LADIES IN BOOTS

Most of your adult life you are sure, very sure about one or two things. Things like I can never fit in a bikini, I can never wear a hawk on my head; I can never drink cheap alcohol. Omera. Just like I have started to be sure I can’t write now in the middle of my intro, at some point in my life I was sure I am not really a poetry guy. Just like sitting with a guitar on the pavement or wearing a sleeveless shirt thanks to a number of weeks at the gym, I thought poets were sissies, – and I quote – ‘poetry, guitars and biceps are desperate attempts to get noticed’. This is not a complain, it’s not a revolutionary call, it’s not what you want to think but you can think what you want, and above all it’s not personal. Sissy.


This is an arrangement of words that tell you the Adventures of Josh. Am writing this in the middle of a hangover, I need some water. In my head I have gone over the different ways I want this to come out but like teenage daughters, stories have a way of taking their own stand, either wrong or right from where you are stand is. Am going to be a very bad father to this story, am going to stand where I want and watch the story ruin its life- get pregnant, abort it or smoke it to leprosy, do a lot of alcohol, guys and useless stuff; whatever it wants. Brace yourself, you are about to get Harry Potterized.


It all begins before the beginning. It’s Sunday morning and my eyes are closed. My lips pulled to form this curve are forced by linguistics and traditional codes into calling a smile just so that you understand. I am smiling because am imagining myself somewhere else. At home. That shows you how much I was bored with Maseno.


I could have smiled imagining myself anywhere else; at that bus station where you play grab with a number of drunk or stoned(there is a very big difference)formerly gym going or guitar playing guys who will threaten to beat you up if you don’t get on the bus they show you; in the same bus -you are not in because you are afraid of settling it like a man, rather, unlike them you have brains that feed you and you don’t want them bouncing on the cold, wet pavement- this mother who keeps sleeping on your shoulder and smiling sheepishly when you wake her up only to sleep on you again in a few minutes. You could be anywhere, happily getting pushed shoved and threatened, bearing the weight of a mother's world, breathing, and smell of strange perfume on your shoulders. Sadly I was there, eyes closed. But I was not going to be there for long, am leaving.

SPOKEN HEART STORY

Most of your adult life you are sure, very sure about one or two things. Things like i can never fit in a bikini, i can never wear a hawk on my head; i can never drink cheap alcohol Omera. Just like i have started to be sure i can’t write now in the middle of my intro, at some point in my life i was sure i am not really a poetry guy. Just like sitting with a guitar on the pavement or wearing a sleeveless shirt thanks to a number of weeks at the gym, I thought poets were sissies, – and I quote – ‘poetry, guitars and biceps are desperate attempts to get noticed’. Continued………….

THE CONTRACT

I sat through a three hours class of psychology of communication this week. The topic was self concept. I don’t want to turn this into a review of that class but am going to tell you this; those quotes we write in facebook, hear from our preachers, told by our teachers about self esteem, happiness and personal behavior and their relationship have a strong psychological background.

The basic idea is that everyone has a painting – or several paintings depending on your creativity, sanity and emotional state - in their head of their own physical, behavioral and psychological attributes. The issue is not the number; the issue is the polarity of these paintings. Some people actually have a painting of themselves that they are proud of – they are very positive towards themselves. Most people have mixed feelings when it comes to looking at the picture of them. The rest hate that picture, they think it’s not good enough, they should have been taller, browner, sharper in class, their hips should have been fuller, their parents should have been a little richer, they should have had better social skills, their breath should have smelled a little better.

The relationship between these paintings and happiness, success and our behavior is very simple. By creating this picture, we are not only painting how our life is at the moment but most important we are casting an image of how we want our lives to be in future. Positivity draws positivity, negativity draws more of it.

The moment you view yourself as the best, as the brightest, the moment you tell yourself that ‘maybe am not doing good now but I know and I have always known that I have the potential, the connection, the will and the power to be the best and eventually I will’ you have painted a picture of success for yourself

A negative painting is a killer and a positive one is more of enduring happiness. One week ago I was looking for a movie to watch among the several in the computer. I’ve watched all of them so I settle for this documentary titled the secret.

The documentary simplifies the reasons for success and failure into one very subtle secret: we draw these things towards us by our thoughts. We succeed because we think of success, we are happy because our thoughts appreciate the reasons for us to be happy. We fail because we keep thinking of the failure, we keep thinking of those obstacles of reasons why we could not succeed.

