Michael

Of late it has come to my attention that the hugest pitfall since the beginning of human history was in the idea that we somehow could bestow the power to lead on one of our kind and expect he or she not to become lost by it. We see it all over the television, the ideal way to handle power with grace, demeanour and justice. We all go tutt tutt and shake our heads when we see His Mugabeness on television and tell our children when you grow up you should not be a leader like that. I agree they shouldn’t. No one should. In fact I think we should abolish this whole thing of leadership and being led. It stems from our inner gut instinct to have someone to put the blame on.

And it is getting tiring. In countries where the free press has been brought up without a harness the leaders are not even free to have a meal without everyone speculating on how it will affect the policy changes of the country in relation to some other country whose name ends in –stan. We seem to have a knack for throwing things on the shoulders of leaders and leaders, because they have been taught so, take this burden on. Some with grace some without grace but they take it on none the less and carry the pressures of a thousand people on their shoulders and these same thousand people do not want their leaders to relieve their stress say with sex, alcohol or even to go duck hunting with their friend Cheney. No, it seems more and more that the leaders are meant to be someone there that is to be blamed for everything that has gone wrong in society.

Fuel prices are up? Blame the government. Your dog is stuck in a tree? It’s the cruddy governments fault why are there so many trees about anyway? You have no job? Of

For what it's worth their really was one. The speaker threw his plate at someone.

course it is in the government’s best interest to create some sort of employment for you, god forbid you actually get of your lazy bum and look for a means to fend for yourself. No, it can’t be because we as human beings need someone to blame. It is inherent within us, so much more so in this modern society that we have created where being wrong is a crime and making a mistake is punishable by death. In this modern day the first word a child learns to say is “mama” closely followed by “It wasn’t my fault.” Absolve yourself is the first motto of anything.

Of course it would be completely ludicrous for me to ramble on and say that shift happens, we just need to get it under ctrl. It is this non compliance that is the corner stone of capitalism. The Darwinian theory and all other things that they teach you in college while you are asleep in the back of the class. No, it would not make sense to say that we are only human and error should be accepted because that would be calling ourselves to our lower standard. That being said we let this “Naomba Serekali” attitude to go on leading our lives. We can’t keep looking to lay the blame on our leaders. That is why I am suggesting that we abolish leadership.

It is really quite simple actually. We will start at the highest and simplest level and abolish government. That will probably be simple enough. People are always complaining of how they would do better off without the lazy scum anyway. Once that is out of the way we can slowly work our way down to mid management. Of course bosses would still exist but that wouldn’t be leadership per se, just a higher pay grade and more responsibility. There would be no one to blame because there would be no one with any abstract responsibilities.

In fact I will go first and say we start with declaring presidency illegal. To be fair there is no one who could even do the country any good in that seat and maybe finally we could have Kenyans getting up in the morning and doing something for themselves, or staying in bed and knowing that the blame lies squarely on their own shoulders. Alternatively, we could legalise prostitution and open a special branch on parliament road.

I have been reading a lot of columns lately and I have decided that this stuff can’t really be as hard as it looks. I mean, all you have to do is type out a couple of, mildly, coherent words together in a sentence and then string a couple of those sentences to make a paragraph and hence forth until you have a couple hundred words which, if you know the right people, you can sell for about 10 bob a word. Do two or three of those a week averaging about 2000 words each and you can make yourself a clean sixty thousand shillings in every week for all of 5 minutes worth of work. That sounds pretty decent to me.

So I decided to give it a shot. I installed Microsoft office on my laptop, brewed myself a bad cup of coffee sat looking out the window and wore a scarf. I was sure that this would beat the job that I currently have. After looking outside the window and putting on as deep an expression that a man of my mind could muster I opened a new word document and began to type. Okay, you got me, I didn’t begin to type I kind of sat there and had a blinking competition with a relentless cursor. I had all these thoughts in my head but putting them down on paper was proving to be more difficult than I had imagined. I, however, am a man with a plan and my mother taught me always to have a plan B. So I did the one thing that I was sure would make me a brilliant writer. I put on a hat. Not any hat mind you, it was one of those beret things that I see the creative types prancing around the town in with their skinny jeans and leather jackets. I was hoping that my block wouldn’t push me al the way to wearing skinny jeans because I find those things way to tight in the nether region. Plus I prefer the skinny on those of the female gender.

