usiogope

there are many things that one is privileged to fear in this life ... and i have had my share ... though in the sea of fear ... am yet to add a drop of the craven ... but now to things that have really given me the creeps in my young life

• the Christmas Tree... don't get me wrong ... have nothing against that ice-cream shaped little cute tree with a misplaced star on top ... its just that at my paros place there is this huge tree ... i think it is a podo ... and it is really scary ... especially when i was much shorter than i am right now ... it is enormous and so tightly-meshed with dark green leaf and if you ever perch beneath it for shadow ... you will be welcomed with an eerie din ... and a constant pecking sound that my sister claims must be a python ... my mum wanted to 'trim' (her idea of the word is to lop the tree into a measly half) another time ... but i damnedestly clung to the fact that mr and mrs.stork had nested there recently and were expecting to have babies and it would be very inhuman to cut it down ... so at last the xmas tree was saved thanks to me ... keep green mr. christmas tree!
• coffins ... i have always been disgusted by the shape, size , features, boola boola ... i have this loonish superstition that if a coffin is the last thing i see before i go to bed, something very sinister will happen ... though i have never had the courage to discover what the sinister thing is ... but i always ensure that i gaze at something more enlightening before i catch my share of forty winks
• turning twenty ... am now 21 but that does not mean am in a constant state of panic ... though it took a while to adjust to the fact that i was no longer a teen when i hit 2 decades ... i just realized that age was just a number and i could keep on doing the things i love doing till my limbs give away with age and tear
• lizards ... i really hate those reptilians ... once saw one in highschool that had two tails ... like at the same time ... shock of my system ... it probably saw that i was afraid of it because it literally jumped and am not kidding, and landed on my shoulder ... hate to remember how i got it off ... but somehow i believe that reptiles all over the world have started a campaign to scare me in similar fashion because the other day i sat down on a comfy chair only to find out that i had squashed a pair of mating frog ... but the worst was when i was young and was walking back home after walking miles into the wilderness to search for some wild fruits courtesy of a friend who told me how sweet they are ... as i walk i felt something cold against my leg ... but i dismissed it to be the wind ... then i enter the living room and my mum screams ... a full-sized(1.5M) snake had wrapped itself round my leg for warmth!
• teachers ... this is a fear that i have been able to outgrow ... but i was always ready to jump at my skin when i met my teachers on the road ... one day in my primo days ... i was carrying a particularly heavy piece of luggage with my sisters ... and were glad about the progress we had made with our small feet ... then all these teachers appear ahead of us coming from some TSC meeting ... we skittered back home with luggage ... hid in a corner to let them pass without noticing us ... only when the coast was clear did we realize what a task it had been to trudge uphill with the load.
• tintin ... he was a large, overfriendly dog that we kept ... though he kept marauders and waylayers at bay with his steel-shod fangs and eerie bark, he also succesfully locked me within when he was out ... he used to jump at me till i fell down then like a lion protecting its kill would proceed to lick me all over ... gross! nways RIP tintin
• mamsap ... there was this old lady who lived alone in a little hilltop ... rumors said she spent the night as a black cat ... and once i walk up at midnight and cast a glance outside only to find a black cat sitting on the window sill ... its form immensely 'creepefied' by the moonshine ... i nearly got a heart attack ... which is not a good thing at such an early age ... nways mamsap was said to be a witch who cut up the ears of kids who misbehaved and cooked it for her dinner so that she could turn into a black cat ... the thought was enough to keep me squeaky clean...
• the nandi bear fur coat ... my mum had a purple fake fur coat ... quite beautiful it was when i look back at it in retrospect ... but she embellished her purchase by saying that her brother had knitted it for her from the very coat he had skinned of from a nandi bear (read my previous article) which she said her brother had bravely killed ... any mention of the nandi bear always increased my heart palpitations ... which goes without saying that i could never be left in a room where that nandi bear fur coat was hanging.
• mr. J.E.B Williams ... my highschool headmaster ... no one ever got to know what names his first three initials stood for ... he was a tall man, white, very british and with dry wit ... when i think of him i remember a man with an overwhelming personality ... who never minded walking to a meeting with gumboots direct from the muddy school farm much to the shame/disgust of the BOD who must have spent the entire morning trying out the appropriate attire... he was always keen to catch anyone committing a goofy mistake (which could have been anything like laughing out louder than the rest of the crowd when he made a joke) ... down to the farm with a heavy jembe for you it would be ... or probably you would be told to go and feed and wash the pigs ... now that would not have been very necessarily bad were it not for the fact that those hogs were enormous, canniballistic, stinky malformations of a genetic engineering experiment with pigs that had backfired
• KCSE ... i always waited with trepidation for this big day which was going to culminate everything we had done in high school ... i was not like in the top ten or anything ... but i always wished to pass ... when i saw that i had gotten an A-(minus) grade i was on top of the moon
• kapenguria 59 ... it was the dreary room i got when i was in second-year ... am in lower kabete campus UON where am taking a BCOMM degree and we kind of shift rooms every year ... all my friends got these nice, freshly-painted rooms and laughed with mocking glee when they came to visit me in my dreary hovel ... it looked so gloomy when i first stepped in ... some shadows never lifting in spite of all the electric bulbs you could put on ... but thanks to a friend who is a wiz in interior design ... i was able to refurbish the room with cheap stuff i got from secret spots in town ... and when i was going to third-year ... it was like the most marvelous room in kapenguria ( a second-year hall in lower kabete)
• now for something i would love to fear ... if you have happened to read through my list, please be kind enough to tell me some of your worst fears in life ... yeah, i love that hair-raising, pulsating feel i get when reading through such nasty renditions

the nandi bear (chebakerit)

my ancestors have always talked with dread about this creature ... and when they talked about it ... especially my mum, and my aunt, and my grandma ... and even my great-grandma whom i had the chance to meet with very briefly ... they all had their encounters
one time in the distant past when the plains of uasin gishu were wild ... they spoke of a creature that came to village ... especially when men were away on a battle ... or wherever men went when they left women alone ... they remember well the devilish cry ... they sound of a tortured demon ... they remember the dark moonless night ... they remember the goat lying headless on the field ... they remember the sinister smell ... so strong that it could make one collapse ... they remember wearing pots on their heads when they wanted to go outside to take a leak outside ... for the creature so much desired to lop your head off that it keshad on your rooftop

my mother was among the last to spy upon it ... she believes the creature is now extinct ... she tells me that it loved living amongst bamboo trees... and that one leg was shorter than the other ... so that it limped when it walked ... my priest back in iten spoke about it too ... and you could have heard a pin drop as the horror of his tale stupefied his congregation ... and yes, i believe that the nandi bear once terrorised peeps ... call me a romantic but that is what explorers were dismissed as when they went to africa and spoke about gorillas .... a mere hundred years ago giant pandas were also dismissed as a chinese myth

and all in all, would it not be nice to know that there was or is a loneful creature out there that scientific description has not appreciated ... many cryptozoologists have tried to adequately describe it ... the kalenjins, luos and bagandas who lived alongside it say it looks like a giant baboon ... early colonialists in uasin gishu say it is more of a bear ... some say it is an undiscovered species of hyena ... though it has been discovered that africans, who have never seen a bear, will describe it as a giant baboon... so may be the chebakerit is truly a bear, an african bear ... a bear that could climb trees and spring away very fast with your head in its mouth ... your beheaded corpse waiting to be discovered by your terrified village folk...

