Advanced Rooster

The secret to being a great writer (I learned just the other day) is being constantly on the lookout for things to distract you. All great writers have been distracted by one thing or another. William Shakespeare was distracted by the absence of enough vocabulary, so he made up plenty of words. At the last count, Shakespeare had invented 1,700 words, which, believe it or not, were subsequently added to the English language. Shakespeare can be solely blamed for creating mediocre writers whose idea of good writing is using words no one has ever heard of. 

As a writer, being distracted by the need to create words is a massive waste of time. The Englishmen have since decided that there are already enough words in the English language. Besides, there are high chances that you are not a native speaker, and Englishmen do not take it kindly that you know their mother tongue better than they do. That’s why they force you to sit English proficiency tests when thousands of them cannot even distinguish there and there. Or your and you’re. 

Granted, you need simpler distractions. For instance, you could abuse drugs within your wage bracket. I must insist that these drugs should be legal or that you know how not to get caught. I have been arrested so many times because of this. If I weren’t so keen on doing things that do not involve writing, I wouldn’t have had a wonderfully rich experience of sharing a cell with criminals. I had always dismissed that single bucket that rules one of the four walls in a jail cell. It is disgusting. 

You could choose to travel. You could choose to gossip provided you are at peace with being the subject of gossip once you leave your gossip conglomerate. You could think about spending time thinking about starting a cult or a church. I have thought about starting a church, and I suggest you try too. It is not enriching but you will think about things that make people readily give their money to pastors. However, I will advise you not to go to church. The things that happen in the church are not as interesting as the things that people do before going to church to repent. As an aspiring writer, you do not need the latter. 

The thing about being a writer is that staring at a blank page trying to abduct words and force them to form an interesting story is a painstaking endeavor. That’s why very few people write, and even fewer are great writers. The rest who do not qualify as great writers end up being journalists. 

I have a new distraction. Well, this piece was all about this new distraction of mine. I am surprised that I could string this number of words when all I wanted to write about was that I joined Reddit the other day. I chose a name that I thought was funny. Advanced Rooster with four-digit numbers starting with six. If the numbers suffixed on my new avatar name represent the number of advanced roosters in the entire world, then there are more than six thousand of us. And that is not too comforting. 

THE END 

So What

 What does it mean to me?

Even when it feels the whole world to you

It can't be you, you can't be 

We can't see the world with the same eyes 

Unless I poke yours 

People Against Exams and Assignments

There’s a fancy water bottle she carries along. It has the color of wood. It has water in it, but it’s just an assumption-it could be liquid oxygen. It seems like it is standard survival procedure for women nowadays, to carry water bottles all everywhere. It is as if they have special information that water will run out any day they don’t do it. Joke on them!! We men just need oxygen, and sometimes beer (insert your favourite poison). She’s a lecturer, who in my estimation is in her early thirties. At irregular intervals, she sips from her fancy water bottle, sometimes just opening it to see if the water has turned into wine.

It’s always a long drawn class, with her monotonous voice ruling the room. It hovers above heads, from which it leaves vital information such as ‘let me doze off.’ To keep myself listening, or seeming to be, I have to stimulate my mind by mentally stripping her, one clothe at a time, just for the fun of it. Of course I never get there, because she throws a glare at all the darn time, especially when I am about to flay her. One time she asked a question in which the class spokespersons had no interest in speaking for us. She left the room and emerged a few minutes later with foolscaps. And we had to write an exam. I personally cursed the talkative people who failed us at our hour of need.

But not this time, I am very alert though. I sit next to a talkative foreigner, whom I am more than glad he has never discovered the miracles google can do. He asks questions, answers questions like he is just about to take over the class. Even then, you would think that such kind of a person would be nice to be around with, more so when you have no desire of answering any questions. You are wrong. It is not possible to live without have a kind of hatred for such a person. Not the hatred that makes you want to shoot them in the head though, but just a form that you can’t pinpoint. You just know you hate him, or put more precisely your person desperately want to have a concrete reason to hate him.

