he licked them and whatever else she had rubbed on them.
***
Heavy pounding and yelling outside his door is what woke him. It is eleven o’clock, whoever was outside barked, we want the bed sheets.
***
There was no one else in the room with him and he had absolutely no recollection of having sex with one woman, leave alone two. And he hadn’t.
***
The last thing he had seen was breasts.
Till today, he is haunted by breasts.
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Untitled Rant
Sod’s law is, in the IT age, your laptop dying on the eve of a public holiday and with nonnegotiable deadlines starring you in the face. You work hard to find a technician and as soon as you have one, you realize that your ATM is not working and you do not have enough to pay the guy. Which is all good since the technician is willing to work and take payment later but there is the small matter of finding you a replacement part for your computer. That just means that you just have to wait till the next day, for the banks and the computer shop to open. Oops... but Tuesdays are rationing days at the technician's workshop! Ack, your deadline is a contract not a Muslim so Idd is not working your way. How sad the saying mwana mzuri hufaidi siku ya Idi considered; have you really been bad?
Wish that was the story of my life, though, and not just an excuse I had to give to this dude who was expecting 800 words from me before Monday. It is the kind of excuse I always have to come up with when the realities of my existence get in the way of occasional work.
Picture this:
It is Saturday afternoon and I am sitting at Vaite’s veve Base. I have been there since the night before and in between chewing miraa and bullshitting, I have managed to explain the Global Economy part of the Global Economic Crisis (I do not understand the Crisis part, either); write a review for our first Potash Book Club reading and 800 words for said dude. Basically, I am within deadline. Most important of all, I have what I had promised the readers of this blog earlier on in the week. All within the time it takes to get high. All that is left is to find this chick that, between one shag and the next, can be relied on to get that stuff typed up and posted/ emailed.
So I start walked, nay, staggering to her place but I am feeling mighty antsy from all the chewing so I decided to get a quick drink to fight the miraa. I enter the nearest supermarket and grab a can of Kane Extra, down it and hit the road.
Then it begins to rain.
I am somewhere between high and drunk. Damn drugs got a hold of me.
To make a long story short, I made to jump over a ditch, tripped and fell. My two notebooks got mighty soaked and all my doodles went down the drain. What is a guy to do in that situation but go back and get mighty wasted if only to keep pneumonia at bay. So here I am, a couple of days later, trying to pick myself up and make up a plausible- and acceptable in a yuppie’s world- excuse for not having met my deadline.
As for you my reader, the truth about what happened explained, you just have to wait a couple more days until we can get to work on those Potash Book Club readings. As long as it takes, of course, for me to approach a modicum of coherence.
Wish that was the story of my life, though, and not just an excuse I had to give to this dude who was expecting 800 words from me before Monday. It is the kind of excuse I always have to come up with when the realities of my existence get in the way of occasional work.
Picture this:
It is Saturday afternoon and I am sitting at Vaite’s veve Base. I have been there since the night before and in between chewing miraa and bullshitting, I have managed to explain the Global Economy part of the Global Economic Crisis (I do not understand the Crisis part, either); write a review for our first Potash Book Club reading and 800 words for said dude. Basically, I am within deadline. Most important of all, I have what I had promised the readers of this blog earlier on in the week. All within the time it takes to get high. All that is left is to find this chick that, between one shag and the next, can be relied on to get that stuff typed up and posted/ emailed.
So I start walked, nay, staggering to her place but I am feeling mighty antsy from all the chewing so I decided to get a quick drink to fight the miraa. I enter the nearest supermarket and grab a can of Kane Extra, down it and hit the road.
Then it begins to rain.
I am somewhere between high and drunk. Damn drugs got a hold of me.
To make a long story short, I made to jump over a ditch, tripped and fell. My two notebooks got mighty soaked and all my doodles went down the drain. What is a guy to do in that situation but go back and get mighty wasted if only to keep pneumonia at bay. So here I am, a couple of days later, trying to pick myself up and make up a plausible- and acceptable in a yuppie’s world- excuse for not having met my deadline.
As for you my reader, the truth about what happened explained, you just have to wait a couple more days until we can get to work on those Potash Book Club readings. As long as it takes, of course, for me to approach a modicum of coherence.
Thursday, September 17, 2009
ROOTED IN COMMUNISM: THE POTASH BOOK CLUB
If you don't know it, then go ask your mother, Kenya died in the early nineties. Well, not died died, but when Moi has got a vicious arm around your neck and the World Bank's grip on your balls is tighter than the pliers of a Nyayo House torturer, then you are as good as dead.
There I was, transitioning from primary to high school with white-collar dreams as the only wind in my sails. Such is the folly of youth it blinded me from the fact that the formal economy was losing jobs by the thousands. Our parents, having been coerced into taking early retirement, took their golden handshakes and made a beeline for Dubai. They came back with panties of the same colour and television sets of the same make to sell to...er...who?
It is as they sat in exhibition stalls, in between long waits for customers, that self-employment quickly became a euphemism for unemployment. (Everyone you met on the streets was doing Biashara and, every one of them, was trying to pull a fifty out of you for bus fare). But maybe, as they sat in those stalls trying to keep up with the Onyango's, and the lower than cost price tags they had put on their Gushi hanbags, they wished they had followed Mr. Onyango's lead into sampling Mombasa's carnal delights. Do it, beginning with the more exotic thrills at the beach resorts, working down to no-frills Mtwapa and all the way down to Makadara Grounds, as their money ran out.
In the meantime, for those who still had jobs, a lot more shilling was paying for a lot less filling and only Chinese merchandise and the kadogo economy could save them.
