One cardinal rule, broken again and again even by old hands who should know better, is to never chew miraa alone. Miraa is generally considered a mild stimulant but, as with all drugs, threshold levels vary from one individual to the next and so does the intensity of the physiological and psychological effects. Also important with miraa is that because it is consumed in its natural state, with absolutely no laboratory processing, determining the potency of the product is still much of a fluke even for the self-professed connoiseur.
The active ingredients in miraa, Cathine and Cathinone, are ingested through chewing of fresh twigs and leaves of the Catha Edulis plant. These twigs and leaves are harvested all year round and, naturally, the crop from the dry season is bound to vary in potency and ease of consumption from that of the rainy as well as that of the cold season. The geographical location, age of the plant, the nature and extent of the plant husbandry, the lack of or the existence of inter-crops (and the nature of these crops) among other things are all conditions likely to mildly-to-significantly alter the potency of the product.
The unpredictable nature of miraa though has been demonstrated to me though by the observation of variance between what its chemistry says and what I have seen in real life. The most active ingredient in miraa, Cathinone is believed to decompose within forty eight hours after harvesting. This is to say, and all effort is made to ensure that, the product has to be delivered to the consumer long before the end of this period. Chemistry aside, everyone swears by fresh miraa and your supplier goes to great lengths to convince you that his stock was plucked and delivered on that same day. Yet, I have sat, chewing with a bunch of four other people who got mighty high even though they were chewing miraa that was at the very least, two days older than mine. Also, I have to admit that one of the very few times that I have had a head-rushing kind of miraa high, a feeling I can only occasionally induce with the smoking of the cheap, unfiltered Rooster cigarettes, was when I was chewing stock that had lain on my floor for at least five days. This days-old miraa, referred to as kilalo in allusion to its state of having ‘slept over’, seems quite as potent, albeit a little rough on the palate, as the fresh pick.
And reverting to the idea of solo chewing… I for one spend long hours chewing alone. Usually, I am seated in the same position reading or, as in the case now, writing. I cannot for a fact say that it enhances my productivity but the down time occasioned by post-chewing lethargy is significant. Then of course there is the anorectic effect which when coupled with the sore mouth makes eating a decent meal- assuming such can be found- quite a chore.
Maybe, because my mind is constantly focused on the reading and writing, at times even when chewing in a group or the fact that miraa affects me in a different way- I do not become hyperactive- I have not experienced certain things that many others have reported to me. It is common, for instance, for many people to get home while still chewing and clean their houses inside out. A story is also told at my regular chewing base of this guy who was chewing all alone in his house at night when he started to feel all sweaty and dehydrated. He got up and went to the corner of his bed-sit where a pack of jerry cans stood, Nairobi style. He picked one, took a massive swig from it and poured the rest on himself. It is the burning sensation in his mouth and the distinctive odour of paraffin that quickly enveloped him that brought him to his wits and sent him gagging into the shared toilet outside.
Of course the veracity of most of the stories you hear in the course of chewing, especially those from second hand sources and those that you hear different versions of in different chewing bases is impossible to ascertain. But attempts to poke holes in them are not only silly but bad form because story-telling is the Big G that binds the takhzin. If you have to take them any other way but as truth, then it must be as plausible.
The next story though, told to me last night is straight out of the mouth of a horse of my acquaintance. A few years back, my boy Ngure, used to chew out on Kirichwa Road in Kilimani. One night, at about two a.m. he decided to drive to his house, and as he had a bunch of sticks left, chew on his balcony for about another hour, screw his wife and then sleep. As he was driving, he started to hear this persistent humming sound and became convinced that he had a puncture. So with the one-track-mindedness that miraa induces he stopped the car, right there in the middle of the road at that ungodly hour. He stepped out of his car and inspected every single tyre, twice. Nothing. Vexed, he stepped back into the car and only then realised that what he had thought was a humming sound was actually his car’s stereo. Laughing loudly at himself, he set about lighting himself a cigarette and then as he was pushing his gear into drive, realised that he was parked on a bridge.
He was in Kikuyu, headed out of Nairobi in the opposite direction of his Langata house.
Friday, October 02, 2009
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
LETTER TO THE GREAT AND THE DEAD
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
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
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
Saturday, August 29, 2009
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...
“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...
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
TAKHZIN DIARIES
“Warya! Warya! Saidia mate/” Brother, brother, lend me your saliva.
That is yet another punchline from a miraa chewer's oeuvre. The best part of chewing miraa/ khat, I have realised, is not the drug's high but the camaraderie in the process of getting there.
I have hang out in numerous drug dens. The quest for the ideal poison for me to write to has taken me through myriad journeys into intoxification. I have journeyed, variously, as a participant, an observer, a participant observer or even, with alcohol and nicotine, as inveterate consumer. Many substances I have become acquainted with; many delusional trips I have taken with them, but none surpasses miraa.
My recent adventures into the, largely indeterminate world of the miraa high demands an entire series of its own on this blog, but before I can take you there I have to tell you the 'lend me your saliva story'.
