So there I left my heart, on a bus-ride to a city I returned to not…!
She says that memories are like autumn leaves; the blossom falls away and the bloom of spring is sooner forgotten, that the emotions wash away and the magic fades away, that the colours turn to gray and the emptiness is filled with ‘disremembrance!’ she says I should try and move on, to stop living in the past, that I should let her go, let her fly away from the cage where she lives: a prisoner trapped in my heart….she says that I need to stop loving shadows, grasping at straws…she says that I can’t love, that I can’t give any part of me until I learn to forget and let go of the past!
But memories is all I have….alluring eyes, wide with curiosity, glittering with excitement and the intensity of her stare, mesmeric beauty, but in the end, ardor held sway; her eyes glowed, enthralling as she spoke about family, school, culture, music, then she suddenly asked about the incredulous look in my eyes…I grasped for words, struggled to trace my mind to whence it had wandered…angelic beauty, elegance in the likeness of tranquil, clear waters that flow unencumbered, a vision of sunset – iridescent, a thousand splendid suns hidden behind hills, as the water holds the fading light in a poignant embrace – bidding the day farewell…enchanted and falling fast, I was rushing-in but then just as fleetingly, the phantasm was gone…I remembered to utter something about how incredible it is to find a person so conversant in African percussion…on a bus-ride to a city I returned not!
But there’s more than time that separates us…in my dreams, in my waking moments, in the solitude of midnight, when the longing is hardest to bear and the loneliness aches the most, engulfed by a hollow emptiness, I ran back to that moment – frozen in time; pulling back from her soulful embrace, her lips close in on mine – I taste her tears, a knowing kiss, full of longing and regret. I stare into her teary eyes, reverberating with intensity, imploring me to understand, not to ask for a promise she can’t give…a chasm lies between us; beliefs and circumstances! She: caught up in the entrapment of her religious devotion and I, a victim fear & despair, desperately clinging; looking for the future in the past, on a bus-ride to a city I returned to not, where she holds my heart…trapped in a prison of wistfulness and maybe memories!
Some things you remember and others you miss the most, but somewhere between the hostile climate, the strange faces, and the unfamiliar customs, you look back at it all through tinted glasses and even the thorns seem rosy. I once read somewhere, that if you thought that drag-racing is dangerous, try a matatu in Kenya – ain’t quite a safari without the hustle, deafening noise (blaring music, screeching of tires every car length or so and the honking that sounds more like a techno beat than a horn), dusty roads, rowdy touts (with lots of love) and over-crowded isles, that is your typical ride in a No.9! At least that is how it was in my Eastleigh schooling days – and that was after Michuki, mind you! So yes, public transport in Kenya is a disaster and a full adventure in itself. Most evenings, the ride home was the worst part of the day; the endless queues of commuters, most of them with only a dollar in their pockets and only for the matatu (when it is finally your turn) to hike the fare and then you have to wait another two hours – and that is if it doesn’t rain – before a regularly priced matatu comes along! That is the nightmare that was commuting home in a matatu….and until now I never imagined there could be a silver lining to it all, especially not during those many hours I spent at the spent at the cyber-cafe, dreading what I would find at the bus-station!!
But now I look at it all differently; the anonymity of it, a sea of drawn black faces, after a long day at work and hardly anyone would notice you. Then you forget how tall you are, that you just got your visa, that you just got a promotion or lost your job, you’re just a part of the masses, just another guy trying to get to home and every time I hear those words, common mwananchi, this picture comes to mind: nothing but ordinary!
Here it’s different; yes the fare is constant, the queues are considerably lesser and the ride is quieter, but now I understand that the more things change, the more they remain the same! Just like before, I dread the evening; I cringe at the thought of the ride home and most times am just as glad to lag behind at work if only to delay the inevitable – keeping death at the door, they say! Because I am like a Blackman in Moscow: there is nothing ordinary about taking the bus anymore. Now you’re conscious of your height – I have never felt so tall, the color of your skin which is never an issue, you feel like a child, so lonely and lost, the loneliness stabs at you as homesickness sets in, everything reminds you of just how different you are. The black sheep – with all the pun intended – a black face in a sea of brown faces…..the stares, crawling down your back – probably just curiosity, but nervousness makes one irrational, so tense and uncomfortable and those beads of sweat dampening your forehead and trickling down your neck….