Then the mid-nineties came. That age found my peers and I too wrapped up in our school work to see the anger and frustration that had consumed our parents even though the only thing it had left to gobble up was us. And it eventually did but at that moment we were looking forth into the future an unusual shade of hope glinting off our eyes. We were, after all, standing at the eve of our Tomorrow. The tomorrow that we had been harangued, ad nauseam, that we would be the leaders of.
Tomorrow came. The system spat us out, into the Kenyan economy. But the Kenyan economy had long found rigor mortis.
It has been over ten years now, for me since high school. Ten years of, at the risk of sounding fatuous, trying to play poker at the table of life with the foul hand that time, space and the circumstances of my birth had dealt me.
In those days, there were many of us running through this city, like headless chicken, trying to figure out the next step towards making ends meet. Ends that, somewhat, felt like they were tied to two bulls charging in opposite directions and us stuck in the middle. And all this while, more and more, like us and with the same dreams, were pouring into the city.
We did what work could be found, when it was to be found; we ate what there was to eat and often it was nothing. We spent so much time walking, searching for work, and then we spent a lot more time talking, for lack of gainful employment. Many of us turned to despondence, more and more turned towards illegitimate means of goal attainment. Those of us that had read a little bit more outside of the required readings in Nyayo Philosophy started to suspect that maybe that fellow Karl Marx was right, after all, and imagined ourselves the proletarian victims of a historically stratified society.
Suddenly, we wanted to know more; read everything that we had hitherto been disallowed. So we started to scrimp and save, cut deeper and deeper into our alcohol money- alcohol that was our primary escape vehicle from the harsh realities we were living in- in order to buy and rent books. That is how the thing that would later come to be referred to as the Potashian Book Club on this blog was formed. This of course being an abridged version that avoids details of our (or maybe mine, specifically) fallouts with individuals and entities that would, later on at the beginning of this decade, define the popular/ public perception of lower class youth in this city,
It is all a long time ago and some of those, at least those of the fifteen or so core members who have lived to see today, are no longer at the same place we were then. Not in ideology, in levels of desperation or even in a desire for a just world where everyone can find their basic needs fulfilled.
The only person, that I believe would still stand with me, (now, as then) and who would probably have been a far better chronicler of those days than I can ever be is Timi. But Timi is dead, having taken a stray bullet to the head.
Njane, Mumo and Vanga are dead too. But those ones took bullets (ten in Mumo's case) that left the Eldoret ordnance factory with their names stamped on. Dimosh (formerly of Dimosh's Kinyozi) died of tuberculosis last year- or AIDS related complications, if you insist.
Kari, as well.
Bobo is a mother of six and lives in Mukuru kwa Reuben with a paraplegic beggar. I am willing to take a DNA test to prove that none of those children are mine, a simple sight-test will tell you that they were not fathered by the man she lives with either.
Dan, Toma, Dudi and Jamo (not their real names) are in Kamiti. Or so I thought but I saw Toma, last week as I was taking the route eleven from Kangemi to Kawangware. I took a long pee behind a bush but felt terribly ashamed of myself later. But, frankly, I did not feel like I had something to say to him and neither did I have a fifty bob or so to give him for a Kane.
The only people left around that can afford more than just reminisces but also the time, and other resources, to write are Mambo, Dinda and NM.
Mambo got hit on by this American researcher who came down to the old neighbourhood to interview us on whether the music of the then wildly popular Hip Hop act, Kalamashaka, represented the voice (or maybe it was the political reawakening, no, it must have been Empowerment) of Nairobi's slum youth. She ended up with more than a PHD. One day Mambo brought her to the neighbourhood and they smoked tonnes of weed and flushed it all down with Napshizzle. Then he took her to the room, at the back of Mutua's kiosk, where we all used to take the girls that we figured 'deserved' to be shagged on a bed rather than in a phone booth. Earlier on in the day, he had borrowed a couple of condoms from someone and, with a drawing pin, put holes in them. Needless to say, all the condoms broke, that night but the girl was too lost in the rapture of drug enhanced ghetto sex to notice.
Next thing she knew, she was pregnant.
The American girl loved Mambo to bits and, even though she was not ready for that level of responsibility and commitment, she decided to keep both the boy and the baby. The next thing we knew, after a year of getting drunk and laid on her cash transfers, Manga was on his way to America. She invited him over for both a visit as well as, as she put it in an email to his recently opened email address, “...an opportunity to see, how we can make this work.”
He went over on a three month visa but by the time that was over, he had not only dumped the girl but also any idea, if such a thing could have existed in his mind to begin with, of returning to Kenya.
Mambo joined the ever growing horde of Kenyan baby daddies pursuing the burger-flipping dream and not paying a single cent in child support. We haven't spoken in eight years now but two years ago I got his email address from an old acquaintance and wrote him. He replied. The body of the email was blank but the subject line was a Western Union Control number. I shrugged my shoulders and collected 50USD. I still do not know where in America he is or what exactly he is doing there but every time I try to email an inquiry, he responds in the same way. And I collect 50USD. I just try not to make a habit of it.
As for N.M and Dinda, much has been said about them on this blog, it is unnecessary to repeat.
Unfortunately, Mambo, N.M and Dinda are the ones that were never really with us, ideologically. I am not just saying this with the benefit of hindsight but because I always felt it: these were people who the circumstances of physical and social proximity, more than ideological parallels, had thrown their lots in with ours. Or maybe there is a sense in what N.M said last weekend, when they had invited me to chew miraa with them at Dinda's Westlands apartment, “... it could be that it is easier to be drawn to Communism when you feel unable to access capital.” And they, somehow, accessed it.
