mataachi inc.

Psst! This Way---

2007-05-29T02:58:00.000-07:00

www.jackmataachi.blogspot.com

the Busted post

2007-02-28T10:06:00.000-08:00

Now you know.

KIM+12 will be coming soon!

KIM +11

2007-01-26T07:34:00.000-08:00

And in my mind, I think I might be obsessed. The very thought of you makes me wanna get undressed. I want to be with you, in spite of what my heart says.”
Toni Braxton, You’re Makin’ Me High

I know how love ends. I know that well. I know love ends in the night in bed, when her thigh brushes against yours, and without even thinking about what you’re doing, you draw away, your heart racing afraid her beseeching palm is about cup your shoulder. Hoping, hoping, she brushed against you in her sleep turning by accident, in this night when there is no electricity and when her wavering voice whispers, “Darling,” you’re already quickly saying, “I’m thirsty,” stumbling out of bed, bumping against the door, running.

I know love ends with simple words when she declares, “I’m not sorry I did it,” the look on your face telling her more than all your furnace heated arguments will ever tell her because in the silence after, before the Tusker bottle mouth falls away from your lips, your face your eyes flickering with the shock of recognition like the look of dying under torture tells her all she will ever need to know. And walking in silence out of that bar, down the stairs of Garden City with the shops long shut up from The Venue, Kampala will never be the same again, changing.

I know that love ends with her phone in ‘Silent’ mode vibrating like a nestling jumping in her palm, your number a mute scream on the screen, before he tosses it back for her into her black bag and tells her her first lie to you, “Tell him you never saw it,” and because his hand is at the back of her head in her braids drawing her close in for the first kiss, afraid, not wanting this to stop, she closes her eyes, and accepts and love begins to end. I knew that already. But I did not know that love begins in fear. But it does. Love with Kim, unlike with Fiona, began in fear.

Now I know that love begins when “I’ve never been this afraid of being dumped. It would shatter me completely.” Now I know. With Kim. Kim.

It means I no longer have a heart. You have my heart. It means I want to spend every single second of my life in your presence and I can’t rest if an hour goes past and I have not heard from you, not received an SMS from you and when I have not got my yahoo IMs replied I'm thinking of transferring to MSN, through this slow Mozilla connection my email is clogged but it feels desolate and empty when there isn’t an email from you, and I cannot go through the day without retreating to a corner under a tree of our office compound to be alone to look again at you in the photographs of you I keep in my left back pocket. To remember every word you say and I constantly smile and laugh to myself remembering something silly you said, "Do spiders fart?"

I’m not sick of Ne-yo love songs and I think Silver Kyagulanyi is a genius CD playing him over and over and the cry in Juliana's Nkulinze, Iryn Namubiru's Nkuweeki, Sarah Zawedde's Kambere Nawe, Blu3’s Nasanyuka Nawe voices is my cry now. The taxi conductors on my stage know my name, the woman who sells fast food and whose takeaway closes last in Ntinda knows my name, and now the cosmetics shop woman who sells airtime also knows my name and knows its time to lock up when I jump out of one of the last creaking taxis into her scented shop, breathless with a receding look of terror on my face because she is still open and I can buy that last card of airtime she keeps for me to call you Kim in the night, after work. Walking up to my house on the hill you’re with me, in another part of Kampala, in another house, in another bed, you’re with me, on the phone, talking, walking up that gullied hill and I’m not afraid of anything in the world, laughing because you’re laughing, the smile in your giggle my existence and if your tone changes and I sense distress on the step of my house at my door, I turn right around, scanning for a boda boda as I hurry back to you to find out what has suddenly gone wrong and you’re not taking my calls and I know I’ll never be able to sleep until I know because of this I’m in fear tonight night is the night I maybe beginning to lose you and I do not want it to be tonight.

I want it to always be like the day when we were supposed to meet at the Uganda Wildlife Center and I was late and you told me to find you in the zoo restaurant. I had come in time to find that you had already chosen a table facing the lake, not sipping at your coke because you had distracting company, a guy with shades pushed back on his forehead in gray multi-pocketed shorts, slapping his arm away and irritatedly telling him, “Leave it.”

He laughing, “But it’s in your eye! Let me remove it for you.”

“Yeah, you leave it,” you saying forcefully, brushing the braid back into the bunch yourself.

“Why?”

“I have a boyfriend who is supposed to do that.”

Because every word out of your lips is Bible truth to me, my life is changing every day in every possible way, and in all my dreams it had never been quite as it seems, I know I have felt like this before but now I’m feeling it even more because it comes from you and the person falling here is me. And now I tell you openly again, you have my heart because you’re a dream to me.

Now I know what survivors mean when they say everyday is a miracle and nothing is bad, not even what hurts. Like the blessed Wednesday night listening to Ronnie Sempangi’s Capital FM Late Date Show in your house, the radio in the living room turned on loud, washing up after dinner in the kitchen, a girl failed to identify the voice of her official boyfriend and blurted out the name of her occasional’s and you said, “That could never happen to me! What kind of girl forgets the voices of her boyfriends? That’s like forgetting what it feels like fucking him!”

“Come on! You can’t tell me that even three years after you broke up with a guy you can still remember what making love to him felt like exactly?”

“You know you don’t have to call it ‘lovemaking’ all the time! Sometimes its just sex.

“Girls just have ‘sex’ also?”

“The best lovemaking I have ever had was ‘just sex.”

“We’ve ever ‘just had sex?”

“It wasn’t you.”

“Uhm, what, your ex?”

“Him? No way! That guy was lousy! He was breather. It was an in-between, a casual, with Luke, when we went to Zanzibar with my mum. We had fun!”

“Uhm, really.”

“Yeah! If I wasn’t with you, I’d be with Luke.”

So this is what it has come to. This is where you have got me. Me, unable to sleep, 4am writing emails I will never send because I don’t have internet connection in this house and Faisal down in Wandegeya behind El Shadai has learned finally what he never thought he would learn to do: switch off his phone before he drifts off into sleep because, “I’m beginning to dream of you in my dreams! I dream of you calling me in my sleep to get up and open the café so that you can send those emails you claim are for university scholarships. I’m not supposed to be dreaming of you!”

But I can’t help it. I can’t sleep for thinking of you. I can’t stop thinking of you. And every time I’m here I’m certain, I’m sure this is the last love ditty I’ll ever write because I can't go on like this. There will be no more love talk because the lights are going down on this ship and there’s no one at the stern anymore. But while we have today, let’s lose ourselves one time because you and I will always remember these many moments as some of the best months of our lives, changing me and you forever.

Me a doubter by nature you making into a believer with your love, writing you this love poem at 4am in the morning unable to sleep again because I’m so far from you, listening to this Bruce Springsteen song Brilliant Disguise, you on my mind just like you’re the screen saver on my computer, writing this love paean to you, speechless like a mute struggling to speak, the pen you bought me a talisman, on the table this computer has sat on, for weeks holding onto it whenever I begin to falter, writing for you, in my mind’s eye able to see you asleep with your arm under your head, unbeknownst to you that I awake at 4am, looking down at you in my mind’s eye, you are the whole world to me.

I have stopped pretending. Your name is a sacred prayer to me. I live for the Friday weekends when I step out of my office, 9pm, standing on the sidewalk in lungfuls sucking in the air and Kampala clearing and the center of the world is here outside Ban Café, the night denizens beginning to crawl out with a strange gleam in their eyes and I know why, I don’t have to go home alone tonight. I got a girl as crazy as me and she thinks it’s a waste to sleep before 2am and she’s down in Club Rouge already, waiting for me. I don’t have to sit pretending with an Observer newspaper in the taxi in the traffic jam I’m thinking of other things, like tonight, reminiscing in the unscrapped undertow of my mind, that moment, reliving it like I was living it again that first day when I knocked on your door and saw your face peering out through the glass pane before you opened your door and let me in. Tonight I would see you! But it’s not the weekend anymore. That’s why I’m here, awake at 4am, doing the next best thing to living, remembering living, living for the weekend, remembering what it all felt like.

How before I came in, before I rushed for you, to hold you in my arms, to be sure you’re not just words in my mind, your warm living body pressing against mine assuring me you’re real. Before my lips were on yours, in hungry inquiry confirming Monday to Friday’s nights’ long waits had not been mine alone, the spaghetti on the humming cooker unimportant, your vibrating phone on the table next to the radio with music unheard not interrupting, a whole world in four arms, four feet, two pairs of lips and a mind that can encapsulate everything. No one who seeing me on Monday morning knowing that I’m no longer a lonely pilgrim, camouflaged in pullover armour I have worn since I was 13, stunned seeing Susan holding Saul’s hand in the lunch hour like he was me at break time, no longer alone. Wanting to spend my all weekends with you, now that I have you. In love again, like it’s my first time.

preview

2007-01-12T04:51:00.000-08:00

Love ends in the night in bed, when her thigh brushes against yours, and before you can think about what you’re doing, you draw away, your heart racing because you think her palm is about cup your shoulder. Hoping, hoping, she brushed against you in her sleep turning by accident, in this night when there is no electricity and when her wavering voice whispers, “Darling,” you’re already quickly saying, “I’m thirsty,” stumbling out of bed, bumping against the door, running.

Love ends with simple words when she says, “I’m not sorry I did it,” the look on your face telling her more than all your furnace heated arguments will ever tell her because in the silence after, before the Tusker bottle mouth falls away from your lips, your face your eyes flickering with the shock of recognition like the look of dying under torture tells her all she will ever need to know. And walking in silence out of that bar, down the stairs of Garden City with the shops long shut up from The Venue, Kampala will never be the same again, changing.

Love ends with her phone in ‘Silent’ vibrating like a nestling jumping in her palm, your number a mute scream on the screen, before he tosses it back for her back into her black bag and tells her her first lie, “Tell him you never saw it,” and because his hand is at the back of her head in her braids drawing her close in for the first kiss, afraid, not wanting this to stop, she closes her eyes. Love begins with fear. Love ends with fear. Love begins with fear.

Love begins when “I’ve never been this afraid of being dumped. It would shatter me completely.” With Kim love begun in fear when I knew I could lose her, I was in love. Let me tell you how.

Kim +11 will be coming soon.

Signs of Life

2007-01-10T09:59:00.000-08:00

KIM +10

2006-11-09T11:32:00.000-08:00

“And in my mind I’m a blind man doing time, look to my future coz my past is all behind me.”
Tupac Shakur, Only God Can Judge Me

What is love now? Love is a green clipboard of my missed Sociology Paper 101 lecture notes copied out in your handwriting on my Nkrumah Hall bed 9:00am Monday morning. Love is pork at The Deep Saturday night 11:30pm in Wandegeya, my wallet forgotten in my blue jeans, you thrusting a crumpled 5000 shilling note in my palm, excusing yourself to the bathroom, before the waiter returns with our bill, me looking after you, wondering. Love is Nabinoonya beach, volleyball in the afternoon. Love is that night. Yes, love is that night.

Never is it clearer in my mind than tonight, standing in front of another girl on the brink of falling in love again. Standing tonight on Kampala road in front of Kim, watching a laughing girl so unlike you, leaving you behind. Leaning against this yellow MTN booth, for the whole world drunk, a Bata store guard watching me cautiously, I know now. You loved me.

Everyone could see that, from campus friends amazed at how quietly you used to respectfully hang back when you used to find me, an ass, pontificating to them leaning against the rusty railing of the Sociology department, before another mid morning lecture, more spellbound than anyone else. After that night, no one sitting in the seat next to you in those smooth wooden arm chairs in the lectures we shared because everyone somehow knowing that seat, like your heart, was already permanently taken. Five to nine, when I was in, no one knocking on my white suited Biggie Smalls postered Nkrumah hall door because they knew. Everybody knew. Everybody but me. I did not know. Until tonight, after that night, was that I did not know. Tonight, as Kim covers that distance between us to hold me up in time, slumping to my knees next to that booth opposite the Post Office on Kampala road, the insight comes. I know.

The night I won you is the night I began to lose you, a girl checking in with me on a Saturday March night after 12am with exaggerated dark shades, unaware that the cheeky, smiling receptionist was a back seating fellow undergraduate who already knew her, that night. A night surrendered to after mornings, afternoons and nights of sulking arguments for this night, a night granted in an excess of love from meeting two of your best friends, after five months of dating, and making them laugh until they were begging me to stop. That Saturday night in Wandegeya, after driving all the way from Jinja, Mary Stuart hall already locked, that was like any Saturday for the red eyed patrons we met at I Feel Like Chicken Tonight, students and fucked-up graduates in their third working year, horrified, realizing life in Kampala would always be like this; for me, a payoff Saturday for patient hours of listening to your dreams for us in weekday walks to Mary Stuart after 9pm, before those endless stairs of silence and pleading checking into that heavily curtained room. Until we entered that room and entered that fresh linen bed. In Wandegeya three years ago, you a girl, me a clueless fool despite all my experience. Until tonight, a clown for a posse of four girls, after The Rocks, being driven home to my house on the hill in Ntinda or somewhere else maybe, I finally know what you always knew even after years of reading all those SMSes on all my Samsungs that in varying forms codedly informed me, “iwanted to apologise 4havg wanted 2much 2meet you, ithought we were friends!? Am sorry 4havg intruded, nice time, still care," you pretended you read them only on the surface, as SMSes from friends who only happened to be girls.

I never told you before tonight but in my fumbling, mumbling mind in a dark corridor stumbling towards a bright light that could be love; Kim calling, I went in that room a hunchback with an invisible hunch on my spine, in my own way a boy still, because of you, coming out a man.

I could not figure you out, in that straight backed chair with black leather seat in that room, calmly and slowly eating the over chillied chips, chicken, kebabs with cabbage, even making me call reception for a proper plate and fork, disdaining the white disposable paper one, until we got into bed. You, irritatingly, insisting I lock myself in that tiny tiled bathroom with a glinting overhead shower before you get in bed.

I had come out of that bathroom undressed, in my blue boxers only, my teeth brushed. And I could not understand why you would not look at me, stiffly lying in bed like you were in your coffin, the thick green blanket pulled up your chin, fidgety in your fingers. Your voice gone, a child’s scared whisper there.

It’s been a long, long time now but I can still remember very clearly how suddenly happy I was to be there with you, like I used to be when I was a child allowed out by my grandmother to run and play in the rain with Yakobo, the ticklish drops beating on my upturned joyful screaming face like a glass window pane with my shut eyes pretending we were swimming. Incredulously wanting to jump onto that bed and hug you! Tickle and play like we were children! Tell you the story of my childhood there and then. Tell you about my grandmother, tell you about Yakobo, tell you about the mother and father I only saw again after I was ten, tell you about that village I grew up in and the school on a hill where I used to stand at break-time, a sweet potato as my break in my tiny fist, a child of seven on that hill looking down home at my grandmother waving back at me, every single day when I had to leave her side and go to school. I wanted to tell you all that. I wanted to tell you everything.

I wanted to tell you how beautiful you looked in that bed, your braided hair let loose. So still you could have been sleeping. Before I joined you, kissing your temple, then the tip of your nose, lightly, before you gave your lips. Kissing in a meeting of lips that seemed a merging of universes that would never part, leaving us trembling.

I remember, now with a wry smile, you doing that thing girls do, before we could kiss again. The edges of your finger tips on my forearm, you asking me softly, after that first kiss,

“Do you love me?”

Like a National Theater Comedy night actor who had temporarily forgotten his lines, I had paused, frowned quizzically and then like Philip Luswata’s boda boda rider character remembering his NIC Insurance backup plan like a streaking flash coming to his mind, replied,

“Yes, Fiona, I love you very, very much.”

I had been ready for that. How many girls have I replied without batting an eyelid, and replied looking like I mean it, “I love you. You’re the girl I have been waiting for?” I stopped counting after my seventh, lucky number who turned out to be the worst girl I ever rolled in the sheets with. I was flip entering that bed.