To make this clear, think of it this way. Your brain is your life magnet, successes and failures are tiny iron pieces hanging in the atmosphere, and your thoughts are the power that draws particular pieces to your life. The more you think of failure, the more pieces of failure you attract and in the end you are one big magnet covered in failure. The opposite applies to success. The stronger and more frequent your thoughts are, the more your chances of achieving either. To some the power that rearranges everything in this world to fit into your thought is the universe. To me, it’s God

Two weeks ago I was travelling back to Maseno after attending a funeral of a very close cousin of mine, he died very young and in that bus from Magadi to Nairobi I was feeling like shit. I was counting the things I’ve done wrong, the mistakes I haven’t apologized for, the people I haven’t told I loved, the wrongs I’ve never made an effort to make right and wondering if my cousin had his wrongs, his mistakes, negligence instances, things he wished he could say but never got the chance to. My question to myself was, will I have a chance to? What really would have changed my mood that day was the opposite of my line of thoughts, the positive things I’ve done, what I have been able to accomplish, and the far I’ve gone. Even with those few mistakes in your life, the things you have done right are way much more. The problem with us is we overlook a dozen good things about ourselves and obsess over that one thing we think is wrong.

In Nairobi I spent the night with another cousin of mine. In the morning before I leave I pick one DVD with messages from Joel Osteen. I’ve always admired the way he speaks but mostly for the humor and the stories, not really listening to the message. So I watch one sermon and I wake up to take a shower. I leave with that DVD in the Drive. I only notice that I have it when I get to Maseno and I get it out of the drive and put it on shelve. Am back to watching movies.

The same thing that happened one week ago happened last night only this time round I find that Joel Osteen DVD and I continue watching from where I had stopped. The next message in that DVD is called ‘not being critical about yourself’.

What I got from that message is that even though we have a painting of ourselves and we believe that we know ourselves the most, God has a painting of us too. He is the master painter, He painted the universe, all those natural landscapes and features you see at and say wow, He painted them. And then He painted you. What our paintings say is that God made all these paintings we admire so perfectly and then when he got to us, somehow, He made mistakes. That is not even remotely true. You are as good as those things that make you wow in fact even better because God actually took His time, got His hands dirty to make you in His image and breathed His life into you.
You did not get the wrong hips, a smaller mind, the wrong nose, the wrong eye color, the wrong parents, or the wrong neighborhood. What you got is the perfect of all those for you. Joel Osteen said that we are living in defeat because we don’t recognize the value of what we are. You are a masterpiece painting and all that is in your life plays into making you that. Get up in the morning; look in the mirror and say, ‘Good morning you wonderful being’

We are Masterpieces of God. We don’t get our worth from what people think about us. We get it from who the painter is. An original Picaso, no matter how bad it might look would sell for millions of dollars. What would the worth of God’s work be?
Everyday you have to pray that, that painting in your head about yourself draws closer to what God made you and the only way we achieve that is to think positive, to praise ourselves for the good things in our lives, to appreciate our achievements. Too often we tend to obsess over how far we need to go that we forget to look back and say ‘This far am doing very good’. God did it, why not you? Every time he created something, the bible says, and God saw that it was good.

Last night I prayed. It started ‘God, I know its been long…..’. In the end I have decided to make this contract with God and myself. For every negative thought that I can consciously pick, I am going to make an effort to counter it with five positive ones. I am dedicated to painting a picture of my success and that I will start now. You can also do the same. Don’t you dare let yourself go through life with that negative painting in your mind

IS KENYA FLIRTING WITH WAR

I wrote this piece many months ago. sorry, many weeks ago. i wrote it for a school newsletter then i felt it was too graphical for the newsletter. I edited it to fit and it got published. Then i kept the original for this blog but i have thought that i posted it a long time ago - i don't know where i got the idea. So am posting it now because it deserves to be posted, because you deserve to read it. It starts below.............

Kenya as a country has had its dark moments. Darker than this Al-shabaab war. Darker than a few grenade attacks on early morning revelers in a club and late evening travelers in a populated bus stop. But these dark moments have not brought the realities of a nation on the brink of destruction close home than the events of the past two weeks.

It’s only when you are in the thick of things that you realize how grave the situation is. You realize that a country can move from being a safe haven to skeletons decorating its streets, blood filling its potholes and faces caught by sudden death in total astonishment lying around its pavements.