there are many tales of encounters that my family shared with me ... tales calculated to make you jump right out of your skin ... i will share them with you one time ... as for now ... why don't you pay a visit to http://www.cryptozoology.com

times are wasting

went to my sister's in Naks the last weekend ... and like always it felt thrilling to travel in a car full of strange peeps ... it sort of felt like we were this big wierd family and i was this little kid hunched up like a camel on a small corner while the rest were having fun ... actually i suffered a lot because i was sitting next to this lady who gorged up piles and piles of food from her kiondo mpaka i was like men ... nways, the only sad thing is that the driver ran over a hapless baby baboon... i pity those baboons in Naivasha ... someone should relocate them to some safe place

Nakuru was cool as always ... we had so much fun there last december with guys from campo ... we rented a kismall place and literally painted the town red ... but last weekend it was all about seeing my lovely sister again ... let us just call her Susan ... it was lovely seeing her house again ... she is a brainiac when it comes to interior design and the whole place had been transformed into yellows and browns ... from the plates to the spoons, the sofas and the curtains, and all those fluffy fluffy stuffs with strange names were all in those sweet colours ... the place felt kinda hallowed

Yes, she fixed me tea, served it on a yellow cup and stirred the sugar with a brown spoon ... and with those mysterious scents that always linger in a lady's apartment, our conversations were lent an air of enchantment ... she told me about mama and papa back at home ... about how mama is to make a pilgrimage to Israel and how all these hizballah-lebanon thing might affect it ... about workers at the farm ... and my favourite Dan, who has always fascinated me with endless tales about night-runners ... incidentally Dan was doing more than just tell me tales because he is now the proud father of a bouncing baby boy dutifully delivered by a local girl whom I never realized had fallen for Dan's sweet charms

Then another elder sister arrived ... the youngest girl in the family and the one whom i immediately follow ... let us call her Roxa shall we ... Roxa the true raconteur and the life-of-the-party kind of girl further embellished our talk with such hilarious anecdotes that sent our bellies bursting with laughter ... but soon we somehow drifted too much more sober talks ... it seems somehow that in shaggz peeps are starting to lead such messy lives ... a neighbour burnt up her husband with petrol and is now langushing in Lang'ata ... another finally let out that her children were not fathered by her husband, was beaten up by the enraged spouse and is now lying comatose in hospital ... another, a decent man actually, living a modest life and all, cut up the wife with a panga and drove with the corpse to chebloch, a gorge in the iten-kabarnet road to feed the remains to crocodiles ... and this are just the nitty-gritties ... i was like shuck-a-ducky and jizz-the-whizz, wondering why all this was happening..

Iten has always borne a romantic enchatment about it ... mostly because of the scenic valley and the way thick fog would rise from the valley during the rainy season and pour like heavy cream over the land ... may be it only takes a child to see these things and since i spent my entire childhood there, i noticed them all ... we have a farm and a kitchen garden, and an orchard where my mum strove hard to plant all the kinds of fruit available in Kenya and the world ... my sister whose in Swaziland brought her some strange-looking seeds recently and we are waiting with bated breath to see what kind of plant would sprout from them ... nways, about the orchard ... yes... i loved staying there when i was a young lamb, eating unripe apple fruits because they would never mature with all the birds that came to eat them up anytime they produced any form of sweetness ... and when the fog came i would imagine i was in a strange land ... or i had been whisked away to the ice ages and the fog was a snow blizzard hiding away mammoths and mastodons and sabre-toothed tigers ... may be because my folks worked hard to ensure me a comfortable living made me blind to the fact that there was a much more uglier side to Iten ... now that I am old enough i am beginning to see...

but still when i go back there ... and see old gogos shuffling about with grass to thatch there roofs ... and see farmers move about with puttering old tractors ... and see them greet me so warmly in kikale and with so much admiration because am like from kampo and all ... the scent of beauty flows back to my nose

but i could not reminisce for long ... for another sister walked in ... let us call her Shifrah ... Roxa follows Shifrah in the order of birth sequence ... and the two have been arguing and fighting for longer than i care to remember ... i hear it stemmed from the day mama brought me home from hospital... freshly born somewhere around the year 1985 ...and that i was so pretty with cheeks begging to be gobbled and the two sisters would fight over who was to look after me ... the altercation matured over the years into even more bizarre forms ... they would fight when one left a scarf on the other's bed and other wierd feminine battles and the whole house would be full of noise, the two female matadors not minding that there were other folks in the house who needed some peace and queit....

so a pleasant surprise it was to see them hugging and admiring the other one's hairstyle ... and for the rest of the evening ... to hear them talk and chat like bosom buddies brought so much joy to my heart ... every war in the world can end ... it is all a matter of being patient

you know you are in Nairobi university when ...

• 
  
• you do not believe in full-stops when your brain has hit a permanent hiatus but insist on keeping on with a sentence like " ok ... you know ... it is like in ... like ok ... as in we can't really ... you know ... i mean ... ok" wishing that somehow, with all the grace of the lord and of your mother, that your brain will jumpstart itself again
  
• you are so broke that you owe yourself money, your pupils have changed into dollar signs and you are having this crazy look when you are staring at your roommate because to you he has turned into a giant grilled chicken wearing snickers
• you are facing any of the following calamities:

you don't have a girlfriend
you have a boyfriend
you have a girlfriend
you don't have a boyfriend

• you have an impressive CV filled with all flamboyant pages and colourful fonts but with little information therein hoping against hope that your prospective employer will be so much awe-struck by your creative design talent that he will be blind to every other setbacks very apparently clear to you
• you can buy a kshs. 20 000 phone but still believe that getting hold of a kshs. 250 phone credit from the tuck-shop is being extravagant
• your meals have the same colour assortment: white and green ... you can scatter a little bit of red once in a while but that is entirely optional and depends on the heaviness of your wallet ... if you are in the same university as I am you will know what am talking about
• you have completely manipulated all the electricity gadgets in your room with wires criss-crossing all over the place like laser beams guarding the Star of Africa ( the largest diamond in the world) that it will not be too soon before you blow up with the rest of your property like a missile in the deserts of Lebanon ... (forgive me, but i was trying to employ some literary talent here)
• you keep claiming you are fluent in French when all you can manage is 'joie de vivre' and "je ne sais quoi' which you keep employing in the most inappropriate places just to show off like " i am going to buy mangoes ... voila! joie de vivre et je ne sais quoi" ... of course your roommate will never know how much of a buffoon your are because lucky for you he does not know francais
• you speak with an American accent but believe 'allude' is a Spanish word
• you pass examinations when you do not read and fail when you try to
• everyone including your mother is beginning to notice that you are sounding less intelligent than you did when you were in high school
• you believe that whoever said that slippers solely belong to the bathroom was in serious need of seeing a psychologist
• you only have one suit and you can easily commit murder if someone spills broth on it
• you suffer from a severe psychosomatic paranoia that makes you desperate to do all the proffesional courses in town ... ACCA, CPA, Free Japanese Lessons at the Japan embassy (you wanted either german or french but the fees at Alliance Francaise and the Goethe Institute was too expensive), CIMA, CISA, CMA, CASA ... and any other possible acronyms starting with the letter C ... please do not ask me what all those initials stand for!
• you are taking Economics and believe that the degree is so dynamic that it is going to land you a lead role in a movie with Halle Berry
• you never go home during holidays, violently occupying the bedspace of a fellow comrade in session, claiming loudly that you are looking for an attachement while all you wish for is the free DSTV channel in campus
• your lips bleed every time you smile because of severe malnutrition
• you do not know with whom you had sex last night
• you have no problem with sober people so long as they act drunk in public
• you make a list titled you know you are in Nairobi university when ...
  