A friend, friendly, knowing me after my wild years recently said to me, jokingly of course, “If you bring me TK's hymen and place it on this table, you’ll be my hero.” Before you, I used to go in for bets like this, going through horrendous expenditures causing more hearts upheavals to prove I was not like “Biggie worrying about his pride in bed.” Crazy like that.

That night even before we made love, I could already hear in my head the words I would be using at our favourite Kireka bar ‘Oba Tufa Tufe. Here Since 1979’ explaining to Rodney, Christ and Timothy how I had finally ‘touched’ the Virgin Mary of their course they had said was imperious to normal feelings. Before getting into that bed. I did not know getting into that bed that you actually were a virgin. I did not know. Never suspected you could choose me to be your first and this night would be that night. With you.

All in my life, before you, coming second. The less loved second last born before the coveted girl last born, the hand-me-down clothes wearer, going to Uni only because I won government sponsorship, finding you there in my first year, and with you coming first in that room in Wandegeya on a night when I had no right to.

It was never sex we had that night, it was never just sex that night, after midnight, the curtains and windows closed so that the hum of cars and lonely calls of taxi conductors below was like a music all of its own, the locked door double checked, in the soft dark of that room your eyes never leaving my face, watching my every move, like a debutant auditioning. It was never just sex.

Making love to you suddenly I knew, I was sure you were the girl I was going to marry. Somewhere past the frozen Antarctica’s and dry Sahara’s of my mind and heart, I’m married to you forever, the mother of my heirs, whose pedant with your baby photo I wear around my neck instead of a ring.

Coming out of you, I had swung out of my bed, my feet connecting with the floor, shocked at how cold the floor was, to see by the dim light of the window, to be sure I had not imagined. I remember sitting on the edge of that bed, before I peeled off that condom, looking down between my legs, at blood, virginal blood, your blood. You had been a virgin and given yourself to me! Me of all the men in the world. You had chosen me. Unworthy, slutty, planning to fuck Shamim on Sunday in this very room me. Me. I think it was in that moment the frivolous misogynic playboy in me got up, seeping into his clothes, slipped out of that room closing the door behind him. Life no longer a badly scripted game to be toyed with. I knew. And turning back to you, I did not say ‘I love you’ but kissed you so deeply and so hard and so hard and so long until you said, “I can’t breathe! I need to breathe.”

My arm under your head, I kissed you again. Slow, lingering kisses, playing with your hair, whispering words I have said only to you, you laughing and giggling, wanting to look at me.

One ear on the door waiting for the pre-arranged room service knock on the door, one ear listening to you but all my eyes on you, seeing you see a man for the first time, trying to disguise your embarrassment and curiosity.

How hard I had worked to control myself! Rocked with an inner mirth, when after, you knew you should clean my penis but after drawing away the blanket, you ended up gazing at it, your face a Technicolor changing screen of many emotions; wonder, shock, amazement, disbelief, terror barely suppressed questions until you couldn’t hold them back anymore,

“He’s still big! Isn’t he supposed to be small when he’s flaccid?”

It would take me time to get used to your clinical directness when it came to intimate matters but that night I was too amused to be taken aback replying, “That’s how he is.”

It was not formality or breeding when you looked me in the eye and said with just a hint of relieved laughter in your voice, “I liked it! I really liked it so much! Will it always be like this?”

You were so earnest. Those luscious eyebrows raised, your trusting brilliantly brown pupiled eyes intent, your dark lips an open O of inquiry, with a 1st time lover’s intensity that I knew I’d never be able to tell you all my depraved years of experience that made me reply cautiously but honestly,

“When we both want it, yes.”

Your eyes were on him again asking, “Is he mine? Is he mine alone?” shyly but proudly.

I was so full of love, my throat choking, wordlessly I had gazed at you until more timidly you asked again, and with a deep swallow I had replied, “Always, yes, it is.”

I’m sorry I hurt you when I burst out laughing after and you thought, for a dreadful moment, I was gloating I had added you as another notch in my belt. Before you, I had forgotten how to cry. I did not know how to cry. I was laughing because I could not cry.

Sitting on the edge of that bed, after coming from the bathroom, with you frightened still in bed, full of knowledge about what you were supposed to do but the instinct yet to kick in.

But you remembered this was your first time and you were supposed to bleed. All shyness again. Insisting there was a ‘thing’ you wanted to do in the bathroom. I remember your wordless gratitude, face turned my way briefly, when you found Jik in the bathroom, I basking in it behind you, amazed at my own intuitions I never did tell you that that Jik bottle was in that bathroom not because I knew before hand that you were a virgin but because I had told Sula before, “Man, she’s a cleanliness freak. This is a chick who doesn’t like to leave any trace of herself behind: when we’re at a place not exclusively mine. It’s not like she’s ashamed of me. It’s more like she’s been brought up to believe that she was invisible, strictly behind the man. Sula had thought a moment and then said, “Maybe she’s a virgin?” We had looked at each other, like for five seconds in silence as if seriously contemplating that and then I shattered the mood by incredulously asking, “A campus girl?!”

I have been wrong about a lot of things with you and I have been very, very sorry but never was I so glad to be wrong about you as I was that night.

I remember standing by the window, looking down on Wandegeya at 2pm, the sluicing of your washing the only sound in the room, in my beating heart a joy more immense than I had ever thought capable of feeling. All my life before you floating past me like a movie in a projector remembering every detail. I remember what that night meant to me. Standing by that window, you washing and me by that window knowing we were going to make love again, falling in love with you in that room in College Inn in Wandegeya that night.

Making love again.

In the morning, different. Walking with you and walking you to your room in Mary Stuart hall that morning, through the rusted small University Hall gate, the ever grinning tie wearing éclairs vendor by the gate not yet at his stand, through the silent campus, up from Wandegeya, in the brilliant morning sunshine of that Sunday, furtively fingering my belt loop, trying to read in the smiles of the church going people we passed if they sensed what we had been doing the night before. To look at you, for the leap of love in my heart, was almost unbearable. Changing. In love with you and never knowing it. Unlike tonight with Kim, falling aware.

From the moment pressing the cute looking red button of Linda’s Rav 4 taking us all home after The Rocks and the door whooshing open to their screams and the tyres screeching the car to a halt, determined to make that girl of Patricia’s friends who had ignored me, look my way, crazy that the night was ending and I was failing again.

I would like to say I jumped out immediately. It was immediate, my exit. But it was more of a stagger out of the car. When my feet with a disorganized thump hit the tarmac, I remember a whole world tipping nearly over in my stomach before I quickly righted myself spitting two or three times sorghummy bits of phlegm, nauseous.

Kim was quick, next out of the car vehemently declaring, “You’re mad! Mad!” but laughing.

The Bata Store guard watching us, me, shrouded in his night jacket and the dark warily because I was staggering, zigzagging perilously close to his turf. I saw him, knew the implications and then something took my attention completely.

Steadying myself against the yellow MTN booth, I saw Kim. I saw Kim. Knowing this is a moment I’ll remember the whole of my life. Kim on Kampala road, at a quarter to five on Saturday morning, glowing red moon dipping beyond Jinja road behind her, clapping in delighted glee, laughing, at my prank. Me by that MTN booth, in disbelief, turning to the Bata Store guard for confirmation and seeing him seeing it too. Knowing in an instant but not yet understanding the price I would pay for Kim to be my girl, because leaning for support against that booth, the urge to throw up gone, knowing the search was over. The girl I had been looking for here infront of me, home again at last, with Kim on Kampala road, 5am on Saturday morning. Beginning over.

I Sooooooooo Need

2006-11-07T23:57:00.000-08:00

a holiday away!!!!!

Notes from A Mind On the Brink of Collapse I

2006-11-02T03:44:00.000-08:00

I should be working but I’m never working, trapped here because I got a paycheck to earn and I don’t really care about the rest of that check if it covers the rent and my food expenses. I tune out much of life and I’m dead most of the time. I’m writing this because I remember the time before I was like this: bitter, blasé and not giving a fuck what you think of me and certainly never sparing a thought to even notice your existence. I’m like this now and I’m writing this because for a few moments I had an idea of what it like to hope, want something, dream and then I lost the insight again. Not regretful that I lost. I’m eyes turned destruction, watching with tight eyes for my death. I cannot wait for that day!

Was all that too strong for you, love?

There’s more.

I have listened to arguments that all this attitude is just a pose. That I don’t really mean it and when it comes down to a wire, something staked, I will run scared like a kid searching to hide his big brother’s legs as the bully chases after him. Well, that’s all bull. Anyway, I’m tired of writing this. Let me tell you something I saw a few days ago that left me in full acceptance of what I have become.

I was traveling in a taxi from seeing a friend. On the Entebbe-Kampala highway. You know how that highway is. I have never traveled on that highway without at least once a month seeing in the middle of that highway a crunched up metal feast. This Monday afternoon was no different. Slightly after midday, lunch on everyone’s mind that kid in a blue uniform probably dreaming of the remains of last night’s barbecued chicken for lunch. So maybe the driver of that blue BMW was also thinking of picking up his kid in a Kampala school in time too. On the Entebbe-Kampala highway.

Darting across laughing ahead of her friends, I saw that BMW slam into that kid just as she almost made to the island with the metal railing of that highway, her left leg sliced as the BMW cruised into her and jerked her against the railing, the lower half of her ripped leg flying into the other half of the road. Screaming, uncertain who was screaming more, the kid or the horrified driver or even the man I was seated next or the old woman in the seat ahead of us who began whimpering like a bitch.

I was the only one in that taxi who remained seated, bored and without the energy to get out and examine from up-close another death on our roads. Yes, she’s going to die. I have some grounding in medicine and the glimpse I had of her graying face amidst the jockeying ignorant masses from my seat tells me she’s going to die. Is dead now. I did not get out of the taxi.

Am I cold enough for you yet?

preview

2006-10-31T03:57:00.000-08:00

"I remember standing by the window, looking down on Wandegeya at 2pm, the sluicing of your washing the only sound in the room, in my beating heart a joy more immense than I had ever thought capable of feeling. All my life before you floating past me like a movie in a projector, remembering every detail, happy. I remember what that night meant to me. Standing by that window, you washing and me by that window knowing we were going to make love again, falling in love with you in that room in Wandegeya that night."

KIM +10 will be up a week.

KIM +9

2006-09-28T05:48:00.000-07:00

"You know we fire!"
The East African Bashment Crew, Fire Anthem

On the night I met Kim at The Rocks, a girl called Patricia asked me to dance. Patricia of the Poetic Justice Janet Jackson smile, Patricia of the hand slung over my shoulder Richot bottle in hand at 4 in the morning on her veranda, Patricia the peacemaker between two warring lovers in a room of overturned chairs, distended mobile phones on the floor, high heel in the mouth of a TV screen in an island holiday hotel room, the horrified warden at the door. Patricia of the silent look, the strengthening shoulder squeeze, the prayer of all our sins at Easter in Rubaga Cathedral in the midnight mass. Patricia. Patricia I met on the night I met Kim when I had come to see Africano at The Rocks.

Africano my primary school bully turned buddy, torment of my sporting years to whom when bare-chest in ill-fitting sports shorts on the Buganda Road Primary School field with lung-bursting cheers from the girls on the sidelines, I always came second to on Sports Day alone because my father and my mother were too busy working to attend. My first illuminator at break time 9 years old with an oily pancake stuffed in my mouth and another to follow, my back against the chain link fence, briefly turning from the push and shove of the canteen kiosk to tell me, “Kyokka Jack, you can’t see! Molly likes you and you you are there not seeing!” Africano gone from my life for eight years after my primary school years until one night on a night very unlike this one, I wandered bored into The Rocks because I did not have to pay any entrance fee and suddenly stood still listening and watching, feeling the flow in stunned shock as Uganda’s greatest deejay created a night of magic, a Prospero of fingers spinning, a Pavlovich Diaghilev of sound transforming each dancer on that floor into a Pavlova and Nijinsky of movement; one hand in the air, clean shaven head with massive black headphones thrown back, the other hand’s swiftness on the disc barely visible, dark navy blue tee-shirt thoroughly sweat-soaked, Africano a vibrating incarnation of Orpheus behind his turntable. Me three steps in front of the laser security wielding guard at the greenery wreathed arced entrance, arms hanging loose, mouth open, not listening to the muttered growls I stop obstructing entry, wondering, “Fuck! Where have I been?” deciding, even before confirming from him how often he deejayed at The Rocks, this would be a fortnightly devotional, bobbing my head into the flow.

It had been two fortnights before I realized that what I was missing in my life was not just Fiona but my fortnightly devotional. To rectify that, I was here. Then a girl with a Janet Jackson smile called Patricia asked me to dance. On her birthday. On a dare. From her three best friends. When I was trying to get Africano to drink.

To any girl that night, I would have said ‘No.’ To Patricia before I knew her that night, my lips were forming ‘No,’ when I saw, jut like Fiona nervous making to me a difficult request, her little finger twirling and untwirling around the 2nd loop of her beltless blue jeans and my heart stopped.

Before I ever saw her, I heard her voice first. Not in song or whisper or moan but exasperated reprimand, “Will you ever be a gentleman?!” In my mind, as I turned from handing in my receipt calling it a whine. Then I saw her. The girl at the School of Education building on a chilly 9 o’clock morning I had shouldered out the way to the counter to be among the first first year Sociology students to hand in my payment for my first Makerere University student’s Identity Card. She had looked so commanding that despite her odd little finger twirling around the loop of her black jeans habit, for a moment I thought and was terrified that I had disrespected a second or third year student. And she was so heartbreakingly beautiful I never minded I spent the rest of the sunny, sweaty day in queues all over Makerere University cold shouldering so she could reach the counter and ‘clear’ in comfort like the lady she was to settle into Makerere University for her first year an Environmental Management student. I met Fiona like that.

With Patricia it was at The Rocks early Saturday morning with her little finger twirling around the buckle of her blue jeans, asking me to dance. I should have said ‘No.’ I did not. But then it might also be because I did not really think she could dance. She seemed to me, even before I knew her story, a girl who can dance with only one man all her life. Some sadness about her said she believed she had already lost that man. The fearful look in her eyes gave away a girl who will only ever trust one other man after her father; the man who would claim her virginity preferably on her very bloody wedding night. A look Fiona had in her eyes, a look after 3 months of tears, begging phone calls and sleepless nights, I still had not forgotten.

I said ‘Yes’ because I had promised myself that if Fiona ever gave me another chance I’d never hurt her again. I would never hurt that look again. I said ‘Yes’ because I did not really think I would have to get up from my stool next to Africano because I did not think she could dance. I was wrong.

She proved me wrong. Not wrong about her being like Fiona. She is. I have woken many Sunday mornings nude in her bed, yawning with a throbbing headache in her Kamwokya flat without the slightest sense of foreboding to walk over in slacks and badly creased shirts to Al Zawadi to get us breakfast because I know the night before when dispossessed of my own mind she never let the balance of our friendship tilt ever because she’s more Fiona than Fiona. That night would be the last time she ever entertained I being more than a friend and when she decided we be friends that Saturday morning, she made it up to me. Because she can dance. At least that night at The Rocks, she danced the dance of our lives. She danced Fiona out of my life and Kim in. At least I thought so and liked to. That night as much as it is possible for The Rocks dance floor to clear when Africano’s in the booth, Patricia cleared that floor.

Africano’s an evil muthafucker! Back then Fire Anthem was not just a song; it was a declaration of war! No tune charged up dance floors from Kampala, Dodoma, Kigali, and Bujumbura to Nairobi like the East African Bashment Crew’s Fire Anthem. Bebe Cool was not bragging when he claimed Bashment Crew to be the most “unstoppable combination since The Fugees.” In East Africa, it was! And that was the song Africano popped in after looking up to see me being led to the dance floor. And no one was immune to Fire Anthem.

