The back story

According to y'all, these are the posts you loved the most. Being the nice guy I like to believe I am, I will take the liberty of explaining to you the genesis of the genius and idiocy in these posts, from the most loved, and through the top five of your all-time favorite posts. To be honest, there is a couple of posts I believed y'all would have loved a tad bit more, but I don't know you as well as I thought I did. Anyway, here goes.....

When I wrote In Arsene we trust, I was going through the emotions of love and lies, the trust in a great team that makes me weak on my knees, the hope of re-living through the era of the invincibles, and fighting the knowledge that our past is just that, our past. I talk of how beautiful our football is, I protect the nakedness of my favorite team with it's glory days with tales of grandiosity of it's past but my excuses for them were sounding more and more like broken records. I guess I needed to convince myself that we can go back to the days when Arsenal used to give me that fuzzy warm feeling more than I needed to convince y'all. By the number of hits it's got, I can confidently say, am not the only one who needs reassurance.

Good girls magnet.........so I've heard,  wasn't me thinking out loud. It was the thinking of this cool dude I met when I moved to Molo,  who used to roll with my cousin. After he moved into my neighborhood, every once in a while, we'd hang out, light a joint and bounce ideas of each other or just try to figure out women, love, and life in general. One evening, in between sessions, he told me he had finally figured the whole "girls and bad boys" mystery.  According to him, every time he had tried to play nice, he always ended up single with dry spells running into months but as soon as he unleashed the dogs, women flocked. I know the post sounds kinda feminist, but he swore on personal experiences, those of friends and relatives, and to be honest, he truly believed women like a man they can take care off. I think their (the girls) logic is if they can take care of him long enough, he'll become dependent on her and she'll be in full control, but that's just one of my flawed logic....

Moving on,Don't send me to hell, I mind if you forget me was one of those "in hind-sight" moments. It was more of me wondering if it was within my power to control social cause and effect than it was an "in hindsight moment" when I think about it. It was the couple of things in my house that I can't seem to throw away because of the memories they carry. At the same time, losing religion had me trying to figure out what some of the religious concepts symbolized, especially the heaven and hell control. I guess my minimal understanding of death still haunts my sorry ass. Then there was the call from an old friend who called to say hi, after listening to a an old cd I made her for her birthday.

This was more of an out of the blue kind of story. We were rolling some at the beach with Mr. Lee and he was telling me of his history with drugs, the good, the bad and the ugly. At 70, he had tried almost everything, natural and synthetic. They lived in a small town where people always passed through, they never stayed, rarely stopped. When they did, on the rare occasion, venture into the local gas mart to ask for directions, they were met with kind smiles but not much conversation. It was a good place to raise children. One day after school, he was hanging out with this girl, the kind of girl that gets your name whispered around town, but she was the only pretty girl who'd talk to him. In an effort to please, he had his first cigarette. The first time he smoked a cigarette, at 16, he did it to please a girl. This was one of Mr. Lees' many stories. Retracing was my version of the stories of Mr. Lee.     

Life is short, art long, opportunity fleeting, experience treacherous, judgment difficult. Spin, Run and Choose, I have no idea where this came from, but the direction it took reflects some of the fears I live with.  The fear of living a half baked life, the uncertainty of death both in timing and afterlife possibilities drummed in my skull and the possible outcomes of choosing either of the extreme uncertainties. Without religion, this is supposed to be an easy decision but it isn't. It is the choice between walking away from societal norms which enhances survival or be a lone back packer and live a full life. I know am not supposed to blow my own trumpet (please don't misinterpreting this ^^^), but I believe this is one of the best pieces I have ever written.

 PS: I,ve heard word on some awesome folks with some awesome stuff .You can swing by Kilimanjaro Art | Facebook  on your way from here and see for yourself.

PPS: The photos have nothing to do with the story.....

Write all that you can write

 I've come to realize that I love telling stories; sometimes I like a story so much that I tell it over and over again. That's me, I think am interesting or rather my stories are. This isn’t entirely false considering that a few people believe that I should chase for a column which although sounding like the right thing to do, I don't feel it. Most people who read my blog and a few more who love or pretend to love my blog keep telling me that am wasting my time in the professional am currently making acquaintances with. Maybe it would be a good thing to try; maybe writing is what I was supposed to do with my life, born to write, write all that you can write.