Mr. Writer's wishes

• I wish the sky would have a different colour for each day of the week ... blue is kinda gloomy and saddening ... and in any case, it would be interesting to watch people trying to find clad that matches with the particular sky colour
• wish people did not have to squat to defecate ... it is so demeaning
• wish someone would be a darling and whisk me around the campus ground on a comfy wheel-barrow ... for around two weeks or so
• wish I could fly like a bird and swim and breathe underwater like a fish
• wish to head to the Appalachian mountains and capture a baby bigfoot ... then I will emerge triumphantly out of the pine forest and find photojournalists clicking away endless films of camera; all eager to force my image and that of my new-found pet into your TV screen ... you do not have to mind for I am cute ... don't know about the baby ape though
• wish we could switch from the tedious Gregorian calendar into an Aztec one ... it has much more holidays and goes around in a cycle ... which means you can always go back and correct the mistakes of your past ... and the best part is that you have the option of sacrificing your enemy every lunar month or so ... ha ha ha (diabolical laughter)
• wish I could be Santa Claus's assistant this Christmas, then I could send someone a really nasty gift ... like a king cobra inside a shoe-box
• wish to say something really mean one day that will shock the entire universe and send many to a state of near cardiac arrest
• wish I could master all the other tongues in Kenya apart from my own ... I hear it comes in handy if you are caught in a tight corner during a tribal clash ... come to think of it, I should just update my running skills to a much faster version
• wish I will wake up one day from a beautiful dream only to find out that am actually living under that beautiful dream
• wish that all the dramatic scenes in life ... such as rescuing a baby from the mouth of a lion ... would happen in slow-motion just like they do in the movies ... so that we could have a few more minutes to portray our selfless courage
• wish I attended a more cute highschool ... like Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry ... where I could have learnt to be an animagus ( if you do not know what this means, then you are not a Harry Potter fan)
• wish it would snow one day in Kenya and we could all rush out to make a snowmen and ski
• wish I could read people's minds
• wish I could produce a sound pitched voice ... enough to break glass and the ear-drum of a wildly-opinionated loudmouth who is unfortunate enough to become my boss
• wish the tectonic plates of the earth would shift ... so that we could have a change of background scenery ... I want a swan-filled lake ... in any case, I would want Europe to be implanted right in the middle of Congo so that they would know how harsh it is to live in that basin
• wish to escape the human world and go and live with the fairies for a life ... it is sweeter to have a career where all you have to do is to deliver a ring that can make you invisible to a lake of fire and have all these gallant warriors protecting you along the way ( inspired by the Lord of the Rings) ... so if any of you orcs happen to capture a pixie, a brownie or an elf, give me a secret e-mail
• wish I could be a pirate ... with a wicked wicked name like Blackbeard or Red Rackham or Captain Kidd ... with all these undiscoverable treasure hidden in Tortuga and a life condemned to sailing the seven seas for all eternity
• wish I could build a time-machine ... then I could go back in time and confirm if dad was as really hardworking in his younger days as he vigorously claims to be ... after that, I could visit Pharaoh Tutankhamen for a cuppa and ask him to spare me some of the gold he decided to buried with
• wish I was an ice-cream connoiseur then I could work my way through piles and piles of this delicious invention while claiming to judge its flavour ... I will make it my career of course
• wish to take a reindeer sleigh-ride across Antartica ... cross from Cape Town to Cairo and all the way to Timbuktu on a camel ... and sail around the world on an Arabian dhow driven by the monsoon winds
• wish all forests would claim their own and turn the earth into one huge, green rain-forest ... am with Wangari Maathai in this
• wish there were no poor people on earth ... but only people with insufficient funds ... for just like Gabrielle Solis of Desperate Housewives and Dolly Parton in Coat of Many Colours said ... poverty is just a state of mind ... and I wish everyone would have sufficient funds soon enough and live the kind of lifestyle they so much desire
• wish I was as organized as my sister ******** ... she takes neatness to a completely new level
• wish you do not make bizarre conclusions about my state of mind after reading through my wish list
• wish you would tell me all your wishes

you do not till a land by turning it over inside your head

the title is an irish proverb, am never good at giving advice so i will let you dear reader mull over it yourself.....come to think of it the irish have a delightful way of expressing themselves...like this classic...

May the enemies of Ireland never eat bread nor drink whiskey,
but be afflicted with itching without the benefit of scratching

or better still..

Here's to our wives and girlfriends:
May they never meet!

and if i ever met an irish man who could bless me like this...well..

May the road rise to meet you,
May the wind be always at your back,
May the sun shine warm upon your face,
The rains fall soft upon your fields and,
Until we meet again,
May God hold you in the palm of His hand.

this one now is a real comforter...

May you have warm words on a cold evening, a full moon on a dark night,
and the road downhill all the way to your door.

inasmuch as they say English is from Britain, the Irish are truly the ones who possess its mastery....i attended a high school headed by an irish master and irish teachers....and from them i learnt interesting facts like...