The girl I was talking to was not the girl I was with on The Rocks dance floor. Until that night I had never met a more devout lover of Bebe Cool’s unpredictable grooves but that night I did. And her name was Patricia. As soon as “King of the Jungle love child, first lady, Washington, Ham, Tony Hall, Ladies and Gentlemen introducing the East African Bashment Crew, you know we fire!” Patricia was another person.

Bebe Cool’s raspy intro transformed her into a worshipper and Necessary Noize’s Nazizi’s follow-up was enough to turn her into such a devout I was the source of sympathetic smiles as she whirled devilish dance circles around me, Bebe Cool roaring into her ear. For the duration of Fire Anthem I was catching up.

But they don’t call Africano a genius for no reason. There’s no other deejay’s sessions I have ever been a part of who could switch flawlessly from Fire Anthem to R.Kelly’s Slow Wind. Africano’s done it. On the night Patricia became one of my most trusted friends and I met Kim, Africano did it. I knew Africano was a genius when without distraction he switched from Bebe Cool’s Fire Anthem to Slow Wind.

From the moment I heard R. Kelly’s, how shall I describe it, half whinnying half growling, “Girl I want to be alone with you, just to see what you can do, oh you’re dancing all over me, baby this is like some kind of fantasy, the way you move, you’re teasing girl,” I knew this night was mine and I was not going home alone.

The Most Heartbreaking Breakup Line I have Ever Heard

2006-09-16T06:42:00.000-07:00

"Leave my keys on the mat as you leave."

KIM +8

2006-08-17T08:56:00.000-07:00

“Read between the lines,
See what I see,
I see the diary of a sick bastard.”
Welcome to Jamrock
The Notorious B.I.G and Damien Marley

Shambling down the gullied road from my house on the hill at 3am with only ‘my’ anxious tailless wonder mutt for company, I thought the moon in the sky looked like a bone a dog had bitten into and I don’t know why that made me laugh.

My eye was on this mutt. I did not know my mouth too. At the Ntinda stage at 3am in the morning in a stalled taxi with four passengers with the very last fast food takeaway closed, I suddenly realized I WAS the very loud drunk.

Yes, THAT drunk. I was that drunk I used to see everyday.

In that taxi I was the drunk in the backseat of the taxi smelling evilly, head slumped against the taxi window pane, mouth open, drool dripping, hiccupping Liberty into the warm air of the taxi, not bothering to conceal my surrender to scratch my crotch and doing it noisily. I was that drunk and I would never again crinkle my nose in disgust and draw away when he turned to me in another night taxi and asked, “Brother, how much are we paying?”

His arm slung behind me along our seat would never irritate or threaten me again and I had other things to see that night from the inside of a taxi window pane whenever my eyes jerked open to ascertain where I was. Kampala at one of my favorite times, in the night, cruising on that silent road from Ntinda through Bukoto, Kamwokya, Mulago, Wandegeya and into the maelstrom.

And we were at Kamwokya stage. Across, I could see the orange Capital FM studios. That was a warming thought. Alex Ndawula in the booth, Danceforce on, spinning the discs. No, that would be Saturday later tonight. But with the lights on, there was someone there anyway. There’s always someone. Someone who can’t sleep, someone who has nothing to go home to, someone bleary-eyed, on his 10th cup of bad office coffee before a computer longingly reading about lives better than his own in other lands and how his life could have been like that. There’s always someone like that in an office like that.

On the other side, Kayunga stage to Kayunga road. Empty, deserted, no one even under that ancient stage tree for shelter with branches glancing the earth with age. Kayunga stage, Friday afternoon, 1:00pm, fleeing Makerere University campus and lunch with Fiona to Kayunga stage onto a fast red boda boda with new shiny silver painted peddles to Andre’s house for a vodka-laced juice lunch with grilled pork, sliced avocadoes, fresh cabbage, oven-warmed pilawo and fine groundnut paste served with a smile on her lips on her knees by his housegirl/ wife.

Kayunga stage to Andre’s. In my mind, Kayunga road, Kayunga stage will always be Friday afternoon, 1:00pm, to Andre’s. Andre, my friend, my mentor, the Judas I did not expect.

Sometimes, Andre, I still blame you for who I’m today and yes, I still love you but I will never tell you. Friend of my youth, trusted fellow Sunday school backyard prankster, I loved you before I knew what love was, why must life always be about partings? In the end, everybody leaves.

Just below the Post Office on Kampala road, I left that taxi. It was a long way from Rock Gardens where I was headed ‘to have fun,’ but I needed the walk and something drastic to happen. Just before burping onto a thick, green jacketed boda boda’s cycle, I looked around to down to deserted Cairo International bank, across to Amrat, to Amber House and with a shiver, with no reasonable backing, I knew that somehow before this night was over I would be back here again. This time, no money or inebriety would bail me out.

KIM +7

2006-08-01T01:13:00.000-07:00

"An old man in a lodge within a park;
The chamber walls depicted all around
With portraitrues of huntsman, hawk, and hound
And the hurt deer. He listeneth to the lark,
Whose song comes with the sunshine though the dark
Of painted glass in leaden lattice bound;
He listeneth and he laugheth at the sound,
Then writeth in a book like any clerk."
"Chaucer"
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

In that year in that house, I had a job that was not worth being very good at that kept very busy so that I never had to be in that house unless to sleep. But one night the night found me in this house alone. There had had to be a tenants meeting at 5:30pm and I had planned to attend this last meeting and after go out with Drago who needed a drink as much as I was desperate to buy one for some decent company. Unfortunately his misfortune ended that same day.

A week before he could hand in his resignation, on that very Friday evening, he got the letter confirming the promotion he had been working toward for 8 years and ditched my company to pack for his new upcountry posting. I had the money, I had the urge but I had no where and no one to be with and finally the thing I had most dreaded happened. I had to stay in that house in the evening with the night coming on.

Ronnie had taught me well. In SMSes after the break up he had insisted, damn, admonished and bullied, "handle your shit like a man! You have fucked up and now the only thing left is your dignity. Don't give that shit up too! If you do, we are not friends anymore."

It was not the flatutent talk of keeping one's dignity that had stopped me from calling her ever since I had moved out of our house in Kasubi more or less leaving her everything. It was the terror of losing Ronnie's friendship that had kept me together. That night, 7pm coming on, the electricity as designated, cut off by our reliable electric company, I was finally left in the dark with my thoughts.

Cooking a badly charred meal of rice, sphagetti, peas and yes, fried eggs would not distract me from what for two months I had managed not to think about. Chatting with my landlord's girlfriend about what the meeting had been about and enjoying covert sneaks at her breasts through her loose lesu was not distracting enough. The mosquitoes sitting on my stool to watch a poor sunset view that would have had the Warner Brothers hanging their heads on God's behalf before gleefully doing their technicolor magic would not keep me like a lashed sailor from the siren call of thoughts I had long refused to address.

Maybe if the electricity had been on that night with Betsey working impeccably as she always does, I would not have gone down that path. I had a movie collection that had Indecent Proposal and 91/2 Weeks on it that i knew would have kept me engrossed until my mind was too knackered to think. Then there was the Al Pacino festival that a former miser friend of mine on a company trip to South Africa had thought i might like and bought me the original DVDs which i could not yet still bring myself to watch, so crisp and new was the DVD that I dared not yet break the packaging. I wished that virginity still preserved. I claimed Fiona's virginity! I had not even known she was one the first time we did it!

When the electricity went on an extended 24 hour vacation at 6:30pm that Friday, I knew I was in big trouble. I had not prepared for this evening. I went down to the Ntinda trading centre with the intention of buying some locally cooked food to pack in my container and head back up the hill to my house in Kumayinja. I had forgotten that I had more than a full wallet. By the time I jumped on a boda boda back up to my house, I had bought that food, rolexes, cigarettes, Liberty tot sackets of an indefinite number, pop corns, more movies and i don't know what else, going back home four hours later all the way from Wandegeya. The real mistake I made was to go home still with a semblance of sobriety. That night I broke down! I admitted what I had been refusing to admit for two months.

I don't remember what number of tot sacket I was on when suddenly I knew, I MISSED HER! I MISSED HER! I MISSED HER! That is all my slurred, swollen lips could mumble. I could think about. I MISSED HER SO MUCH! Isn’t that pathetic? I knew I was pathetic. After all I was the cause of the breakup. So there I was. Not only was I thinking in clichés, I was discovering again that all clichés are true. That love hurts. That I needed love and no one else’s love but hers. That I wanted her. That it was not anybody's fault but my own I had had such a wretched Friday evening.

I couldn't seem to be completely happy with anybody else. I didn’t want to be funny for anyone else. I didn’t want anyone else to laugh at my jokes. I didn’t want to hear anyone else’s stories of their own lives. I didn't want anybody else. I just wanted to be near her and hear her voice and listen as her tell me something new about Kampala I never before known. I had drunk and drunk and drunk because I wanted to weep and I had to hide that. Every word Ronnie stage whispered just reminded me how so much better she had said it.

She had been so intelligent and charming and good to be with and and I had never before appreciated these things and though she had become tired of me and sometimes I had been tired of her we both had been kind to each other in ways we never tolerated other persons who bored us. So there I was, making another confession of love. Another confession of weakness. Another concession. I didn’t want my pride. I didn’t care if she was going to use me if she took me back. I didn’t care about anything else if she wasn't a part of it. I JUST WANTED HER BACK. I was unhappier when I wasn't with her than I was when I was with her.

But I knew all this needing her was wrong. I knew that it was my intense loneliness that was making me want her so much and willing to throw my pride in the trashcan. I could not yet face the rest of my life. I was scared of it. When I had been with Ronnie at that small Wandegeya bar and I was bored, I scrolled through my phonebook searching for who to call to join us. I had been appalled. In my phone book were mostly only clients’ names. Not one of them was a personal friend of mine who I could call up at any time. In those moments I had realised that I didn’t have many friends I liked much. Friends I could call up and say let’s hang. I had never been scared. Or shocked.

I had never realised so succinctly before how much she occupied a space in my life and how so many needs she had satisfied. I didn't know if I’d ever meet anybody else like her again. I have been one time lucky to meet her and I was sure I would never again be that lucky. I staggered out of my house after 3am that night intent to go do something crazy.

KIM +6

2006-07-12T00:23:00.002-07:00

Let me tell you what moving to Ntinda to a place called Kumayinja in a house on the hill did for me. I was a haunted man when I moved to Ntinda desperate to get over Fiona after leaving her before I met a girl called Kim. I’m a liar. Fiona left me.

I had to get away from her and I could no longer live in our house in Kasubi. Not our house. My house. My rented house she had moved in with me in our last year at Makerere University. Everything in that house was Fiona and I could get no rest.

The pillow on which I lay my head smelled of her hair and when I turned on my side and sunk my face in the pillow, in the bed sheets, I could still smell her, I could almost feel her. In the night when my foot twisted in the blanket, I was almost sure it was her hand on my thigh. Timid at first, then confidently stroking me to wakefulness.

In the shadows over me in the night with no electricity, the flashes of car light swimming across the wall were like snatches of her laugh, in the moment of climax, in the moment of total joy at her control over me, as she lay over me. I could not see that bed, messy ever since she had gone without thinking of her, in the doorway stern-faced demanding I make the bed before she can let me out of the bedroom. Meaning it and making it impossible for me but to lunge for her and drag her kicking, protesting self into the mess, breathless.

On a Saturday afternoon along the road to Nsambya after 3 coming to 4 when I would very much rather have been dozing in my armchair, Fiona curled on the carpet at my feet once again absorbed in Sleepless in Seattle, she had insisted we haul ass to get the bookcase that was the pride of that sitting room, right to the gold emblazoned angel Gabriels’ with the trumpet on his lips on its four corners.

She was not there and there every time I entered our kitchen; I saw her standing by the sink, her fingers resting on its aluminum edge, the sink empty, the cutlery washed, looking wistfully out the window to the old gnarled mango tree. I had to get away! I had to get away!

I was drunk one night and that is the night she came home a day early. I had to get away!

I got away to the house in Ntinda on a hill in a place called Kumayinja. I got away.

KIM +5

2006-06-29T13:22:00.000-07:00

“In everyone there sleeps
A sense of life lived according to love.”
Philp Larkin, Faith Healing

When I came to live in my house on the hill in Ntinda, my move was an escape. A full scale migration. An attempt to put as much distance between myself and the raging furies from my past that up to the moment of my flight, were fast succeeding in swallowing me up.

I chose a house in Ntinda, the furthest part of Ntinda, a house on a hill, with a torturous road to get to me because I wanted to be alone. Because I was weary of my old life.

For months until then I had found less pleasure in looking at my watch and grinning, “4am! Today I’m sleeping at 4am. Let’s bet! I’ll be at the office by 8:30am?” and dumfounding all expectations, after all that beer and bumping, actually making it to the office.

I was not finding it so funny anymore when Mark without warning, one minute eyes wide open, the next he was under the table, passed out like the light went out, wetting his trousers and later to wake up to throw up. The fun in that was gone.

Before the winking waitress said to me as the last customer she liked me so much, I knew somewhere at the back in the dank storeroom of crates of beers and sodas was a worn mattress on the cement floor supposed to be our bed of roses and my promises I’d remain true, connect her, would be all that it took to get her ample behind under me on that thin mattress smelling of the sweat of many previous encounters.

I was tired; I was weary of this life. I was determined to get over Fiona once and for all. And not do it with another girl. I was determined not to be my father. The house on the hill in Ntinda for many months was that last chance at a new life, a new one. I had made the right decision.

I was won over by the evenings in Ntinda in the house on the hill. But it was the dawns that got me. From the first night when I woke up with a start on the mat on the floor wondering where I was and remembered that in paying my four months rent, I had decided to spend a night there and then in my new house. Waking at 5:30am with aching shoulder blades, cold as ice feet, a running nose, chapped throat but curiously with no headache.

Waking up with a start, wondering if I had again been thrown in CPS because there were no curtains on the windows and I was on the floor, with a dog ten meters away ears pricked up ruminating on the condition of my life.

Michael has met this canine. I was over the course of my one year to tell him many interesting political debates I had had with this tailless wonder, my guardian St. Bernard though he was not a St. Bernard by breed.

But it was not the oddity of a dog in my house that riveted me as soon as I was sufficiently awake to register where I was. It was the dawn shyly streaking into my house through my windows that had me on my feet with a cry forced out of my throat, “My God!” These Ntinda dawns are the most beautiful dawns I have seen.

my youth redeux

2006-06-21T02:24:00.000-07:00

today i did something i have not had the inclination or the time to do for quite a while. i walked in my city again. not just walked, i nay strolled. all morning. i had an errand to run in a place i used to work at and i decided i was not going to use a taxi or a boda boda. i was going to walk, like i used to in a time that seems ever more so long ago and my only concern was will i get there too sweaty? how will i conceal the patches of sweat under my armpits and the same time remain totally natural like i'm not trying to hide sweaty patches under my armpits? needles to say, robocop aping a human being made a better act than me trying to appear cool and unbothered!

i started my stoll at about 8:30am from the city square, jumping out of the exbortant taxis that race against death as they bring me into town.....wait...no...this is all wrong....

the part i really want to tell you about is the part where i walked from down Spear House on Jinja Road, crossed, and started walking up to the Monitor newspaper offices, a rehash of a time when i used to walk this route not grinning stupidly like i was today with money in my pocket but hungry and wondering if the only editor who ever thought of my situation would be in. be in not just to tell me if my efforts would be used but also to give me her lunch card before i hit the road again down namuwongo road to the cave i had crawled out of.

the road had not changed too much. the buildings are still the same at least on jinja road. there is still the NEMA building, one of the ugliest buildings on that street supposed to be the guardian of the environment with the meanest concrete pavements and scrawny trees sprouting in the cement. watch for the marabou stocks' droppings when you are here! hope for shade ruined. but is the safest side of the road. and i can get to walk under the shade of kitgum house and remember i once worked in this building and have never been paid for my work. there's not many offices that can compete for the comfort and soothing environment of Kitgum house and i kept coming back because kitgum house made kampala human when i did not know a human being in kampala apart from my family and few friends who cared if i was the body found in the nakivuubo gutter or stiff and mouth open in the constitutional square gardens early in the morning. kitgum house was home for months. michael could never understand why i always paused in our walk up to Monitor at Kitgum house and paid wordless homage. yes, i can admit, sometimes money is not everything. sometimes.

but it is when at 2pm, you're walking on jinja road in the hot sun (kasana). it is when your shoe is split open at both ends and you're pretending that you are starting new open shoes fashion. it is when you can't get your girl shs. 1000 to go visit her sick mother, or go with her yourself. and you said you're working. damnit, money is everything then!

so i was walking jinja road again today morning, all morning. sweating, panting, delirious, my shirt clammy clinging on my back. i was walking jinja road to namuwongo this morning remembering all the friends who i started out with and who have fallen by the wayside. i was walking jinja road today remembering the morning ernest called me and said that he had seen me through his taxi window standing under the shade of International Air Ambulance, was i enjoying the view, he wondered? i walked jinja road this morning to Monitor, Michael you should have been there!