On the other hand, I like small crowds. Small crowds do not demand much. They are content with the few stories that I can come up with. They are not judgmental; they do not tear your humble pieces into shreds for their entertainment. I know I shouldn't be too comfortable because even though it feels like they approve of all my words, they're probably too afraid to crush me a little bit with a pinch of truth because they think it will crush my simulated ego. They won't tell me that my writing sucks when it does if only but to protect me from myself and others, neither do they share it to avoid someone out there reading it and being shocked that someone can write this bad and actually expect to be published. Worse still, they might share and someone out there who doesn't have the same kind of affection for me, who doesn't feel the need not to puncture my belief in self, points out that my writing should be made private as it may cause harm to others and to self especially if, god forbid, someone takes is to heart. But then again, it could be me being paranoid.

It could be the fear of rejection that keeps me away from the big crowds. I know it sounds pathetic but in a way, I don't take rejection very well, never have. I don't scream it on rooftops or insult the other person before other people of interest, or do anything dramatic primarily because flaunting my weaknesses isn't really my thing. It however doesn't mean rejection doesn't cut through me. It feels like a chapter torn in my book or a forever severed by a sharp knife, a story I'll never get to tell, a heartbreak I will never get to go through. I've never being able to handle rejection very well, I just don't go showing it off. I think the fear of rejection would be bad for me on a large scale, if I tried to write for a bigger crowd, with diverse opinions who do not give a rats' ass about how I will take their opinion will crush me. I have read these columns about handling fears and all, but all I see is people who haven't being on the other side who think because they have read a couple of books and watched those motivational movies or listened to those motivational speeches, they can actually relate. I see it differently, like a guy riding around in a Benz and preaching ''kazi ni kazi'' (loosely translated as don't choose a job); while in real sense there are things they wouldn't do to make money even if their life depended on it. Their whole, ''the first step is acceptance'' speech sometimes gets to me and almost makes me want to give em' a congratulatory tap on the back of their head with a sledge hammer for their great service in patronizing and shit monging. I digress.

There is the aspect of time too. The one thing I actually believe is writing more often will improve the quality of my posts. I don't yearn for perfection because am not a fan of anything perfect, because to me perfection equals boring. A perfect piece leaves no room for improvement, no different interpretations from a reader, no a lesson or a story query, no entendres, nothing but a piece that should either be accepted or rejected in whole. A perfect piece does not warm my cuckoos, because it goes against my policy of throwing words out there and waiting for the pieces to fall as they may. Perfection to me is an illness that should be crashed before it destroys us, as it crashes those who yearn and toil to get it. It forces us to create a life based on it while it's absent, societal perfection, moral perfection, perfection, perfection, perfection, in absence but alive and kicking in misplaced facades. Imperfection I prefer because it allows me room to make something better or worse and in this moments of imperfection, once in a while, a masterpiece is born. Time is however a luxury I do not boast, which makes it difficult to improve my little imperfections in search for that elusive masterpiece, something that will be at least go one better than my favorite imperfect pieces (Yes I do, or Love, loyalty and blood.). Time albeit free comes with other costs, opportunity costs, what I'll sacrifice to create time to write more with work, social life, my intention of going back to school and hours flying like they're running from the General Service Unit (for those not in the know, the GSU is a paramilitary unit in Kenya which the government unleashes when they do not agree with the public. Tales of their brutality are so scary such that when they were unleashed on an unruly crowd in one of the slums, even the dogs turned into snitches. One particular dog, let's call him ''Simba'' found himself displaced from his place of residence by a group of fleeing youths. When the GSU arrived kicking and terrorizing anything that moved, one of the askaris whacked Simba a good deal, he stood with his hind limbs and with his fore limbs pointed out where the 'rowdy' youths were taking refuge, Simbas' place of residence).  And when is there time to remember, to sift, to weigh, to estimate, to total? I think Harvey McKay was right when he said “Time is free, but it's priceless. You can't own it, but you can use it. You can't keep it, but you can spend it. Once you've lost it you can never get it back.”, but I don't think he understood that even though we claim to be killing time, it's time that slowly kills us. Time is a luxury most of us can’t afford, a luxury I can’t afford.

Maybe I have just enough time, just enough words, just enough courage to wean myself from my fear of rejection, just enough of everything to chase for a column on a daily, or a magazine. Maybe I should just write without expecting accolades, tell my stories like I tell them on bar stools as if everyone relates. Write as if I was born to write and everything else is just a distraction rather than looking at writing as a distraction or a flight risk with a fear of falling, failing. As I once read in one of the columns, write all you can write and whatever comes out of it, let it be. Write and let the pieces fall as they may.