• there are 30 million irish people in America and only 3 million in Ireland, so if you want to see Ireland you better head to the USA
• The Irish have always hated Britons and thereby encourage each other to procreate so that they can overpopulate Britain and conquer it....my logic was lost somewhere amidst all that Irishness
• it rains constantly ....almost 24 hours..in Ireland...so it is such a relief to be in Kenya
• there are no snakes nor serpents...Saint Patrick..their patron saint chased them away by thumping a stick on top of a hill and they all decided to drown themselves in the sea. ..please try this noble solution if you have snakes in your backyard..just make sure there is a puddle nearby for them to suffocate in
• The is a nasty term known as an irish temper..and irish women have a thing for beating up their husbands if they come home drunk
• there is nothing more miserable than a miserable irish childhood..an irish man wrote that and earned a pulitzer..incidentally, he is american...

all in all, i miss my former irish teachers...bro Ambrose...who emigrated to Papua New Guinea..talk about irish intrepidness...colm o'connell...who mastered the kalenjin language better than me ....and of course Mark Lawler.......who told us to pack our underwears whenever going for a school trip...

and if you love a little pint of history, there was an irish lady in colonial kenya who used to whip railway workers because all the other guys were to shy to do it..thank goodness colonialism is over..

if i was immortal

no one ever attends the funerals of their kindergarten teachers, or even their weddings or birthdays...they are people we meet when our lives are small.....as we grow we aspire to greater potentialities that we believe those fat mamas cannot hold to...we start thinking of Bill Gates and Oprah Winfrey....yes, our worlds become big and we forget the people who once overshadowed our lives with their bulk (they are usually stereotyped as being obese) and their might...

but i did attend my kindergarten teacher's funeral....but do not get me wrong...it is not like i so much liked her.....any sympathy i felt must have been a great consolation for most of the folks were just there to ensure she was buried before she could resurrect and interfere with all the niceties present....now you will wonder why people had cause to hate her like that...but fionina korus was no ordinary lady....first of all she was all modelly and long-leggedly.....come to think of it her legs must have been 12-feet long......

naturally a kindergarten proffession would hardly have suited her and being more than well awre of this she decided to engage herself in other trades......one of them being the world's oldest...and among her first clients....as rudely discovered by a classmate of mine when she opened her office door to show fionina her pencil drawing ....was none other than the local parish priest....two lessons to be learnt from this

1. never open doors without knocking, the results can be traumatizing
2. inasmuch as we confess our sins to parish priests they mostly more worse than us-offencewise

anyway, she must have plied on well with her trade because by the time she died she lived in an elegant mansion complete with an electric fence and an ice-cream-shaped swimming pool....

and that is how i ended up in kitale (her final resting place) after receiving a lacy card signed by none other than fionina (her death wish was that all her kindergarten kids attend her burial)......yep, she did it before she kicked the bucket....so as the priest (the same one caught en flagrante delicto) went on boola boola about her supposed virtues i decided to spend my time admiring her coffin.....it looked very palatable and choc lately-inspite of the decomposing corpse inside..yer, i know..what a nasty thought!

shaped like a boat so as to represent fionina's childhood wish of sailing around the seven seas like Vasco da Gama or Bonny Anne, that famous Carribean pirate woman, it reminded me of Pharaohs who preferred being buried in ornate coffins shaped like papyrus boats so that they could all go sailing down the river Nile to meet the sun-god...the vikings too thought it a noble idea to perish in the harsh Nordic seas....and apparently the neanderthals as well.....i don't know whether fionina achieved that dream...

guess what am trying to say is that death is a reality that we have to face one time or another...people eventually die.....friends, family, you and I.....it is a handicap we wish we could overcome....some philosophers argue that civilization is all a part of man's futile attempt to conquer death...Christians say that they do not die but are only promoted to a higher glory....i do not know but higher glory or not may death stay far from bay on our swell ride on planet earth

the devil that danced on the water

shoes tell a lot about someone's character, especially my character...here goes a wild tale.....i was walking down moi avenue today after a particularly nasty paper.....and suddenly my image flashed brightly and madly before me in one of those glass windows of a fancy, gisty shoe shop with a name that is difficult to remember...my eyes went all the way down to my sport shoes, they were torn around the edges as if a mouse nibbled them and the laces were too long that i could trip over them if i walked too fast....yet, when my sister gave them to me some time back they were so fresh and new and untortured, but after a time spent with dear old mr.writer they are telling a tale so different to the mind of the visualizer.....i felt this pang in my soul like i have been neglecting a part of my life, letting it waste away unnoticed....wish i knew which part that were.....for if anything else, crisp and new, is going the way of my shoe then boy do i need to see a psychiatrist...

speaking about shoes, my mum has this old time keepsake, brown sandals made out of a strange material ( it is hard to tell whether they were khaki or leather), she got them when she was about five years old and living in colonial kenya..... a state of emergency had been declared and no one was allowed to move about freely, but her elder sister, who worked in a pyrethrum board in eldoret, sneaked her out of the reserve one day on the back of a rattling truck that suffered from heavy bouts of whooping cough..... after many resuscitations along the way, the truck finally arrived in eldoret and my mother for the first time viewed this strange world of white people moving about with elegant hats and shoes, yes shoes, because my mother finally realized that what she was wearing could not be justifiably called shoes when placed next to what those white ladies were wearing.......

colonialism came and went, and those fine, dandy, high-nosed, aristocratic British ladies finally packed away from the sweet kenyan sunshine to wild destinations to the Isle of Mann or wherever colonialists go, but my mum still kept on to her old shoes, she never wore them again but time to time she glances at them, now especially that her sister died of ovarian cancer, perhaps she holds on to them because they remind her of dear sister's love.......

imelda marcos had 2000 pairs of shoes, 2000 pair....my foot, no wonder she looked so vain, i mean what do you need all those pairs for when you are only going to wear them once in 3 years....now this brings me to favourite topic-shoes.....no, don't get me wrong....am not a shoe freak and have little idea about the latest fashion in the same.....i only love shoes because they tell me something about the wearer......i assumed that the late queen mother was a strong determined spirit because she could wear high heels all the way upto her hundreds......i also wonder what kind of shoes Adolf Hitler wore when he committed suicide because that might save a lot of historians trouble when it comes to making up what was going up his mind...

i read an interesting article recently..... about a 3000-year old corpse that was found on the Alpine ridge between Austria and Italy and aptly named Otzi the Ice man.....i hear that his shoes were made with such remarkable industry that all this major shoe companies are trying to learn on his style.....there must be a long tale behind those shoes....were they made by his mother knowing that his son would be away for so long..or was his secret lover who fashioned it, a young lady's sweet present for the passion and intimacy they shared....who killed the bear from which those fine shoes were made....did they set out to hunt it or did it invade their village one moonlit night.....was otzi a scientist who wished to invent shoes that could keep the human feet free from frost-bite in the harsh Alpine coldness....may be one day someone will answer these questions for me, or may be they should not, for they may tamper with its magic, by explaining it away in dry, didacting tones....

anyway, the world's most expensive shoes, the cinderella slippers cost a whooping 2 million bucks and is made out of 565 platinum-set kwiat diamonds ( don't ask me what kwiat is), and were worn by an obscure star, Alicia Krauss to the oscar awards.....i hope that at the end of the day she still felt that her life was still a bazillion more diamonds as compared to that inanimate, soulless slipper, i hope she did not feel small, doing her best to protect that shiny, shodding material that she forgot to shine herself out to others, and make them not look down at the glitter of her feet but on the dazzle of her smile.....

but at the end of the day, shoes are there to stay, and they are much part and parcel of humanity, and if in doubt ask Otzi or the herdsmen of the dusty plains of 3000 BC mesopotamia who designed sandals.....and for a last opinion i believe that my mother's first shoes hold much more treasure than those cinderella slippers......