For those who might not know, part of the miraa chewing experience, takhzin, involves the telling and retelling of moments of highness that soon take on an aura of urban legend about them as chewers trade them from one chewing base to the next. So this version of the story is as it was told to me at my regular base and there is no guarantee that it is an accurate rendition or even that I will retell it in this same way the next time I chew.
The story goes something like this: A Somali guy has been hired to drive a lorry from Kisumu to Mombasa. As is the custom with a significant number of long-distance drivers on Kenyan roads, the fellow, who we shall call Hassan, is an incorrigible miraa chewer. So he grabs his three Kilos and tucks them on the seat between his legs. He fills one of those plastic Coke bottles with water from a nearby sink and tucks it in a compartment in the door on the driver's side of the cab. He throws a few bags of roasted groundnuts and some of cloves onto the dashboard and he is now good to go. He begins to chew on a few sticks as the engine idles, then drives of.
The thing with chewing miraa is that it dehydrates you: your mouth gets progressively drier and your lips begin to crack. That explains why most miraa chewers need to keep sipping on something. Ironically, because most people use sugary soft drinks, coffee or alcohol, their dehydration increases and their lips crack some more. To deal with that, most people apply petroleum jelly on their lips.
Some people, on the other hand, use cooking oil or whatever oily substance that is easily at hand. For Hassan, all he had was brake fluid.
So Hassan was driving. Hassan was chewing. Hassan was getting high. High. Higher. Highest. Every time he felt as though his lips were too dry, he dipped his finger into a can of brake fluid and smeared some of it on his lips.
Having got exceedingly high, Hassan begun to imagine that he had a puncture. So he pushed the lorry easily until he got to Nakuru where he pulled into a service station.
Hassan stepped out of the lorry and checked out all his tyres. They all looked fine. But he was convinced he had a meddling tear on the right rear wheel. The best way to prove it, as he knew, was to apply a bit of saliva on the tear and wait. If bubbles begun to show, then he would be certain that he had a puncture.
So he lunged a finger into his mouth. Hassan attempted to raise a mighty gob of spit from his mouth. Nothing happened.
Hassan hacked. Nothing happened.
Irritated, Hassan begun to yell at one of the station's attendants, “Warya! Warya! Saidia na mate...”
That is yet another punchline from a miraa chewer's oeuvre. The best part of chewing miraa/ khat, I have realised, is not the drug's high but the camaraderie in the process of getting there.
I have hang out in numerous drug dens. The quest for the ideal poison for me to write to has taken me through myriad journeys into intoxification. I have journeyed, variously, as a participant, an observer, a participant observer or even, with alcohol and nicotine, as inveterate consumer. Many substances I have become acquainted with; many delusional trips I have taken with them, but none surpasses miraa.
My recent adventures into the, largely indeterminate world of the miraa high demands an entire series of its own on this blog, but before I can take you there I have to tell you the 'lend me your saliva story'.
For those who might not know, part of the miraa chewing experience, takhzin, involves the telling and retelling of moments of highness that soon take on an aura of urban legend about them as chewers trade them from one chewing base to the next. So this version of the story is as it was told to me at my regular base and there is no guarantee that it is an accurate rendition or even that I will retell it in this same way the next time I chew.
The story goes something like this: A Somali guy has been hired to drive a lorry from Kisumu to Mombasa. As is the custom with a significant number of long-distance drivers on Kenyan roads, the fellow, who we shall call Hassan, is an incorrigible miraa chewer. So he grabs his three Kilos and tucks them on the seat between his legs. He fills one of those plastic Coke bottles with water from a nearby sink and tucks it in a compartment in the door on the driver's side of the cab. He throws a few bags of roasted groundnuts and some of cloves onto the dashboard and he is now good to go. He begins to chew on a few sticks as the engine idles, then drives of.
The thing with chewing miraa is that it dehydrates you: your mouth gets progressively drier and your lips begin to crack. That explains why most miraa chewers need to keep sipping on something. Ironically, because most people use sugary soft drinks, coffee or alcohol, their dehydration increases and their lips crack some more. To deal with that, most people apply petroleum jelly on their lips.
Some people, on the other hand, use cooking oil or whatever oily substance that is easily at hand. For Hassan, all he had was brake fluid.
So Hassan was driving. Hassan was chewing. Hassan was getting high. High. Higher. Highest. Every time he felt as though his lips were too dry, he dipped his finger into a can of brake fluid and smeared some of it on his lips.
Having got exceedingly high, Hassan begun to imagine that he had a puncture. So he pushed the lorry easily until he got to Nakuru where he pulled into a service station.
Hassan stepped out of the lorry and checked out all his tyres. They all looked fine. But he was convinced he had a meddling tear on the right rear wheel. The best way to prove it, as he knew, was to apply a bit of saliva on the tear and wait. If bubbles begun to show, then he would be certain that he had a puncture.
So he lunged a finger into his mouth. Hassan attempted to raise a mighty gob of spit from his mouth. Nothing happened.