Anyway, I write this now because I would like to read with you, my dear reader, the books we read way back in the mid to late nineties. Way back before the smart kids- the ones who could explain Dialectics- and the quick ones- the once who could raise a little extra money to buy the books- left the neighbourhood and we went back to reading out battered copies of Shakespeare and the Bible, and the occasional popular fiction. I can only hope that those of the original group- those that actually know what it was called back then- who can read and write will weigh in, with their opinions that a more educated than mine.
Maybe, I could interest you, the reader, in the books themselves. What I hope to do, though , is attempt a resurrection of The Potash Book Club. On this blog. Very soon.
There I was, transitioning from primary to high school with white-collar dreams as the only wind in my sails. Such is the folly of youth it blinded me from the fact that the formal economy was losing jobs by the thousands. Our parents, having been coerced into taking early retirement, took their golden handshakes and made a beeline for Dubai. They came back with panties of the same colour and television sets of the same make to sell to...er...who?
It is as they sat in exhibition stalls, in between long waits for customers, that self-employment quickly became a euphemism for unemployment. (Everyone you met on the streets was doing Biashara and, every one of them, was trying to pull a fifty out of you for bus fare). But maybe, as they sat in those stalls trying to keep up with the Onyango's, and the lower than cost price tags they had put on their Gushi hanbags, they wished they had followed Mr. Onyango's lead into sampling Mombasa's carnal delights. Do it, beginning with the more exotic thrills at the beach resorts, working down to no-frills Mtwapa and all the way down to Makadara Grounds, as their money ran out.
In the meantime, for those who still had jobs, a lot more shilling was paying for a lot less filling and only Chinese merchandise and the kadogo economy could save them.
Then the mid-nineties came. That age found my peers and I too wrapped up in our school work to see the anger and frustration that had consumed our parents even though the only thing it had left to gobble up was us. And it eventually did but at that moment we were looking forth into the future an unusual shade of hope glinting off our eyes. We were, after all, standing at the eve of our Tomorrow. The tomorrow that we had been harangued, ad nauseam, that we would be the leaders of.
Tomorrow came. The system spat us out, into the Kenyan economy. But the Kenyan economy had long found rigor mortis.
It has been over ten years now, for me since high school. Ten years of, at the risk of sounding fatuous, trying to play poker at the table of life with the foul hand that time, space and the circumstances of my birth had dealt me.
In those days, there were many of us running through this city, like headless chicken, trying to figure out the next step towards making ends meet. Ends that, somewhat, felt like they were tied to two bulls charging in opposite directions and us stuck in the middle. And all this while, more and more, like us and with the same dreams, were pouring into the city.
We did what work could be found, when it was to be found; we ate what there was to eat and often it was nothing. We spent so much time walking, searching for work, and then we spent a lot more time talking, for lack of gainful employment. Many of us turned to despondence, more and more turned towards illegitimate means of goal attainment. Those of us that had read a little bit more outside of the required readings in Nyayo Philosophy started to suspect that maybe that fellow Karl Marx was right, after all, and imagined ourselves the proletarian victims of a historically stratified society.
Suddenly, we wanted to know more; read everything that we had hitherto been disallowed. So we started to scrimp and save, cut deeper and deeper into our alcohol money- alcohol that was our primary escape vehicle from the harsh realities we were living in- in order to buy and rent books. That is how the thing that would later come to be referred to as the Potashian Book Club on this blog was formed. This of course being an abridged version that avoids details of our (or maybe mine, specifically) fallouts with individuals and entities that would, later on at the beginning of this decade, define the popular/ public perception of lower class youth in this city,
It is all a long time ago and some of those, at least those of the fifteen or so core members who have lived to see today, are no longer at the same place we were then. Not in ideology, in levels of desperation or even in a desire for a just world where everyone can find their basic needs fulfilled.
The only person, that I believe would still stand with me, (now, as then) and who would probably have been a far better chronicler of those days than I can ever be is Timi. But Timi is dead, having taken a stray bullet to the head.
Njane, Mumo and Vanga are dead too. But those ones took bullets (ten in Mumo's case) that left the Eldoret ordnance factory with their names stamped on. Dimosh (formerly of Dimosh's Kinyozi) died of tuberculosis last year- or AIDS related complications, if you insist.
Kari, as well.
Bobo is a mother of six and lives in Mukuru kwa Reuben with a paraplegic beggar. I am willing to take a DNA test to prove that none of those children are mine, a simple sight-test will tell you that they were not fathered by the man she lives with either.
Dan, Toma, Dudi and Jamo (not their real names) are in Kamiti. Or so I thought but I saw Toma, last week as I was taking the route eleven from Kangemi to Kawangware. I took a long pee behind a bush but felt terribly ashamed of myself later. But, frankly, I did not feel like I had something to say to him and neither did I have a fifty bob or so to give him for a Kane.
The only people left around that can afford more than just reminisces but also the time, and other resources, to write are Mambo, Dinda and NM.
Mambo got hit on by this American researcher who came down to the old neighbourhood to interview us on whether the music of the then wildly popular Hip Hop act, Kalamashaka, represented the voice (or maybe it was the political reawakening, no, it must have been Empowerment) of Nairobi's slum youth. She ended up with more than a PHD. One day Mambo brought her to the neighbourhood and they smoked tonnes of weed and flushed it all down with Napshizzle. Then he took her to the room, at the back of Mutua's kiosk, where we all used to take the girls that we figured 'deserved' to be shagged on a bed rather than in a phone booth. Earlier on in the day, he had borrowed a couple of condoms from someone and, with a drawing pin, put holes in them. Needless to say, all the condoms broke, that night but the girl was too lost in the rapture of drug enhanced ghetto sex to notice.
Next thing she knew, she was pregnant.