the devil that danced on the water

shoes tell a lot about someone's character, especially my character...here goes a wild tale.....i was walking down moi avenue today after a particularly nasty paper.....and suddenly my image flashed brightly and madly before me in one of those glass windows of a fancy, gisty shoe shop with a name that is difficult to remember...my eyes went all the way down to my sport shoes, they were torn around the edges as if a mouse nibbled them and the laces were too long that i could trip over them if i walked too fast....yet, when my sister gave them to me some time back they were so fresh and new and untortured, but after a time spent with dear old mr.writer they are telling a tale so different to the mind of the visualizer.....i felt this pang in my soul like i have been neglecting a part of my life, letting it waste away unnoticed....wish i knew which part that were.....for if anything else, crisp and new, is going the way of my shoe then boy do i need to see a psychiatrist...

speaking about shoes, my mum has this old time keepsake, brown sandals made out of a strange material ( it is hard to tell whether they were khaki or leather), she got them when she was about five years old and living in colonial kenya..... a state of emergency had been declared and no one was allowed to move about freely, but her elder sister, who worked in a pyrethrum board in eldoret, sneaked her out of the reserve one day on the back of a rattling truck that suffered from heavy bouts of whooping cough..... after many resuscitations along the way, the truck finally arrived in eldoret and my mother for the first time viewed this strange world of white people moving about with elegant hats and shoes, yes shoes, because my mother finally realized that what she was wearing could not be justifiably called shoes when placed next to what those white ladies were wearing.......

colonialism came and went, and those fine, dandy, high-nosed, aristocratic British ladies finally packed away from the sweet kenyan sunshine to wild destinations to the Isle of Mann or wherever colonialists go, but my mum still kept on to her old shoes, she never wore them again but time to time she glances at them, now especially that her sister died of ovarian cancer, perhaps she holds on to them because they remind her of dear sister's love.......

imelda marcos had 2000 pairs of shoes, 2000 pair....my foot, no wonder she looked so vain, i mean what do you need all those pairs for when you are only going to wear them once in 3 years....now this brings me to favourite topic-shoes.....no, don't get me wrong....am not a shoe freak and have little idea about the latest fashion in the same.....i only love shoes because they tell me something about the wearer......i assumed that the late queen mother was a strong determined spirit because she could wear high heels all the way upto her hundreds......i also wonder what kind of shoes Adolf Hitler wore when he committed suicide because that might save a lot of historians trouble when it comes to making up what was going up his mind...

i read an interesting article recently..... about a 3000-year old corpse that was found on the Alpine ridge between Austria and Italy and aptly named Otzi the Ice man.....i hear that his shoes were made with such remarkable industry that all this major shoe companies are trying to learn on his style.....there must be a long tale behind those shoes....were they made by his mother knowing that his son would be away for so long..or was his secret lover who fashioned it, a young lady's sweet present for the passion and intimacy they shared....who killed the bear from which those fine shoes were made....did they set out to hunt it or did it invade their village one moonlit night.....was otzi a scientist who wished to invent shoes that could keep the human feet free from frost-bite in the harsh Alpine coldness....may be one day someone will answer these questions for me, or may be they should not, for they may tamper with its magic, by explaining it away in dry, didacting tones....

anyway, the world's most expensive shoes, the cinderella slippers cost a whooping 2 million bucks and is made out of 565 platinum-set kwiat diamonds ( don't ask me what kwiat is), and were worn by an obscure star, Alicia Krauss to the oscar awards.....i hope that at the end of the day she still felt that her life was still a bazillion more diamonds as compared to that inanimate, soulless slipper, i hope she did not feel small, doing her best to protect that shiny, shodding material that she forgot to shine herself out to others, and make them not look down at the glitter of her feet but on the dazzle of her smile.....

but at the end of the day, shoes are there to stay, and they are much part and parcel of humanity, and if in doubt ask Otzi or the herdsmen of the dusty plains of 3000 BC mesopotamia who designed sandals.....and for a last opinion i believe that my mother's first shoes hold much more treasure than those cinderella slippers......

a rumour called agatha

was it the time or was it the smile, i don't know, all i know is that she danced away with a certain part of my fancy. she was neither bright nor beautiful, and she had giant, water-melon-sized breasts. she must have admired them and i hope she still does for she had a way of squashing your shoulders with it if you flattered her, but she did it in such a mundane fashion that it could not be termed as erotic, pitiful at most..............

and she used to zubaa ( there is no english equivalent for that verb), to zubaa is too try crossing a highway, eager to get to the other side , a lot of thoughts in your mind and have it suddenly poof away, as if some angel flew away with your brain and you are left standing in the middle of the road wondering why that heavy truck is coming to crash you.....oops nasty thought
anyway agatha was one of my poorer attempts at dating ( it was not really dating, more of a muddled desperation of a zubaad girl to a lad whose eagerness to dating could only be matched by the bankruptness of her beauty)..............

nways, i do not know whether i should date. my brother says that if you do not get a better half in campus then you are as good as a zubaad agatha, he has in his proud possession ( pliz excuse the insensitivity) a caramel complexioned cameo who has bestowed upon him a caramel complexioned baby, seeing the three together is like witnessing a nativity scene........

an acquaintance ( i differentiate them from friends in that the former are close enough that i could borrow money from them but not that close that they should borrow money from me), anyway the acquaintance accused me of having no real feelings for ladies.....this has some serious intimations....and i looked at him with those what-do-you-mean-eyes......

i think i hate the whole game of lads running after lasses...why can't love just happen.....e.g.....you walk into a lady's hall of residence....and you see this butter-skinned butterfly sashaying in a bath-robe in the corridor... a total stranger....and a gust of wind tears furiously into the room, bearing with it the bathrobe....the same furious wind also bears you off the ground and hurls your mighty frame at her nubile form and you end up tumbled and interlocked on the floor ( welcome to the fantasies of the masculine mind)....from there it is so easy to declare your love.... i don't think that in such a privileged position any of you can afford to play with the usual beating-around-the-bush nuances of this ancient game......

wouldn't it be so nice if men could just be honest with women
"look here, i really don't want to watch Oprah with you, i came here to have sex and if you are humane enough you will appreciate the urgency of my carnal desires and be compliant to my swiftest caresses..you see i usually sleep with your sister susan on thursday but she is not in town today....you could substitute her well...i am willing to overlook the cellulite and the multiple chin...hop off your clothes now"

nways, my mind is not that twisted, i was an altar boy remember ( read through my blog if you can't).....it is just that this relationship making-breaking stuff bore me.....and campus chicks bore me as much as i bore them of course...they don't care about you, they only care for your card-your sound stereo and your snoop-doggy-dog style......please don't think that this is a materially-deprived student's consolation.....i mean....actually.....i just don't know ( oops losing my connection).....all in all it is not fair out and out, for girls to behave that way in an institution of higher learning... i thought we had come so far in education to remove blinders from our eyes and see material possessions for what they are.....worldy decorations that have little value compared to the person....ladies should be deep for they are naturally abundantly endowed with that aspect.....well, this is just my opinion, not a fact, may be i am the one with the wrong attitude, if anyone has his/her opinion i will be more than delighted to read your comment..