When you are caught in a traffic jam pretty close to where a grenade is exploded, you fear for your life, you are terrified. The conversation in that bus is a combination of very frustrating efforts to sound assuring. Efforts to avoid showing fear, still, it is expressed in your voice and in every word you utter.

If you are not talking you are thinking. A lot of what ifs. What if they intentionally caused this diversion of traffic so that they create a richer crowd to bomb on the highway? In your head you hear a boom then you imagine people scrambling for the narrow bus door. Then you are scared more.

Why am I telling you that? You ask. In a documentary titled the ghosts of Rwanda, a United States general who was send by the UN on a peace mission to Rwanda during the genocide says that the faces of dead people are still vivid in his mind. He says that he is scared the most by the faces of those who were caught in total astonishment. Their eyes expressing pain and questions at the same time. Those people never expected it will get to them. Those who were asking ' what in the hell happened?'

Most African countries have had serious civil war. There has been serious bloodshed from independence up until now. Some like Rwanda have recovered while others like Somalia, the war laid them flat on their bellies. The truth is, most civilians don’t realize the gravity of a war situation until a gun is pointed in their face. People will still go to work, shop, swim, play golf, chew miraa on pavements or do whatever things they do with their life even after a few building are bombed.

But when your life is seriously on the line, you start questioning the wisdom in a country involving itself in such confrontations. You start asking yourself questions
Why would we follow alshabaab to Somalia if their leaders are in Kenya? Why did we wait until the sect has done all this harm – infiltrated our country, recruited our youths, hijacked a number of our ships and seriously harmed our tourism industry by kidnapping tourists – before we got this sworn dedication to destroy them?

On 29th of this month, I saw a picture in a daily newspaper, on the FrontPage. The face was shocking. He didn’t have vampire teeth, his eyes were not bloodshot and he did not have scars all over his face. Instead his face was smooth, he wore a pretty genuine smile and his name was Bwire.

Mr. Bwire was sentenced to life imprisonment in connection with the Nairobi grenade attacks, he was happy for it. He received it with a smile for the camera. This only happens in movies. A person would not be happy to receive a life sentence unless he is absolutely psycho, he is putting a show, he is convinced that there is nothing more to live for and bombing people is their right or he knows that he is not going anywhere near jail for life.

Whatever the situation with Mr. Bwire, I am afraid. First my stereotype Alshabaab face is gone, now it could be anyone and they are stocked with grenades. Two, these people are either protected or they are sycophants and you don’t want to be involved in a war with a sycophant who could be living with you.

Mr. Bwire confirmed one nagging thought in my mind. There are some Kenyans especially youths who are always ready and willing to grab arms and kill fellow Kenyans. If this is the case, whether it’s a matter of unemployment, brainwashing or whatever, Kenya is sitting on a very dangerous time bomb.

With very little financial motivation, youths killed fellow Kenyans with very crude weapons after the 2007 general elections. They burned women and children in churches and slashed heads of their fellow Kenyans in transit.

Some said that Kenya is over that, that we learned our lesson. We haven’t. If we did, our youths would not be enrolling for Alshabaab, they would not be happy to grenade bus stops and clubs, they would not participate in kidnapping tourists knowing how much harm that could cause to the country. If we are not careful, the lesson will be learned. The hard way.

MY BROTHER AND ALSHABAAB

My brother’s mouthpiece is distorted, the one in his phone. The kind of distortion that gives his voice a twist and he starts sounding like one of those antagonists in movies I used to call ‘guezz staro’ – that was like ten years ago and anything I said then cannot be held against me in any fair hearing, especially the Mr. Right hearing.

So what if I made a few pronunciation mistakes several years ago? People still make them now. My friends don’t like the way I say three or Seychelles. But I don’t care, none of them were lucky enough to get first class English education under a tree and from the one and only Mr. Sayialel, the one who during his school days he had to divide his attention between his two wives, his livestock, being a clan leader and his several children. Just to mention, some of his children were his school mates when he was in class eight. The one who would avoid pronouncing Seychelles for fear of what might come out. At least I try

So, a lot of times I laugh it off with a stupid joke. They think its funny, but I know it aint.

Back to my brother’s phone. The movie is staged in some building in outering on a fateful Sunday. The apartment is cool – there is flowing water and electricity – what else could one ask for? I am fast asleep. At about 12 midnight, my phone rings. Just to mention, I hate late night phone calls if am not the one making them and especially if I spent the whole day wondering the streets of Nairobi with a heavy laptop on my shoulder.