The American girl loved Mambo to bits and, even though she was not ready for that level of responsibility and commitment, she decided to keep both the boy and the baby. The next thing we knew, after a year of getting drunk and laid on her cash transfers, Manga was on his way to America. She invited him over for both a visit as well as, as she put it in an email to his recently opened email address, “...an opportunity to see, how we can make this work.”
He went over on a three month visa but by the time that was over, he had not only dumped the girl but also any idea, if such a thing could have existed in his mind to begin with, of returning to Kenya.
Mambo joined the ever growing horde of Kenyan baby daddies pursuing the burger-flipping dream and not paying a single cent in child support. We haven't spoken in eight years now but two years ago I got his email address from an old acquaintance and wrote him. He replied. The body of the email was blank but the subject line was a Western Union Control number. I shrugged my shoulders and collected 50USD. I still do not know where in America he is or what exactly he is doing there but every time I try to email an inquiry, he responds in the same way. And I collect 50USD. I just try not to make a habit of it.
As for N.M and Dinda, much has been said about them on this blog, it is unnecessary to repeat.
Unfortunately, Mambo, N.M and Dinda are the ones that were never really with us, ideologically. I am not just saying this with the benefit of hindsight but because I always felt it: these were people who the circumstances of physical and social proximity, more than ideological parallels, had thrown their lots in with ours. Or maybe there is a sense in what N.M said last weekend, when they had invited me to chew miraa with them at Dinda's Westlands apartment, “... it could be that it is easier to be drawn to Communism when you feel unable to access capital.” And they, somehow, accessed it.
Anyway, I write this now because I would like to read with you, my dear reader, the books we read way back in the mid to late nineties. Way back before the smart kids- the ones who could explain Dialectics- and the quick ones- the once who could raise a little extra money to buy the books- left the neighbourhood and we went back to reading out battered copies of Shakespeare and the Bible, and the occasional popular fiction. I can only hope that those of the original group- those that actually know what it was called back then- who can read and write will weigh in, with their opinions that a more educated than mine.
Maybe, I could interest you, the reader, in the books themselves. What I hope to do, though , is attempt a resurrection of The Potash Book Club. On this blog. Very soon.
Sunday, September 13, 2009
Mourning Semenya
Semenya's only crime was to be born the way she was, Athletics South Africa's president, Leonard Cheule, told the media at the 2009 Athletic World Championships in Berlin. Cheule was responding to what, beginning as murmurs at the 2009 African Junior Championship, had grown into loud protestations that Caster Semenya was a gender cheat. That she, Caster Semenya, winner in the Women's 800m Final, was actually a 'he'. The response from her camp and supporters was a miffed one, and acceptably so, had it not been drowned by the standard fare — racism & sexism — of the international kneejerk protests brigade.
As all this was happening and the most intimate details of this teen were speculated and fought over by strangers across the globe, the people expected to protect her betrayed her, her fans and her sport. Athletic's international governing body, IAAF, (having more leaks than the Kibaki cabinet) revealed that they had ordered gender verification tests on Semenya. With these revelations, Semenya's privacy was cast out of the window as even idiots generally incapable of an opinion made categorical remarks on what lay beneath the pants of a stranger they had only seen on TV.
Now the farce has quickly turned into tragedy as once again, on IAAF's watch, information on Semenya's supposed gender has been leaked. The news, emerging from the Australian press and gobbled up by the rest of the world is, brace yourself, that Semenya is neither a man or a woman. That Semenya, despite having the external genitalia of a 'she' has no womb and ovaries and instead, internal testes. Semenya is, technically, a hermaphrodite.It has neither been confirmed or denied, but the international media has alleged it and that is now a truth.
Fine. But why in hell did I need to know that?
Somehow, in the light of Semenya's humanity, all the arguments and counterarguments I have been having with myself and others about 'undue advantage' don't seem to matter any more. I am beginning to worry a lot more about this young teen who had a great future ahead of her and who will now lose it. I am thinking about what it means to be that person that grows up with one conception of the self and then has it shattered and smeared with public humiliation. But most important of all, I realise that because I know and you know what Semenya is then she has, in own foul sweep, died and been resurrected in public as a freak show.
The punishment for the crime of her birth will not be gentle. Semenya has been accused of and charged with being born different. Whatever the verdict, in official spaces, will be, the court of public opinion has sentenced her to a lifetime of self-loath.
As all this was happening and the most intimate details of this teen were speculated and fought over by strangers across the globe, the people expected to protect her betrayed her, her fans and her sport. Athletic's international governing body, IAAF, (having more leaks than the Kibaki cabinet) revealed that they had ordered gender verification tests on Semenya. With these revelations, Semenya's privacy was cast out of the window as even idiots generally incapable of an opinion made categorical remarks on what lay beneath the pants of a stranger they had only seen on TV.
Now the farce has quickly turned into tragedy as once again, on IAAF's watch, information on Semenya's supposed gender has been leaked. The news, emerging from the Australian press and gobbled up by the rest of the world is, brace yourself, that Semenya is neither a man or a woman. That Semenya, despite having the external genitalia of a 'she' has no womb and ovaries and instead, internal testes. Semenya is, technically, a hermaphrodite.It has neither been confirmed or denied, but the international media has alleged it and that is now a truth.
Fine. But why in hell did I need to know that?
Somehow, in the light of Semenya's humanity, all the arguments and counterarguments I have been having with myself and others about 'undue advantage' don't seem to matter any more. I am beginning to worry a lot more about this young teen who had a great future ahead of her and who will now lose it. I am thinking about what it means to be that person that grows up with one conception of the self and then has it shattered and smeared with public humiliation. But most important of all, I realise that because I know and you know what Semenya is then she has, in own foul sweep, died and been resurrected in public as a freak show.
The punishment for the crime of her birth will not be gentle. Semenya has been accused of and charged with being born different. Whatever the verdict, in official spaces, will be, the court of public opinion has sentenced her to a lifetime of self-loath.
