Clingy Sorrows

I bought a rope, and a lighter,

My sorrows have acquired life jackets, and boats

They, too, have insolent grins on their faces

My demons have learned a new language

And forgot the one we used to converse in

It’s colder and darker inside, lonesome and weary

Nights are long drawn

Mosquitoes have become menacing

Communing with me into the wee hours of the night

SUBTLE SIGNS THAT YOU NEED TO MARRY

In life, somehow, we thrive under deadlines. Just imagine what wouldn’t have been accomplished if there were no deadlines? Many of us, if not all, wait till the last minute to type that report, or waited till the last minute to do that assignment back in school. It’s the nature of being alive and without a hurry in the world. As such things that do not have a deadline attached to them, ticking like a bomb, will never really get done as quickly as they should be. One such is marrying for the man. The ladies, I hear, have their aunties up their sleeves, nagging and nagging … because of the ticking biological clock. Luckily for men, the clock doesn’t tick against them.

But then in life, there are subtle things that just appear to us, that seem to tell as we need to find a partner, marry and settle down as quickly as possible. Of course your years must be quoted in centuries and it makes sense, such as ‘I have lived for a quarter a century.’ If you have no kid out there, then you should be worried because you are contravening against strict African customs that necessitated you had close to three or more kids at that age. Bedroom conquests, although they did not covertly say so, were strictly for procreation. Having lived such a long time must be enough a reason to look out for an offspring. You never know when you can be hit a stray bullet, or you may just be visiting a sick relative at KNH, and the next thing you know is you are in the morgue, lifeless and masked people are conducting strange experiments on your person.

As you walk across your neighborhood, you take note of kids playing with their tiny bicycles and it suddenly occurs to you that it would be a beautiful sight if that kid originated from you. When your heart goes ‘aaaaaw!’ in a strictly feminine way, my friend find the nearest cute thing, even if a tree, and go down on your knee, for its nature way of telling you that it’s your time to procreate. Even worse, all the friends you were in high school with start posting picture of little pinkish human beings on their whatsapps, and you have to imagine all yours that were trapped by latex or those that were gunned down by the ever efficient Super Agent Postinor. You may regret once or twice, until you take at least four beers and you find yourself in the same circle again.

Sometimes, on  evenings, when you trudge up the stairs to your little ‘sheethole’ the aroma of cooking food, doused with all the spices imaginable, arrests you in one dimly lit corner of the stair case and tells you in a diabolic grin: ‘you may have to get hungry, and there’s nothing you can do about it.’ Inside the houses emanating that smell, are wives doing their things. The man, if he has not passed by the local, has his feet on the table, watching important things such as lotto and sports betting adverts. What about you? You will be welcome by the stale smell of dishes that you haven’t washed since Agwambo was a toddler. Which reminds you that you have surviving on one sole culinary skill, boiling things up and adding salt. When it gets to this point man it’s time to get a helper.

As men, we are both biblically and legally allowed to be hygiene challenged. Questions will be thrown at men who are abnormally clean, and you don’t want to be one of them. These questions, mind you, put to question one of the core reasons as to why are a man in the first place. As a matter of fact and urgency, you are allowed to employ the following hygiene techniques every day, until you find a wife. When it comes to dressing, you have two techniques to use when all your clothes are dirty: looking through light to determine which is less dirty, or sniff to determine the extent of sweat you have deposited on your clothes. However, the sniffing technique is quite irrelevant when certain small insects drop dead, which you have to update you laundry techniques by getting a wife, assuming she subscribes to the traditional roles of the wife that our fathers have, since time immemorial, determined as the correct and acceptable reasons of paying too much unnecessary dowry. If not, my friend join Maendeleo ya Wanaume. Revive it if you have to, they’ve been too silent of late.

And then the cold. Although you do not want to give the wrong impression, that sijui he wants constant sex, which is hundred percent true, this is also part of the package that just demands that you marry quickly, through whatever means.

Of Whatsapp groups and the people in it

She is asked whether she’d be willing to be added to a whatsapp group. She completely refuses, as if she is allergic to the mere mention of whatsapp group or as if a brain eating bacteria spread exclusively through a whatsapp group has been invented. She says she belongs to four groups, and the fourth one is because its family, which leads you to question her priorities.

Unlike her, you and perhaps me belong to a million plus one whatsapp group. There’s one for job, one that represents your passion (drug consumption group), one for school if you are still in one, one for family, plenty for politics…until a million of them. In all these groups, there are some characters who to your last nerve, of course if your life is not interesting. Mine is. I have however heard what pisses people off in regards to whatsapp group. The key is minding your own business, but it is an alien concept for some people.

The caring ones

Unlike many people, I find it normal for people to want to wish people good morning, a nice afternoon, and sometimes a good night. I do not feel pissed when such messages pop up in a group, because I do not even make an attempt to read them. But when people issue a decree when forming a whatsapp group, that such stuff is forbidden , you definitely know that it gets on some peoples nerves.