Fashion, or lack of it, of the younger generation aside I was ready to be a writer now. With my thinking cap on and my, now cold, cup of bad coffee I resumed my position on the window seat (I lie I was on a pillow outside the house – I figured it can work seeing as I have NO window seat) and put on the deep. Ben Okri like, stare. Surely this timesomething would come – and something did. Only halfway through my typing did I realize that while I thought I was on a roll I was actually typing out the lyrics to “What’s My Age Again?” By Blink 182. In disgust I packed up my laptop and went back to doing things that I know how to do, watching old reruns of friends.

Surely though this writing thing can’t be as difficult as they claim? Put aside my own lack of success at it I think it is pretty simple. I mean if people like Jeremy Clarkson, who is as coherent as two ducks sitting in the middle of a whorehouse playing pin the tail on the otoscope can do it then why can’t I?  Joel Stein makes a great deal of money writing his “awesome” column where he generally rants and raves about himself and makes no headway in the process. Surely if writing is for the intelligent then you’d expect the Einsteins of this world to be the ones who are doing it, not the people who watched his shoes. That being said what more am I to expect from a couple of people who look up to Shakespeare, a man who himself couldn’t understand what he is saying, as the god of their profession?

Armed with this logic I decided to try again with similarly dismal results. Following all this and looking at my laptop I have decided that my failure at writing is due to my utter inability to wear a pair of skinny jeans, and I’m fine with that.

My boss walked into the office the other day with, what I thought, was the most ludicrous resolution the other day. Following what can only be descried as a dismal storylining session she decided that the best thing for us to do would be to go search for stories seeing as our creativity wasn’t quite getting the job done. She didn’t say that in those exact words of course the words that were used were far too crass to be used here. So, with the resolve of an army commandant, she decided that the whole team would be subject to the task of watching a little green man water the plants everyday. At least that’s what I heard but the translation that was made was that we were to read the newspaper every day.

Here is my issue though I am a man of the modern era. I get all my news via twitter and facebook I don’t see the need to buy, let alone read, an actual newspaper everyday. Last I checked there were trees dying to make those papers – Not that I’d think twice about buying a book by the way. Anyway I know who gives me free internet to post stuff like this online and hence I followed her instructions to the letter. Trolling through the online paper the other day (I still don’t see why I need to spend 50 bob on a paper when I can read it online) I found an interesting article on how we have plans to scrap 8-4-4 and replace it with a rather American version of learning. Now I am completely against this

*sigh*

Americanisation of Kenya. I mean, who do they think they are?! They come here with their fat people, KFC, DTV, HIV and other deadly acronyms and expect us to follow their very lead? That being said I am actually for this change. Or at least I was until I got to thinking about it.

Under the proposed changes the schooling system will include talent schools and the like. Now this is a good idea in concept but let us think about it. The artists in Kenya are rebels. The musicians, painters, writers, actors, spoken word artists and the like are all breaking away from societal norms to follow their passion. That in itself takes a great deal of balls and hence the numbers of people in these fields are quite small. Yet even with these small numbers the field themselves are incapable of providing for their people. What them makes us think that having an actual talent school that will be churning thousands of professional artists a year will be sustainable. I mean what will said artists eat? Where will they work? And more importantly will it mean that we will finally have a school whose uniform is a pair of skinny jeans?

The fact is although the number of people interested in the arts is growing the industry is not growing at a matching rate and that is a fact that we cannot dare ignore. Or maybe we can, after all we ARE Kenyan are we not? Another interesting thing is that the proposed system will cost Kenyans a whopping 360 Billion Shillings, otherwise known as 10 US Dollars. This amount of money is before the taxes, scandals, corruption and shopping money for whatever minister’s poodle. Where will this money come from? The taxpayer of course which means that by the time this changes are coming into play you will have so much deduced from your already too thin salary that our ATM’s will be forced to have a coin option.