Thursday, September 10, 2009
HANGOVER MEETS THE YOUNG URBAN POLYSEXUAL
Hangover, the movie, is like my life dressed up in a tuxedo. You would feel the same way too if you were to watch it from beneath a mushroom cloud of cannabis smoke, stale alcohol, constipated farts, smelly socks and whiffs of sweat with that tangy odour of last night's sex in it, like I did.
There is something about Kamwana's Video Parlour, where I watched this movie last Friday, that manages to peel the glamour off Hollywood; turn all that tinsel into post-midnight Cinderella. I used to think it was the bad quality DVDs, you know, those grainy 40-in-1s with subtitles- that you cannot disable- in a language that appears to be Chinese with an English accent. But now I think otherwise. It must be the social and economic distance. The distance between the actors and the spaces where their made up realities are played out and us and the spaces from which we observe them.
Anyway, it is not like we a reviewing a Warner Herzog film for the New Yorker or something, so let us cut the quasi-intelligent musings. Hangover is one hell of a funny movie. Even when you are watching it on a camera copy dubbed by an idiot who decided to: a) Sit too far left of the movie theatre giving you more theatre wall than screen in most frames; b) Enjoy the movie rather than film its screening and as he laughed into his mike gave the movie the feel of a broken fourth wall and with his body shaking with glee, the camera calls attention to itself like a bad version of that scene in Children of Men (2006) where blood from the shoot splashes on the camera; c) sit behind an incontinent guy who when he isn't getting up and walking right through your screen, manages to keep his long, shabby hair in it all the time. Simply put, this movie is straight out hilarious, no technical challenges in watching it can get in the way of the laughs.
Hangover doesn't pretend to be anything but a comedic guy flick, thus to judge it outside of these parameters is not to do it a disservice as much as to hoist it on a pedestal that it neither deserves or demands. If you are looking for a movie that will, above all else, make you think and or engages your social consciousness then get Kibera Kid, or whatever, Hangover is not for you. It is also not the movie for you if you are looking for that new; edgy; ground breaking comedy. That is unless you have never heard the phrase, 'what happens in Vegas stays there,' or watched a movie premised on amnesia.
With writing credits including the John Lucas & Scott Moore duo that gave us the the considerably hilarious Four Christmases, Hangover's plot is quite simple. Doug is getting married to Tracy Garner and so his boys, Stu and Phil, decide to take him to Vegas on his last night as a bachelor. Tracy's brother, Alan, Stu and Phil's reservations not withstanding, tags along. They head out in Tracy's dad's treasured old school Mercedes Benz convertible, which he has graciously entrusted to Doug.
Once in Vegas, after checking into the Caesers Palace, the guys go to the roof to toast to a great night out. The next we know is that they are passed out in their hotel room with a chicken clucking about, a tiger in the bathroom and a toddler in the closet. Two things are conspicuously missing from this tableau that is evidence of tremendously wild night out: everyone's recollection of the past night and the bridegroom. The movie then turns into this epic of hilarity as the present trio seek to find their memories and the bridegroom with only a few hours to go before the wedding.
Even as I laughed right through this movie, I couldn't help checking myself every time the thought of the number of times I have woken up in weird places and situations and with all the events over the past couple of hours or even days being able to fit in one blank slate. I do not even remember which of those moments it is that I have written about on this blog, but one particular one comes to mind. In a post titled Young Urban Polysexual, I recollected:
How I had ended up at Jamo's I have still never been able to explain and neither can I answer the question: with whom and how did I have sex.
But my life is paralleled by the movie Hangover only in the amnesia. The setting is totally withdrawn from my reality, what with the fancy car, the luxurious suite in a Las Vegas hotel and the fact that a guy can just put USD800 on his credit card on a whim. Man, if I just had the USD800, here in Nairobi, I would give myself permanent head damage.
The heartbreaking part though is the realisation that for this guys, Vegas, the big night is just this one night when they get to do something silly. For me, for all of these kids down here, this is what we try to do every day. At the end of the movie, the guys return home to a wedding and their normal lives of wives, jobs, cars and dogs. For us, when we come to, there is nothing to return to. Nothing but all that that we were trying to get high enough to forget, in the first place.
Blog Trivia
Posts that mention Kamwana's Video Parlour:
1. Return of the Sleazemeister
2. Last Thursday
3. The Night of the Rattlesnakes
4. Frm Grass to Grace
There is something about Kamwana's Video Parlour, where I watched this movie last Friday, that manages to peel the glamour off Hollywood; turn all that tinsel into post-midnight Cinderella. I used to think it was the bad quality DVDs, you know, those grainy 40-in-1s with subtitles- that you cannot disable- in a language that appears to be Chinese with an English accent. But now I think otherwise. It must be the social and economic distance. The distance between the actors and the spaces where their made up realities are played out and us and the spaces from which we observe them.
Anyway, it is not like we a reviewing a Warner Herzog film for the New Yorker or something, so let us cut the quasi-intelligent musings. Hangover is one hell of a funny movie. Even when you are watching it on a camera copy dubbed by an idiot who decided to: a) Sit too far left of the movie theatre giving you more theatre wall than screen in most frames; b) Enjoy the movie rather than film its screening and as he laughed into his mike gave the movie the feel of a broken fourth wall and with his body shaking with glee, the camera calls attention to itself like a bad version of that scene in Children of Men (2006) where blood from the shoot splashes on the camera; c) sit behind an incontinent guy who when he isn't getting up and walking right through your screen, manages to keep his long, shabby hair in it all the time. Simply put, this movie is straight out hilarious, no technical challenges in watching it can get in the way of the laughs.