The ‘if-you-don’t-forward-this-to-ten-people-something-terrible-will-happen’ kind of people

These by far are the worst kind of people. If God would listen to people’s suggestion, then these people would be already condemned to the hottest part of hell. Nobody knows where these people are. I have no close relation or friend who sends such kind of messages. Should I happen to know one, trust me I will hunt him down and make sure he sends it to all people I hate, everyday for the rest of their lives.

The quiet ones

These are the ones who never say anything even in light of grave injustice meted on one of the members or even all of them. Their only notable significance is their numerical value. The only notification they brought to the group is when they were added, and when they shall leave. Often times they don’t leave. Just there, absent but present.

The opposers

Then there are those who oppose everything others say. It is as if they have veto power. When the group decides on something especially when they are offline, they demand who made such decisions as if they own the group.

The cardinal rule in being in any whatsapp group is: learn both the scientific and the art part of minding your own business, that is, if you cannot locate where the ‘leave group’ button is. otherwise, you have no right to complain of others conduct in whatsapp groups considering they are the only ones in their villages who have whatsapp-enabled phones that run on symbian OS.

CAGED

Caged, looking out with longing, eyes fervent with desire

Attracted to the flames inside yours, untouched,

Untouchable even in the face of tragedies,

Such as a fatal attraction, drifting me ever close to your bosom

I set these words free, to find a place to perch

And if you may, have a touch of your velvety soul

Blossoming in my head, and body, craving your piercing look

Pierce my heart with undying passion, sacred and eternal

But if these words fall short of your estimations

Don’t hold them for long, release the with the middle finger emoji

I understand the language of disappointed beings

-Disappointed at how people wish away a lifetime of blessing

Deport me to a place close to your bosom

Sedate me with your laughter, and smile

Then deport me to a place close to your bosom

Torture me, if you may, with yours sweetness

Because, with you, I harbor intentions of overthrowing time  

Walk into my soul, and steal towers of solitude

Channel my rivers of loneliness,

Through your garden, where flowers bloom

Let them absorb water, until they run dry

Embrace perfectionism out of me

Prod the demons to release passions of mine

Salvage the best of them, and keep them

And then deport me to a place close to your bosom

A man’s guide to great make up for the ladies who need it most

Back in high school, there was a guy who had huge pimples dotting prominently on his face. This was one of his qualifications though. Another one was his characteristic bad handwriting. Matter of fact, that guy wouldn’t even draw a straight line with a ruler. He was himself with it. We never saw him trying to be anything else, because we never allowed ourselves to think of him as ugly. One day when we opened school, he came back with a pimped face which was basically elastoplasts that held cotton wools at all strategic points where pimples had pitched camp. After a few weeks of this complex medical procedure, the pimples successfully managed to be resistant, and grew even bigger.

A few years later, which is today, we are looking for ladies to make wives. But left, right and centre we are accosted by ladies who have exaggerated their looks, modified some of their features and hid some with moulds of makeup. We, right thinking men, have a few words for these efforts: it’s disgusting (sometimes), needless, and boring. It is not that we do not want our ladies to look beautiful, aiming for perfection is boring. As you walk around town, you encounter some badly drawn eyebrows, some which seem like a toddler was doodling with crayons then something better beckoned its attention. Often you want to laugh really hard, without being seen as a lunatic. The best option of course is to make a note to laugh when you get home later in the evening.

Why would our ladies be so focused on make-up anyway? Ninety percent (the rest are retarded) of guys do not care whether your face looking at par with those imaginary standards that you’ve set, do not care whether you eyebrows are shapely or not. Most of the times men ninety percent of the men are interested in the fact that you have a vagina, anything else is an add on, which doesn’t in any way disqualify the first fact.This brings me to the first make up guide; don’t give darn, because nobody does, unless they belong to the ten percent I mentioned above. Spend the time you would have used to make that face doing something useful with your life like reading a book to improve your intellect.

The second guide is referenced in the bible. I do not the extent to which a woman looks like god, but I think they fairly resemble. I should imagine how pissed off god is when he looks down at his creation and sees people modifying themselves. Personally I would be mortally enraged. I guess that’s why he sends morons to date these people if not psychos. And then these women will bombard us with insightful information such as men are dogs, or more scientifically, all men are the same.

If you posses a substantial amount of grey matter in your head, then you should have known from the beginning that the message I am trying to pass is; stay make-up free unless you are dating a moron, which by far that’s allowed. Also, if you are in the showbiz business it’s perfectly allowed to smear your face with those carcinogenic substances because the truth is you are trying to impress the other ten percent of the population. And for that matter, many of us have stopped watching news because all there is, is an aesthetically modified human being, which can be achieved if you do the same to a monkey, reading news. 

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.