Then bingo!

The lecturer with a fancy water bottle spills the beans.  This whacko has been going around our backs, asking for assignments. Not once but twice. This is what you’ve been looking for to hate this person. What kind of person actively seeks to be given assignments?

In the spirit of people against exams and assignments [PAEA] he needs to have his head examined for contravening one of the most important rules; ‘you shall not, in any form whatsoever, display an abnormal love for exams or assignments, through gallivanting with the lecturer/teacher, for this is traumatic to some (all of us), unless under extremely unavoidable circumstances.’   

However, the group is very lenient on those who contravene this rule and a light punishment has been proscribed for offenders. It states that,’ anyone who contravenes this rule is liable to a mandatory brain examination, which shall be conducted by highly trained surgeons renowned for vigorously and relentlessly hitting the offenders’ head until he asks for forgiveness by collapsing and going limb.’ This punishment has been argued to so lenient, although the use of guns was banned on the grounds that offenders had a relatively easy way confessing.

In the spirit of unity and harmony, we do not like assignments and exams at all. If anything, it should be replaced forthwith with something less serious like drinking water from fancy water bottles. Even though it may be indispensable, we would like to proclaim unequivocally that we do not like it.

A Little god Within Us

If anything, I pride myself in having a brilliant memory. I can remember pretty mundane things, that may have happened years ago. Plenty of them are embarrassing, which gives them the street cred to run riot in my head every once in a while. Even with a brilliant memory, I still manage to forget really important facts such as how to make money by simply not doing anything.

Today however, I do not choose to recall embarrassing things that have happened in my short career of not doing anything meaningful. It was a Sunday. I remember lying on the bed waiting for the clock to hit one so that I could join the queue filled with rich kids clamouring for that one meal they clamoured for- French fries or chips to the common man. The details have escaped by brain, although I could have been counting the number of the squares on the mesh that was part of the upper deck bed. My leg could have been suspended on a red shoe string that acted as a sling. I don’t remember any of those, except I was lying down on the bed when she texted me.

After we exchanged pleasantries, she asked me what I was doing. Previously, I never thought of anything other than blurt what I was doing. It was somehow special when a girl asked one what they were doing. It was as if they were weighing if they could interrupt you without deviating you from saving the world from its evilness. Also it was as if she wanted to show up naked on your door. Now it is not special at all. You could respond with a bland message, texting you.

And so she asked me what I was doing.

‘Fantazing.’ I had replied.

‘About what?’

‘About (insert the name of that person you hate) naked and lifeless body.’

She laughed-in text-and replied that I had just made her day.

I thought myself as a little god who had made someone’s day. Just with a fantasy of someone’s dead and naked body. I wanted to let her know that I was a god, something I had once told people. Just to emphasise the point, I had put it my whatsapp bio: I am a God, it read. We then were in a makeshift relationship, one that never quite took off. And she reminded me, when she got the chance to tell me, that I was blaspheming. To me, it was far from blasphemy because I didn’t use the article the. Better yet, the words were a title to a Kanye West song that I sort of loved. The lyrics to the chorus were:

I am a God

Hurry up with my damn massage

Hurry up with my damn ménage

Get the Porsche out the damn garage

I am a God

Even though I'm a man of God

My whole life in the hands of God

So y'all better quit playing with God

Soon as they like you make 'em unlike you

'Cause kissing people ass is so unlike you

The only rapper who compared to Michael

So here's a few hating-ass niggas who'll fight you

And here's a few snake-ass niggas to bite you

I don't…

Speaking of being a god, I have countless thought that there is a god in each one of us. Just devoting our lives to not, consciously and unconsciously, hurting others, and perhaps helping that person in need may be a godly act. You could be walking on the street and you stumble upon a street kid begging. Something may stir within you, and you hand that child a few coins you had although you had vowed not to sometimes back. You have however acted as an agent of god.