Hassan hacked. Nothing happened.
Irritated, Hassan begun to yell at one of the station's attendants, “Warya! Warya! Saidia na mate...”
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
ON THE WAGALLA MASSACRE OF 1984
I spent the entire afternoon in conversation with a friend I have not seen in over 12 years. S. Abdi Sheikh, his name is, has been quite busy raising a family and running a couple of businesses. Most important of all he has been writing. Most recently, and this being the particular reason I sought him out, he has published a book that examines the events surrounding yet another horrendous moment in Kenyan history, the Wagalla massacre of 1984.
I will let the blurb from the book, Blood on the Runway: The Wagalla Massacre of 1984 ,speak for itself:
“In February 1984, Kenyan security forces rounded up and detained over 5,000 men from the Degodia clan of the Somali tribe, confined them at the Wagalla airstrip, stripped them naked and held them without food and water for four days. Blood on the Runway is the story of what happened and over 20 years of the ongoing struggle for the justice for the victims and survivors.
The Wagalla massacre story has every bit of a horror movie; blood and scattered brains, severed limbs, rotting flesh and mass graves.
The story of Wagalla is filled with intrigue. There is a conspiracy at every turn and nothing seems what it is. There was a master plan that was drawn up and implemented; it failed at the last minute; what was thought as an easy job of slaughtering 'sheep' became a nightmare. The 'sheep' scattered and bleated loudly, waking up the nearby villagers. Hiding the feast in the bushes became the only hope for the hunter. But scavengers had already smelled the blood and were turning every corpse around. The mortally wounded hid in the bushes only to come out at night and die in the open fields. For a period, the confusion created confounded even its creators. As the drama unfolded something strange began to happen. The world turned around and saw the sorry state of Wagalla. The story could not be killed. “
There is a time and space for commentary, but for me, this is not it. I have a book to read. For those that might want to engage with this issue, and there are legion it can be hoped, please go out and get a copy from your preferred Nairobi bookshop. For a briefer analysis of the issues and events surrounding the Wagalla massacre, KenyaImagine has this week published an opinion piece by the same author.
I will let the blurb from the book, Blood on the Runway: The Wagalla Massacre of 1984 ,speak for itself:
“In February 1984, Kenyan security forces rounded up and detained over 5,000 men from the Degodia clan of the Somali tribe, confined them at the Wagalla airstrip, stripped them naked and held them without food and water for four days. Blood on the Runway is the story of what happened and over 20 years of the ongoing struggle for the justice for the victims and survivors.
The Wagalla massacre story has every bit of a horror movie; blood and scattered brains, severed limbs, rotting flesh and mass graves.
The story of Wagalla is filled with intrigue. There is a conspiracy at every turn and nothing seems what it is. There was a master plan that was drawn up and implemented; it failed at the last minute; what was thought as an easy job of slaughtering 'sheep' became a nightmare. The 'sheep' scattered and bleated loudly, waking up the nearby villagers. Hiding the feast in the bushes became the only hope for the hunter. But scavengers had already smelled the blood and were turning every corpse around. The mortally wounded hid in the bushes only to come out at night and die in the open fields. For a period, the confusion created confounded even its creators. As the drama unfolded something strange began to happen. The world turned around and saw the sorry state of Wagalla. The story could not be killed. “
There is a time and space for commentary, but for me, this is not it. I have a book to read. For those that might want to engage with this issue, and there are legion it can be hoped, please go out and get a copy from your preferred Nairobi bookshop. For a briefer analysis of the issues and events surrounding the Wagalla massacre, KenyaImagine has this week published an opinion piece by the same author.
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
WHEN I WAS HIGH...
This is a vignette in search of a writer, a tableau in search of an artist.
Every tooth hurts. Usually I have cavities... now they feel like something the scope of a moon landing vehicle picked up.
The neighbour is playing Stevie Wonder's Fantasy Paradise and I am humming along. No, truth is I am mouthing the words from the hook of Coolio's Gangsta's Paradise. In my fantasy Island I am calling that a fuck you to that old neighbour for being so old... me, I came of age in the nineties.
Now the old boy is playing Otis Redding. Wait a minute, how do I even know this music? I think I am a time traveller.
I just burnt myself with the Rooster cigarette I was smoking. Damn it is stuck to my finger. The middle finger. Now who is getting a fuck you?
*X&^... Wait! The burning cigarette has fallen on the mattress. Looks like it will cause a fire. And maybe these notes will survive. And then I will find fame, lauded as a latter day Beatnik. Nairobi's first and last Situationist.
Posthumously...
Some louts just need to die to make a statement.
I need to pee...
Guess what, you know thing they say that God takes care of drunks and children, watch him now. He just sent me a fire extinguisher: a penis. A penis has never been put to much better use. I mean penises have been known to create life but saving one, now that is new!
“Get on the good foot...” James Brown wails. “Come on...”
