Man's Dilemma

The cri de coeur of human race is perhaps the predominant nature of a masculine species. The fox has tendencies of marking territories against marauding philanderers. Like animals, men are consciously aware of tasks ahead of them especially in female arena.

The worst fear a man can withstand is his manhood put in question. Put a man with no credible and astute source of inspiration to his female colleagues on spot and you'll have a man withered at heart. Nowhere better is such experiences vivid than in our respective campuses.

                                

Therein expansive edifices harbours different kinds of men. The loud and swarthy, silent but reflective, gullible and petulant. Most of the traits are downright irritating. Infact, in individual analysis, it would be difficult to find a 'whole' man. Pity, I may say.

In attempts to subdue these 'inadequencies', man has resorted to cliques. Common of such groups are the hommies, the book-nerds and the anti-babylonians. Yep, the unati crew. Each, within the comforts of confines, can brazenly open up to staggering levels of bravery. Infact, some Swiss shrink said something to that effect.

'Man in a crowd is unconsciously lowered to an inferior moral and intellectual level, to that level which is always there, below the threshold of consciousness, ready to break forth as soon as it is stimulated through the formation of the crowd'.  The macho and the hype are mostly admired by their colleagues. They bag the most beautiful chics in campus, ride in pimped autos and have membership in the most of entertainment joints in the city. Thus, a loner would do anything to be identified with the likes.

He will try a foreign accent, attire in blings and churn out dry jokes in random groups graced by chics. He will laugh the hardest when a mamasita attempts a joke and will vigorously negate in a critic-mock attitude when a guy emphasizes on a topic in a desperate action to ascertain his knowledge. He ends up being a connoisseur of working hard on something smoothly done. Pity, I may say.

You can't be a nutty if yo like rock music. Nor would you fit in hip-hop craze if mugiithi drives you yoriyori. A man is sufficiently stable in a recognizance clique. Otherwise, like a mismatch in blood groups, coagulation will be evident. Let us embrace an iota of sagacity lest we end up in embarassment and frustrations.

LIFE TEACHINGS

It had started slowly and unexpectedly. Then fast and uncontrollably. Like the roller-coaster. Like the falling of dominoes. Unexpectedly, fast and curdling. And unfortunate. Because it was his life, and life was proving economical with goodness. It refused him to brandish his smile.

He sat in the room alone. His hands stretched on the desk. A very serious young man. It takes a lot of courage to face the future without security of any sort. And most of the times, his courage failed him. At such time he forgot life was a gay and glorious adventure. You needed a free heart, and clean life.

But you cant be free without security. You cant think, you cant focus, you cant make decisions with a chaotic brain to nurse. It was not that simple. Bludgeoning of almost all his family members to a pulp was still a sore. And other incidences before. So it was impossible to be free. It made him think of many, many possibilities in life, when he should have been thinking of something else.

Therefore he was unhappy.

Insecurity implies uncertainty. Even risks have certainties. Inability to convert uncertainties, in stark reality, is a very scary incidence. Therefore he was scared. He had come to accept that he could never fit in the life he had once been. He could hear laughter outside. A lady laughing. Life was going on around him just the same.

Untroubled, uninterrupted.

Of course life continued. The sun rose, and the warmed-over cadavers would uncoil from sleep and the anodyne of inhibited sex, giving themselves over to the frustration and hunger and disillusionment and emptiness and panic and despoliation and decrepitude and deception of another day.

                                                            I am not SCREAMING!!!!

He refused to think of other things. Like the dizzying greediness by MPs, like the death-inducing pot-holed roads, the sickening bursting sewers, ineffective police force with inability to calmly place their oiled AK’s muzzles in the asses and blowing themselves to smithereens. He refused to think about the grand corruption, the Ocampo Six and the death of Mercy Chepkosgei Keino under an influential politician . His derailed brain could only accommodate that which troubled him most.

In his wildest moments of thinking, when he would become fervent to the point of hilarity, he would talk to God. God was a deity, and he appreciated that. He had been brought up in a strict Christianity background, and had learnt fast, that without his presence, he could have withered ugly-ly. The Book of Job was his favorite, and he could recite it verse by verse.

Lord, he would say, I want to be the gayest, maddest nigga in the world. I want it as much as the next fellow. To be spontaneous as the green idea of growth. And to know goodness as the tree is glad of the burden of its bearing. Knowing that at last there are know exclusive persons and no such things as special privileges for anyone. Neither here nor thereafter…

He would let go of everything. He would loose the knot in his heart, the enigma, the paradox, the irritation and the attitude. After prayers he would relax. And hope. Hope was the only thing he was left with. Hope that prayers changes things.