KIM +4

2006-06-20T05:26:00.002-07:00

"It's like my soul's on ice, everything's on pause. It's the sense of buried life screaming like the condemnded damned that has one at 4 still awake."

I have been poor. I have been down. I have known what it feels like to not want to wake up again in the morning.

I have lived long enough to reach a point where I was grateful at the end of each day that the day was over and I was going back home to my house, a house without a furnace unfurnished, a pantry empty and cobwebbed, six jugs of water in the corner the only thing to eat and the sh. 200 mandazi in my hand, still grateful. Indescribably joyful to be at home in my own house where I can close the door behind, shut out everything, and in those two bare rooms create my won world of Arabian nights dreams. I have lived long enough to experience that and know it is one of the greatest gifts a human being can have when his knees seem to have been knocked off from under him.

I have lived long enough to know that and something else more this poor bastard who was looking at me as if his brain had ceased functioning and he was dead and did not know it. I have lived long enough not to just know but to accept, without bitterness or anger or hate, that in this world we are each alone. You cannot trust another human being, they'll break your heart, they'll break your spirit, they'll kill you.

Like a sinner's mind is his sanctum, your house is your heart, don't give it away.

Don't give it away especially if it is the only thing you have. Don't give it away especially if you love it that much. Don't give it away if you have to walk from town, from Namuwongo, all night, taking four hours, to come to it, the only hope at the end of this daily nightly odysseys full of peril and uncertainties. Don't give it away.

I looked at him, a heap on the floor, wailing, without pity. Tears don't move a woman when the woman's cheating on you. I wanted to kick him, bark at him to get up and be a man, punch me, be angry, kick me out of your house! You have found me fucking your wife! But he was a heap on the floor, wailing. Punched in the stomach and knocked out by the abused power of his own love for her betrayed.

She was a distressed, shivering mirage behind me, trembling teary voice beseeching me not to leave her alone with him.

He was a stupid, half-man on the floor negotiating, that he could go away and come back later, but please don't take her away from me. I was a raging inferno, disgusted at this submissiveness, a venom that had not been put out licking itself afresh into a frenzy. I was going to teach these two stupid idiots a lesson.

oh drat! it looks like its again...to be continued!

KIM +3

2006-06-08T04:57:00.000-07:00

“There’s people that love me and there’s people that hate me. But it’s the evil that made me this backstabbing, deceitful, and shady. I want the money, the women, the fortune and the fame. … I got problems and now everybody on my block’s got them. ”
Eminem, Rock Bottom

I could have killed that night. I wanted to kill that night. Kill or be killed. Made no difference to me. Pulverizing immediate pain was what my fists or my body demanded. Complete blackening emptiness where nothing can reach or touch.

And then I wanted to give out or hell receive some more. Because fuck that shit! She had not done enough! She should have done more. I wanted fucking more!

But first I should teach this stupid phone attendant a lesson tapping me on the shoulder like that. Asking, politely yes, but daring to ask, “These things are not as bad as they seem at first. My money?”

What the fuck!!! I didn’t give a shit that I was known here. Ronnie saved his ugly face from being made uglier by a crack. I was ready to smash teeth but that was a crack to unlock even my gnashing jaws, bobbing up between the phone attendant and me, assuring the phone attendant, “You heard what you heard! What more do you want? The sound effects too?”

Fuck this boy! This boy should be doing comedy for a living I was thinking. I nearly hugged the idiot. The phone attendant was so in love he refused payment now!

We had money. But what is money? Money is the root of all evil. Money is what makes a man act funny. She would love me tonight again if I called and told her I had more than the money she needed.

What is money? Money is what can get you to Ntinda on a boda boda with a bottle of beer in hand when Ronnie’s still in the loo emptying his bladder. Money can make a boda boda cyclist let you ride his bike half the way there without a helmet, holding onto you tighter than a delirious girl orgasaming for the first time, frightened and with nothing to say.

Money can make you ride that muthafucking big bike right through Kamwokya Market, all cylinders pressed, shit all Ronnie’s sound effects thrown in, Michael never to know walking with you through this market on another night why in the few bufunda bars open several patrons come out to stare at you. Mike never figuring that one night you rode a bike on their verandas and made them tip over their tiny coffee tables in fright that you were going to ride through into them, the bike roaring on their doorsteps like a slavering rabid dog with flailing nostrils that warn stay the fuck away from me. Or, don’t worry, come a little closer…

Well, even this boda boda guy after putting up with all this, can accept for sparing his life is to reverse his monster bike and leave your compound when he notices that from the house you have not come back with the promised glass of water but a butcher knife until today never utilized. Wishing you a good night while anxiously revving up his baby to shoot off in top gear despite the bumps and gulleys that lead to your Ntinda home, downhill even.

It is not a miracle to you at all that electricity is on. Finding out if those Romans were right that slitting your wrists, as a method of death, is noble would have been more interesting. But doing it in the dark would have been the best.

Instead there’s another woman in the house and she’s demanding attention. She’s never let you down before; why not give her a little love? She deserves it. Betsy deserves it.

It’s not you that I remember,
Can’t you see?
I don’t know you,
It’s the girl that you were
Still on my mind
The woman you were to become
Before we begun our surreptitious betrayals.
Why don’t you remember you
Like I remember you?

I look at this piece of Shit I have written. Betsy’s betrayed me too! Only Eminem gets this shit! Plug me! If I had is the shit!! This is what I’m, fed up!

I can’t sleep alone tonight. I have a standing offer (oh yes, we’ll do it standing up too!) and I intend to take it up tonight.

He comes back home late working so hard to get the money to finish paying the tuition fees for her last year at Makerere University Business School. I’ll teach him a lesson like I have learnt tonight. He maybe my landlord but his girlfriend craves me.

She learnt from me that Betsy’s not a TV, Betsy’s a computer. She’s been urging me to teach more tonight I will.

The bolts shoot back faster than my throbbing eardrums wish but who am I to complain when a woman wrapped in a short green towel opens the door so fast for me at a quarter to one? That the other neighbors don’t see us? I don’t give flying fart about them. I have not come for a social visit. I have come because baby got game!

I’m drunk and she licks my tongue like its made of manna, her absentee Muslim landlord boyfriend hasn’t let her touch a drink in two months. I’m the one for her because I know all the dirty things she likes to do without her telling me a thing.

I don’t have to look down into her cavernous nostrils but I like the fire that’s buzzing in her breath and I like the smoothness of her thighs my towel unwrapping hands are finding.

Poor bastard. He must have been walking that night all the way from Nakawa. His fingers upon my neck were the coldest I have ever felt. She had forgotten to lock the damn door behind us again, the bitch!

uhm....to be continued...

KIM +2

2006-05-28T23:49:00.000-07:00

“All these moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.”
Blade Runner

Ronnie' s back in town! We’re young, the world is ours! He has a job; I have a job coming up. He has good girl tossing and turning in a Namugoona bed waiting for him, a pretty girl who turns heads. And I have a girl, or almost have, who does not in the least resemble the behind of a rhinoceros. Ronnie has said that, “If I did not have Stacey…she would not have survived me!” We have money. Our own houses to go home to.

Tonight is the first night Ronnie’s been in town in four months. He is here for a month. This is the first of many Sundays of fun. We’re having fun drinking. Pork Talk is not the place to go to. We know where there is better pork. In Kisenyi. We have carried our loot from there to Rhino bar. The world is fine. It’s coming to midnight and groin urges are beginning to demand attention. I have a side deal. She is nearly mine, boldness achieves all. “Come on, let me show you how master without Barry White’s voice but his confidence does it. She’s letting in her Pandora’s box this time! There’s a phone there, listen and learn mister one woman at a time timid little brother!”

I did not tell Ronnie that for a week I have been on the freezer for some reason. I know I more than interest her. No one makes her laugh or think more than I do. But I’m quite there. And this week, she has not been taking my phone calls with that much enthusiasm. But tonight is my night. I have 60 thousand in my pocket and I want to blow it on her after she gives me a blowjob tonight, she has been pestering me for it anyway. Besides I can’t lose tonight. I’m lucky. Ronnie is with me. I never lose when I’m with Ronnie. Ronnie is my lucky charm. Fuck! I have one million in an account no one, not even my over accounting mother knows about for work I have been doing and never told anyone about except the bastard receiving prizes for his improved diction and imagination “thoughtful investigation of the current political situation” is receiving. Peanuts as money in his world of no moralities but not in my world of responsibilities and necessities and a mother who behaves worse than Medea. Fuck it, I can’t lose! I haven’t had a single loss in months and tonight my streak continues to her. I’m sure. I can’t lose!

I’m in friendly territory. I’m in a now strange territory but all around I have sprits of true friends all round me. Brian on Sir Apollo Kagawa road. Abbey just up on this very road, a friend since I was 14, supported him on the first afternoon he drunk and got drunk groping the woman we met and staggering into the middle of the rod trying to get killed instead of facing his mother. Eddie in Kasubi with my name tattooed on his arm. I have friendly spirits all round me. I can’t lose.

She has not been taking my calls. But tonight I’m in a different area code so she can’t know it’s me calling. I have money on me. I can talk for an hour and pay well. Nothing she’s mad with me about that I don’t know about cannot be explained and charmed away in an hour’s talk on the phone with me on one side of the talk on the telephone tonight. Have you heard me on the phone when I want to be seductive and convincing and have you on my side? Thought so! You haven’t. And tonight, I’m bowling from the winner’s corner. Call this bitch!

She picks up. The area code thing has fooled her well like I thought! She coos into the phone, “hullo.” Heaven! At least she’s talking at last when I call. It’s that voice! Her voice, the public seductive voice that had lured in. More than Gatsby’s Daisy’s voice, this is the voice of pure undiluted sex. The sirens must have had this voice. I’m a boy again, vulnerable and ready to worship before WOMAN. I had my doubts, my suspicions, my anxieties, but tonight with that voice, I want to believe again. I believe again. I’m honest, “It’s me, Jack.”

She is shocked I got through. This technique has never failed her before. I can hear it in her shocked pause. It has been so perfect, she has never thought of an emergency stopgap. Background noises provide the gap.

Clearly, in the background, I hear a guy’s voice. I know that voice. I have heard that voice several times when in a house on a hill on Sunday morning she assured me he now meant nothing to her. Despite his calling constantly. When he’s not beeping constantly, we make fun of his ball-less cowardice. I know that voice. It’s her ex-boyfriend of four years. To the day I die, I can never forget that voice.

Before she can talk, before she can think of what to say, I hear what that voice says. Tonight it’s not a pleading voice, it’s not a begging voice, it’s the voice of a man abandoned in bed sure of himself commanding, “Leave it, come back to bed. LOOOOOOK! I’ve got something for you!”

My world is spinning.

Nights with her

2006-04-30T09:21:00.000-07:00

Like Keats she has made me
In the night yell,
"I cry your mercy!"
Begging her to stop
Not for withholding "of your love, your kiss, -- those hands, those eyes divine,
“That warm, white, lucent, million--pleasured breast, ---"
But for giving, giving, and giving more,
Towering over me, her breasts hanging over my hungry lips like ripe fruit
In my secret places with her short, delicate fingers extricating fistfuls of shinning sliver she deems more precious
than any silver
When I cry "I’m done, I’m finished, I’m through,"
Prim lips of day licking me back to throbbing, quivering, shaking life
My thirst, again and again and again
Quenched by her lips, her little quick tongue in my mouth delivering quick relief
Sweet, sweeter than marmalade, honey
Sweet, sweeter than sugar
I cry
"Oh God, what have you done?"
She laughs,
Not done
And I yell,
"I cry your mercy."

Who WasTimmy T?

2006-04-17T05:53:00.000-07:00

Monday, April 17, 2006, 2:54 AM

So here I’m, at some minutes before 3 AM in the morning listening to Timmy T’s ‘One More Try’ guilty and trying to understand why I’m doing what I’m doing and going to do what I’m doing to the one girl I have ever loved: A. J. The song is so perfect because in its banality it expresses everything I feel for A in a deeper way and because I first heard this song when I was going out with her and I remember how much she loved songs like this and others by Boucher.

I was an innocent when she found me and made me her lover, looking for purity and a forgotten simplicity she had lost since her adolescence when she had grown from a pretty girl into a desirable woman. I was the innocent to lead her back to what she had lost and if she had not had to go away I think I would have been able to do that. But she had to go away.

And now in my drunkenness and loneliness to a Timmy T song I’m facing up to what I’m doing to her before she finds out, “It’s been a long time since you left me.” Yes, it has been. Nearly a whole year since I last held her in my arms and kissed her and in that wonderful hotel room made love to her, had the most wonderful sex I have ever had.

Before she comes back and finds out, I know, “I didn’t mean to make you cry. I didn’t mean to disappoint you. I didn’t mean to tell you lies,” I’m living them now. I’m living those lines and I’m telling lies because I have found another woman and I’m binding her to me in a way that is not honest and I’m making her love me in the way I know despite “these lonely nights” A loves me too. I know how much she loves me. But still I go on with my sins. Asking all the time, “One more try,” because, “living all these lonely nights without you,” is not easy for me. If I’m not drunk I cannot survive these nights. I don’t know why but this is how it is.

In all my actions, “I didn’t mean to disappoint you, I didn’t mean to tell you lies, And after all that we have been through, Won’t you let me tell you why?” is the only excuse I can come up with. Because, “if you knew how much I missed you, you’d forgive me if you could,” Is truer than she can ever understand because for me, “It’s been a long time since you left me. I didn’t mean to make you cry. I didn’t mean to disappoint you. I didn’t mean to tell you lies. And after all that we have been through, won’t you let me tell you why? ”

reading maupassant sunday morning

2006-03-18T05:32:00.000-08:00

There was a time when perfect mornings were 6 O' Clock in the morning emptying my medicine cabinets on the floor, trembling fingers turning over sackets for one pair of Headex or Action tablets I was sure somehow had been left over. Rummaging through the kitchen fridge for jugs of cold water to slack my throat's burning thirst. And finding that there was no boiled drinking water in the fridge, switching the fridge off to a shuddering stop and on my knees sucking the ice in the freezer, the need in my throat greater than the pain in my gums.