But I only have one foot, or so it feels, and it is not a good one. I crash on the smouldering mattress. I am still holding a miraa stick and I continue to chew.
Every tooth hurts. Usually I have cavities... now they feel like something the scope of a moon landing vehicle picked up.
The neighbour is playing Stevie Wonder's Fantasy Paradise and I am humming along. No, truth is I am mouthing the words from the hook of Coolio's Gangsta's Paradise. In my fantasy Island I am calling that a fuck you to that old neighbour for being so old... me, I came of age in the nineties.
Now the old boy is playing Otis Redding. Wait a minute, how do I even know this music? I think I am a time traveller.
I just burnt myself with the Rooster cigarette I was smoking. Damn it is stuck to my finger. The middle finger. Now who is getting a fuck you?
*X&^... Wait! The burning cigarette has fallen on the mattress. Looks like it will cause a fire. And maybe these notes will survive. And then I will find fame, lauded as a latter day Beatnik. Nairobi's first and last Situationist.
Posthumously...
Some louts just need to die to make a statement.
I need to pee...
Guess what, you know thing they say that God takes care of drunks and children, watch him now. He just sent me a fire extinguisher: a penis. A penis has never been put to much better use. I mean penises have been known to create life but saving one, now that is new!
“Get on the good foot...” James Brown wails. “Come on...”
But I only have one foot, or so it feels, and it is not a good one. I crash on the smouldering mattress. I am still holding a miraa stick and I continue to chew.
Tuesday, August 04, 2009
Happy Birthday Barack
Dear Barack,
I do not know you but I Know of you. I have heard a helluva lot about you. The most important thing I have heard is that you are, currently, president of the United States of America. That, if what I am told is true, makes you the most powerful man in the world. (In the big world out there, of course, and not my little one here where the most powerful man in the world is the Administration Policeman with a gun on my head and a paw in my pocket).
Now here is the deal, I live in a small corner, of the big Island of Africa, called Kenya. That Kenya where, the internets keep reminding me, your roots run deep. Good for you. Good for you, I sometimes think, that all you have here is roots because most of us that have more than roots have a lot less than you do. Because you have the world beneath your feet and we don't. We have roots, trunk and head in Kenya (and maybe because of that)we cannot see the world for all the shit that is above us. That does not mean that I am not proud of Kenya, just not a fan of myriad of its everyday realities.
But why am I wasting rare and expensive internet time to write you? It is simply because today is your birthday and I was once told that birthdays are important dates in the West. There seems to be a problem though, some people think that you were not born in America but here in Kenya. That maybe a big deal, I do not know, but beyond suggesting to me that today might not even be your birthday, that matter does not change my life. You only affect my life as much as the next US president. And as long as you remain in office, then it is the great influence that you will continue to wield over the entire world that will always have an impact on my life and not the small matters of your place of birth, your wife's favourite colour or the fact that your grandfather and mine were kicked by the same pair of boots.
I do not know if I am making it clear enough but the name of the place you were born is as valuable to me as knowing whether or not Mwai Kibaki has a second wife. Well, I have lied there because if Kibaki has a second wife, then I want to know whether or not I am paying her rent even though I do not have a house of my own... But you get my general point, Barry, no?
Anyway, I really have to go, and meantime you do your thing son and lets hope that all the wacko people in the internets can go back to providing me with what I follow them for: Good Porno.
Happy Birthday Barrack (alleged or else)
Potash
I do not know you but I Know of you. I have heard a helluva lot about you. The most important thing I have heard is that you are, currently, president of the United States of America. That, if what I am told is true, makes you the most powerful man in the world. (In the big world out there, of course, and not my little one here where the most powerful man in the world is the Administration Policeman with a gun on my head and a paw in my pocket).
Now here is the deal, I live in a small corner, of the big Island of Africa, called Kenya. That Kenya where, the internets keep reminding me, your roots run deep. Good for you. Good for you, I sometimes think, that all you have here is roots because most of us that have more than roots have a lot less than you do. Because you have the world beneath your feet and we don't. We have roots, trunk and head in Kenya (and maybe because of that)we cannot see the world for all the shit that is above us. That does not mean that I am not proud of Kenya, just not a fan of myriad of its everyday realities.
But why am I wasting rare and expensive internet time to write you? It is simply because today is your birthday and I was once told that birthdays are important dates in the West. There seems to be a problem though, some people think that you were not born in America but here in Kenya. That maybe a big deal, I do not know, but beyond suggesting to me that today might not even be your birthday, that matter does not change my life. You only affect my life as much as the next US president. And as long as you remain in office, then it is the great influence that you will continue to wield over the entire world that will always have an impact on my life and not the small matters of your place of birth, your wife's favourite colour or the fact that your grandfather and mine were kicked by the same pair of boots.
I do not know if I am making it clear enough but the name of the place you were born is as valuable to me as knowing whether or not Mwai Kibaki has a second wife. Well, I have lied there because if Kibaki has a second wife, then I want to know whether or not I am paying her rent even though I do not have a house of my own... But you get my general point, Barry, no?