But in his situation, alas, lies a moated-tower of mediocrity, close to unassailable, and it holds such sway, it has acquired such a body of mediocre opinion about it that it is useless to try and make a dent in its smugness, and its exclusiveness, and its indifference to anything that does not come entirely with its limited scope and compass and influence.

That situation is called life.

My Petty, Petulant Pet

This is a good story. And am a good guy. Sometimes you have to be the good guy in this story for it to make sense. For one to comfortably project similes unseemingly, ooze metaphors with grandiose, portray sage unwittingly. But still make sense, y’know?

Petronilla  is a nice chic. I like her. And she knows that I like her. That is why she displays a naseauting sense of following me everywhere. Everywhere, everywhere. In class, in ghetto’s cul-de-sacs, under a shack dealing with flies-dripping muturas, in churches. Everywhere.

This chic is bright. As bright as brightness can be described. She can read, write and make jokes. And, oh my! she can laugh. Pearls of purified laughter can decorate the varsity’s compound for miles no end.

That leads us to the unfortunate part of this story; THE PLOT. Not everyone appreciate Petronilla’s sight. I call her Pet. It sounds a lil’bit sweeter to thine ears. Few people can condone Pet’s presence. It has to do with her awkward long name.

Or her over-emphasized girth. It would take a wise-ass of a lawyer an incredible amount of his valuable time to adequately convince an experienced mid-wife that Pet is not triples.

Then we have her face. Pet has a fugged-up face. Fat and dark. Pretty dark and dull as Erebus. Jagged dinosaur-like teeth jut from her wallop-y lips. And when she laughs, that laughter I so eloquently described afore, disastrous torments arise.

So Pet has an incredulous physical un-proportionality. But I like her. Because she is bright. She can read, write and make jokes. And, oh my! she can laugh. I like her because I know her; the purity of her heart and the spirited soul of a cherub.

Here I am with Pet, in my room, seated on a stark Kenpoly chair, the only furniture around. She is talking incessantly, as she always does, with vocal pronouncements of rapids, cataracts and waterfalls. Heaving and sighing and shouting and whispering. Gesturing and pacing and stamping of foot. She suddenly stops and stares at me, almost extracting my soul. That unnerves me. Then she says something.

Ok, she is talking fast. But my, I can almost catch each and every word oozing from her lips. In fact, I can almost see each word before I can hear them. This chic, I tell you, has serious guts. I swear, this time her confidence has gone overboard. I pinch my ears to shake my wax off, and yes, I had heard right.

‘John, I wanna contest for the upcoming Mr and Miss JKUAT Beauty Pageant.’

Y’know, as shrinks advices, it is wise to express your deepest reaction no matter how ugly it is. You can laugh raucously like a chimp on heat, gasp and snigger in disbelief or just pretend you have heard nothing. I did neither. I just stared back.

You see Pet has serious issues. She has reverse inferiority complex. And that brings us to another part of this story: THE CONFLICT. She thinks she has Christina Milan’s angelic face, Angelina’s lips and Beyonce’s curves. She believes so much in her physical composition illusion to the point of frivolity.

I have always condoned her (in)security? In fact, I have always encouraged it because this is a serious mental phenomenon that to appreciated as a blessing other than a curse. I have seen lasses going under a knife to pimp their faces, boobs and booties due to low self-esteem. Not this Pet. Pet has let his brain lie to her and having abetted her to that psycho-thought esteem, she has managed to survive in this tumultuous world of looks and deception.

The silence of the room savagely attacked my conscience down to the spine. She was obviously waiting for my reply, probably a positive feedback, a crazy cat dance and a fuzzy hug to acknowledge her impeccable sense of wisdom. I would never tell her that she would be a laughing stock to the institution, a good recipe for the school’s media taunts and in a million years would she ever, ever, ever make it past auditions. No, that would be mean to her. And am not that mean.

My brain cogs are doing a nasty twisting and it is tormenting. A crazy mental over-spin and am sure I will be the youngest stroke patient in history. So I grab onto something I know not, like a divine intervention, like a sudden Solomonic  wisdom, just to prevent my larynx from tearing itself apart. I beckon her to sit next to me on the bed, which she jovially does. And I say:

  'Petronilla, dear, you are an awesome person. Awfully awesome. As awesome as the finest whiskey in this world. You elicit grandiose and ennoblement that is rare as a pink poodle. You have chutzpah and character and the desire to succeed. Few people can show such enthusiasm.