It was only when the last drop in the freezer lingered too long, gave me a chance to look at it, that I realized in an instant the mistake I had made and I was going to be punished for; the drop of water thick milky white in the darkness of the refrigerator like a mucus drop on the tip of a child's nose about to lick it away and I ran, ran knowing it was in vain that I would never make it to the toilet bowl in time, to retch on the floor of the toilet. Convulsively, my back arched tight, my veins in my throat working and taut, a torrent of all last night's feast, unable to breath, scared, wishing the naked girl I left curled in my duvet would wake up, remembering Jimi Hendrix died choking on his vomit. In the cellar at the back of my mind a penitent boy, no longer THE MAN from last night, on his knees praying for one more chance to live.

There were mornings...but there were so many such mornings...I confuse them now all with one another because they were so many. I remember those mornings instead when Ronnie was in Jinja, Sam with his girl on Campus, Eddie was in hospital sick again, Singh wouldn't leave home because his Uncle had bought one of the first contraptions in Uganda called a computer, there was no school, and I had to be alone because I was making a decade since I last stepped inside the echoing hall of any cathedral, Sunday mornings reading Maupassant. In the red armchair living room. After five years.

After five years of waiting, hopeless at French, to read an English translation Guy de Maupassant. After five years of fruitless libraries' poring. Five years of Owino market weekend book stall hunts. Five years and the closest being Maupassant cameos in Flaubert lives, Zola letters, Henry James memoirs pored over hungrily. Five years stripteasing Maupassant asides everywhere in unexpected places like painting books with precious Maupassant quotes: "Like …the younger element of the time Maupassant frequented the banks of the Seine on Sundays for boating. From this he drew a number of short stories, among them Mouche: ‘"I saw some funny things and some peculiar girls in the past when I was rowing. How many times I have wanted to write a small book called On the Seine, to tell about this life of strength and jauntiness, gaiety and poverty, of robust and rowdy holiday that I led between the ages of twenty and thirty."’ It gives one the impression of looking at Renoir's painting Le Dejeuner des Canotiers, which was painted in 1881, several years before de Maupassant wrote Mouche."

Virginia Woolf, the first neurotic to earn my respect and opprobrium talking about Maupassant but turning against Ernest Hemingway: "Something indeed seems wrong with the people. If we place them (the comparison is bad) against Tchekov's people, they are as flat as cardboard. If we place them (the comparison is better) against Maupassant's people they crude as a photograph." Knowing even before I ever read anything of Maupassant's and so little of Hemingway's then that the bitch was absolutely right. After five years of waiting and hoarding.

Then one evening when I was not waiting, my hair unkempt, my shirt not tucked in, my shoe laces undone, eight packets of royal vodkas scattered around me, stinking from four days of not being near the shower, red eyes staring the emptiness of the first furnished flat I had ever rented and she would never live in with me, Sam possessing "one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away" to my heart dropping by and dropping on the coffee table next to the red armchair a red hardcover book and saying he would not be able to come in tomorrow. Me squeezing dry another vodka into my coffee mug and lighting another cigarette, "Fuck him."

And in the night beginning to read, '"When I saw her for the first time," Louis d' Arandel said, with the look of a man who was dreaming and trying to recollect something, "I thought of some slow and yet passionate music that I once heard, though I do not remember who was the composer."' Until then all my mornings were Camus mornings but reading, "As the weather was very fine, the people on the farm had dined more quickly than usual, and had returned to the fields. The female servant, Rose, remained alone in the large kitchen, where the fire on the hearth was drying out, under the large boiler of hot water. From time to time she took some water out of it, and slowly washed her plates and dishes, stopping occasionally to look at the two streaks of light which the sun threw onto the long table through the window, and which showed the defects in the glass. Three venturesome hens were picking up the crumbs under the chairs, while the smell of the poultry yard and the warmth from the cow stall came in through the half-open door, and a cock was heard crowing in the distance," Sunday mornings forever on that Sunday with no heart becoming Maupassant mornings. Morning coming on.

my youth

2006-01-28T06:45:00.000-08:00

In Chekhov’s Russia there was a tradition just before the winter of middle class families that could afford it leaving the cities for the countryside seeking warmer climate and relaxation. In fact another great Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky based one of my favourite short stories, White Nights, in St. Petersburg about this lonely time in the city based on the events of his youth probably.

I say ‘probably on his youth’ because I’m not sure, I’m just guessing. But I have good reason to guess. George Bernard Shaw said that the greatest education he ever had when he had just come to London as a poor young man from Ireland was walking for long hours in the alleys and museums of London just as Charles Dickens a hundred years before him had done too. Bernard Shaw said that walking was the great pastime of the poor. The only pleasure available to the poor the government had not figured a way of taking away from them by making them pay for it.

I have enjoyed that pastime a lot too. It’s quite possible that I have walked around the entire Kampala more times than I have lived on this earth. No, I’m not going to tell you my age. Someone like Caesar is always walking half Kampala from his office (why do they call it that?) after mutilating my articles before you read them.

The Take 2 writer was even once offered a chance to go on the Ugandan Olympic team but he turned down the chance when he was informed that the fast walking competition he would be representing Uganda in would not include any perks apart from the “honour” of serving his country. Dogs have suffered muscle strain trying to keep up with him on nights when he is returning home. Yes, he is in debt to several church mice that want to see him urgently.

So you can see why I’m quite sure that Dostoevsky’s White Nights was based on his own youthful experiences. In the true Hemingway tradition White Nights is good that if you have been young and poor and walking was all you could do, it is as if Dostoevsky was writing about you the afternoon you walked from Namuwongo to Nakulabye, walked that distance for six months and did not find anything strange about it.

Reading White Nights you’d be forgiven for thinking Dostoevsky knew why a simple, cramped taxi ride in late in the evening was such an event. You’d be quite sure that the man who wrote White Nights would understand that to this day you still buy those green ‘Sweet Pepsi’ early every morning to remember those days when those six Sweet Pepsi costing only a hundred shillings were your only lunch. Each of those six Sweet Pepsis’ melting on your tongue is you mentally trapped walking under that blazing sun in the afternoon over and over.

Six Sweet Pepsis and Dostoevsky’s White Nights are some of my favourite things. My youth was Six Sweet Pepsis and Dostoevsky’s White Nights. I’m not young anymore.

house wives tales

2006-01-11T04:50:00.000-08:00

WHAT I HEARD IN A TAXI.

I was in the worst taxi ride of my life from Bukoto through Wandegeya until at City Square I couldn't stand it anymore and I snapped by getting out. I was getting pointers I did not appreciate, a view of domestic intimacies I have not been privy to since I last lived in a house with more than one person, with a family in fact. Since I'm a mean bastard, I want you to suffer as I did!

"I got this girl who didn't know how to cook at all. The poor girl, I have to admit, she wanted to learn. She was enthusiastic. But she was too young. I remember I went to office one day in the morning and left her in charge. My husband was at home that day. I left the girl washing clothes and told her they expected her to cook lunch. I believe the girl was washing clothes from about 10 O’clock to about 1 O’clock. That’s when she thought of starting to cook food.

My husband got tired of waiting for lunch. He was so hungry that with our son, he went to a shop, he told me, and bought some biscuits and safi. That is what they ate for lunch! After that they both went to sleep until 3 O’clock when the maid woke them up that the food was ready.

The girl couldn’t cook! Not even this very simple food we are talking about. She made for them food that day but right the next day, even if I didn’t want to do it, I had to send the girl away. My husband and son had diarrhoea for a whole week after eating that food. I tell you, she nearly killed them. But she also did something good for me. She made him appreciate me more.

But then there was this one I had. This was a girl could not clean! She was 19 years old, supposed to be getting married. How will she manage her home if she is so dirty? I couldn't understand the girl. She would not even wash her bedsheets. Bedsheets?! A 19 year old girl! How dirty can you be? I had a woman who was washing my clothes for me before this girl came to work for me, I just kept bringing my clothes to this woman because the way this woman was washing, we would all have to buy new clothes very soon.

But the one who really annoyed me was the one my boss brought to my home. You know my boss is a woman, her husband is in Algeria and she is here and they run an organization that helps the girl children. Girl child. Girls who are disadvantaged that they cannot continue with their education. They help them. This girl was a senior four leaver, okay she was going into senior four but she was discouraged.

My boss brought her to me to work for three months. They had told her clearly that those three months were for trial, to see her and how she is as a person before they recommended her onto the programme. They wanted to see if she was a hard working person. I tell you I have never met anyone who is less grateful than that girl! That girl was a menace in my house!

My boss told me later that she had brought the girl to me because she thought that she herself could not get along with the girl because of a cultural difference. My boss is not Ugandan, you know. She wanted to see how a Ugandan family would react to her before she decided whether she should go ahead and make arrangements to help her continue with her education. That girl gave us hell!

She was worse in one person than all the house girls we had ever had! Even the very bad house girls of before, at least each of them had something nice about them. But this one, she was bad bad bad all through! She had just separated from her husband and came with her son who was sick and like two years old. I was smpthasising with her until she actually came to live in my house and then I saw why men leave their homes for other women. It is because of women like her!

This woman could not look after her own son let alone ours. I used to buy milk and porridge, milk for both her child and mine but she could not make it even for her own son alone! The woman would come to me and say I don’t feel like working today. I don’t FEEL LIKE WORKING! Meaning I do the work myself! Then she would turn around in like two days and come back and say that she was sorry, she did not mean to say that she did not want to work she was sorry. Then another day, she is demanding for her salary yet she has not yet even finished a week of work. She wants to be paid.

During her time, all the time during her time, I was cooking for my children and husband because eating her food, I was always scared, I was afraid wondering but what has she put in here? I was cooking, I was washing my clothes every morning before I went to work, I had to come back at lunch to make sure my children had eaten something, that woman was ruling our lives! Could she clean?

That woman spent most of her time drinking. I’m paying her fifteen thousand she is drinking more expensive drinks than I drink. She would start drinking in the morning, she would drink and drink but I never saw the woman drunk. And then she would go out to the shops and start playing omweso with the men there all day. I don’t know how her former boss managed her. Maybe she had something on her, I don’t know. And my husband didn’t want me to let her go!! Can you imagine that?

But I had to let her go! I had to for my own sake! I asked God sincerely what is happening to me? I have become a person who quarrels. That woman was making life impossible for me. The week she went, and I only told her at 10PM at night after she had finished supper to pack her clothes she was going the next morning, early in the morning, that week after she had gone I spent the whole week day and night at home cleaning and clearing and just enjoying being in my own house. I was so relieved it was like when I convinced my husband that we rent another house for his mother and he accepted. I was free! Free!"

what a year! what a year!!!

2005-12-31T08:55:00.000-08:00

Aren’t you tired of reading about the New Year’s resolutions people are making for this New Year? A week is already nearly over and yet still people are still asking you what is or are your New Year resolution! That is if they are not wishing you a happy and prosperous new year even if they clearly know well you do not have any form of employment and no hopes either. What about for once talking about last year’s resolutions? Why doesn’t anybody talk about them?

What’s the point of making new resolutions of what you want to achieve if you are not going to first evaluate what you achieved in the year that has just ended anyway? I mean, that’s why I recommend we should examine our last year’s resolutions. Like mine about moving out of my parents’ (really my mother’s) house and into my own. Which I did. It was an exciting year, that I can tell you.

Some strange things were happening over at my new house all the time. I was away not more than three days two weeks after moving in during those days when all that was in plenty in my house was stale air when I returned and discovered that the cockroaches had evicted themselves because there was nothing to eat up in there. The rats in the ceiling had also stopped practicing their Olympics on my side of the ceiling and it was not just me who had noticed.

My neighbor’s wife, Mama wa Bana had even stopped me one morning and asked me which medicine I was using to fight the rats. They had bought a kitten but the kitten had taken to sleeping in a tree in the compound preferring to brave being eaten by the marauding dogs our hood has in plenty to waging war alone on the rats in the ceiling. Rats that marched in high stepping well-coordinated maneuvers like Stanley Kubrick was directing them in Spartacus.

But that was ordinary. That was not the strange thing that happened at my new house. The rats, the landlord’s girlfriend who was always lounging in my sitting room were as ordinary as everyday people. What I wanted to figure out was what was happening to my house when I was away. Something always seemed different each time that, and this is no bombast, every evening or early morning returning home I expected to find my front door wide open and my house burglarized. Don’t ask me why I would expected to be burglarized seeing as landlord’s girlfriend blue plastic chair was the only thing in the sitting room and it was on three legs.

I think though always finding the security light, okay bulb, lying on the floor on my veranda qualifies as strange. This happened only on the nights when I did not come back home. And coming the day after I would find the bulb on the floor. Then one day I found the bulb missing and the wire gnawed!

Day two I find that a dog had taken possession of my missing bulb. Now the dog was absorbed in my bulb. Now his. Using his paw he was carefully shuffling it from side to side. On his face were clearly his thoughts. The dog clearly was thinking, “Aha! This must be it. This must be one of those new age tech bones they were talking about back at howling hill. Yes, the digital age has come even here.”

That happened. So know you know why I’m not bothering this year with more than trying to keep myself out of Butabika Hospital when I tell people I understand animal speak like Dr. Doolittle.

So here's me wishing you a 2006!

ANNOUNCEMENT!

2005-12-29T08:52:00.000-08:00

not auspicious

2005-12-08T02:34:00.000-08:00

Jack to guy: "Would you cane your kid?"

Guy: "Yes, I would and I will. Life punishes for every mistake so you better prepare him."

finally... he's here

2005-12-02T04:35:00.000-08:00

THE CHANGES ARE A---- COMING!!!

TUNE IN TUESDAY AND BE THRILLED!

at swim 2 birds

2005-12-01T03:14:00.000-08:00

"And I was touching you, touching you. And I was touching you. And all the time I was touching you, touching you, I could feel you under me. And all the time I was touching you, touching you, I was inside you, inside you, and it was like thrashing, thrashing. And you were under me, under me, under me, and you were moving, moving, and I could feel you as you moved. And it was like flying, falling through the air, and I was falling, falling, and I was afraid, I was afraid, and you under me, you said, “don’t rush, don’t rush.” And I was falling, falling through the air, and my lungs were throbbing, throbbing. And I could feel you under me, wet, moving, moving and you were calling my name, calling my name. And I could hear you, and I could hear you, and I was falling, falling through the air, and I couldn’t breathe and you couldn’t breathe. And I could feel you, I could feel you. And I was touching you, touching you."

adieu

2005-11-21T08:58:00.001-08:00

“All the things I could have said come back to me.”
Phil Collins, All My Life

This is the last column of this series I’ll ever write. I have known this time would come from the time I was allowed to write this column by an editor in a newspaper on a trial basis and to both our surprise it became so popular that it had to stay around longer than we had both expected it to. I have been preparing for this column ever since I wrote that first Mad World that was a complaint and a passionate rant against Makerere University toilets. The toilets in the Faculty of Arts where girls sat on the benches directly before the toilets and forced the boys to catwalk with great dignity and style in and out of the toilets however much the guys were dying to susu.

From that first column article, still lovingly pasted on the wall of a room in Lumumba Hall I hope for eternity as it was on the very Friday night the column was first published, I knew one day I’d have to write the last column in this series. If I did not die suddenly like Wahome Mutahi, that is. And I have been preparing all this time. But now that the time has come, I can’t for the life of me collect all my thoughts into one last coherent, brilliant burst to imprint in your memory.

There are so many things I did not say, to you, to the players in this column series. It’s not there was no time to tell you. Many times I just didn’t know how. Many people who know me enjoyed a game of trying to guess who the main characters in the column were based upon, many times laughingly convinced it was themselves and I did not have the heart to contradict them. To contradict them would need me to tell them, for example, that Pyro and I are no longer friends. Have not been for many months. Are enemies in fact.

I lost Plain Girl. That I told you. “You…you can never love another girl, get her back,” the Professor implored me the last time I saw him. Yes, I told you full of mirth about his failed suicide attempt. I could not tell you about his success on his second try. Even now I can’t. Plain Girl is married but not to me with a son.