Anyway, I really have to go, and meantime you do your thing son and lets hope that all the wacko people in the internets can go back to providing me with what I follow them for: Good Porno.
Happy Birthday Barrack (alleged or else)
Potash
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
KWANI TRUST SHORT STORY COMPETITION
Following the launch of 5 new titles last week, Kwani Trust is pleased to announce the launch of a short story competition with a 1st prize of Ksh 100000, Ksh 75000 for the 2nd prize, and Ksh 50000 for the third prize, as well as publication in the upcoming issue of Kwani? 06. [They] are seeking stories on the theme, The Kenya I live in, - a story now being told by a new generation, a new imagination, new narratives and expression. Kindly circulate.
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Tuesday, July 28, 2009
JR: From Kibera to Sotheby’s
A guest blogger post curled from a very rough draft Kibera Kitsch & other Tales of Art for Social Exclusion by Njoroge Matathia.
ABSTRACT
If Kibera were a cultural icon, then it is one that enters the global cultural economy certified Kitsch. And Kibera is a cultural icon, the template for an angst-filled other; a case study in the semiotics of African deprivation. Kibera as pallette; Kibera as theme; Kibera as setting, Kibera globalised through (faux) artistic expression. Brand Kibera: proven success in selling everything from soapstone carvings to box office movies and installation art. All fair trade of course. No Africans were violated in the production of these artworks!
Really?
From Kibera to Sotheby’s
On Saturday, I watched Christine Wambui’s Kibera Smiles Again. Screened at yet another one of the Urban Mirror shows hosted by the Goethe Institute, Nairobi, the documentary relives French artist JR’s work in Kibera. JR’s oeuvre is not vast, but it is, artistically, impressive. And at 25, and all of a ’street artist’ having found global critical acclaim and significant financial success is in itself no mean feat.
Friday, January 31st, 2009 marked the unveiling of the Nairobi leg of JR’s 28 Millimeters public art installation project in the city’s Kibera slum. As seen, on the documentary, JR and his assistants had stretched large black and white prints of his photographs over roofs and embankments. The photographs were of parts of the faces of a couple of local women. In one wow-inducing scene, as a train trudges past, above the shanty-line, the images pasted on the train align with those on the ground below to form three complete faces.
The Sunday Times has lauded JR as “the hippest street artist since Banksy”, and the parallels are evident. At least if the prices JR’s prints fetch is what you have in mind. And if I were to quote Banksy in his Wall and Piece (2005): “When you go to an art gallery you are simply a tourist looking at the trophy cabinet of a few millionaires.”, then watching that documentary told me less about Kibera and more about the living rooms of those who have paid as much as £26,250 for JR’s work.
But the wealthy buyers of Sotheby’s JR are wasted on the JR of Kibera who maintains that he uses the street so that everybody can benefit from art [so that] people who don’t go to museums and galleries can know that they do not have to pay entrance fees to these places to see art. And his art is worth paying to see, but the question that I, and the two mzungu artists I stood watching the documentary with, couldn’t get over was: why Kibera?
I was not angry from watching the documentary, I was too busy admiring his work anyway. Admiring it and thinking that Kibera as a setting was an exceedingly gratuitous touch to something inherently appealing. Then I read about why he had chosen Kibera:
Ire rose. There are transgressions I will willingly forgive, excuse away as naivety, but condescension just wont wash with me. So pulling furtively at my eyebrows I scrolled down:
Interest in JR flew out of my window and into a battered cubicle in the lavatory section of my mind marked: African Consultants. A space I reserve for the kind of Westerner that makes one trip to some African country or other and suddenly becomes an authority on the entire continent. JR had gone further, yet, and bought the globe-trotting do-gooders maxim: All Poor People in the World are the Same. (Yes, and Bono has found the cure for Global Poverty but the G8 will not let him bottle it). But snideness aside, how this Parisian photographer had turned into both omniscient curator of his own ‘non-existent slum art’ show and Kibera’s foremost cultural anthropologist, eludes me.
[...]
ABSTRACT
If Kibera were a cultural icon, then it is one that enters the global cultural economy certified Kitsch. And Kibera is a cultural icon, the template for an angst-filled other; a case study in the semiotics of African deprivation. Kibera as pallette; Kibera as theme; Kibera as setting, Kibera globalised through (faux) artistic expression. Brand Kibera: proven success in selling everything from soapstone carvings to box office movies and installation art. All fair trade of course. No Africans were violated in the production of these artworks!
Really?
From Kibera to Sotheby’s
On Saturday, I watched Christine Wambui’s Kibera Smiles Again. Screened at yet another one of the Urban Mirror shows hosted by the Goethe Institute, Nairobi, the documentary relives French artist JR’s work in Kibera. JR’s oeuvre is not vast, but it is, artistically, impressive. And at 25, and all of a ’street artist’ having found global critical acclaim and significant financial success is in itself no mean feat.
