Vile Banter

Every sports betting enthusiast or gambler – if you choose a higher moral ground – has had this distinct moment in his career: staying late up the night refreshing a live score site or an app. Mind you, this is a feat he (most gamblers are of the male gender) never achieved while in school or if he is still in school has never made head or tail of the advantages unless it involves nudity and free drugs. 

 

The sole purpose of staying late at night is to follow a minute by minute progress of a team he bet on especially with school fees – confirming he is a moron – or the last team on his betting list that will guarantee a windfall. At that moment, there are many glittering things he will buy, and the mere thought of possessing them is enough to give him an erection.

Unless you are a Kenyan politician, karma does not just sit by and watch make lots of money without working hard for it. The reason could that all the luck apportioned to the males in your lineage were all used up by one of your fathers in his attempts to woo a fairy princess. And so, you will lose your school fees, and, more painfully, your sleep.

It was a sure bet, you tell yourself, banging your head on a hard surface. Once in a while, you’ll gather your friends or pretty much anybody who is interested in your ‘team moja iliniangusha’ story, and go over the minute details of your gambling exploits, hoping they’ll bow down their heads and make you a ceremonial gambling god.

That’s never the case because they too have their own stories, some better than yours especially if they did not bet on school fees. You will hear of a story where Chelsea, despite having close to useless odds, therefore poised to win by a landslide margin, gets held to a 2-2 draw by a lowly Norwich.

“Nilikua nishinde 800k,” the man will tell you and you will believe him even when he is lying. “It was the last team, and I thought I had already had the money.” And that was the last time Chelsea was Chelsea to that gambler. It officially morphed to Chelshit, even if you are a diehard supporter and were once willing to bet on your own two balls – biological ones just for the sake of arsenal fans.

The advent of betting added another dimension to football fanaticism: crude and vile banter. It is no longer about how a team plays shitty football, but about how that shitty football prevented me from winning a windfall, thereby changing my fortunes and the fortunes of all the generations after me, even up to the fifth one. And the emotions expended in it is so real that it can cut through steel reinforced concrete.

Gone are the days when a game of football was just that. Despite the fact that Manchester United is a limping team, no self-respecting fan will bet against it even though they blatantly and boisterously talk about its complete shittiness. It is often a welcome loss in the case that it  has lost and thereby making one lose money, because it only confirms that you have always passionately hated Man U, and there’s no way you could ever ever bet on such a loser team. You call it names referring to a donkeys gonads.

Sometimes, while watching a game of football, and it is open consensus that majority of the patrons have bet on a certain team, be sure that banter is legally prohibited on that team people have bet on. These are people capable of rage that can move mountains. They’ll order your swift removal from the place because you are causing financial disturbance in manner likely to cause economic depression. Worse still, they could have been sent by their wives to bring a packet of milk and decided to bet on a team they were sure to win.

Facing the danger of being called stupid for the hundredth time, the man of the house will do everything to bend the force of nature just to make sure he retains his money, but plus a little more. Often, dharma (the law of cause and effect) sits by and calls the man stupid in advance, making sure Barcelona, with odds of 1.2, losing miserably to Las Palmas. A one-nil loss. No over 2.5, no Messi goal.

And in that state of utter disappointment, the least that man can do, even though he can constitutionally punch you, is call Barcelana  by certain organs found in the nether regions, which, by definition are overused. And this is not reserved only to the moment he lost his money, but eternally. Even if Barcelona wins by ten goals, he will find something he thinks is deragatory and says with Miguna’s conviction. And he will feel good about until you tell him about how shitty Chelsea is, and he happens to be a Chelsea fan.