Hangover doesn't pretend to be anything but a comedic guy flick, thus to judge it outside of these parameters is not to do it a disservice as much as to hoist it on a pedestal that it neither deserves or demands. If you are looking for a movie that will, above all else, make you think and or engages your social consciousness then get Kibera Kid, or whatever, Hangover is not for you. It is also not the movie for you if you are looking for that new; edgy; ground breaking comedy. That is unless you have never heard the phrase, 'what happens in Vegas stays there,' or watched a movie premised on amnesia.
With writing credits including the John Lucas & Scott Moore duo that gave us the the considerably hilarious Four Christmases, Hangover's plot is quite simple. Doug is getting married to Tracy Garner and so his boys, Stu and Phil, decide to take him to Vegas on his last night as a bachelor. Tracy's brother, Alan, Stu and Phil's reservations not withstanding, tags along. They head out in Tracy's dad's treasured old school Mercedes Benz convertible, which he has graciously entrusted to Doug.
Once in Vegas, after checking into the Caesers Palace, the guys go to the roof to toast to a great night out. The next we know is that they are passed out in their hotel room with a chicken clucking about, a tiger in the bathroom and a toddler in the closet. Two things are conspicuously missing from this tableau that is evidence of tremendously wild night out: everyone's recollection of the past night and the bridegroom. The movie then turns into this epic of hilarity as the present trio seek to find their memories and the bridegroom with only a few hours to go before the wedding.
Even as I laughed right through this movie, I couldn't help checking myself every time the thought of the number of times I have woken up in weird places and situations and with all the events over the past couple of hours or even days being able to fit in one blank slate. I do not even remember which of those moments it is that I have written about on this blog, but one particular one comes to mind. In a post titled Young Urban Polysexual, I recollected:
"I came to this morning at Jamo’s house as sticky between the legs as an SJ whore. To shower or not to shower, that was the question. I skived shawi but I had to have loads of alcohol to wash away the taste of semen and after shave from my mouth."
How I had ended up at Jamo's I have still never been able to explain and neither can I answer the question: with whom and how did I have sex.
But my life is paralleled by the movie Hangover only in the amnesia. The setting is totally withdrawn from my reality, what with the fancy car, the luxurious suite in a Las Vegas hotel and the fact that a guy can just put USD800 on his credit card on a whim. Man, if I just had the USD800, here in Nairobi, I would give myself permanent head damage.
The heartbreaking part though is the realisation that for this guys, Vegas, the big night is just this one night when they get to do something silly. For me, for all of these kids down here, this is what we try to do every day. At the end of the movie, the guys return home to a wedding and their normal lives of wives, jobs, cars and dogs. For us, when we come to, there is nothing to return to. Nothing but all that that we were trying to get high enough to forget, in the first place.
Blog Trivia
Posts that mention Kamwana's Video Parlour:
1. Return of the Sleazemeister
2. Last Thursday
3. The Night of the Rattlesnakes
4. Frm Grass to Grace
Sunday, September 06, 2009
TIPS FOR KENYAN MEN WHO CHEAT
People who have jobs tell me that Sunday is an easy day. Some spend the morning sleeping in and probably having lazy sex, possibly the only sex they have with their wives or live in girlfriends all week, while others head out to church, not to communion with God but rather to make amends for the sins of the past week and hopefully earn a pre-emptive forgiveness for the sins of the next. These people then spend Sunday afternoon with their families.
I lack the luxury of engaging in such an ordered life. I know no routine beyond trying to exist, one day at a time. I do not have a wife, a steady girlfriend or a live in girlfriend, unlike most of the guys of my age and acquaintance. That allows me a moment of self-righteous indignation at their promiscuous ways.
Your average Kenyan guy cheats on his partner. Incorrigibly so the anthropologist might be tempted to opine that men cheating is culturally acceptable in this society. I do not know that that is true or not but I know it is in my observed experience. (Note that I am not convinced there is such a thing as 'Kenyan' culture and so every time I say Kenyan, let it be assumed that the word is in quotes. So all of you who do not cheat in your relationships and those of you who believe that they are not cheated on, please leave me alone, I am not talking about you and your partners).
The young urban professionals that I know have, consciously or unconsciously grown up into their fathers. They wake up and go to work every weekday morning. In the evening they report to the local bar, or more likely, especially for the better paid lot, a trendy bar downtown or in either Westlands or Kilimani. They have a couple of beers, discuss work and who is sleeping with who and maybe chat up and exchange business cards with the the skirt suited girls in the next table. Though these guys will flirt with the waitresses, unlike their fathers, they are unlikely to end up sleeping with them. Aside from the women they will occasionally pick up in strip bars, Koinange Street and Florida clubs, and pay to have sex with, Kenyan yuppies will make an effort of having sex within their class. But it has to remain clear that the more licentious among them will still end up in bars like Rezorous and Tropez during the weekend intent on picking university, college and even high school girls for one night stands.
That is what Friday night is for. Boys, Booze and Babes. Most people work on Saturday morning so the girlfriends will be content with a Java coffee on Friday evening and maybe a quick drink at Tamasha or Bacchus leaving the boys to their own devices.
Hello Chips Funga!
Now chips funga and whores raise one problem for those guys who are married or living with their girlfriends: where to shag them. Forest Lodge on Forest Road, is a good option. I mean, if you just want to be in and out and do not insist on clean bedsheets, then that there is your Vegas: what happens there, stays there, as they say. As for the Herpes, please! Get over your American movies hangover and be a Kenyan for once; who the fuck in Kenya worries about herpes? So, condom, check; room, check.
Smack that!