Friday, January 31st, 2009 marked the unveiling of the Nairobi leg of JR’s 28 Millimeters public art installation project in the city’s Kibera slum. As seen, on the documentary, JR and his assistants had stretched large black and white prints of his photographs over roofs and embankments. The photographs were of parts of the faces of a couple of local women. In one wow-inducing scene, as a train trudges past, above the shanty-line, the images pasted on the train align with those on the ground below to form three complete faces.
The Sunday Times has lauded JR as “the hippest street artist since Banksy”, and the parallels are evident. At least if the prices JR’s prints fetch is what you have in mind. And if I were to quote Banksy in his Wall and Piece (2005): “When you go to an art gallery you are simply a tourist looking at the trophy cabinet of a few millionaires.”, then watching that documentary told me less about Kibera and more about the living rooms of those who have paid as much as £26,250 for JR’s work.
But the wealthy buyers of Sotheby’s JR are wasted on the JR of Kibera who maintains that he uses the street so that everybody can benefit from art [so that] people who don’t go to museums and galleries can know that they do not have to pay entrance fees to these places to see art. And his art is worth paying to see, but the question that I, and the two mzungu artists I stood watching the documentary with, couldn’t get over was: why Kibera?
I was not angry from watching the documentary, I was too busy admiring his work anyway. Admiring it and thinking that Kibera as a setting was an exceedingly gratuitous touch to something inherently appealing. Then I read about why he had chosen Kibera:
“The more you go to places like Kibera, the more you realise that the people don’t understand you,” JR states in his Times online interview, “Food is their first need. They don’t do art just for the love of art. It has to make sense. By making their roofs rainproof, what we did made sense. They loved it.”
Ire rose. There are transgressions I will willingly forgive, excuse away as naivety, but condescension just wont wash with me. So pulling furtively at my eyebrows I scrolled down:
"I see [ the planet’s poorest places] in the media,” he says. “But I want to see them with my own eyes. You realise when you do go to these places that there is no art. My aim is to show that art can work anywhere."
Interest in JR flew out of my window and into a battered cubicle in the lavatory section of my mind marked: African Consultants. A space I reserve for the kind of Westerner that makes one trip to some African country or other and suddenly becomes an authority on the entire continent. JR had gone further, yet, and bought the globe-trotting do-gooders maxim: All Poor People in the World are the Same. (Yes, and Bono has found the cure for Global Poverty but the G8 will not let him bottle it). But snideness aside, how this Parisian photographer had turned into both omniscient curator of his own ‘non-existent slum art’ show and Kibera’s foremost cultural anthropologist, eludes me.
[...]
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
VOLUNTARY DRINKING OVERSEAS
Those who know this blog from its better days will remember a post titled Voluntary Drinking Overseas. As I have mentioned, previously that post has been professionally revised, edited and published in the Nigerian magazine Farafina. But that happened back in 1997.
Now I am pleased to inform you that my friends at the Black Campaign have not only republished it, but also made it available in PDF. That means that you can now read it online, download it and print it to read later or even (and this is highly recommended) email it to all your friends.
Alas, this might just be the thing to put in a care pack for your friend who abandoned the American dream and joined Peace Corps in West Africa. Yes that one who occasionally sends you long letters (postmarked six months previous)lamenting not so much the lack of decent coffee in her village but the fact that the only literature that comes in is USAID posters.
Download PDF
Now I am pleased to inform you that my friends at the Black Campaign have not only republished it, but also made it available in PDF. That means that you can now read it online, download it and print it to read later or even (and this is highly recommended) email it to all your friends.
Alas, this might just be the thing to put in a care pack for your friend who abandoned the American dream and joined Peace Corps in West Africa. Yes that one who occasionally sends you long letters (postmarked six months previous)lamenting not so much the lack of decent coffee in her village but the fact that the only literature that comes in is USAID posters.
Download PDF
Monday, July 20, 2009
OFF WITH THEE POET!
There is a lot of things in life that I do not get, poetry is one of them. This might come as a shock to a lot of people but not to me. People say to me: Potash you are a writer, how can you not get poetry. That is the problem right there. If it were to be assumed that I am a writer, how does that make me, by default, a good reader of every other means of artistic expression out there?
See, the thing I like to point out is that there is no lingua franca for artists. When people ask me what I write my response is: words mainly, but when I am lucky I get in a few sentences and paragraphs too. But no one asks me what I read and why, they just proceed to drag me into an engagement with their poetry. When I insist that I do not get it, they say: But, Potash you are a writer! Yes, I do write, but I write prose. It is the form that I appreciate the most. It is the structure through which I find myself most able to communicate creative ideas. I do not privilege prose, as the ultimate form of literary expression, I privilege it as the ultimate form of literary expression, for me.
Let me make a few things clear. I grew up being told, and I know it to be self evident, that the first step to being a writer is to be a reader. And a reader I am. In fact I go through alternating phases of intense reading and zero writing and intense writing and zero reading. (Zero is, of course an absolute and I baulk at such but see it here as hyperbole for illustrative purpose). As a reader, it ought to be noted that I read widely. I read everything I can get my hands on. And everything means everything, including Kenyan newspapers. The question is how often do I read Kenyan newspapers? How often do I read poetry?