'But  Alas, in this mediocre state of brilliance and certainty, you are bound to exude your extraordinary abilities to all and sundry. That is an acceptable step, dea, to court acceptance and recognizance among peers. Do not push though; be subtle.

'Everyone loves you Petronilla. From the highs of lecturers to the lows of freshers, guys sing your pretty name in drones. You are an elixir to multitudes, a mover of mountains, a giver of hopes. Dear, with all that resume under your –um your belt–you do not need to prove it. You are much better than that dear.

'They do not deserve your greatness dea. Not at all. There are other channels to prove your salt, Pet. Your goodness brightens the dull atmosphere that surrounds our environment. Enjoy your current role in the society, dea, and yearn not for more.'

She is staring at me with that look of incredulity and wonder. Her forehead creases as if to ascertain the purpose of my speech. She then smiles, as if satisfied, and it dawns to me that sagacity had permeated through her cranium.

‘John,’ she is over-excited. ‘I knew you would be there for me. You are the only one who cares for me. Thank you for supporting my idea to compete for the beauty pageant. Mwaaah!’

WHAM!!!

A Lady's Man?

What makes a woman tick? That is the sort of question every able masculine figure should decipher. Is it their feline mannerism, their tiresome quest for perfection or their petite physical features?

Maybe it is that fragrant blast of Yardley with subtle nuts and honey overtones when you pass her on the Lifestyle elevator. But hey, that would be a risky assumption if your perception is based solely on nasal senses only. The sense of touch and sight should be employed nowadays. Especially with the advent of a metro-sexual man. It is crazy how a dude’s bedroom can have all sorts of toiletries that can make Miss Kenya’s products pale in comparison! Unfortunate.

As a person brought around many feminine creatures, I can’t, in emphasis, proclaim my prowess in women matters. Every single notion I grew up with about these feisty creatures has been thwarted to disproportionate twaddle. The loud tomboy with an aggressive nature is nowadays so sweet and caring, cooing even, the sort of thing that makes you wonder what the eff really happened?

Taking a sip of my favorite and watching her cavorting on the dance floor made me realize that she was more to that perfect figure. What women have in bales is pure and honest common sense. It is there naturally. They arrive with these genes fully formed and purring purr-fectly. Their intuition is always top-notch. They always seem to know what is wrong around them. As for us, we have to burn our fingers to know that fire is indeed dangerous. Ladies can’t do that mistake. Unless their reason is to protect their French manicures!

The current man is evolving into a sissy for sure. No reference to homo, bro. not that they innocent anyway. Where are the days when men used to be men? When a man would not compete with his girlfriend to smell like lavender? Where are those days when necessity was the mother of all inventions?

Yes, inventions. The greatest of things on earth were invented by man. Electricity, cars, the atomic bomb. Actuarial Science or Home Science. Remote control, dildos even. Everything. The need to win a woman’s heart drove men to portray incredible capabilities. Picture this:

Lady Ford: Hi dear, can’t see you morrow coz me crib is 30 kms away and by the time you reach here you’dda be tired to do a thang.

And so, Henry Ford, with chutzpah to meet his love daily, invents a car. Voila! Just like that. Yaani, ladies are those creatures that drive men to their full potential which otherwise would have been wasted.

Guys, you are surrounded by the type that are evolving to dangerous levels of unlike dimensions. They are ladies trapped in men bodies…or vice-versa. It is a pity, so to say. Feminine creatures should have no balls.

Period. Let us bravely and roughly rip off the ugly veneer that traps our brothers in an abyss preventable click here for more

So that the next time that blast of Yardley hits your olfactory cells, you can comfortably turn around and ooze a generous smile of acknowledgement with no fear of encountering the wrong kind of creature. But am afraid the moisturizer is no longer an exclusively femme preserve.

OF FOOD AND FUEL

When the fuel and food prices began to overwhelm what i have always been taught to understand as the oil in the economics of this country, the middle-class, then i knew somehow that route11 and Sossi(instead of beef) was not the exclusive preserve of us, the unfortunate class. It has been a sobering realization to see that the higher you climb up the economic ladder, the louder the thud when you involuntarily hit the ground.Relative to the rest of the petty bourgeois, there are those in the country used to being at the bottom end of the ladder, where stampede for crumbs can be equaled to Sonko's persevering antics, especially towards walls.

I have seen various countries in a panic response choose to put effective mechanisms to curb the menace here. I had hoped that my country, Kenya, would have the gift of such benevolence and rise to the occasion to protect the poor, but no, it was not to be. I could imagine the almost morbidly obese bureaucrats rolling their eyes, thinking:"What is this Unga Group outside parliament talking about? When they've been eating shit their entire lives?'