In the course of our lives, we’ve encountered people with seemingly incurable ailments. Pictures of their bodies devoured by invisible creatures are splashed in social media, ruining your browsing experience because all you ever wanted was to see pictures of girls in tight clothes, escorted by captions about an earth quake that devastated a remote village in Indonesia. You are forced to abandon your mission and concentrate on this human being, whom, with all due respect, God has decided he suffers from an ailment that leaves his external body parts either excessively swollen or simply nauseatingly unsightly. Below the description will be an m-pesa till number, urging you to contribute money for treatment in India.

Then the fear that it would you next triggers a hormone that is responsible for philanthropy. You reach for you m-pesa account and send something small. It’s not only you, millions others will contribute. Millions will be raised and the sick person will fly to India for treatment. Most often this person will thank God for having heard his prayers.

A simple act of kindness shows people that there’s God above, watching the downtrodden, and the helpless.

Mjulubeng

Ever since the damning revelations about the inspiration behind Naiorbi’s landmark, KICC, the term mjulubeng (udogo ni kajulubeng, ukubwa ni kulundeng – for those who don’t know) comes to mind. Sometimes in public, a strange little smile forms in my face, which a psychiatrist would definitely diagnose as the early stages of lunacy. But do I mind? Absolutely not. Because the term mjulubeng is way too hilarious.

This word, mind you, is not a product of random assignments. The person who conjured it up did not excuse himself to that filthy urinal at his local and had a eureka moment. He didn’t open his fly, fish the thing out and as he watched the trajectory of his money [already converted into unusable liquid form, unless for perverted sexual fetish] and had divine inspiration. He then exclaims as he staggers out of the bacteria infested toilet, ‘wow! From now on it’s called mjulubeng.’

No. It is far from it. Balding scientists sat in laboratories [it’s been years and I still say labarotory] for ages, disguised as space researchers, in order to come with this hilarious combination of words that would define a man’s favourite body part – mine is the brain. These scientists came in, day in day out, months in months out as they hammered words together to make this complex word. And every evening, when their wives asked them what they were doing, they calmly said:

“Space research,”  

“You mean you want to go the moon?” a prodding wife asks.

“Sort of,” the balding scientist says curtly.

And so they worked tirelessly, even avoiding alcohol because it would speed up the process. They had lucrative contracts. When they thought they wouldn’t come up with a word according to the specifications given, one of them had an insight: he told the others he was going to have a drink. All of the followed him and their contracts were severed.

But that was not the end.

Sitting in his room at approximately 3.17 am in the morning, wondering how he would write twenty pages due in a few hours, a university student cracked the code, giving birth to the now famous word mjulubeng. It follows that he never wrote 20 pages and decided to dedicate his campus life to making memes and shagging girls with intellectual depth of a fishing rod. He used the word extensively in the memes he created, until it stuck in people’s brains.

And now it is one hilarious word that will last for a long time. Cheers to mjulubeng.

The Ultimate Wing Man

In the days of our forefathers, days that the white man has duly assigned a word-primitiveness- women walked bare-chested and it was not something that Mutua (the film guy) would yap about in connection to morals. With all due respect, morality is now defined by western concepts and religion, and is passed down as African. Yes, because we’ve become too westernized. The white saw our nudity and determined that it was gross, gave us clothes and proceeded thereafter to found a million dollar porn industry.

We, the almost morally bankrupt millennials, marvel at this technology called the internet. I mean if you type certain words on your search engine, you are likely to stumble upon a million photos of naked women, in all their varieties. Well, some of us actively seek these photos day in day out, as we wait for our bets to ‘enter’ or ‘drink water.’ If you think deeply, it’s quite the easiest thing to do knowing that we do not have people who can walk into a ministry and withdraw ten billion shillings and walk away scot free. Almost always, these pictures seek us out too. It sometimes form the headlines in the local tabloids, or sometimes when you are taking a brisk walk down the anonymous and dark alleys of social media, bulky men accost you with the following headlines: LEAKED NUDES OF [insert the name your crush].