The big challenge for me is the need to consume knowledge/ information and creative energies being on one hand, how to best consume these is on the other. So prose, being for me the easiest to ingest, must take an enormous amount of my time. Unfortunately, this need to consume aside, the writer part of me comes with more responsibilities than power. Being embraced by writers has made me part of a larger, global artistic and intellectual community that demands that you cannot trash it if you have not read it and therefore, once a month at most, if free internet is available and I have had a surfeit of breaking porn and trending tweets, I will skim through the most read stories in the Kenyan dailies.
Still there is horrid prose out there (and it is just not on page 1 of the Nation as my once in two years attempts at reading that blog Kumekucha have taught me) and though as a reader I am bonded to read them, as a human being, lately blessed with choice in reading material, I will often not.
And there is good poetry out there, too, I just cannot tell you if it is really good. I cannot because I do not get it. I just read it as part of my corporate social responsibility as a (fringe) player in the literary/ creative/ knowledge industry. And that responsibility ends with reading so spare me your demands for analysis.
See, the thing I like to point out is that there is no lingua franca for artists. When people ask me what I write my response is: words mainly, but when I am lucky I get in a few sentences and paragraphs too. But no one asks me what I read and why, they just proceed to drag me into an engagement with their poetry. When I insist that I do not get it, they say: But, Potash you are a writer! Yes, I do write, but I write prose. It is the form that I appreciate the most. It is the structure through which I find myself most able to communicate creative ideas. I do not privilege prose, as the ultimate form of literary expression, I privilege it as the ultimate form of literary expression, for me.
Let me make a few things clear. I grew up being told, and I know it to be self evident, that the first step to being a writer is to be a reader. And a reader I am. In fact I go through alternating phases of intense reading and zero writing and intense writing and zero reading. (Zero is, of course an absolute and I baulk at such but see it here as hyperbole for illustrative purpose). As a reader, it ought to be noted that I read widely. I read everything I can get my hands on. And everything means everything, including Kenyan newspapers. The question is how often do I read Kenyan newspapers? How often do I read poetry?
The big challenge for me is the need to consume knowledge/ information and creative energies being on one hand, how to best consume these is on the other. So prose, being for me the easiest to ingest, must take an enormous amount of my time. Unfortunately, this need to consume aside, the writer part of me comes with more responsibilities than power. Being embraced by writers has made me part of a larger, global artistic and intellectual community that demands that you cannot trash it if you have not read it and therefore, once a month at most, if free internet is available and I have had a surfeit of breaking porn and trending tweets, I will skim through the most read stories in the Kenyan dailies.
Still there is horrid prose out there (and it is just not on page 1 of the Nation as my once in two years attempts at reading that blog Kumekucha have taught me) and though as a reader I am bonded to read them, as a human being, lately blessed with choice in reading material, I will often not.
And there is good poetry out there, too, I just cannot tell you if it is really good. I cannot because I do not get it. I just read it as part of my corporate social responsibility as a (fringe) player in the literary/ creative/ knowledge industry. And that responsibility ends with reading so spare me your demands for analysis.
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Down but not out
“I am sleepless and my mind is fuzzy...” Potash 2006
I am in Kiambu. The place I return to when things are going terribly wrong. This time round I have returned to recuperate. But the way I feel, it could be as well that I have returned to die. Returning to the village, empty-handed, to die, after living la vida loca in Nairobi. This is not the way I imagined my life would end: and he rested in poverty!
I am bedridden with a particularly virulent flu. And it has held me down for over a month getting progressively worse for the last two days that I decided to come here, twiddle my thumbs and see how it pans out.
The other day some guy asked me if I have been catching some odiero action. No comment but the idea that I have caught swine flu just keeps taking me back to the days when I was a young and vital Polysexual. And now that this flu has made me sleepless, my mind fuzzy and incapable of a coherent sentence I will take you back.
In the meantime, as you enjoy the archives, I will be here hoping to feel better and look to be back to scribbling inanities here in a day or two. Mad love.
I am in Kiambu. The place I return to when things are going terribly wrong. This time round I have returned to recuperate. But the way I feel, it could be as well that I have returned to die. Returning to the village, empty-handed, to die, after living la vida loca in Nairobi. This is not the way I imagined my life would end: and he rested in poverty!
I am bedridden with a particularly virulent flu. And it has held me down for over a month getting progressively worse for the last two days that I decided to come here, twiddle my thumbs and see how it pans out.
The other day some guy asked me if I have been catching some odiero action. No comment but the idea that I have caught swine flu just keeps taking me back to the days when I was a young and vital Polysexual. And now that this flu has made me sleepless, my mind fuzzy and incapable of a coherent sentence I will take you back.
In the meantime, as you enjoy the archives, I will be here hoping to feel better and look to be back to scribbling inanities here in a day or two. Mad love.