I take the seat by the door, if you have to rationalize this, then it’s probably because it’s easier to get off the bus, but maybe it’s because it’s as far away as you can get to the edge without falling over.
Then a punk boards the bus, probably still in his late teens spotting a Mullet and even, amidst the veiled faces and bearded cheeks, in a land of propriety, where the line between different and wrong is ever so thin, he still fails to stand-out. I envy him! It could be me, a few months back at least, with that very indecent hair or even the corn-rows and still looking ordinary. And that is the romance of an evening bus-ride home that you miss so much. After the daily drag of routine that dulls your emotions so, that you stop caring about whether it was a clown suit or a green jacket with a yellow tie……………………
Filed under: Uncategorized
Harry Porter, the Bible, am desperate to believe in something! Maybe God is real, but so are the innocent millions dying of hunger and diseases. But I can’t deny his existence, because how else can I explain my mother’s devotion – and she should know, because she’s been to hell and back and never doubted her faith. So torn between guilt,fear, shame and blame, I say am agnostic. But that word gnaws at me, it belies my fears and my craving for a faith. But maybe if close my eyes hard enough, maybe if I can’t see the pain and misery that clouds their faces, maybe if I can’t hear their cries, feel the tears on her face, the blisters on her hand as she toils for naught, maybe if I turn my back to the tatters and rags bearing their buttocks: that hide the shame of lack, of hungry nights in the cold, maybe I can shade my eyes from the look of emptiness and despondence that you can make out behind the glazed hue of a drug induced comatose – a welcome escape from you and me. Maybe I can stop caring like the rest of world, maybe I’ll promise to donate my wealth after am dead and in the least it will earn me sleep at night if not a ticket to heaven. And maybe, just maybe I can start to believe that there’s a master plan, that it’s destiny, that it’s okay to starve because we’ll have plenty in heaven and that it will all be okay because after-all, all is well that ends well.
Am trying to make sense of it all, they say am disturbed because I bleed for drama, am sad, because I write about tragedies. but my sadness is real and tangible and the smile like beauty skin-deep! life is a long frightful dream whose waking is death. In fleeting moments of waking, I live, trying to take my breath. am broken and dejected, am afraid of the dark, trying to flee the demons in my sleep. I yearn for it: Sometimes I feel it, I taste it, tempting and teasing, whiffs of destiny – a cruel temptress! My mind is a burden – questions without answers. my treacherous heart wrought with yearning, full of dreams and desires, reaching for an end that’s never nearer – feeling for a shadow in the mist. My pen owns my hand – a talent that’s a curse, an expression of my emptiness!!
The world is full of colour, but most times we see it in black and white and we miss all the gray areas. so in a world of broken hopes and dreams, of glass ceilings, full of divisions of religion and race that brew hate, full of calamities and disasters, through the gray, the sadness, thye pain of losing, the dull of routine,and moments of deep internal turmoil, i look for the odd smile on the bus home, for the child within spurred by curiosity – that still believes in dreams and miracles, for love that bridges divisions of religion, culture, race, and politics, for beautiful art that depicts the scenes of peace and for inspiration to succeed because others made it. i look for something to believe in , in human will, noble quests, sacrifices of love and a passion to live – that above all burns with desire and drive and a courage to face my demons.
I’ll survive and so will you. So keep your head up!!!
so we all love to daydream, that peaceful, magical or for some, that sick and perverted place where our minds find mental solace and escape from those drag monologues that that all egotistical people specialize in; dragons to slay, damsel in distress to rescue, conquering space and well there’s J Lo’s butt, but I won’t go into that! My teacher used to call it building castles in the air but I simply call it cutting grass; now don’t blow your brain trying to figure out the relevance – which there isn’t, to be honest. Let me explain how it came about……………………..C’mon, you really want me to try and define seriously expect me to start defining insanity?!