speaking of deep ladies, i really pray that whitney houston gets better soon if she is not better already ( i really don't trust the media when it comes too reporting celebrity details-it seems the dirtier the better...am sure with such an incentive i would not be too wrong to say that they might have cooked something up about this fiery alto)....and yep, i believe she is a deep lady....just listen to her songs for confirmation.....

otherwise, the sem is coming to an end, trying hard to chop early enough and not to procrastinate like we usually do......wish me luck peeps..

a rumour called agatha

was it the time or was it the smile, i don't know, all i know is that she danced away with a certain part of my fancy. she was neither bright nor beautiful, and she had giant, water-melon-sized breasts. she must have admired them and i hope she still does for she had a way of squashing your shoulders with it if you flattered her, but she did it in such a mundane fashion that it could not be termed as erotic, pitiful at most..............

and she used to zubaa ( there is no english equivalent for that verb), to zubaa is too try crossing a highway, eager to get to the other side , a lot of thoughts in your mind and have it suddenly poof away, as if some angel flew away with your brain and you are left standing in the middle of the road wondering why that heavy truck is coming to crash you.....oops nasty thought
anyway agatha was one of my poorer attempts at dating ( it was not really dating, more of a muddled desperation of a zubaad girl to a lad whose eagerness to dating could only be matched by the bankruptness of her beauty)..............

nways, i do not know whether i should date. my brother says that if you do not get a better half in campus then you are as good as a zubaad agatha, he has in his proud possession ( pliz excuse the insensitivity) a caramel complexioned cameo who has bestowed upon him a caramel complexioned baby, seeing the three together is like witnessing a nativity scene........

an acquaintance ( i differentiate them from friends in that the former are close enough that i could borrow money from them but not that close that they should borrow money from me), anyway the acquaintance accused me of having no real feelings for ladies.....this has some serious intimations....and i looked at him with those what-do-you-mean-eyes......

i think i hate the whole game of lads running after lasses...why can't love just happen.....e.g.....you walk into a lady's hall of residence....and you see this butter-skinned butterfly sashaying in a bath-robe in the corridor... a total stranger....and a gust of wind tears furiously into the room, bearing with it the bathrobe....the same furious wind also bears you off the ground and hurls your mighty frame at her nubile form and you end up tumbled and interlocked on the floor ( welcome to the fantasies of the masculine mind)....from there it is so easy to declare your love.... i don't think that in such a privileged position any of you can afford to play with the usual beating-around-the-bush nuances of this ancient game......

wouldn't it be so nice if men could just be honest with women
"look here, i really don't want to watch Oprah with you, i came here to have sex and if you are humane enough you will appreciate the urgency of my carnal desires and be compliant to my swiftest caresses..you see i usually sleep with your sister susan on thursday but she is not in town today....you could substitute her well...i am willing to overlook the cellulite and the multiple chin...hop off your clothes now"

nways, my mind is not that twisted, i was an altar boy remember ( read through my blog if you can't).....it is just that this relationship making-breaking stuff bore me.....and campus chicks bore me as much as they bore me of course...they don't care about you, they only care for your card-your sound stereo and your snoop-doggy-dog style......please don't think that this is a materially-deprived student's consolation.....i mean....actually.....i just don't know ( oops losing my connection).....all in all it is not fair out and out, for girls to behave that way in an institution of higher learning... i thought we had come so far in education to remove blinders from our eyes and see material possessions for what they are.....worldy decorations that have little value compared to the person....ladies should be deep for they are naturally abundantly endowed with that aspect.....well, this is just mu opinion, not a fact, may be i am the one with the wrong attitute, if anyone has his/her opinion i will be more than delighted to read your comment..

speaking of deep ladies, i really pray that whitney houston gets better soon if she is not better already ( i really don't trust the media when it comes too reporting celebrity details-it seems the dirtier the better...am sure with such an incentive i would not be too wrong to say that they might have cooked something up about this fiery alto)....and yep, i believe she is a deep lady....just listen to her songs for confirmation.....

otherwise, the sem is coming to an end, trying hard to chop early enough and not to procrastinate like we usually do......wish me luck peeps..

if i had a song for africa

my blackness is not my skin,..... it is my pain and my destiny,..... i recoil beneath it like a tortoise, ....seeking covering in its velvety covering .....when the world overwhelms me.

i carry within me the dreams of the many children ......who have died of aids, genocides and famine, .......there voices whisper to me in the dark of the night, ......telling me that their destinies were unfulfilled, ........the world only heard the sorrowful stanzas of their song, that rang only of misery and despair, ......but their song was much bigger than that, ........and its sound would have stilled the eagles in the sky

it was a song of africa,....... africa whose feet are shod in the gold of south africa and whose hair is the shifting sanddunes of the sahara,....... africa to whom palaces were built from timbuktu to songhai, ........from zimbabwe to heliopolis egypt

they tell me that our mother has been naked to long,........ naked to the shame of oppression and indignity,...... but now africa wants to be clothed in designers, ........she wants pearl earrings on her ears to match the richness of her heart,.......... for too long has she cried,....... tears longer than the river nile

am black i say again,........... though i have lived in the dark my dawn is nigh, and the sun will rise on me tomorrow and i will sing a new song for africa......if you say am mad give me privileges for my madness, ............if you say am proud my pride is of a loving kind but if you accuse me of being black then just lock your lips and throw away the keys ......for i am black...i am black .....i am black!

if i had a song for africa

my blackness is not my skin,..... it is my pain and my destiny,..... i recoil beneath it like a tortoise, ....seeking covering in its velvety covering .....when the world overwhelms me.

i carry within me the dreams of the many children ......who have died of aids, genocides and famine, .......there voices whisper to me in the dark of the night, ......telling me that their destinies were unfulfilled, ........the world only heard the sorrowful stanzas of their song, that rang only of misery and despair, ......but their song was much bigger than that, ........and its sound would have stilled the eagles in the sky

it was a song of africa,....... africa whose feet are shod in the gold of south africa and whose hair is the shifting sanddunes of the sahara,....... africa to whom palaces were built from timbuktu to songhai, ........from zimbabwe to heliopolis egypt

they tell me that our mother has been naked to long,........ naked to the shame of oppression and indignity,...... but now africa wants to be clothed in designers, ........she wants pearl earrings on her ears to match the richness of her heart,.......... for too long has she cried, tears longer than the river nile

am black i say again,........... though i have lived in the dark my dawn is nigh, and the sun will rise on me tomorrow and i will sing a new song for africa......if you say am mad give me privileges for my madness, ............if you say am proud my pride is of a loving kind but if you accuse me of being black then just lock your lips and throw away the keys ......for i am black...i am black .....i am black!

islands in the stream

islands in the stream
that is what we are
no one in between
how can we be wrong
sail away with me
to another world
where we belong to each other
aa--aaah

country musicians really impress me, they treat words as if they are horses that can be galloped away with. nways, i always find myself flowing back to that sentimental tune...dolly parton is way deep, i tell you ( can't say much about the endless make-overs though)

wish i had a horse right now, a palomino or an appaloosa ( the names sound so fantasi-romantic ) and a thousand acres, somewhere in the deep hinterlands of the lone star county, wish also my heart was as big as texas and that i never meet with meddle-some people

meddles-some peeps...they are the worst people you can ever eat, sorry meet...they think they know so much and go about criticising everyone without even taking notice of the shame that is there in their lives...is it some sort of cover-up for the misery that is there in their lives that they have to speak so negatively of everyone who is around them..