Perhaps you should begin thinking less lowly of nudity and stuff, because it has been proven to one of the qualifications to a ministerial position. Also, nudity and all that appertains to it is present in nature, just as espoused by that sculpture at JKIA. The animals are not ashamed of this act that human beings have associated with every diabolic thing possible. But then there are dogs that apparently are clueless about the act, so much that men, with all their brain cells functioning properly, decided to help them mate. It was gross to say the least; two grown men holding dogs, one the gonads of the male, and the other the ears of the bitch. This was a video conducting a guard of honour on twitter, whereby people expressed their insights, because it is a crime not to. One that caught my eye was ‘AND THE AWARD TO THE ULTIMATE WING MAN GOES TO…’ I presume he was the one holding the bitch.

Speaking of wing men, man (not the biblical man) has always been set on conquests and winning. In the ancient days, it was about masculine things such as hunting with crude weapons and going to steal cattle. The only manly thing left in this technological world, is actively soliciting nudes from ladies as well as banging them. It is the reason why men go to bars in the first place; to lose inhibitions and talk about their conquests in the same level Alexander the Great would have bragged. And then hitting on random ladies. It’s here that the wing man sometimes chips in. You never know what these ladies can do to you. Man, you could be slowly siphoning your favourite poison and all of a sudden the world gets dark, and you wake after William Ruto has been severely humiliated by the aristocrats in the year 2022. Masaibu ya boychild!!

The bar setting has ceased being the hunting ground for men. The only thing a man needs to do is wear a crisp suit and tie, look suave and stand at the matatu stage, waiting for fare to drop before he heads to his humble domiciliary. A lady will saunter around that gentleman, flaunting her credentials, once or twice before she realizes that the man is too engrossed in his phone to notice she is overqualified. She strikes up a conversation with him, where she decides that she’s also heading to the same direction as him. Because the gentleman does not want any more complications in his life, he does not even ask for the ladies number, which she notices and promptly volunteers. She’s called Beryl. The gentleman saves Beryl Beauty on his phone.

A day later Beryl claims that she’s been chased out by her brother for getting home late. She’s asking for a place to stay the night as she gathers herself. The gentleman, just like you and me, only has the house to sleep in, of course and pay rent. He recently moved, his living room is emptier than the hearts of politicians. Beryl coaxes the man until she gives up.  Later, she shows up in the middle of the night, not without a fracas with the boda boda guys. Typical Jang’o ladies. Here’s where the wingman steps in. knowing too well that it’s stupid to die for ladies who show up late in the night, reeking of cheap liquor, the wingman advises him to stay away from the fracas, as far as Timbuktu.

Being a prospective man does not make one ‘the man’. As a lady, you will deal with your squabbles before a man becomes the man. But then again nothing diminishes a man more than a lady who constantly picks up fights over extremely trivial things and expects a man to ‘sort’ the guys out. It always a losing situation especially in a public place where there are idle people itching to lay their frustrations on an innocent soul. Beryl may have learnt the hard way, escaping with only minor injuries in her internal organs.

Once the fracas has died down, the gentleman and his wingman escort Beryl to the domiciliary. There she is condemned to the coach. She sleeps like a piece of rotting log, waking up at noon. Upon waking up, she brazenly asks if there’s something to eat, and the wingman says no. the gentleman left strict instructions to the wingman before he left for work. He tiptoed out leaving her soaking in her drunken drool.  He then switches off his phone and the wingman is left all alone with a stranger in the house. His only job is to make her step of the house and then lock it.  But that’s not how Jan’go ladies operate. They came with a completely different operating manual, with some crucial pages missing. She obstinately refuses to leave, hurling curses that one feels straight in the bone, even though it is a language one barely understands.

When she asks for the tissue, the wingman knows that shit is about to go down. She enters the toilet, which also doubles up as the bathroom and the wing man promptly locks the door and calls the police who in the service to all, do not show up.