In fact, i would vehemently oppose to any insinuation that i am poor, and i refuse to be categorized with the wretched of the earth. This is because am one of those upwardly mobile persons, who are well-educated and, most significantly, can afford bread on the table! I am also a member a member of a club, and a society, whose members i understand, lubricate the wheels of this country's economy with its unrestrained consumption, and often as conspicuously as our pockets allow.

Now that the food prices have gone through the ceiling and transport woes are becoming part of us, i am forced to abruptly downgrade from my lavish, comfortable lifestyle to an undignified existence.

What my government fails to appreciate is that we, wenye wako down tu sana, have a penchant for the finer things in life and that this lifestyle is the medicine for the country's economy. I resent not being able to make my regular outings to those expensive restaurants to savor the finest food i once could not even pronounce. Gone are the lasagnas, king burgers, the cheese and wine, single-malt whiskeys and good rave. I want to be the knight in shining Armani once again.

Now i have to grow contend with that tasteless Ugali as my staple diet again, plus some occasional sniff of Sossi to assuage my sanity-altering cravings for Mexican beef. My palate has taken this culinary assault with remarkable poise, but i will not venture to comment on what this difficult, dark periiod has done to my super-sized ego-or whatever has been left of it.

The lowest moment of all was watching the cockroaches from my house embark on a Great trek over to the neighbors for greener pastures.

The Letter 2020

'Dear son,

By the time you get this letter I believe I will be long gone. The auspices of my frail life is deadened, despite the enormous hope I had cringed at.

You did well son; you did well when you ran away to the city where dreams are tarnished or realized. It might have been those hapless eyes of your family members, or your 'neighbors' in the camp, or the rumbling of your blotted tummy.

It might have been the reeking of the makeshift sewer within the camp compound, the buzzing of flies anywhere everywhere, the biting never-ending cold during the night.

Could have been...

Could have been harassment by the mosquitoes; hundreds and thousands of those irritating phenomena that defies nets, or plain worthlessness of the cause

The true cause

Or just

Or the whirlwind of mental unfathomable of WHY?...

But you went to Nairobi after three months in camp, despite tender edge of twelve. Don't ask me how i knew, but you couldn't keep from telling Mwangi, the second-last born and I don't know if you managed to reach there.'

The son peered in the letter and smiled ruefully. Strong, nauseating memories almost overcame him.
He remembered the flashes of dejection flipping in his brain, his parent's blank stares, the fighting for the yummy morsels dished by Red Cross, the cryings, the fires, more cryings...

And HATRED

Deep, seething hatred from within

Neighbors were kept under constant stares.

Personalities with guzzlers and journalists prowled the camp and paraded the inhabitants like trophies, evoking bitter memories of the blessed past

Of the tarnished present
Due to a worthy cause
For a worthy cause
For a worthless cause

The son perched the metallic-rimmed glasses on his nose and continued reading...

'Your mother died few weeks later after you ran away, leaving me with five siblings, including Jimmy, the two-month-old last born. It quickly died too; no one volunteered to wean it. Njenga and Chege are also no more, they opted the easy way out. It is a pity they held for that long. The other two, like you, ran away too. God bless them. So I've been alone, holding and wishing, praying and cursing until...

They came with HOPE. The TJRC. The Truth and Justice Commission. Taking the truth and letting your heart free, and forgiving and praying...'

The son spat on the ground and grimaced. The journey to Nairobi had been dreadful but necessary. He remembered when the commission had been created. The darning ILLUSIONS! His eyes scanned the last paragraph of the letter...

'I went there last week. The Ambassador and his cronies lowered lowered their specs and nodded their pampered faces. "They struck at me.

They plunged at my goats and cows, burned my granaries and shamba, killed my neighbors. I have no wife, nowhere have I seen my six children." my bony lips creaked.

"Did you strike back?" they asked expectantly. My eyes had no strength to glare ferociously at the unintended remark.

"Not at all. But they is still there. And they still a threat to my conscious." I'se replied. "And am a pauper.
And I have nothing for my mouth." I'se replied, hopefully.

And they looked at me, slightly disappointed."Mzee, you was given 10000/=. The Government has done a lot to you.

You should learn to forgive. Everything will be Ok." Then they shouted, "NEXT!"

So son live and appreciate your life. This world was not meant for me.'

The son removed the spectacles and wiped the flowing tears. He was now twenty-two years, working hard in a Jua-Kali sector. He blew his nose and carefully folded the letter and locked it in an old box.

It was a ritual. This was the 10th year since he had found the letter in his father's belongings.