...take not of this, there are this people who walk around my country ( i just want to be specific) claiming that if we could just be a bit more clever the woes that surround us would not exist at all..nothing bad in that thought, quite ponderable in fact, but since when in the history of mankind does one who knows not what it is to be hungry, what it is to be suffering from aids, what it is to be uneducated accuse others who are dipped in those very shifting sands of torture that it is they who authored their miseries...

i might sound a bit incoherent today, but i am just fired up with a song, it is a song every black person in sub-saharan africa knows by heart but has a craven fear of admitting it......it was the fiery singer Angelique Kidjoe who struck those first chords in my soul....never make people feel guilty she said so, for when you bring in the cycle of guilt you kill there spirit... nobody chose to be poor, to be a bean-pole, to be born black or white, and it is not like rich people are the most hardworking and poor people the laziest, and before you criticize someone take time to walk a thousand miles in his shoes, you might end up with a different tale

we look so much to define the world, but it can never be defined, it is amorphous and mystical, just as is every human, this is just the bizarreness of this cosmic phenomena called life...so don't strut like a turkey-cock believing you are so right and everyone is a fool and only you have the right ideas on how everyone should live their life...keep cool and flow with the beat, don't see the rough crust..see the diamond..see the sparkle waiting to shine...and dude don't try to hide its glitter for it will only shine brighter...and one day it will shine so bright that its light will consume you with all your contempt and show the world all the dirt hidden therein your heart...

the king of takka tukku

who am i kidding? the only reason why i ventured into blogging is because i was bored with life in the real, un-e-world. and why should i not be bored. i am ensconsced in college room where my next-door neighbour does nothing but have sex all day ( at least that is how it appears to me with all the attendant bumpings and moanings i usually get as a free orchestra service). and he expects me to shake his hand in the morgen, no way...
nways, i also bought a pair of jeans, real heavy jeans but it seems they were a size too huge ( my friend says that they must have been designed to keep Danish cows warm in winter).why didn't i see that?now i am stuck with a pair of jeans that i will never get to wear unless i intend to hire myself out as a circus clown-so nerve-grating isn't it...
then again, i got chased out of class this morgen, for being late, i have never been late this much befor, but its like my head just shut off and i couldn't get up early,couldn't take breakfast (actually i could, only that i choose that moment when i was too take a bite of bread to mull over the writings of Plato so i ended up like a greek statue my hand frozen with the bread and my eyes staring solemnly into space).....
it was so disgusting you know, the guy doesn't know how to control the tone of his voice and when he shouted at me the whole class turned around thinking that Hitler had entered the room and it was all i could do not to break into flight, though my legs had developed a new life of their own and did not wish to tarry slow with me....
now he is one of those lecturers who give sudden, surprise quizzes,bolts from the blue ( truly they are bolts for they are hard like magic) and since there seems to be no love lost between the two of us ( from this and other experiences) he might just strike with his lightening staff ( his acquired the image of Zeus in my mind, sitting on a throne in mount Olympus while we get crushed underneath) and worst of all since he does not tolerate people who miss even a zenith of his classes ( i find this odd to believe because if he wants full classes why does he chase people out) he might be evil enough to dish out a disgusting grade at the end of the sem, despite all my superlative efforts..but no way, i am not going to allow that to happen, i have worked hard enough and i deserve a break....
so let me just cross my fingers and see what happens...ciao dudes, peeps, giants, trolls, orcs, philosophers, wizards..

yoyo dances

life can be frustrating at times, especially when you are searching for something exciting, looking for that special friend who will make your sojourn on earth more lively and engaging, that special moments in sesame street where life is just about jumping up and down and having fun. well, it seldom never is unless you choose to find joy in the situation you are in. just ask God for help in that.
Anyway, i meant to talk about gender inequality in movies, i am not an expert in this and i have not done much research so as to come up with accurate statistics. but have you realized that male characters practically outnumber their female counterparts in the screen.
let us start with an example, in the film THE ICE AGE, that lovely digital cartoon about a grumpy mammoth, a nerve-grating sloth-like mammal and a suave sabre-toothed tiger named Diego are out in a noble mission to bring a human baby back to his 'herd'. nothing wrong with that really only that both herds, the tiger one and the human herd, held no hint of the female form. it is a naturally expected fact that for a race to survive, females have to outnumber men since they can only give birth once a year unlike men who can impregnate many women at a time.
now i do not know what ploy the ice age marketers were trying to use but i certainly did not appreciate the fact that was presented to kids like the ice age was just a world for men.
look again in Titanic, that lofty tear-jerker that had many reaching for their hankerchiefs. why is it that that female lead character could only discover her freedom after being shown how to by a man ( leonardo di caprio's character). could she not guess things for herself, could she not discover her power by herself without involving a man.
why is it that in every sensational novel or movie, the woman is shown as being an emotional wreck who finds love in the most inconceivable form such as falling in love with the pirate who killed her brother, the former governor of San Domingo
yes it is always like that, the men have worthwhile careers, whether clean (governor) or vile (pirate), the woman is just at home being dressed and pampered by maids employed in her father's rich estate while being tormented by sexual images. pathetic isn't it?
well, i could talk on forever and give you more and more examples, all i want to say is that those screen writers and novelists should finally realise what century we are in. ciao

the long road home

there is an old viking tale that when a brave warrior dies in battle his soul goes to valhalla where he is entertained by a thousand virgin maidens for all eternity. i shared this with a friend and he said that the chances of finding a virgin maiden is just as possible as being hit by lightening twice under a very clear sky.
anyway, i meant to talk about myself and not to scorn the virtues of the female kind(which am sure there are plenty around)

it is midnight and i am typing randomly on my keyboard. i wonder if anyone is up late with me for there is a full moon outside complete with a fairy ring, maybe if i look close enough i could see those pixies going round and round in their enchanting dance. there is always something sinister about the moon; it is full of werewolf tales and witches swishing to and fro on their ugly brooms. someone told me that there was a full moon the day Judas Iscariot betrayed my saviour Jesus. i don't know about that but it is enough to get me scared.

but today the moon is different. i have closed my room lights so that i can type with her sheen. her light is different today as it slowly sifts through my window. today she is hiding away everything ugly-the concrete, the steel cages commonly known as sky scrapers-and all i can see are the tender buds of the purple jacaranda and the dew drifting down her leaves like soft tears. it makes me think that if i could just open the window i could drift back to my childhood.