It’s during those moments of mental inactivity – at least as far as listening is concerned that is – that we find our Eureka moments and our biggest sources of inspiration. It’s during those moments that you discover the cure for cancer, the key to peace in the middle-east and a solution to Al Gore’s Global Warming problem but almost always it involves some grand plan to use the waters of Gondor (first one that came to mind), Gandalf’s staff and some inter-galactic (just insert some jargon that you can’t even pronounce) alien technology from Krypton that is as destructive as it is useful in the wrong hands. so maybe you’re not that creative but you can’t be worse than the last Harry Porter movie unless of course you watch Brad Pitt movies for the acting!
Back to the melting ice in the north pole that is going is to flood the world making one of the most outrageous movies ever made, Water World come true……….nah, not gonna happen! so am sure you’re starting to understand what cutting grass is; that’s right whatever you’re thinking, it’s not!!
So now I have to go back to ruling my empire, catch u later and remember, whatever you do: don’t let the grass grow too long!
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: because life is hard enough, fighting the odds
The days that you wake up with the world on top of you, when you realize that your castles are made of sand, all the doors are locked and the walls start to close in, you’ve lost it all and the best doesn’t seem to mean a thing, she sleeps besides you but the nights are cold and lonely – the distant look in her eyes tells you that she’s no longer there – you know you should let go but you can’t, because misery loves company. only hollow emptiness remains because the tears are gone and you stopped caring – when Life became a routine. It’s all black and white now, the laughter’s dead and the music is gone, the wind is still and love bleeds from the hole where your heart was. You can’t stand the person staring at you in the mirror and you cry for pain, just to make the numbness go away…..it all seems so senseless, but it still gets worse because the light at the end of the tunnel turns out to be a train!! Now you look back, to when you ruled the world, an innocent adolescent with so many dreams, immortality and it all seemed possible. They sang your name and drank to your health, life was just another frontier to be conquered and the wind spoke to you; of visions of gold, with laughter in your eyes and music in your soul, when love was real and she was your life, then days seemed short and the nights even shorter………
So where did it all go wrong? when did you start going through the motions? when did the tables turn? when did she stop to care? Did you fail to read the signs? But the answers are not there because you stopped listening to the wind and it comes back to you like an echo, you can’t see the signs because they’re written in the language of love, now your loneliness hurts………..you hold a gun to your head and long for the end…..to move on – to a place where you can feel again, a place of no sleep to keep away the demons in your dreams, where the wind blows unrestrained and where love has no power to hurt you…….you move your finger to the trigger but you stop because tears are streaming down your face, you turn to look at her and you realize that you love her too much to let go. You hold her hand and you feel the warmth,you look into her eyes and you see recognition, there’s a gentle breeze and you can hear the wind – it tells to look, to read the signs, to see the silver lining, to dare to dream, to rise above yourself because life is hard enough but you DARE NOT LET GO!!!
Today Morning as I computed along Thika Road (one of Kenya’s busiest highways) I saw a woman walk right into a lane of on-coming traffic without a care, she looked dejected, hopeless and just waiting for the end to come and amidst the mad hooting, my heart went out to her, I felt helpless and guilty because I thought that life was hard…..I may not know what triggered the proverbial straw that broke the carmel’s back but I know that she doesn’t need a reason because life is hard enough. wish I could tell her not to give up, because just becausing you’re losing doesn’t mean you’re lost and to borrow a quote from Muhammad Ali: only one who’s knows what it is like to be defeated can reach down into their soul and find that extra ouncefof magic to make a match even – not too sure about the wording though!!
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If I had to conform to the norms set by our society my surname would be Ogweno, my dad’s name. The JJs in the house gotta feel me! What was a young Luo to do when all settled for The Chicken Club, little knowing the chicken went further than he had in mind!