So I receive the late call, the voice is strange, not the stranger kind of strange, the strangest kind of strange. It sounds like the distorted voice of a ‘guezz starro’. The kind of voice that says something like this; ‘is this the prime minister, oh who am I kidding I know it is. Now listen very carefully sir, we have fifty bombs distributes in the city, if you don’t meet our demands… blah blah blah blah’ you get the drift. Its so distorted, it sounds like it was mined from deep inside the throat.

And what does the voice say? ‘halo, halo, Joshua’. I freeze. First, the number is strange, two, it is distorted like in a movie, and three, the voice knows my name. I hung up the phone and switch it off. Sounds pretty cowardly but if it was you, and you have seen several classic movies, you would have shitted your pants.

Let me explain to you why. Sunday morning, a grenade explodes in a bar I Nairobi. On Sunday at around eight am in town doing stuff. Sunday evening, just before I leave town, two grenades explode. The route am supposed to use out of town is blocked and all the traffic is diverted to a much smaller road, we nearly empty that road of oxygen. The buses and cars are crowded and I am seated in one of the buses wondering if they did that so that the traffic can be diverted and then they can cast their net in a much richer pond. In movies, that is a brilliant plan, in real life it is a terrifying one

So we are stuck in traffic less than 100 meters from where the grenade exploded. People are conversing in very sad tones in the bus. Most of them don’t want to talk about the grenade attacks. They go round in circles and come back to the same topic. Me? Am not talking, am tired so I go to facebook and write; ‘these Al-shabaab want us to do to their mothers and sisters what they are doing to our civilians?’

I eventually get home after a few hours and go to sleep immediately. So when my phone rings I add one and one together. Strange number, distorted voice, strange time of the night, the voice knows my name. Al-shabaab must have seen my update and they are looking for me.

After I turn off my phone, I try to sleep. I can’t. I wake up, turn on my phone, go to facebook and I delete the text. I don’t know what purpose that was to serve. Maybe I thought they wouldn’t have evidence incase they decided to take my head to court before they grenaded it.

At around five in the morning, my brother calls again. I don’t know why I picked it. He says very fast ‘ Joshua, Joshua, ni Lenana. Nilikua tu nataka kukuuliza ka utanitumia success card.’ At midnight?

BE HAPPY

I asked a number of my friends what would make them happy, like really happy. Some of the answers were logically what everyone else would say.

Here are a few. Money, someone who makes me laugh, when am not hurt as in when there is no one stressing me. Others were unexpected, for example a baby who doesn’t cry at night, sex, a lot of things, matoke and stew; and some guy said ‘a cat’.

But what really makes people happy? Can a single thing make you happy your entire life? If your priorities change, do the things that make you happy change?

A lot of people are not sure what makes them happy. Money, a good job and recognition can make someone happy for a period of time, but then, in the long run people get tired of routines and the attention that comes with them. The friend I asked took an average of ten seconds to come up with an answer. Most of the answers started with ‘many things….. Or I guess……. Or that is really hard but…….’.

Happiness is related to self realization. Knowing who you are first and then working to make you happy. Without understanding yourself well, you would never know where your happiness lies.

As a necessity, you need a positive attitude towards life and the challenges that comes with it. The challenges should be seen less as stumbling blocks and more as the stuff that will make you happy after you overcome them.

Appreciate small things. Sometimes the smallest of events can turn into one of the best inventions in history. Everyone knows Isaac Newton not because an orange interrupted his hobby of sleeping under a tree but entirely because unlike most people would have, he didn’t just eat the orange and go back to sleep. He thought, an opportunity fell from the tree, and he utilized it.

When you decide to peg your happiness on things that you can’t control like how much you earn or how much sex you get, you are playing a gamble with your moods. If you decide that finding a person who appreciates you, makes you laugh and never stresses you will make you happy, you are deriving your happiness from the behavior of other people, what if you are disappointed.

Happiness is not in the hands of other people, it’s not bought, and it doesn’t come with a good job. It is in us. Inside every one of us there is the trigger that excites our moods. You choose to be happy even though whatever you earn is for subsistence only. You choose to be happy even though she left you for that lecturer. You choose to be happy even if your baby cries throughout the night and you choose to be happy even when your matoke and stew turns into ugali and soup.