If I called your home late at night drunk again, forgive me. I don’t drink anymore. But I can’t write this either anymore. The circle is broken and I can’t write this anymore. I always did make awkward bows so here I’m bidding you adieu. Adieu.

throat clearing

2005-11-10T09:47:00.000-08:00

SAYING GOODBYES

“Now I tell you openly
You have my heart so don’t hurt me.”
Dreams, The Cranberries

Before I broke up with a girl for the first time, I used to wonder what I would say. I knew that I would have to say “I can’t see you anymore,” but after that I was not too sure of what I would and should say.

My only source of advice at the time, movies, were not very reassuring. At one end of reactions was the woman calling out her mountain of a secret lover Ricky and declaring, “ Pup, it’s okay to pummel him into pulp now, I’m done with this one minute prick.”

But at the time I was with a girl who did not need a bodybuilding boyfriend to pin me down on a kitchen floor and make me cough out all my indiscretions. When Maridadi sat on my thighs during music concerts, the fireworks going off were my bones cracking. So I was apprehensive about how she where she would want to take it about my decision to split up with her.

During the AIDS adverts that ran on TV, while friends were laughing uproariously at the man who ordered iron underpants to protect himself, I was cursing that the TV camera did not pan a little higher to show me where the work station of that diligent blacksmith was. I knew I needed that underwear whenever I was going to break the news to my girlfriend.

I was going to break her heart but she was going to burst my balls, literally. She may have thought I was lovingly massaging her legs those last nights together but what I really was doing was taking the measure of her muscles and trying to estimate the power of her kick when I told her it was over and she retaliated by kicking me viciously in the groin.

My extensive cassette and CD collection began in that year. Chiefly the titles and most of the songs had two familiar words in all of them: forgiveness and sorry. “Don’t hurt me,” made up many of the choruses. In the end it turned out that I did not need all that.

I was the one who needed the handkerchiefs and consolatory hugs as the weeping best man on her wedding. On the best day of her life is the only time I ever felt defiled by our ten-year age gap. Love is always sweetest when one is losing it.

you can never go home again

2005-10-28T12:02:00.000-07:00

"don't look back."
On the Menu

I tried to lift my beer and drink as heartily as I had been drinking before but on my tongue the beer tasted like oil. I was on my sixth cigarette but all I could think of as I inhaled again was how I was committing suicide with this habit I knew I should not indulge anymore. I was not laughing anymore. At least I should have been laughing even if I was not happy. The Professor was here. And Pyro. But I was not laughing.

Every time something like this has happened, I have had inklings before hand. I know I’m not simply ready for change anymore; this change has to happen now. Nothing can or will be safe standing in the way of this overwhelming need to change that is slowly gripping me in a vice stronger than the slow numbing of many Uganda waragi tots. But this time this one happened with no warning.

If Plain Girl were still a part of my life, she would not have been in the least surprised that my epiphany happened in a bar. Yes, I said I don’t drink any more (but I did not specify what I would not be drinking anymore, did I?) I was in a bar, okay. I’m too befuddled to explain how God does his most booming business in bars to attempt another try. (Thomas Brian, I know you’ll find this very hard to believe).

The facts of the matter are these. I was in a bar drinking, smoking, pinching the bum of the waitress and very happy. I was not alone. I’m not usually alone but I was super glad today with whom I was keeping company. All the old crowd. Pyro, the Professor, Q, the women, everyone was here and we were hanging like we were first year Makerere University students.

I knew I could get any happier than this. I had been trying to get everybody to coordinate their busy schedules so that we could meet here one more time at Classic Inn on Namirembe road. I was determined to make this happen this time because I know after this semester, everyone will be too busy and we will only ever meet again on our graduation parties. So here at Classic Inn on Namirembe road was Elysium. I was happy. I was happy. Then I was not.
Here I should give you a lucid explanation of the cause of my languor. From my ennui I should bring to you the cause of my existential despair. But I don’t know either. But I have a vital clue and it means I’ll have to bid you, dear faithful blog reader, a permanent farewell.

the life you missed

2005-10-24T12:17:00.000-07:00

"I'm ridin' in your car
You turn on the radio
You're pullin' me close
I just say no
I say I don't like it
But you know I'm a liar
'Cause when we kiss
Ooooh, fire..."
FIRE, Pointer Sisters

All week I have been fighting with my big sisters. I have three big sisters and boy can they never let me forget that they are my big sisters. This week they were going on about how women are going to ruin me (savour the irony all ye suave readers). I love my dear sisters (and never, never, never ever tell them I said that) but I think they are very wrong. The fights existed at all because I did not keep this opinion to myself like I usually do all my other opinions when my sisters and our mother are together on one side. A man must have supper after all and not poisoned either.

But this time this was not just another opinion I could hide under a bushel without offending it. I wanted this opinion out in the open, spreading its light to all because I think its worth some judgmental people understand. I’m not wasting my life living my life the way I live it. I look back on the path I could have taken and I’m glad I totally refused to go along with the Seminarian education I was being offered.

I realized that I’m not at all sorry for the life I’m living when I was ill. It’s quite amazing what deep insights one can be granted while squatting in the latrine many nights. I may have had to be held down to accept the malarial blood test I was afraid and half sure would reveal a more dreaded disease but my little boy whimpers did soften the Rubensian bosomed nurse to give me her phone number. Plastered her heart on my arm. My heart thereafter was not skipping beats only for the blood results.

So while I was in the latrine considering my future, I had a sudden vision how my life could have been if I had followed all the strictures I have ignored all my life long so far. Before pushing became a necessity, I saw quickly all the things I would have missed.

I did not want to be, I was so very glad I was not, the loner I saw in my mind’s eye in a taxi being driven home in the night. To a supper alone in a silent house. No pet even to leaven the quiet. Watching from behind a glass window a hand holding girl and boy along the roadside walking home and wondering what that is like. I’m happy to not be that guy whatever the price.

not in love with her anymore

2005-10-15T03:23:00.000-07:00

“I’m tired of being in love and being all alone.”
So Far Away, Dire Straits

I’m surprised that this has been going on for weeks and no one has noticed. At least no one has said anything to me. So I was assuming that no one has noticed. But then I may be wrong. In fact I’m nearly sure that I’m wrong. I think you may have noticed but decided not to say anything. Maybe you assumed that you were being sensitive by not saying anything. I appreciate.

The truly strange thing is that I just noticed myself. Maybe it was this Freud psychology thing going on in my head, I think. You know automatic suppression of things unpleasant and all. Bill Clinton is the world famous master at it. Called it thinking in different boxes. Something bugs you, don’t think about it. And most importantly, don’t let it screw you by disorganizing the rest of your life. Put it in a box and don’t think about. Move on to other boxes that contain some things that are more important for the moment. I think I have been doing that.

For weeks now I have not talked about the most important woman in my life. And writing this, I just realized, can you believe this, I don’t momentarily remember her name either! She’s real. But I could not to save my life for some minutes remember her name! The box thing I see is working too well. Which may not be a bad thing you know.

We have not broken up or anything. Patricia, that’s her name, has stuck around longer than any girl I have had here on Campus. Did I tell you that Plain Girl, my first, asked if we could go out again? Story for another day! A sweet story. But Patricia is my major concern here. I have not talked to you about her for weeks because, well, I can’t seem to care about her. God that makes me seem like a heartless Lothario. But it’s not like that.

I wish it were like in the epigraph up there. That she has gone far away somewhere and the only way to keep in touch is by one nightly phone call a day. The big event of each of our days. But it isn’t romantic like that. She is here on Campus, 24/7 available and I’m avoiding her. Hate what I’m about to say, but I think I’m just tired of her. To break up with her would break her heart. But sometimes I think what I’m doing now is much, much worse. The funny thing is I’m doing it, I say to myself, for her own good. The road to hell indeed is paved with good intentions!

my vices

2005-10-07T07:40:00.000-07:00

“Of things that go bump in our nether regions.”
On the Menu

In five years I have not been ill. Notice that I did not say sick. My condition was temporary. So stop the jokes about subscribing me for ARV drugs. They are not even good jokes. They are disrespectful, insulting jokes even if President Bush believes ‘those people’ are suffering the wrath of God for their weaknesses and USA should not spend another dime supporting lustful sinners in third countries. Those wretches in Africa!

Excuse my moment of my passion. Sickness does that you. Illness, I meant to say illness. I was ill, as I was saying, nearly all last week. Deadly ill. Picture a grave situation and I was in it last week. I didn’t have the chance to think or be afraid that I was dying because the first time I was only aware for like two seconds I was going to faint before I fainted.

And the next time only the voice that can wake me up anywhere that is like an alarm clock in my head roused me from unconsciousness. My father’s voice that is. What was wrong with me? When the doctor diagnosed, finally, what was wrong with me, I wanted to laugh out loud. But my mother’s smile did that for me. In all seriousness, the doctor announced: stress and overwork.

It tickled me nearly red I tell you. Me? I got caught. My vice found out. With Pyro its sex. Pyro is so addicted to sex that if he ever found his girlfriend with another man in his bed he would probably interrupt them to suggest, “how about a threesome?” The Professor’s book worming is because he gets his thrills from being smug because all his reading has made him all knowing. His girlfriend is yet to figure out that her expanding lingerie collection will never get him check under her bonnet when there’s a book on B.B.C.

Me? What’s my vice? My bedroom secret? My late night, furtive groping event that climaxes my day induces out of me groans of orgasmic pleasure? Work. Work. And more work. That’s what the doctor said. Told my parents with me there. And if you believe that reason you are more stupid than I ever wildly anticipated. To think that on my less than living wage (social scientists of the future will try to puzzle out how I subsisted) I would visit a therapist.

I’m a sick man. I think my liver is diseased. My spleen is talking. Alright so now you know I'm a Fydor Dostoevsky showoff. I also know you were not in the least bit wondering who said that which is why I told you.

a girl next door

2005-10-01T11:36:00.000-07:00

“This could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”
Casablanca

I knew it wouldn’t last and true to form it has not. A home I could look forward to rushing back to at the end of another annoying wearying day spent making my boss richer. Glad to be going to my home because I had no neighbour and therefore peace of mind. That state of affairs was not bound to last and it hasn’t. I have a new neighbour.

Many people say they would instantly know if a neighbour moved in next door. Pray very hard you never live next to such people. They are called nosy neighbours. I’m not a nosy neighbour so I did not know I had a new neighbour until four days later when we met. My neighbour made a very strong impression on me. Like the old neigbour, I must say, but this time in a good way, I must gleefully add.

My first impression…. No, let me tell you about the second impression first. We must keep the suspense in this story going. Come to think of it, It’s the only thing we actually have going for us this week. And even that we are pissing away. Have you stopped reading yet? Okay, I can see you are determined to make me sweat for every shilling this paper cost you. If you did not borrow this copy, yeah, we know about you. But back to my neighbour.

It was a sweaty, steamy introduction, x-rated action thrown in with bits dangled here and…. oops, wrong column! That’s Guru’s forte. There couldn’t have been any steam because our bathroom is outside. There was water but it was so cold penguins were trekking towards the basin. There you have it. I first met my neighbour in the communal bathroom which is why a very strong impression was made on. The impression was of a very hot slap on my cheek. After I blundered into the bathroom without knocking.

I can now authentically report that cartoons do not lie. You do see stars and whooshing on being slapped. That slap also temporarily erased from my memory my first impression. The fleeting impression of a backside out of a soap billboard advertisement. My neighbour’s backside in my case. Really. Which is why a slap followed very rapidly. And that is how I got to meet my new neighbour.

She’s not yet sweet on me. Okay, who am I kidding? She would rather I was dead every time she lays eyes on me. But finally I too can say that I’m in love with the girl next door.

my neighbor's moved!

2005-09-24T10:10:00.001-07:00

“I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects. A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.”
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891

For 16 days now I have been waking up with a smile on my face. A goofy silly smile of satisfaction on my lips and sighing over and over again contentedly. Each morning I wake up and I still can’t believe my luck. I have not been this happy since the first morning when I woke up and realized barely able to stop myself from laughing out loud with pleasure that Patricia had at last agreed to spend the night over.

I remember waking up that morning and my surprise turning into pure kiddish joy to feel a pair of nostrils continuously breathing into my ear. That was, naturally, before I knew about her window shaking snoring. But let’s not divert from a perfect picture. Of late, for 16 straight days, I have recovered the exact feeling I had on that morning. I can hardly believe my luck.

I’m not a misanthropic recluse as I’m often accused though to get to where I live is a mile from the main road, I need to wade through a gigantic swamp and the shortest cut is through a wild life game park. It is not true that I hate kids though I was once found encouraging ‘running nose’ Richard to stick his hand in the oven of his mother’s gas cooker. I was simply trying to teach that pesky kid that curiosity does not only kill cats.

Just in case you were lost for a moment a paragraph back there, don’t worry. I was carefully explaining my stance because I don’t want you to take the wrong way the reason why I have been in nirvana for 16 days. You see, my neighbor moved! Shifted, left, gone, packed their bags! Yeeee-ha!

For 16 days now I no longer have to wake up the morning noise on CBS radio. I no longer dread opening my door because of his sugar-borrowing wife standing there on cue Saturday morning after I did my shopping the previous evening. Richard, their 22-month child of a devil who can talk and God the things his evil little lips come up with. I was not ‘fondling’ his mother; I was helping her pull down her dress. What was I doing help her pull her dress down? I was being a good loving neighbor! What? I care. I will miss them. But not miss them enough to wish them to come back.

can we get any deader?

2005-09-19T02:19:00.000-07:00

“You want the truth? The truth recoils from itself, son!”
On the Menu

We are getting political these days, I warn you. It was a Sunday, an afternoon, there was no evening premier league football match to look forward, we were broke and in my room but none of us was sleepy or bored. In fact, the atmosphere in my room was positively sizzling.

The professor was trying to convince us that we should give Health minister Mr. Jim Muhwezi a chance instead of sitting on our bottoms and judging him guilty without evidence. Pyro was not biting, “Gwe guy, the man has been censured twice. Don’t you get to understand that censure is a longer word for thief?”

Q’s two cents of interruption were worth more, “Do you think these guys of the TV tax are thinking about what sort of message they are sending out? What they are doing, there is no way of softening it, is indecent. Stealing is okay. But at the very least they could steal with some effort! There was absolutely no effort in that.”

I totally clued in on Q’s wacky argument. “So there were no social activist Kampalans marching in the street because the TV tax was not a clever enough move to steal some more from the people? In other words, Kampalans will only wake up very early on a Saturday to march to city square when the latest ploy to rob them is more ingenious than any Al- Queda terrorist attack plan. That is very cynical, you know.”

Pyro roared, “Cynical? Jack, you are truly a village rat in the big city. We have now gone beyond the worldwide known wisdom that it doesn’t pay to pay your taxes. We are the first to go further, for now. By not returning the money for the aborted TV tax, they are telling us something important. Only in Uganda are you also punished for paying your taxes.”

Someone had to play the devil’s advocate and what the heck I was in the mood. “I refuse to believe that there aren’t a few good men left in our public service. It is statistically impossible that in a group of people there don’t be at least one honest, good, duty conscious person. It’s just not possible, scientifically and mathematically!”

My argument was not a dazzler even with the Professor. This guy’s depravedness surprises me more and more these days. He had a question in return that answered my argument, “Statistically impossible a group not to have an honest, clean person? Okay, I won’t ask you to look back to all your lives. Who here among us in the last six months has not bribed even just to get a service they shouldn’t pay for?”

That was unfair if you ask me. And Pyro’s crack did not help matters either, “Speaking of tings that can happen only in Uganda, soon unborn babies will be bribing their mothers to let them be born!”

this week's clown is...big surprise!