Things to do before 8 o’clock in the morning

It is saddening, that nowadays these socialites are not releasing nudes, or some wannabe socialites have theirs leaked. We the people, who do not have blue blood coursing through our veins have to contend with the frustrations, sometimes drinking cheap liquor when those bets go through, just to have better conversations with our demons.

Because we have surrendered to our fates, being just statistics every five years and sometimes ten years, we hold on to the hope that it may be so for the next fifty years, although it largely depends on people’s plans. Personally I plan to live right to the edge of life, all factors kept constant, and dying peacefully at state lodge in Mombasa, preferably at the gate.

For people like us, now that politics has cooled down, weekdays tend to be long drawn and extremely boring. So boring that we begin reading terms and conditions on websites and even manuals to things just in case our fates are hidden there. but the words written there are a bunch of unintelligible phrases which state things such as: the terms and conditions are subject to change, without any notice, as we deem fit. Of course they have to explain how ‘we’ is used and ‘user’ which in this case is the person who may not have time to read the instructions. That’s how we fill our weekdays.

You should be wondering how we use our mornings. As people rise and go to the various places of work, which we know beyond any reasonable doubt, that they hate with passion, we too have things we do before 8 o’clock every single day. We hate the boredom too, so we have to practice hating it even better than those who hold on to jobs they completely do not like. Just in case they wake up one day and decide to steal the printer, and in the process get summarily dismissed, we have to practice how to fill these positions through the following ways:

Hitting the snooze button

We have discovered, through relentless scientific research that the origin of the snooze button is in nature. It began with the cockerels. Depending on the cockerel’s health, and sometimes the availability of hens (the research established this) it crows endlessly after five am, at completely irregular intervals until the cockerel can spot at a hen to mount. What do we do now that we are in the city? We have phones that can act as cockerels. So we do set our alarms at 6 am in the morning and snooze until we doze off and wake up at midday. Thereby we proceed to get something to eat and continue with our research to establish how long someone can live if they sleep for approximately 19 hours.

Checking on what’s going on social media

On occasions that we feel sufficiently philanthropic, we log into social media platform where we contribute to likes and double taps on slay queens photos, as well as they clichéd philosophical musings when some sponsor somewhere drops dead due to heart failure. We condole them with messages such as ‘you deserve every bit of misfortune,’ although we are smart enough not to post them. We also know that people who have jobs, as part of their job descriptions, log into social media sites to check how the lives of those high school or campus classmates are faring. Often, it’s a girl, they’ll be posting pictures about their times in Diani, or some other exotic places especially where politicians are discussing matters of national concerns such as vetting nudes.

EXCUSE MY DISGUST

Disgust

“Excuse me!!” she retorts

Ah! Man with a womb and a cunt

Because your dick grew inwards

Filth

“Excuse me!!” she menstruates

You are trash

You need someone to take you out

The garbage truck or the hit man

I’m the later

Whore

“Excuse me?!!!” wide eyed response

Poetry is beyond your understanding

Ah! You’re limited to sexts-

I know I’m insensitive

When it pays your bills

“Excuse me!!”

Multiple sorries dear heart

I now understand your distaste of her

Fuck you

“Excuse me!!!” she cringes

Yes I said it, fuck you

Go to hell for heaven’s sake

FUCK YOU

THE ALLURE OF NORMAL LIFE

You are that kind of person who has no guts, you give every time life pushes you. You are the kind of person who'll live all his life playing it safe, doing the right things, saving yourself for a moment that never comes. Then you'll die a boring old man if you live long enough. The best part of it is, you'll have many friends who really like you because you were such a nice hard working guy. You spent your life playing it safe, doing the right things. But truth is, you let life push you to submissions. Deep down you were terrified of taking risks. You really wanted to win but the fear of losing was greater than the excitement of of winning. Deep inside, you and only you know you didn't go for it. You chose to play its safe.