Tuesday, July 07, 2009
TRANSITION: Off to Butterfly Blogs
Every day we are changing. I am changing. This blog is changing. Over the last couple of years this blog has taken a life of its own. Many times I have found myself wondering if this blog is relevant, nay, necessary, any more. The truth is that it is not.
I started out looking at life through the eyes of a mid twenties Kenyan guy trying to afford his next measure of alcohol. In the Kenyan blogosphere circa 2006, filled with diaspora Kenyans with too much free bandwidth and Nairobi based yuppies, A Kenyan Urban Narrative was not only a unique voice but one set to rise above the din. And it did.
Within a few months, the laudatory clapping of literary admirers in its wake, the blog catapulted me into the warm embrace of the new generation of Kenyan writers. In the circles of writers, my name was mentioned. But praise doesn't make writers. And thus, he that was hailed as the next best thing in Kenyan writing, came and went... and, alas, there is no writing to show for it all. Sad.
All this while, my style was changing, my voice, my world-view even. Most important of all, beyond the fact of being distanced from the realities that I used to write about, I stopped being angry. The truth I can never deny is that my early blogging fed off the anger drawn from not being recognised as a writer. Without the anger there was nothing to express in texts. I was, in a word, irrelevant. I was now just another Kenyan with a blog.
In between times, I was exploring opportunities for collaboration. Well, mainly, being dragged into them. And I took them. I had a couple of things republished in cool places, others I had people rework them into stronger pieces through their more trained voices. And, because I now had access to publishers, I started on The Book. The Book that has long stalled and whose characters sound like pieces of wood.
In the end, I was tending towards the realisation that a blogger is the best I could ever hope to be. A couple of offers were on the table. There were still people willing to pay for my lazy writing and occasional musings. Most important of all, I was broke and contrary to popular belief, writing does not pay as well roundabout these shores. Which is to say that three or so years of passing for a 'celebrated writer' had not translated into money. I was as poor as when I started out but at least I knew I had the chance to buy my alcohol easier by selling words rather than as a grave digger or such thing.
Finally, I thinned everything down to two offers: The Black Campaign and Butterfly Blogs. Evidently, I have chosen Butterfly Blogs because at least they put in a cash incentive of some sort, in both the short and long term. As for the Black Campaign, well they are the biggest winners because through a deal with N.M they have full rights to more of my work than I imagined existed. Once again that fucker mercenary writer N.M, who cannot even write to save his life, has played me. And all I have left is this new problogging deal deal with Butterfly. A lifeline if ever there was one. A chance to go back to being relevant.
Y'all will be hearing from me, here, at least twice a week. Just because the contract says so.
I started out looking at life through the eyes of a mid twenties Kenyan guy trying to afford his next measure of alcohol. In the Kenyan blogosphere circa 2006, filled with diaspora Kenyans with too much free bandwidth and Nairobi based yuppies, A Kenyan Urban Narrative was not only a unique voice but one set to rise above the din. And it did.
Within a few months, the laudatory clapping of literary admirers in its wake, the blog catapulted me into the warm embrace of the new generation of Kenyan writers. In the circles of writers, my name was mentioned. But praise doesn't make writers. And thus, he that was hailed as the next best thing in Kenyan writing, came and went... and, alas, there is no writing to show for it all. Sad.
All this while, my style was changing, my voice, my world-view even. Most important of all, beyond the fact of being distanced from the realities that I used to write about, I stopped being angry. The truth I can never deny is that my early blogging fed off the anger drawn from not being recognised as a writer. Without the anger there was nothing to express in texts. I was, in a word, irrelevant. I was now just another Kenyan with a blog.
In between times, I was exploring opportunities for collaboration. Well, mainly, being dragged into them. And I took them. I had a couple of things republished in cool places, others I had people rework them into stronger pieces through their more trained voices. And, because I now had access to publishers, I started on The Book. The Book that has long stalled and whose characters sound like pieces of wood.
In the end, I was tending towards the realisation that a blogger is the best I could ever hope to be. A couple of offers were on the table. There were still people willing to pay for my lazy writing and occasional musings. Most important of all, I was broke and contrary to popular belief, writing does not pay as well roundabout these shores. Which is to say that three or so years of passing for a 'celebrated writer' had not translated into money. I was as poor as when I started out but at least I knew I had the chance to buy my alcohol easier by selling words rather than as a grave digger or such thing.
Finally, I thinned everything down to two offers: The Black Campaign and Butterfly Blogs. Evidently, I have chosen Butterfly Blogs because at least they put in a cash incentive of some sort, in both the short and long term. As for the Black Campaign, well they are the biggest winners because through a deal with N.M they have full rights to more of my work than I imagined existed. Once again that fucker mercenary writer N.M, who cannot even write to save his life, has played me. And all I have left is this new problogging deal deal with Butterfly. A lifeline if ever there was one. A chance to go back to being relevant.
Y'all will be hearing from me, here, at least twice a week. Just because the contract says so.
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