2005-09-13T11:00:00.000-07:00

“Who is this guy?”
Danny de Vito

The Professor has asked us very many weird questions over the time we have known him. (Three years in case you’re wondering.) But Pyro and I are agreed that the weirdest one has definitely got to be the one the Professor came up with on Wednesday, “Do you guys think I look like Nsaba Buturo?”

“That doctor guy?” Pyro wanted to be sure, “the mini- star of disinformation, you mean?” “Look, I just want to know, do you think I in anyway at resemble Nsaba Buturo?” the Professor really sounded desperate.

Pyro still was refusing to take the Professor seriously, “ Prof, that is like saying you’re stupid. The Internet search engine Jeeves comes to you to help when it’s doing its research. You’re the smartest guy I know.”

The Professor turned to me pleading. “Please tell me the truth. Do you think I’m a sadistic, power hungry, frustrated cross dresser who kicks his dog every evening after my boss has turned down one more of my schemes to suck dry the citizens of Uganda? Do you recognize any future signs at all of that at all in me?”

The Professor hummed a little ditty before us as showed off some strange dance steps copied off Leonardo di Caprio in the Titanic film, “I can dance. I have a life. I don’t need to feel alive by making little rats squeal. In this case by dreaming up taxes and giggling with pleasure. Tell me I’m nothing like Nsaba Buturo, please!”

I was really concerned. “Who says Nsaba Buturo is any of these things? Did Nsaba’s housegirl catch him trying on her extra large bras and come running to tell you?” I queried trying to find out the source of the Professor’s anxiety. “Gwe, I don’t think any eyesight would survive a trauma like that,” Pyro put in unhelpfully.

“We are trying to help here,” I reminded Pyro. “Jack,” Pyro said, “even a raccoon thinks that guy stinks. A raccoon! How can you be helping when you keep mentioning that name in every sentence you’re saying? Can’t you see that that is one person who does not bring happiness wherever he goes but causes happiness WHEN he goes?”

This, quizzically, is what clicked the Professor back with us. “Hey, here is one headline I’d give anything to read. The beauty of all: NSABA ASKING TO BE FIRED. “

We knew the Professor was definitely back with us when he went on, “How about this one? NSABA VISITS UTV, IS SURPRISED TO FIND STATION TRANSFERRED OFFICES INTO A ROOM IN THE UGANDA NATIONAL MUSEUM. What do you think of that one?”

“I’d rather be watching UTV,” Pyro replied dryly.

a girl's life today

2005-08-26T11:45:00.000-07:00

“And the posters scream safe revolt.”

In Goddess's girl voice (the conceit!):
It’s impossible to be a rebel today. I don’t mean Kony style. He’s not a rebel. He’s like one of those dreadful P.E. teachers whose humiliating classes were compulsory for all of us, whether you had things that might pop out or not when this sadistic bastard was busy making us jump up and down. Up and down like human tennis balls.

When I say rebel, I mean in a personal capacity. A one-woman rebellion that might catch fire and change everything! Like Margaret Sanger. Have you ever heard of her? She was the mother of pill-plan and other contraceptives. Introduced them to women against opposition virtually from religion to the police. A wild story goes that a married Member of Parliament who was her lover but opposed her crusade when they were about to engage in sex fearful that he might get her pregnant stopped and asked sheepishly, “Can we use contraceptives?”

What about Joan of Arc? I wonder how she managed to keep those men off her? Couldn’t have been easy. I mean they say we women think insignificant thoughts. Yes, true of some women. But what about men who can only think of one thing and one thing only? At least we have diversity! I’m still trying to figure out exactly how men always manage to escape being termed idiots in I.Q. tests because if your train of thought is railed like that then logic dictates you’re a moron.

To be a rebel nowadays funnily enough is by refusing to engage in sex instead of like in the old days when even secretly dreaming about it instantly rendered a girl a social outcast. I just wish men could catch up! I mean like Pyro. From his speeches you’d think we were at a United Nations conference discussing how to commence relations between bitter enemies.

I say speeches because most guys don’t actually talk to a girl they want to sleep with. They breathlessly yell speeches of love and friendship and understanding and then wonder why we find them boring. For Christ’s sake we’re not at Namboole to be convinced ekisanja is bad as if it is not also what they want if they could get the chance.

Surely by now we’d have come to a consensus that sex is not the most important thing in the world. If only men knew how funny they look while ‘at it’. Like sputtering, backfiring cars clunky in many areas. I say this for the good of all men. We women think about a lot of things as you can see.

the best hangout in town!

2005-08-26T11:41:00.000-07:00

“You’ve been existing. Now start living.”

Portentous. That’s what the Professor was when I got to Mama Something bar on Namirembe road. As is always when the Professor is grim and serious, Pyro who had got there before me was grinning very happily.

The Professor had summoned me. I’m not being needlessly pompous here. “Make yourself available at Mama whatever bar Namirembe road in twenty minutes. No need to pretend you’re busy, I’m doing you the favour. You can ogle the back page of that smutty newspaper you’re reading later. Wash your hands before you come,” seems an officious way to talk on the phone especially when calling me.

“Tell him! Tell him!” Pyro started hectoring the Professor as soon as he saw me on the top of his voice. They say women are so jealous of each other; they’re always trying to pull each other back. I think Ugandan men are becoming more like women. I know that it’s not just my imagination that male car drivers on seeing another man in the middle of the road with an insane gleam in their eyes accelerate trying to run him down.

That’s why I hate crossing Namirembe road at 7 in the evening. Five metres across seem like an Olympic-size swimming pool in which Ugandans are always coming last. Getting across alive is the primal concern. So excuse me if I was not too concerned to find out exactly what Pyro was poking me to hear.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with women!” the Professor exploded again. Pyro couldn’t sit still for the excitement. “He’s talking about the Goddess! The Goddess. The master who knows everything is not happy with the Goddess! He’s human! He doesn’t understand women completely either.”

“Well, at least he has a woman of his own,” I snapped when I realised not one of these insensitive brutes was going to hold my hand and congratulate me on my successfully crossing the road.

“I’m going to the toilets,” Pyro said darkly to that and the Professor’s face beamed thankfulness.

“What’s up?” I asked the Professor.

“We need a holiday plan. This is the bar we’ll be using,” he said. Before I could protest that no one had consulted me or why this bar, Pyro came back, spitting every ten seconds.

“Jesus, Professor, are you trying to kill us? How could you bring us here?” Pyro was more pissed than he had left.

“Did you find anyone in the toilets?” the Professor asked laughing. “This is the bar that knows how to prevent toilet queues. The toilets are dirty so that you only do there to what took you there.”

boys' riotous night out

2005-08-26T11:39:00.000-07:00

“Oooh, the(boys) just wanna have fun.”
Cyndi Lauper

The Professor beds down in University Hall. A piece of brilliant luck entirely wasted on the unworldly fool. If Pyro or I had been assigned to reside here, we should have relocated long ago with mattresses and all into Sambo bar. Because Sambo bar is literally at the Professor’s door, outside the small U.H gate in Wandegeya.

Imagine, if I wanted a drink all I would have to do would be to sit up in bed and bellow, “Mama Viola, give me mine!” And Mama Viola waddling her substantial girth over would give me my mwenge bigere. Dream room service!

Instead I have to goosestep from Lumumba, konkona Pyro out of Nsibirwa who will try to convince me all the way to University Hall that if we add his 200 to my 500, we can jump on a boda boda. If I don’t want, he can jump on it alone, with my 500. The only time I can remember the Professor ever being impressed by one of our sweat-drenched arrivals was when we handed him our dead lungs and borrowed his spares.

There’s a new nook in Naalya with promises of ekimansulo so we wanted to do our traditional Sambo bit quickly. Hard to believe that this was our first guys alone Friday evening out since we were manacled. We were going on a spree; spend, spend, spend!

But Pyro didn’t fancy spending on beggars. One of Wandegeya’s “historical” beggars riled him when he came with his AIDS certificate. Pyro verbally kicked him out of Sambo to great cheers.

“But this ‘beggar’ is wearing spects that are more expensive than the Professor’s! How come? Check and make sure his pajero is not parked outside.”

After several poked eyes and stomped feet, Sambo’s dance floor had respectfully cleared. The Professor was on the dance floor. Generating more electricity than Syda Bumba’s UEDCL with his flailing arms and ekitaguuro leg missiles. I wished Plain Girl were here to see this windmill dance.

The crooked special hire driver to Naalya wanted to charge us 20,000. A conversation changed his mind. Nearly there, in dark loadshedded Kiwatule, I badgered Pyro, “I told you to buy a car. Why are you so stingy with the money Col. Kayanja gave you for selling your own brother, Black?”

Pyro caught on, “You leave me alone, you think stealing cars is easy for all of us like for you?” The Professor loves this game, “Mutugge( to Pyro), I hope you remembered to bring my SM machine gun.”

“We need a fast car. How fast is this car, driver?” I asked. The driver gladly accepted 5000 fare.

just who is this jack mataachi?!

2005-08-26T11:26:00.000-07:00

“I wanna be a paperback writer.”
The Beatles (read their snap history in The Musicians Club before the posters mould off the walls.)

There’s a misconception that needs clearing up before It’s a mad, mad, mad, mad world proceeds. Did you notice that? It’s a mad, mad, mad, mad world. We’re a column! I’ve a column! Hallelujah!

Thanks to all those who wrote in or verbally suggested that we become a column. Zeeeee to those who didn’t or don’t. Political pessimists pay attention. Agitation does work, plus hooking up the editor with a luscious campus babe.

The misconception that needs clearing up is that ‘Mad, Mad World’ is not fair, is partial in its presentation. Some of you have written in your concern that certain old time characters that all along you thought were historicals in the series forever there to stay have taken to disappearing acts rather like certain people do in political movements undergoing reconstruction. Mabugo for you dears, those characters couldn’t stand the heat in the kitchen of the creator.

Some of you readers have written in about how displeased you are with the recent trend of shoving Pyro to the margins. Why do I never write about Pyro and his life anymore yet all along I led you to believe that Pyro was the main player in the series and you even believed that his was the name of the whole series? (How wrong you were!)

Another clique of readers is perturbed that there aren’t any more love scenes in Mad, Mad World yet the male characters have now supposedly hooked up with girlfriends. Perhaps Mad, Mad World is simply imagined, made up, they disturbingly suggest. To these readers I’ve an answer: go read the Red Pepper or Danielle Steal or borrow the Basic Instinct to disrobe. We’re intellectuals here though our degrees maybe like Ph. D’s from Bwaise.

But the caucus that most bugs me is the one clamouring for the resurrection of certain disreputable characters like my Lumumba roommate Q. I live with the guy, do I have to write about him too, I ask you. I find this section of readers most selfish. I don’t trust them like I don’t trust Q.

The most irritating cliché on meeting a fellow Campuser is to be high fived with “Ki story, mwana.” Q has a personalised cliché all to himself and he doesn’t just use it on me, “Ki guy, give me there lukumi.” Point of very important information: only one-skirt wearer has the right to ask me that, Christina Milian.

my knight to the rescue!

2005-08-26T10:23:00.000-07:00

I hate being grateful. That’s when I do the silliest things. I was grateful to Plain girl. I was so grateful I did what I had never for the life of me thought I was capable of doing to Plain girl. I kissed Plain girl. No, I did not just kiss her; I lip locked with her until we were both breathless. All this happened because I was overwhelmed with a sense of gratitude towards Plain girl. Damn gratefulness!

Only if you have been in jail at least once can you understand what I felt when I woke up and I realized I was in jail, a holding cell. The first morning in a jail what you feel is not terror that you might spend a good amount of time locked up. That is not what bugs you, or at least bugged me. Fear is what takes control of all your body and thoughts. Fear about what the people who know you will say, will think, will tell to others who know you. In my case, I was sweating out what my parents would say after they found out where I was.

I could already see my mother’s grief stricken face. My father’s wrath would know no bounds. And as for my so-called friends… Funny, it’s been years but somehow I thought that if I ever got out and got home my father would cane me!

The hilarious mood in our cell that being locked up was just another extension of the high jinks we had had in our adventurous night had disappeared. In the morning everybody was deep in somber concentration trying to think up what appropriate lies to explain the mess each of us found ourselves in.

I knew I would have to call my mother eventually but I was waiting for one of the other guys to be the first to go and call their own parent before I called her. Everyone else too was waiting for one of the others to be the first to go call their parent before they called their own. That’s when the warden came in.

“Mataachi, your wife has saved you. Come.”

I went with my heart in my mouth to the office and found Plain girl handing over some money to one the police guys who had hauled us in.

1st they tell u what 2think then...

2005-06-18T11:49:00.000-07:00

“Eh! Look, the clothes are wearing him!”
On the Menu

You’re smart if you feel you’re smart. I’m desperately on my knees praying those words are true. After all Eva Mbabazi did look smart wearing a fishnet dress. (Don’t quibble with me about the definition of a dress; they call g-strings underwear too don’t they?)

I knew when I got a girlfriend I would have to brush my teeth obsessively like after every meal instead of chewing Big G after. With Plain Girl the Syda Bbumba- UEDCL- Lake Victoria is shrinking excuse wouldn’t hold water; ironing regularly must be done. (Pity, you who thinks this ends immediately after desired babe becomes nagging baby-girlfriend.)

I wouldn’t have minded the ironing. I like variety. The change from rumpled like a kavera shirts to sharp creases I hope could possibly stop receptionists in buildings like Telecommunications House barking at me to come and carry out the dustbins, which are overflowing inside their cubicles.

I wouldn’t have minded ironing as long as I was ironing my own shirts. My own shirts Plain Girl evicted from being sprawled all over my bed into the cupboard and now they are locked away in a suitcase for their own good after Plain Girl “accidentally” used my No. 9 Real Madrid jersey for moping.

“I know his music is no longer selling,” Pyro said, “but is Kanda Bongo Man doing so badly that he has started selling his memorabilia?” when he found me ironing one of these “shirts” in my room.

Q, of all people, complained that Pyro and the Professor have no manners. “Can’t you knock? Why do you just enter as if you’re entering your toilet?”

“It is not?” the professor feigned shock, “Gwe, how many peacocks did you murder for that shirt?” he joined in turning to me.

“That is a kimono!” Pyro lobbied.

The “shirts” Plain Girl has determined I wear if I’m to be seen in public with her as you have already guessed are those Congolese things favoured by musicians for which you have to wear protective shades before you approach the person wearing one.
“Have you ever worn anything that costs sh70, 000? I run up bigger clothes bills than Mike Mukula and even pay for me,” I boasted hoping no one would catch me in a lie.

“I don’t know who’s the fool. The tailor or you,” Pyro sourly retorted.

“Where’re you going anyway?”

Their sudden respectful interest in Q whose wallet on the floor was bulging with currency meant I didn’t have to kill them with laughter by miserably whispering, Pastor Sempa’s Prime Time at the Pool.

on a real date

2005-06-14T10:32:00.000-07:00

“Look for the girl with the broken smile and ask her if she wants to stay for awhile. If she’ll be loved.”
some band

Next week, my God, I can’t even bear to think about! Next week, but this was supposed to be fun! We were supposed to be having fun! Next week, ah, these are holidays, in holidays I go out with Pyro and the Professor and with only 10k I’m supposed to stagger home. A pig is supposed to be dead in my honour.

Instead, next week, because of drinking too much ndume, each of us is supposed to go out with a girl. Not alone with the girl. The girl and all the rest of us, a group date. Why? Why? It was the Professor’s drunken idea. It was Pyro’s fault for teasing him so much about quarrelling with goddess.

“You think because your trouser has no zip, you know women more than me,” the Professor was angry, “Next week, ha! Next week,” and here he chortled, “each of us will come with a girl who qualifies to be a girlfriend but who you know well enough to grope and she minds but doesn’t slap you.”