He Thinks of You Till it Hurts

He sits in silent contemplation,
Turning thoughts of you,
The same thoughts of your loveliness
Your timeless laughter ringing in his head,
Echoing inside the void created by your absence,
And emptiness that fillas every part of his body
But he sits still, thinking
Of your eyes boring into his,
Of your hands tracing patterns of pleasure
on his skin
He thinks until your absence hurts
He misses you, but you are in a parallel universe
Getting concerned with problems unique with your world

The Picture

It’s still you, the very lady I fell for,

The tooth gap, a door to your laughter

A thousand lives spring from your feet

I want to love you today,

And tomorrow a little more

Do not hoard your love to make me change

Be there for me when I need you

And I’ll be there when you need me

Everything will fall into place

A Sinner's Funeral

A palpable somber mood,

Wrung the air of oxygen,

Beckoned the departed to reveal secrets,

Secrets hoarded by the confined body

 Still as though in deep slumber

Mourners wondered where the destiny,

The mortal destiny of man

A destiny vast yet tiny as a coffin

 As mourner after mourner

Extolled the virtues of the departed

And prayed for her soul

As it met God’s ever just judgment

Was a her lack of religiosity the greatest sin

Confessions of a Homo Technolopithecus

Picture the earth before creation – dark, desolate, and scary. Time stretches endlessly, without the grasp of the ever swooshing deadlines. Now picture yourself in that world, in this present world with numerous technological distractions which have embedded themselves into your everyday life.

You will be lonely in a crowd, wandering in the streets as though you are a lost soul seeking redemption. I guess that’s how it feels without a phone, for that’s the experience I went through back in the village when power went off, and KPLC, ever reliable in disappointing, took its sweet time.

I am homo technolopithecus, a reverse from the sapien sapien thing. I can’t live without my phone. I love to feel it in my pocket, the right pocket of my trouser, and whenever I feel its absence my whole body is sent into unspeakable panic. It has to be there, even when I don’t need it, such as when I am dead and need to check whether I have received a text.

You may have heard of people making jokes that the wifi was down once and they were forced to talk to their families. They confessed that they seem like nice people. I am one of them, though I do not overly peg my existence on the internet. I just need to feel my phone, on for I derive immense pleasure in drawing the security pattern and gawking at it endlessly, for hours. When I get bored with it, I set it aside for ninety seconds and resume fiddling with it.

I can’t, for the fluids in me, imagine how someone can survive without a phone. Of course there are people who can live without it – dead people and hopeless drunkards. Even though no one actively looks for me, I feel I am obliged to be reachable. It is true with relationships.

When you are in love, there’s that constant need to validate your affection. The only thing available, what with the distance is a phone. Texting and calling brings forth two dimensions in a relationship – strengthen it or break it. if you are dating a lady with the intelligence quotient of boiled maize, it can be disastrous because every time your phone is off, she conjures up a thousand scenarios of where you could be – which often is on top of a naked woman. To her, there are never any other viable reasons as to why you could be unreachable. That’s why I am a homo technolopithecus. 

 

The other day, while with a friend, he turned and asked me what postpartum meant. I looked at him with an ‘are you stupid glare’ and answered him. Because I know things, and the way I know things is through googling. That answers you why I thought he was stupid – he was holding his phone, and I wondered why he couldn’t make use of it. Some people! They think we have time to answer questions google can answer within a second, and not just answer – have detailed illustrations that may even include pictures of naked women.

As an avid social media user, I often rise in the morning to see the posts and go like – what a complete moron.  I love this routine so much that I log into social media even before my eyes have fully deciphered the brain stimuli instructing to open the eyelids. Even though social media has a certain dumbing-down effect, I love it. I love gawking at pictures of people living really good lives, read news and check out memes. Mostly I check out memes. And imagine my complete uselessness. 

 

Do not say ati I am addicted to my phone. Everything is in my palms. What more can I ask for? Money in my palm, entertainment, news, and naked pictures of women. I am a homo technopithecus, and one day when my bones will be discovered in the year 4000, they will discover my phone beside me. Archeologists at the time may wonder how primitive I was (or I am right now), but I’ll answer them now – I don’t give a damn.

Sober Moments

Every sober moment gnaws

The edges of his mind like a saw

It reminds him of abandoned dreams

Stupor rids him of lofty aspirations

He desires not the soberness of a judge

The verdict is often unbearable for his person

The world looks him an elevated pedestal

Saying with only its eyes ‘you are a failure’

He is every inch one, and he needs to forget that

Every single second of the day

The world does not cut him some sluck

It demands what he can no longer give

Except drunken drools and disappointment

The Pain is Gone

it feels different now,

the scars appear like petals,

like medals from a war

a victorious war,

it speaks of your exploits

right inside the belly of the serpent,

how you emerged, scarred alright

but with a new resolve,

to not only live but conquer as well