CHICKEN! takes me back to one cold night, my heart trying to pull a Kosovo on me, my feet defying the laws of friction, or were they simply complying with it , dark, brown, light, black silhouettes pacing in front , behind. “My ancestors would have leached them,” says a flabbergasted simpleton from the refectory with a gift from the father only he wasn’t meant to live alone on. What the hell was the mischievous sprite thinking!? Forgive me Father for I am about to speak in vain. When he came to the Nazarene, he should have offered wine instead; on several grounds he’d been in the desert for 40 f*&#!^g days, bread would have choked the sucker to death and wasn’t his thing anyway. Wine on the other hand, he could turn water into! So where was I, I forget……uuh, mmh, aah, Oh yes black, brown silhouettes pacing ahead, behind. Well, my ancestors had less neither did my Lord on his celebrated throne. The young man (young only for the purpose of this segment) clearly had his premise wrong. But clearly these men had what the rest considered ‘natural dresses’….cant blame a man if he wants to commemorate his first moment on earth.
For the record, my family has no poisoned blood and we actually sleep at night or play (strictly adults only and Hon. Kajwang, this doesn’t include under 18s – ignorance is no defence Jimwat!). A man who goes back on his word is not worth calling a man, don’t know about women though. I got a pair of my own and this son of Eve was clearly not gonna let his manhood be disputed by a bunch of runners, he aint no chicken. NO! He’s as much a chicken as they are! So off my Italian Designer Shoes exclusively design for my majestic feet, a gift from her majesty for services rendered (what the hell do you think she was doing in Kenya when she became queen?) my Armani suit hanged, Mark and Spenser shirt neatly folded away, and there I was in my Gucci Boxers, ready to undertake this defining fete…..
We all have different memories we’d like to carry to the future, tell our grand kids of the heroism we professed back in the days. This, this is one of those situations I wouldn’t want to carry along in my memory, associate with my powerful name. No my grand kids shall not here me tell this story. Owino Jr thou shall not have children before you’re an adult and Mr. Kajwang please don’t shutter my dreams of dying before this little ingrates are born!! Please I beg of you, from one chicken to another!
Authored by:
CBE, Prof. Dr.Ralph Fredrick Wasington Barrack Owino -any more questions about the tribe?!
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: chickens, crazy, cuttting grass, wesley chege
Sunday evening, sitting on a park bench fighting off the competition, a super race of genetically bled (am sure I meant bred but hey, there’s a downside to loving money) winged cyborgs trying to get to the elixir of wakedom; more important then because of the impending sitting of the council of the Jedi knights. Okay, so maybe they were nothing more than stinging insects but c’mon they were attacking my precious, ready to drink quencher, and let’s face it the kids should never know that their mother wears the trousers! What happened to them………….are there any animal rights activists reading this? Can’t be too sure, so email me if you must know, no promises of happy endings though.
There’s something about cheap fries – Keep off them! The first led to war of the worlds, the second; Jaws, Deep Blue Sea, Anaconda – now J Lo in skimpy clothing, yagagaga! I would understand the snakes dying to get to J LO coz man she looked scrumptious, thinking about it makes me hungry, be right back………………now why are we even talking about Anaconda? Back to the cheap fries….oh what the heck let’s just skip to the part of being at the coast for the first time in your adult life with no food, accommodation or warm clothing, ‘air-banding’ on the streets – It’s nothing like they make it look
on OC!
Epilogues? Prologues? Eulogies? No! Not a scary movie either. Just two meaningless stories that make perfect sense only to the Chickens, namely: Bubbles aka “Pete Wenz”, Macking aka “Fred, Ralph, Eric – whichever helps you sleep at night”, Njine (always quiet – too perverted for words), Fonzi aka “Luke, Evans, Chumz, Mojo, Maddocks – no-one really knows his real name” and yours truly, the magnificent, the incredible, the magnanimous, the humorous: Wess ……… thank you, thank you, thank you, you’re far too kind! Am sure the rest will have tons to say about that but don’t believe them, they’re clouded by jealousy and they’re too damn insane to be rational.
The story of a craziest, weirdest, and the most daring group of friends, ingenious fools who set campus alight and grew to be brothers in school, business and life.
Chickens: flightless birds, flying without wings!
leaving a mark!