Following all the changes in the country with the roads, constitution, counties, sentimentality of our president and now education it seems that our country is trying to cram a millennia of changes into the 2 minutes we have between now and 2030. We are changing everything except what really matters, the infrastructure itself. At this rate will have better roads to beg on, more boundaries to pester with, more degrees to be unemployed with and a president who bursts into tears every time someone calls out his name.

So there is a member of parliament who chose to go on hunger strike following the confirmation of the 4 most dangerous people in the country at this point in time.  This struck me as extremely funny. Not the confirmation, that is dreadfully serious and, seeing as this is a place where serious things are avoided, let me just put an end to all politics and say that I believe the Ekatrina 4 (or whatever nickname they have been given) deserve to be punished. Now that all the hullabaloo is out of the way what I found funny was the fact that one of our politicians thinks that he could go through with a hunger strike. I’m sorry what? These same men that are hiking their salaries by 20% every other year and sitting fat in parliament everyday half asleep think that they have the ability to go without food in protest.

Even further they are not in protest of anything that is worth being in protest over. I mean, I would understand if they went on strike because the size of mandazi in the August house on parliament road has reduced. I would have been a little more sympathetic if they went on protest because the Society for Protection against Cruelty for Animals had confiscated Mr, sorry, Dr Mwai’s poodle. This however must be one of the most foolish, selfish and generally stupid reasons to go on hunger strike. The man who was possible behind the killings of tens of thousands of people has been charged with just that and you decide that you want to go on hunger strike.

I mean, what is they aim of the hunger strike? What does he hope to achieve? Seriously I can’t even begin to imagine Lady Justice Ekatrina coming back out and saying “Okay, fine we did confirm Mr Freedom but seeing as a Member of Parliament in Kenya has decided that he will not be sticking any food into his overpaid palette we have since decided to review our decision and let said suspect go free.” To be honest I can imagine The Lady Justice doing exactly what I did when she hears about the news, bursting into laughter for exactly ten seconds and then proceeding to go on with whatever other dictator she is busy putting behind bars. So what then is the point of this said hunger strike? What does he want? Even the university students in Kenya normally have demands that are to be met to stop their ever so common strikes. Given that sometimes they are out of touch with reality but there is always a goal to the strike even if it only is to spite KPLC.

I think that the politician in question was a spoilt child. Listen to the rant he is putting in it is like when a kid holds their breath until you give them something they want, no matter how impossible it is. Anyway seeing as politicians are meant to be the leaders of our country I think that they, obviously, know best I have decided to follow their lead. I shall now go on hunger strike until David Beckham decides to agree to give me a manicure.

The other day my editor told me to do a rewrite of a book review that I wrote. She said she had read through the review and thought that it was a bit too young for the target audience and moreover that I didn’t take my job seriously. I was completely taken aback, I do completely take my job seriously I mean, I even bought a pair of skinny jeans that I heard were the in thing for people who are in the arts these days to wear. Given I do not see myself wearing them in the conceivable future even if my house burns down and they are the only pair of pants left but the fact that I bought them must, at the very least, count for something.

You see, I take pride in my job, it is the only job in the world that allows, if not encourages me, to be a lazy bum and sit on my arse all day imagining things and everyone knows that I enjoy imagining things. So it seems simple enough to understand why the rewrite had me completely bonkers. Not to mention the words in her “comments” on my review vastly outnumbered the number of words in the review itself. In my anger I went and did the most rational thing I could think of. I went to watch a football match in bar. Now before you get all judgmental on me or begin to ask what that has to do with anything this side of Pluto, hear me out. I don’t think the sport of football has any point. The goalkeeper will pass the ball to a player who will proceed to pass the ball out wide and run down the flanks after which they will bring it back in towards the centre and try to score. If they are successful they restart from the centre of the pitch. If not, the  other team has a goal kick and does the exact same thing, only in the opposite direction.