i was born about 300 miles from Nairobi a long time ago ( but not that long time ago that you wonder what it is i'm still doing in campus). my parents brought me from hospital and my grandmother blessed me by touching my forehead with red ochre smeared with fresh milk.
mine was the nature around me, the guinea fowls that strutted around with their harsh shrill cry( we used to take their eggs and hatch them with a pullet so that they would grow up believing that they were domestic fowl) and the squirrels that stole our precious millet from the farm, i found it hard to associate thievery with those cute fellows and forgave them, never stoning them when they skittered away with a few grains of sorghum.

school was a mile or so away, and it meant leaving my village of 500 chimneys to pass through a dark , gloomy forest, ha ha that is a cliche, it was not gloomy at all but warm and full of wondrous lights dropping like liquid jade all the way down to the forest floor. there were monkeys along the way, colobus monkeys dressed like old men in white and black suits and another bluish-whitish monkey whose name in English i cannot tell. someone told me that another monkey lived in the forest too- a big ,black baboon that stole little boys like me when no one was looking. this made me very afraid and i never walked in there without company.
at school i was the only one with shoes and the kids must have spent a better amount of their time in admiring my pretty bubble-gummers than in listening to the teacher, no wonder i garnered all the As as they floundered along.
girls were never an issue. after all i was timothy, the altar boy who helped the kindly italian priest every sunday at the catholic mass. he had a mule, that italian priest, a pretty mule with a tail like a horse and with a bite scarier than a dog's. i meant to befriend him in spite of all and fed him with bread when the italian priest was not looking ( bread was precious and meant only for humans). he let me ride him once, when the children performed the nativity play, although i was a boy i insisted to play the part of the virgin mary so that i could ride the mule. and boy did i ride him like a king, sorry, queen.

when i was about to join high school a girl walked into my class and into my heart. before that all the girls had been the cheeky annoying type that hid away my story books so that i should kiss them before taking it back. but clarissa, with her long black hair cascading down her back like a waterfall was different, her hands were soft like a butter and her luscious lips begged to be kissed ( i had read my share of romance novels set back in the days of chilvary to develop such a lusty little mind). knights fought dragons to win the love of their damsels but i went back to my monkey-filled forest to bring her the sweet red lamaek berries, they grow so high up in the trees and i was so short, like a hammer more or less. to cut the long tale short i fell and broke my leg and my cries brought me a local farmer who whisked me to hospital in his tractor, my search for the lamaek fruits left unproven in the forest floor, just like my love for clarissa.

high school was a long way of, in a dusty town called eldoret. it was a national school where the bright kids went to meet with others of their kind from all over the country. it was in high school that i developed a love for literature and for language, admiring the lyrical French that we were now learning. high school was a unique experience altogether-some were rich, most were poor- some were the kids of diplomats and had grown up in Europe, most had,like me, had grown up in sequestred forested villages.
my roommate was a sleek savvy guy named Arjuna who hailed all the way from Gujarati India, he used to torture me with spooky tales and i never realized till much, much later that it was he who filched soft drinks from my locker in the dead of the night while i shivered in bed believing that a ghost was prowling about.

high school came and went and it was back to my green village while i considered the places where i could pursue a higher education. the forest was gone now, replaced by wheat-fields and concrete houses all in the name of development. the only monkey left was a sad blue one, emaciated to the bone, sitting beside the road, his hand stretched out begging for food. i couldn't hold back the tears, it was like a piece of my child hood had been stolen .
their new parents now, new parents who have sassy jobs in distant towns and smell of new money. and to prove their wealth they stuff their kids with chocolates and ice-cream, with video games and salsa lessons. the kids no longer speak the local kalenjin language, they now prefer, although seldom, swahili but most of the times they prove themselves in their english, imitating the britons and the americans they see on tv. it stabs me to see a language going to waste like that, it is like allowing a whole species to dwindle in extinction, i fear that one day kalenjin will go the way of the mammoth and the mastodons.
they now listen to 50 cent and Britney Spears, trying to behave like them, how do you behave like an artist who is worth 150 million dollars while you don't even earn a single, miserable penny a day. they should concentrate on building their lives and their countries, and not waste their tender, African lives in hopeless imitation of others.

anyway, i came to Nairobi University, where i am currently pursuing a degree in commerce, majoring in marketing, i plan to work for a while, in a reputable company and then do my masters in a foreign university, i want to understand money and why it has so much power, power that could often lead to good but often ends up destroying, and i want to come back to my country with some of it and build back the shattered lives around.
may be we will all find our way back to valhalla and be entertained by a thousand colobus monkeys all our lives, just think of that........
goodnight!

on the corners of heaven i sat- tale of an old man

i sat on the corner's of heaven's pearly gates i sat. peter was there, a gentle father abraham, and the fruits of the tree of life looked so luscious. well, all i could do is accept jesus and step in and enjoy the warmth( lovelier than the sun it was). but i thought of earth, of that one last drink of beer i could have, one last tryst, one last lie, one last puff of marijuana......
the presence of sin felt so welcoming. and i looked up to heaven. and thought of the many evil men who went there only by confessing at the last minute and i told God no, book me a space, am coming back. and now am old and my days are done, my life is wasted, i have beared no fruit. and i look up to God and the day when i sat beside heaven's gate, at all the blessings i had missed, of how my life was now even more empty, and i ask" God why is it so hard to accept you when i know you are the best!"

memories of a diamond-studded night

life is full of possibilities we ay never get to see for we are so unwilling to try. i learnt this the other day when a friend of mine shared this tale with me. he had loved running ever since he was a child but never explored it for folks considered it as a mindless pastime.anyway, one day, i do not how, he could not resist the urge. and the urge pursued him for so long that it was not uncommon to see him galloping like a thoroughbred horse in the chilly fields of nairobi university.
an ogre lived nearby, not an ogre really, for it was only his wife who saw him that way. nonetheless he had been told gently by his doc that people who were ballooned like constipated hippopotamuses could very easily float to heaven with a gentle breeze, which was a nice way of saying that the grave was knocking at his door in the form of heart attacks and the like. you see the man had weight, real weight from the piles and layers of fat coiled upon his slight frame like humongous pythons.
so one fine morning while grieving his predicament, he looked upon his window and what does he see but a sturdy young man riding in the wind like an angel in flight. what spirit possessed the lad that he did not mind the chill and the mud in the early morning? wondered the ogre, sorry the man.
so my friend was stopped on his tracks one day by the man who happened to be an expatriate from norway. my friend had inspired him so much that he insisted they be running each day together.
"pick me up whether rain or shine" was the expatriate's broad proclamation.
so began their work-outs, each one encouraging the other. and finally, when the expatriate flew back to norway, his wife saw him as a better version of brad pitt and my friend, to whom he indebted all the support and encouragement, is looking forward to a fully-funded trip to norway to meet the man and his beloved norway family.
just look at that!