But remember, as one of my uncles told me, never, ever shower in a lodging or hotel after clande sex. The soap smells, idiot, and it is unlikely to be the same as what you use at home. My advice is, use a lot of damp tissue paper to clean your penis and makendes. Then jump into the shower as soon as you get home. I mean even if your girlfriend or wife is up, it is not like she meets you at the door and gives you a hug. If she does, tell her to cut that crap.. that shit is too mzungu, and the consequences are emasculating. The ideal situation, though it works for only those with cars, is too keep an extra bottle of the deodorant you use in the car. There is no reason for the girlfriend or wife to see it, unless she is looking in which case she needs, like the girlfriend/ wife that answers your phone, to be replaced.
The one thing, though, that you are never to forget is that you are human. You can make mistakes. Here is what happened to my uncle referred above. He was drinking as usual and hoping to end the night as always with a clande in a lodgo. Naturally, by the time he was goading the clande upstairs with his elongated appendage, he had had too much to drink. So he entered the room, hit it drunkenly, and got dressed.
My uncle got into his car and engaged the autopilot. The car, as it does every night, found its way home. Once there, he banged on the door until my aunt let him in and staggered into the bathroom. What happened next is as clear to him as the mind of a drunk idiot. The last thing he remembers is seeing a condom on his now flaccid penis. Maybe because the last woman he had seen was his wife, the lone brain cell left standing told him that he had just had sex with her. He dropped the condom into the toilet bowl, pissed and obnoxious as hell, walked into the bedroom and slumped into bed.
He woke up the next morning to the yells and curses of a mad woman. The cobwebs in his eyes cleared immediately he saw that that woman was his wife and there was a used condom dangling from the edge of the kitchen knife she was holding. In their ten years of marriage, they had never used a condom.
I lack the luxury of engaging in such an ordered life. I know no routine beyond trying to exist, one day at a time. I do not have a wife, a steady girlfriend or a live in girlfriend, unlike most of the guys of my age and acquaintance. That allows me a moment of self-righteous indignation at their promiscuous ways.
Your average Kenyan guy cheats on his partner. Incorrigibly so the anthropologist might be tempted to opine that men cheating is culturally acceptable in this society. I do not know that that is true or not but I know it is in my observed experience. (Note that I am not convinced there is such a thing as 'Kenyan' culture and so every time I say Kenyan, let it be assumed that the word is in quotes. So all of you who do not cheat in your relationships and those of you who believe that they are not cheated on, please leave me alone, I am not talking about you and your partners).
The young urban professionals that I know have, consciously or unconsciously grown up into their fathers. They wake up and go to work every weekday morning. In the evening they report to the local bar, or more likely, especially for the better paid lot, a trendy bar downtown or in either Westlands or Kilimani. They have a couple of beers, discuss work and who is sleeping with who and maybe chat up and exchange business cards with the the skirt suited girls in the next table. Though these guys will flirt with the waitresses, unlike their fathers, they are unlikely to end up sleeping with them. Aside from the women they will occasionally pick up in strip bars, Koinange Street and Florida clubs, and pay to have sex with, Kenyan yuppies will make an effort of having sex within their class. But it has to remain clear that the more licentious among them will still end up in bars like Rezorous and Tropez during the weekend intent on picking university, college and even high school girls for one night stands.
That is what Friday night is for. Boys, Booze and Babes. Most people work on Saturday morning so the girlfriends will be content with a Java coffee on Friday evening and maybe a quick drink at Tamasha or Bacchus leaving the boys to their own devices.
Hello Chips Funga!
Now chips funga and whores raise one problem for those guys who are married or living with their girlfriends: where to shag them. Forest Lodge on Forest Road, is a good option. I mean, if you just want to be in and out and do not insist on clean bedsheets, then that there is your Vegas: what happens there, stays there, as they say. As for the Herpes, please! Get over your American movies hangover and be a Kenyan for once; who the fuck in Kenya worries about herpes? So, condom, check; room, check.
Smack that!
But remember, as one of my uncles told me, never, ever shower in a lodging or hotel after clande sex. The soap smells, idiot, and it is unlikely to be the same as what you use at home. My advice is, use a lot of damp tissue paper to clean your penis and makendes. Then jump into the shower as soon as you get home. I mean even if your girlfriend or wife is up, it is not like she meets you at the door and gives you a hug. If she does, tell her to cut that crap.. that shit is too mzungu, and the consequences are emasculating. The ideal situation, though it works for only those with cars, is too keep an extra bottle of the deodorant you use in the car. There is no reason for the girlfriend or wife to see it, unless she is looking in which case she needs, like the girlfriend/ wife that answers your phone, to be replaced.
The one thing, though, that you are never to forget is that you are human. You can make mistakes. Here is what happened to my uncle referred above. He was drinking as usual and hoping to end the night as always with a clande in a lodgo. Naturally, by the time he was goading the clande upstairs with his elongated appendage, he had had too much to drink. So he entered the room, hit it drunkenly, and got dressed.
My uncle got into his car and engaged the autopilot. The car, as it does every night, found its way home. Once there, he banged on the door until my aunt let him in and staggered into the bathroom. What happened next is as clear to him as the mind of a drunk idiot. The last thing he remembers is seeing a condom on his now flaccid penis. Maybe because the last woman he had seen was his wife, the lone brain cell left standing told him that he had just had sex with her. He dropped the condom into the toilet bowl, pissed and obnoxious as hell, walked into the bedroom and slumped into bed.
He woke up the next morning to the yells and curses of a mad woman. The cobwebs in his eyes cleared immediately he saw that that woman was his wife and there was a used condom dangling from the edge of the kitchen knife she was holding. In their ten years of marriage, they had never used a condom.