Why then did I go to watch a game of football if I find them completely redundant? Well it’s simple. Football games, particularly the ones watched on wide screen televisions in bars

She does look a bit like my editor

with beer, are the perfect location to throw around as many profanities at whatever time you feel like it. No one will question you for your sudden outbursts. Try it, just go into a sports bar at the height of a United v Arsenal game and shout “intercourse!” or its more commonly used equivalent and wait for a reaction. You shall get none. Do the same thing in the middle of Kenyatta Avenue at the peak point of the after work rush and everyone shall turn and look at you as if you have fallen from the sky and have green goo dripping from your sides.

So it made perfect sense in my head for me to go to a sports bar, to my disappointment though there was no football and all that was playing in my sports bar of choice was a game of the only sport of the world that goes on for so long that the fans go to sleep and come back before the game ends, cricket. Cricket is such a silent game that if you yell profanities you may interrupt the concentration of the guy wherever he is so I decided to take a pass. No, not a football pass but pass by the bar and just beeline for my house and do something that is completely unheard of. Actually do the rewrite. Getting my stubborn old laptop out I re-read the review I had written and I figured something out. My editor actually was right. The review was sketchy, vague and generally not seriously written. The voice was that of a man who isn’t taking his work seriously. So maybe I owe my editor an apology for making her read that bucket load of crap. Or maybe I owe her two because she might have to read this one as well.

Sometimes you just write just because you have stuff on your chest that you need to let out. That is more or less what I am doing now. In fact I have so much stuff that I don’t even know where to start. I guess I will write the thing that burdens my heart most. Over the last month or so I have been unable to churn out a coherent, or even borderline coherent piece of poetry. My lines seem awkward, all of them. It feels like the words have deserted me and the fact pulls me down so low that even the strongest of soul searchers armed with their strongest charms couldn’t pull me from the depths of this slump I have found myself in.

Maybe it is because I have outlived my purpose in the writing world. I have told my story, I have told all the stories I had in me and now it is just for me to sit and wonder waiting for the day the words will take a stroll down memory lane and find me in the corner where they deserted me and left me to fend for myself while I was yet still a child in the writing world. In the depths of my infancy they left me all alone. So I should just sit here and wait. Struggle at the mercy of this unforgiving cursor that constantly blinks at me so furiously you can almost see it nudging me to a corner, waiting for me to shrivel up and die.

So maybe we should call this the eulogy of a dying writer. The oration of my better dayswhen the words would come out of me with the ease and relief of taking a good piss, frequency as well of course. I remember the glory days when the rhyme, meter time and all didn’t stand over me, looming like beasts waiting to attack.

I imagine myself standing in a courtroom with the gods of writing, Poe, Kipling Gibran and all the rest looking down on me from high up on their pedestals. Telling me to account for what I did, for every single time I used up the visits of the words. Judging me for the times I had that tingling at the bottom of my belly urging me on to write and I ignored it, or mistook it for hunger and proceeded to devour  ridiculous amounts of food only to wonder why  I’m still hungry after 2 kgs of meat.

I imagine myself standing in this courtroom feeling a tad bit overwhelmed by the scene and showing my meager works by way of testimony. Explaining the concept of Birds That Pray or Shades of His Future to Emily Dickinson and watching her shake her head in disapproval. Showing thoughtful Sunday to Rumi and watching him hold his head as if tormented by an unknown evil.

Sometimes I question what purpose writers have in this earth. We come, share our stories, our views, open our hearts and bleed it out in ink and watch it form shapes, then letters, words, sentences, paragraphs and eventually shaping into up into whatever we seem to want to write. Then what? What’s the overriding purpose of this writing thing? It sure as hell can’t be gratification because writing is more like subjecting yourself to an eternal thirst than drinking water. The man that said ignorance is bliss was definitely in his right mind when he said that. The lack of knowledge makes life a great deal less complicated.