Happiness is a choice, not a person, not materials, and definitely not food

THIS IS FOR ME

The problem with a white blank word page is that it stares back at you. In your face, it seems to say. It is a manifestation of the blankness in your mind then. The fact that you can’t seem to figure out how you start, how to make sense of what you are thinking, how to make it understandable for the few great minds and the numerous feeble minds out there – if this hurts you, you are in the latter group hahaa.
You look, and then you think. You make a sentence in your head and then move your fingers, before you give the kiss – sorry, keys – that delicate touch, you find a fault in your sentence. It can’t be like that, you say, it won’t fit into the story well, it doesn’t bring out the sarcasm, I need a better one. Then you are back to thinking again and like a wicked witch’s spell, the circle goes on. You keep making sentences; you keep moving your fingers desperate for a touch of the delicate kiss even just once.

They tell a fairy of a princess that only needed a kiss from a prince to break a wicked spell that was cast upon her. Like that princess, your ideas remain an imagination in your mind, you imagine how the prince will look like after you get that delicate kiss – this time it’s the right word – and like the prince in that story the perfect sentences eludes you. Just like the princess you get imposter sentences, sentences not worth the stature of a prince, sentences that you can’t touch with your hands leave alone letting your lips touch theirs.

You imagine the rest of your story after you get the perfect start; you create it in your mind, word after word, sentence after sentence, paragraph after another. Like that princess, life after the kiss makes sense, it’s perfect, it’s happy and everything just falls into place. But you have to get that kiss. You have to get that touch. You need your prince. Damn this blank page.

Your mind starts wondering off. You start thinking about awkward stuff. Stuff like why did Microsoft make this page white? White is pure, white is clean, it symbolizes righteousness. This page is white; it might be clean but pure and righteous? Definitely not. Its tormenting, its rude in its stare. It is sinful, with thousands of sins. I just can’t pin down one of its sin in my head for you but am convinced it sins. Maybe it has cast a spell that obscures its sins from the eyes of men, even the most observant of men.

Then in between the confusion, between the awkward thoughts and when you are convinced you are not getting anywhere with your story. When you have given up on your prince, when you are thinking that maybe it was never going to happen and maybe it was meant to end that way. Like the princess, you start thinking that maybe you were meant to die with the spell. But then it hits you. In between the kilos of chaff you find your lost pin of gold. In that large dark cloud of thoughts you find the silver line. The thought jerks you. Your fingers cant wait to feel the keys. You hit one after the other. Just like the story in your mind, you go sentence after sentence, paragraph after paragraph.

You see, just like every fairy tale, there is always a happy ending. The prince shows up in an entourage, the princess’ heart jerks, then like an excited fetus it kicks with excitement, beats through the chest. She is wearing that wide smile on her face. She lifts her big robe and throws away her shoes. She runs like she is going to lose her legs if she doesn’t and embraces the prince in a kiss of love and witchcraft. She cant stop now, her heart wont let her. The satisfaction that comes with it wont let her.

Though it seems like forever for the onlookers, ripe with envy, blushing and trying to avoid eye contact with the two – there is no point, their eyes are closed anyway – its seconds for the princess. She wishes she didn’t have to eat, shower, wishes that she couldn’t get tired of kissing. That night never fell and day never broke. She feels a little guilty that she wishes the people around them could be swallowed by the earth. But what’s a little guilt? What’s a little evil thought if they could stand there forever, if she is going to be free of evil for the rest of her life? If she could do what she loves until death takes either of them away?

What is the moral in this jumble of word you might ask? I will not answer. I will write this. Everything everyone does needs the first step. For some people it comes easily, not such a biggie. For others its treacherous hard work, you practice, you type, you backspace like hell. You try to create that story. Man you try.

But if writing is what you want, writing you will get. Hit those keys until they lose their markings if that is what it takes. Hit that backspace until it comes off the bottom of your laptop. Write simple things, try to write complicated things. Write when you are sad, write when you are happy, write when you are mad and write when you are hungry.

Make mental and physical notes of ideas you want to write about. Then explore them, research them, give those angles and most importantly turn them into stories.
Practice for you is like patience for the princess, in the end it bring the perfect kiss. In the end, it doesn’t matter how much chaff you make. Your gold pin is in there somewhere. Find it. And please don’t swallow it or keep it within the reach of children. hahaaa