Wednesday, September 02, 2009
WHY I DO NOT READ MY OWN BLOG
Let us get this straight, I generally, do not read blogs. I used to until I realised that the blogosphere panders to two distinct pathologies: Voyeurism and Exhibitionism. It is a totally symbiotic relationship with bloggers intent at showing off, what they imagine to be, their incredibly exciting lives and their readers so dead set on hearing about it.
Blogs are like porno with bloggers as performers and their readers as goggle-eyed watchers. Bloggers are the wraiths of human experience's equivalent of a bigger penis. They are the kids with all the cool toys, having all the fun. Readers of blogs are the everyday folk who cannot experience life unless it is processed and canned. Sometimes, they even need it garnished with a slice of demographics. Bloggers blog and porn stars perform while their audiences can only hope to live vicariously through them.
This of course I present hypothetically, whereby in the absence of any scientifically derived data that I know of to support my claim, you can proceed to call me another idiot with a blog. Furthermore, I have to make it clear that, though the fact that I keep a blog suggests it, I am not trying to mark myself out as one of the well endowed.... with exciting lives, silly! (But I sure have lived an exciting life, thank you for asking). All I am saying is that I often have more important things to do with my limited internet access other than read blogs. Yes, downloading porn ranks high up amongst the useful things I do online, probably right at the top, but there are other things that, just because I cannot pin them down, doesn't mean they do not exist.
There are those rare moments, though, when I read blogs. In times like those, I will read anything and it doesn't necessary have to sound like Inside Karen Lucas, Lolita Goes to Brazil, Blacks on Blondes or any such thing. (Well, Lolita Gang Bang is a top Keyword search of mine with Blacks on Blondes as a close second but that only for video and not text).
What I do not read though is my own blog. God, only narcissists do that! Yes, I am a narcissist but not to the point of absurdity. Narcissism is a virtue greatly tainted, nay, desecrated by the kind of person that reads their own blog. That kind of being (beast, suggested) is right at the bottom of the human food chain. (I mean in terms of social graces, of course, and not privilege in which case I will consider myself as having it worse than even someone who is black, female and Muslim).
The only type of person that can be considered lower than the kind that read their own blogs is one who updates his/ her Facebook status and then 'Likes' it. Are you for real? But at least, in my reckoning, these kinds of people are merely socially deviant. There is worse. The lowest of the low. Down and out sociopaths. Those who to term deviant is to soil other otherwise fulfilling actions, such as the occasional indulgence in psychedelic substances, that are generally referred to as deviant. These: people who update their Twitter six times an hour. With inane details of their personal lives. Yes, Twitter exists to answer the question, What are you doing?, but details of your ablution? No way!
@potash: WAITIN For BathTUb to Fill UP
Dude, how about: Get a life, PERVERT! And a girlfriend while you are at it. Honestly, unless you are a Twitter god like Ashton Kushter, no one really interested in even six updates in one day from your private life. And it is fine, if your fifty or so followers are in acceptance of their Voyeur selves, but to constantly remind them is an insult.
Hmmm... I have run out of miraa and I am terribly antsy so I will have to go. But you know you can catch my peep-show on Twitter
Blogs are like porno with bloggers as performers and their readers as goggle-eyed watchers. Bloggers are the wraiths of human experience's equivalent of a bigger penis. They are the kids with all the cool toys, having all the fun. Readers of blogs are the everyday folk who cannot experience life unless it is processed and canned. Sometimes, they even need it garnished with a slice of demographics. Bloggers blog and porn stars perform while their audiences can only hope to live vicariously through them.
This of course I present hypothetically, whereby in the absence of any scientifically derived data that I know of to support my claim, you can proceed to call me another idiot with a blog. Furthermore, I have to make it clear that, though the fact that I keep a blog suggests it, I am not trying to mark myself out as one of the well endowed.... with exciting lives, silly! (But I sure have lived an exciting life, thank you for asking). All I am saying is that I often have more important things to do with my limited internet access other than read blogs. Yes, downloading porn ranks high up amongst the useful things I do online, probably right at the top, but there are other things that, just because I cannot pin them down, doesn't mean they do not exist.
There are those rare moments, though, when I read blogs. In times like those, I will read anything and it doesn't necessary have to sound like Inside Karen Lucas, Lolita Goes to Brazil, Blacks on Blondes or any such thing. (Well, Lolita Gang Bang is a top Keyword search of mine with Blacks on Blondes as a close second but that only for video and not text).
What I do not read though is my own blog. God, only narcissists do that! Yes, I am a narcissist but not to the point of absurdity. Narcissism is a virtue greatly tainted, nay, desecrated by the kind of person that reads their own blog. That kind of being (beast, suggested) is right at the bottom of the human food chain. (I mean in terms of social graces, of course, and not privilege in which case I will consider myself as having it worse than even someone who is black, female and Muslim).
The only type of person that can be considered lower than the kind that read their own blogs is one who updates his/ her Facebook status and then 'Likes' it. Are you for real? But at least, in my reckoning, these kinds of people are merely socially deviant. There is worse. The lowest of the low. Down and out sociopaths. Those who to term deviant is to soil other otherwise fulfilling actions, such as the occasional indulgence in psychedelic substances, that are generally referred to as deviant. These: people who update their Twitter six times an hour. With inane details of their personal lives. Yes, Twitter exists to answer the question, What are you doing?, but details of your ablution? No way!
@potash: WAITIN For BathTUb to Fill UP
Dude, how about: Get a life, PERVERT! And a girlfriend while you are at it. Honestly, unless you are a Twitter god like Ashton Kushter, no one really interested in even six updates in one day from your private life. And it is fine, if your fifty or so followers are in acceptance of their Voyeur selves, but to constantly remind them is an insult.
Hmmm... I have run out of miraa and I am terribly antsy so I will have to go. But you know you can catch my peep-show on Twitter
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