So here’s to a dying writer. To the man who has put down his soul in an eternal archive of letters and words. To a man who has spent his life pouring his every thought onto a piece of paper and watched in amazement as the masses used it as a tool to try and decipher the multiple complexities of the fundamentally simple man. Here’s to the words, the lines, stanzas and multiple works of art that passed through him and into the world. Here’s to that man, and though his works have been immortalized may he rest in eternal peace.

Yesterday I spent the better part of my day watching def Poetry Jam season 2. A great deal of good poetry but what struck me most Mos Def’s introduction to the show. He talked of a song called ugly beauty. Then went on to say “Not every thing you hear today will be pretty but it will definitely be beautiful.” What the song, and his statement explained, is that ugly beauty is the truth even when you don’t want to hear it.

Many times we hide our truths behind lies just because we are scared what effect it will have on those who are affected by it. We mask our opinions and finish our statements with “you know?” and this interrogative tone to our statements making questions of statements that never really aren’t (Taylor Mali puts that best).We seem to be ashamed of our truth and even more of our opinions. No more do we have people who say “That’s what I think and the rest of you can stick up where the sun doesn’t shine.”

I encountered a similar crisis recently over a book I am to review for an online literature magazine (blog, thingy I don’t know what to call the site). I almost went to the level of writing a lie until a friend told me that in the end it is my opinion that the people who read the book reviews want. Needless to say I wrote my opinion and can only hold my breath and wait for the fireworks once the review is published. Then again though what is a review but an opinion? And what is an opinion but your very being? If we can’t stand by our thoughts with an undying passion what will we stand by?

So this post is more of a disclaimer than anything else, in fact this is not a disclaimer, it is a proclaimer. I write what I think, it is my opinion. If you have any sort of problem with it that is really your problem. I write the truth as I know it, in both my poetry and my prose. The truth may not always be pretty, the words here may not always be “right” or a conformation to society’s principles. The only thing I can promise you is my words, will always be beautiful.

I recently (according to history recently can date as far back as hundreds of years) joined twitter. So far I find it a very cool social media platform mostly because of the exclusivity. You get to choose who you follow and hence who you see on your timeline. Now, this is not a piece about the merits and demerits of twitter – it’s awesome though – the reason I am telling you this is because one of the people I follow on twitter has bad twettiquette (etiquette on twitter). This person, let’s call him sesquipedalian, will constantly tweet about how nobody is tweeting him and how he needs more followers, so please tell people to follow him. Now, Sesquipedalian is generally a cool person but every time I see a tweet from him on my TL that’s whining I just get angry. In fact I unfollowed sesquipedalian for a while but we talk in our dm a bit so I had to follow him back.

What’s wrong with this though? Isn’t Sesquipedalian just saying things that we all feel? I mean I know days when I have gone hours on end without a single person tweeting me and ended up asking myself questions as to my public behavior. I know you have as well (at least if you are on twitter). We all have insecurities and yet it seems that it just cooler to put on a brave face and move on. No one wants to be with the person who opens up their heart regularly. We are expected to hide behind a façade of being okay even when we aren’t.

When I was a child I used to cry, a lot, and when I speak of child here I don’t mean 3 years old, I am talking about 10, 12 maybe even 13. I cried at the slightest provocation, I cried to get my way, I cried not to get my way, I cried just for the sake of crying. This really frustrated people and I kept being told real men don’t cry. So I stopped. I haven’t shed a single tear since I was 14. Why? Not because I haven’t been hurt or had moments when I should have cried. Simply because it is a sign of weakness, and no man should show weakness on any level. A real man must show his face as a man who always has his head above the water, a man who always has things in control, a man’s man.

Well you know what I say to that? Those people who tell us to hide all our emotions can go suck on a leaf, a bitter one at that. Now, I am not telling you to go to twitter now and be for followers (have some dignity). What I’m saying is let’s not be cocoons of penned up emotion and covered insecurities. The concept of a real man, is stupid. Sometimes, you just need to let loose and let your emotions take control. After all human beings are beings of emotion, or so I was told.

Okay, first things first right? I would like to take this moment to appreciate every Dad in the world. Everybody who has sired children and influenced their lives, who has taken an active part in the upbringing and livelihood of their children. Sure, most of the time they just scared us stiff but you know what? We love them anyway. Happy Father’s day.

I’m not sure if it is doing Fathers justice to have today’s theme being disappointment but it has been on my mind for so long that I really cannot help but write about it. I read a quote once somewhere that said “some say god guys come last, what they forget is that good guys are running a completely different race.” Cool quote right? Catchy, quick on the tongue, smart, witty and all those other cool things that you would like to see in a quote. However, I don’t think that it’s true. I think good guys constantly get disappointed in life. If that’s their race then why bother right?

Let me say that this isn’t from an experience level (at least on the most part) but on a observational level. I have this friend, let’s call him Metaphysics – obviously not his real name- he is a very good guy. He has struggled to get girls (I know this because most of the ladies he has hit on are friends of mine) but all the time he gets the same response. You’re such a good guy, and any girl that would get you would be lucky, I just *insert appropriate excuse*. So last week Metaphysics and I were having a chat and he poured out his frustrations to me. It made perfect sense, he was obviously extremely let down and on some level he thought it was him. So he resolved to become a bad guy. I’m waiting to see how that turns out.

So this is not to make you feel sorry for Metaphysics and all good guys out there, no. This is to show you exactly how it feels to be disappointed. People think disappointment is just an “oh okay” moment. It is worse than that, it literally wears you down and tears you apart. Of course I can’t tell you to never get your hopes up or something because that in itself is extremely sad. So this is what I am going to say, watch what promises you make, watch whose hopes you get up and watch how you treat others, because there’s nothing worse than looking in someone’s eyes and watching their enthusiasm fade away, watching their spark go away. It is extremely sad when you hear someone say the words “I expected more from you, I’m very disappointed.” In the words of a friend of mine – not metaphysics another one- never overpromise and underdeliver, always underpromise and overdeliver. Have a lovely Sunday.

I think the most disturbing thing about a multiple choice exam is that I can’t manipulate my way through it. I can’t just use my prose skills to weave a tale so thick, so sweet that the lecturer will be forced to nod his head in agreement, not at my knowledge of the subject but because my story is so delicately written that it can only serve a greater good that he, the marker, cannot see. Multiple choice questions are a case of black and white and that confuses those of us who have built our very existence somewhere in the shades of grey. Of course there is the general idea that with multiple choice, the answer is always right in front of you, mocking you, and hence a well placed guess could give you the answer, but that only serves to fuel insecurity. Even after you have settled on your final answer all the other answers look at you questioning your choice. They seem to scream out “Why didn’t you choose me?” and you can try to be impartial, you can try to accommodate all the A’s, B’s, C’s and D’s but the truth is there is only one answer. Only one of them can be completely true.

And that there must be the problem, right? Is it possible, in the scope of life to have anything that is totally, completely, undoubtedly, 100 percent true? Is there any fact that is so completely agreed upon by the entire human race that it puts all other possible facts to shame, a fact that monopolizes its market, so to speak? Truth is facts are only things that we generally accept to be true because we found them that way. History in itself is plagued with instances where completely unchallenged facts have been turned over practically overnight. Galileo comes to mind at this time when he turned the world from flat to round, scholars to date still argue about the truth of Einstein’s theories and your mother wouldn’t be very educated if she just showed you nine planets now would she?

I guess what I am trying to say is, sometimes, we confine our minds, our thoughts and eventually our lives to one set of thinking. We live within boundaries of black and white and restrict ourselves to facts so much that we fail to see the possibility of any other existence outside what we know to be true. We feel safe within our reality and yet we forget that our reality is just the work of another man’s imagination proved by a couple of equations. Even the very words we speak were once made up by someone.

So liberate your mind, free your thoughts and walk around with your palms wide open ready to catch whatever the world throws your way. Remember, whatever they say, whatever they do, they can’t cage your mind. Your mind is an upsilamba. Anything’s possible, just because, it simply is.