If I had false teeth, they would have fallen out. I’ve dated a lot this first year of campus. But of all the girls I’ve loved, they all have a price. My usual one needs four Bell Lagers before she’s blind enough to think I look like Denzel Washington. The one I take to functions where other campusers will be like karaoke and beauty contests demands a whole sania of pork with chips and fruity things, that is before I order the real drinks. Then there’s a Miss Jack Daniel’s Black Label, two stiff ones, before she allows me to hold her hand.

I’m a student! No one has yet answered my Searching-for-a Sugar Mummy advert in a certain tabloid for me to have that sort of money every day. And this is one week when I’m B-R-O-K-E. Sue me please, I called Plain Girl.

“Hi, would you like to go out with me?” I wanted to make this quick.

“Why?” she asked. That was unexpected. She couldn’t say NO, could she? COULD SHE?

I needed the freak. What the hell. I decided to talk, “We’ve been friends a long time. You understand me.” I started and said a lot of stuff that surprised me. I continued. “This night will be special. You’re the only special person I can think of worth it.”

Then I stopped. My hand was shaking. I think I meant all that.

“Okay, I’ll come,” she replied.

a secret place of my own

2005-06-13T11:22:00.000-07:00

Heaven is a place on earth. No, I have not become saved, yet. I just made a discovery that as a man very soon you have to find a place of sanctuary. A hiding cove where no women are allowed entry. It is not until you begin to hunt for your own hermitage that you will realize that there are very few places in this city where women are not allowed so that men can get a breather from their company. There ought to be plenty of places like this but there aren’t!

We were lied to you know. James Brown, that American singer, tricked us into believing that “it’s a man’s world, don’t you know!” It is not! It is a woman’s world! Think about it! All the laws enacted favour women; you get a divorce who loses more? Social customs we imported demand that “ladies first.” Remember the traditional ones that women eat last when food is served? Why do you think it is like that? So that women can save the best for last for themselves!

Even nature, biology is against us men! Confess if you are a man why you work so hard. Isn’t it to 1) get enough money to marry or at least afford a date 2) get enough money to dress well and impress all women 3) get enough money to feed the kids your wife said are yours 4) get enough money to look after dear mama in comfort? Everything favour women!!

Why this diatribe? I hate all women right now!! Beyonce Knowles of course excepted. Ok, I knew being sprung from jail by Plain Girl meant I owed her. But no one hinted at the bill I would have to pay for my narrow escape! I now sympathize with what Engineer Kazibwe used to go through with his famous wife. I have been reduced to a piece of property. Plain Girl displays me around Campus like I’m a bracelet on her arm.

Who do we meet sometimes? Pyro, somehow he got out finally, and beautiful Miss High-and-Mighty in front of the Main Building. Pyro goes in overdrive saying, “Oh, don’t these two just look cute? Is this lovely lady the woman who won your heart? Look, Miss High-and-Mighty, you have met his girlfriend. It just warms my heart. You two make whichever place you go to a little piece of heaven on earth!”

Plain Girl is in ecstasies after. “Your best friend thinks we make a cute couple! Don’t you think we make a cute couple?” I’m muttering to myself, “I’m coming for you, Pyro.”

doodling in the library

2005-05-10T10:37:00.000-07:00

The library is not merely about musty books and bespectaculed gentlemen. Romances and heartbreaks are recorded here too. Read on!

Scene: library, very hot afternoon. Culprit is supposed to be revising but the words just won’t make sense. I mean every time I try to read, the eyes become teary and very heavy. Or the words just won’t stop doing one Congolese dance after another on their pages. Is it my fault?

Even the looming threat of tomorrow’s exam in the afternoon is not enough. Look, tomorrow is so far! After all, there is to night when after a heavy supper, shower, to read. But if I happen to be too tired to night or maybe got distracted by a programme on TV, there is still tomorrow morning.

Anyway, it is unnatural to read in the afternoon. To be in a class struggling not to yawn crueler. Why can’t Ugandans catch onto the Mexican craze of a siesta? It is only normal that after lunch one should take a snooze. Preferably until 4:30pm.

But the library desks are too hard. Need I mention that the chairs are the kind standing on three legs? You sleep you crash! So staying awake is the only option. Bored, the normal occupation would be to ogle cute girls.

But this is a library! Cute girls don’t visit libraries. There are girls all right but they are here because they know their problem very well. Your {hey, I still want girls to talk to me, especially the cute ones} protesting eyes demand tinted shades whenever they pass your line of vision.

Much better, unbelievable! to read the book before you. But wait; there is some fun in these dusty tomes. If you have a hankie, press that your nose and blow, you may find a message. A blast from the past!

Its not that halfway through, the writer suddenly got witty {like I’m desperately trying to be}. You are reading a Mechanical Engineering textbook! No, some idiot idler mistook the gaps on the page to be part of his or her own notebook. Or maybe resented the wasted space. So they decided to utilize it. All those utilize your resources maximally government campaigns were not in vain.

This guy; it has to be, the scratching is no better than a doctor’s, using a blue pen was attempting to commune. Quote, “But why are you torturing me?” Reply, obviously from a girl {it seems cute girls only stopped coming to the library recently}, “I’m not torturing you.”

I wonder if librarians used to tell them to ssssh in those days. “ I love you, sweetie honey. I can’t sleep at night because you!” Girl plays hard to get, “Is it my problem?” {They were always like this!} Romeo rebut, “You are the Prime Minister {what?} of my heart. You are my kimuli kya Rosa {how long ago was this?}”

Girl very severe, “Stop writing such things in library books. They are for everyone. {Hahaha! he is about to get dumped!} Don’t you have your own paper? {What! I think this guy must be writing to himself.}”

But Romeo has home advantage. “You first tell me you love me, *********{name furiously rubbed out}.” I wish could see this girl’s face, “Bolingo, you know I care about you.”

I should give them a piece of my mind! Oh, someone got there before me, and in capital letters: “You girl are a slut! You boy, you will die of AIDS.” Never mind! I too will give them a piece of my mind. Where is that pen?

in jail!

2005-05-07T10:08:00.000-07:00

“I don’t ever want to be in jail again,” were the first words Pyro said to me when my eyes bolted open in panic. We were sharing a tiny, patchy mat right under the window and it seems he had been awake a while.

My God! We’re in jail! We’re in shit!” I exclaimed and got up too fast for Pyro to warn or stop me. Mathew, one of the guys we were with at Sambo’s party was on the cooking oilcan used as a toilet and I toppled him off with my foot as I got up. He landed with a brief scream in his own stuff and what had accumulated through the night.

“You,” the warden said pointing at me, “and the fat boy are cleaning there!” he bellowed. I wished immediately to sink back into my dream as Pyro beside me shook his head grinning.

In jail. When I went to Sambo’s opening night party after Miss-High-and-Mighty stood me up again, I wanted adventure. I had certainly got it. The fracas Miss-High-and-Mighty’s white sugar daddy started because he had caught her two timing could not have lasted more than fifteen minutes. Why the hell then do the Police come on time when you least need them to?

You know the real name of persons who study in Makerere University is scholars. Scholars are learned fellows with a great amount of dignity. Well, you should have seen how much dignity we had that night, the guys squatting in the road without our shirts and shoes as Policemen liberally kicked us closer to each other until I knew what chicken feel locked up in those tiny hen coops, noses running in the cold night and not a handkerchief in sight.

Bull to dignity after Q, my Lumumba roommate, got a hot slap for trying to frighten the police guys that we were Makerere University students, that we knew our rights. Mathew, one guy having a worse day than me, burst into open sobs and though the rest of the guys tried to sneer, I admit I was a bit scared. The girls were right there bringing along the teary chorus with Mathew, which the Police guys shushed every so minutes with frightening sounds. I say sounds because I don’t understand Swahili and if ever they try to make it official East African language, I will be there in front of the protestors resisting too.

The top guy who had all the other police guys scrambling to line up at attention finally came amidst a whirl and whine of sirens. We were expecting mercy.

“Campusers?” he said, inspecting us, “We have got them! Put those ones in Siberia. They will learn their lesson.”

epitaphs

2005-04-25T11:37:00.000-07:00

Today is my birthday. I'm moved to reflect. Morbid for your pleasure:

The next time anyone asks you how you would like to be remembered, choose your words carefully. You could be making your epitaph or someone else’s. The wit who remarked at the end of one the most infirm English kings certainly didn’t know. But what he said of that king has come to stand: “He never said a foolish word nor a wise one.”

Although we all have a chance to at least say what we would like etched in stone on our tombs, not many are eager to exercise that nature enforced right.

There’s the superstition. We don’t talk of these things. To even think of one’s own death according to our African tradition is as good as to make it come true before it’s proper time. Besides, you can’t force those who will dispose of your last remains to honour the epitaph you chose for yourself. They might not agree you were a loving father, affectionate husband or patient mother.

But there’s no harm in trying. Death need not be so serious.

Don’t be like Shakespeare. After all those magnificent plays and poems of still disputed authorship, all Willie could come up with was “Good friend for Jesus’ sake forbear to dig up the dust enclosed here. Blessed be the man that spares these stones and cursed be he that moves my bones.” Politicians, as we all know, have an opinion about everything except one thing, their death. But Winston Churchill, British Prime Minister, was no ordinary politician. After a long life, talking about death he said, “I am ready to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.”

Boxer Jack Dempsey who was known to fans and trembling opponents as the Manassa Mauler did not see himself that way. He thought he was “A Gentle Man and a Gentleman.”

Inspite of Pablo Escober and other recent Mafia kingpins, the lord of them all remains Italian-American Alphonse Capone. The US federal authorities were not impressed by his suit wearing and cigar chomping image attempts to make his ‘profession’ respectable and put him behind bars for some time. His epitaph, “My Jesus Mercy,” might have got him better PR up there though.

With “Steel True, Blade Straight,” for a moment I thought Superman died too. No, inventor of another detective, Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle used that one.

That was serious. Entertainers’ epitaphs tend to be crazier. The voice of Porky Pig, Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny, Mel Blanc, after giving so much joy had only to say “That’s all folks,” and we understood.

The men she worked with considered her quite a bitchy diva in her time. But one of the first stars of Hollywood, Bette Davis was not only speaking for herself but for millions of women in her time when for an epitaph she chose, “She did it the hard way.”

W.C. Fields, another early Hollywood star, would do anything to get a laugh. Even if it were at his expense, dead. Asked what epitaph he would like, he wrote, “Here lies W.C. Fields—I would rather be living in Philadelphia.”

Truman Capote, American writer and celebrity in his own right, may or may not have read the one above. His thinking was along the same lines. “I tried to get out of it, but I couldn’t.”
But my absolute favourite is an anonymous one from a book Uh-Oh, Some Observations from Both Sides of the Refrigerator Door by Robert Fulghum. Cheers me up every time. It goes “If only I could get through this week.”

riot mode: how 2behave @ a campus party

2005-03-24T11:36:00.000-08:00

There is one good thing about parties with lots of Campusers. They are never boring. By the end of the night, if you get to the end of the night, you are sure to have a hilarious anecdote to tell in another place at a better-organised party.

The most unexpected is always happening. If you come to Campus, you are sure to meet someone who remembers the party at which Jose, the self-proclaimed best drinker swallowed a whole bottle of Jik in the belief he was gurgling down Ndume, a local brew. They will also tell you how he spent the rest of the night in the toilet with a literal running stomach. Or maybe you’ll meet a witness to the party where a certain strict, cute female lecturer performed kimansulo on the dance floor.

When Pyro came into the room at Sambo’s party with Miss High-and-Mighty as his date, I knew fireworks were on tonight. Campusers with the best rumour grapevine I have ever known circled around us urging me to some dramatic action. You could say they were whispering in my ear, “You see! Is that who you call your friend? He has stolen your girlfriend. He has stabbed you in the back. Revenge!”

I was barely holding myself together. In some far region next to me I could distantly hear Plain girl yapping on and on. I did not have to walk up to Pyro and say, “Look at me, you bastard!” the hate and venom my face must have been beaming, frightening to myself already, made Pyro look my way. I was shocked. There was real worry on his face!

I started to chuckle satisfactorily to myself. “The girl must be a real bitch if Pyro was worried. Maybe I have been saved.” I never finished that train of thought. As if this whole party was some surreal movie, Miss High-and-Mighty’s white sugar daddy walked in. Just like in the movies, people parted, making way for him as he strode toward Pyro and Miss High-and-Mighty.

His face was brick red. If I thought I was angry, he was trembling all over. A funny, squeaky, small voice came out of all his six-foot bulk. “I knew it! I knew it all along you were not being faithful and with this… this…black monkey!”

Before the wows of appreciation at this opening salvo were over, the white guy lunged for Pyro’s collar and punched him hard. I cringed at the loud thwarck as fist connected to Pyro’s face. Pyro realised he was on his own and threw in a kick at the white’s groin that sent him howling.

This is when three burly guys emerged from the crowd and we all knew the white had not come alone. Pyro was going to be trussed. Suddenly Campus solidarity went into overdrive. To the music of whizzing chairs in the air and hysterical girls scampering for cover, a free-for-all fight began! I dived in headed for Pyro.

sleeping with girls

2005-03-15T11:33:00.000-08:00

“No one knows what it feels like to feel these feelings like I do, and I blame you”

What is real life? No, it is not the Professor writing again, it is I. I’m just a little bit confused. I thought I had my whole life in sync until Campus started again. Then the gravity of what happened at the Speke Hotel sunk in. with a thud so heavy I felt like I had been slapped. I’m, We are not single anymore. And that makes a whole world of difference on campus.

A whole world of difference that I’ve begun to discover things in campus I never knew existed. My friends who are girls will not give me hugs anymore when Plain Girl is in the vicinity but as if to compensate, they involve me more in their girly conversations. I was as astonished as you will be when one of them suddenly asked me, “Which material do you think is better for panties, nylon or silk?”

There are many irrelevant organisations on Campus. So irrelevant those even rundown hostels now have student organisations dedicated to, would you believe it, remembering they were once members of that hostel. I’m now a member of an organisation I dare not tell Plain Girl I think stupid. Utterly, ridiculously stupid. Plain Girl could not wait to have (note) US inducted. I belong to a couple’s club on campus. Would that you were there to see the faces of the guys each tine they walk in for these get-togethers called bonding meetings. We look like we are being marched to the firing squad, which we are in a way.

Pyro is faring no better. Remember when we were thrown in jail and to atone Pyro had to front at one of his parents’ phone shops? Pyro believed he would never endure a greater humiliation. He just is. Chauffeuring Miss High-and Mighty’s handbag is not shameful enough. Pyro now knows all the best boutiques in town because Miss High-and-Mighty drags him through all of them at least 3 to 4 times a week. So much is he into them that he knows the names of the model mannequins in Mutaasa Kafeero building.

The Professor? The Professor says he may need new prescription lenses soon. The librarian asked me a few days back in a very concerned tone whether my friend is feeling very well. She has not seen him in the library for weeks now. The Professor goes to another kind of library now, protestingly. The video library, to borrow romantic comedy after romantic comedy that the goddess is crazy about.

I spent the night once in Africa hall in a girl’s room. That was by accident as was wearing a thong. These days, the cool Sunday morning sun finds me staring out of the window with Plain Girl’s head on my chest in Africa wondering what the hell I’m still doing here.

bar fight!

2004-11-20T10:55:00.000-08:00

There are two kinds of fights. There’s a fight you have to fight and it doesn’t matter whether you’re going to win or lose. It’s based on pure faith. Like the terrorists dodging laser guided missiles. Then there’s the fight you don’t want to fight even if it’s quite obvious you’ll easily win.

You’re not playing for anything.

Bar fights, like the one the Professor was determined to get us into, belong to the second group. Unfortunately in this case, it was quite obvious that if there was a fight, we were not only going to be beaten. We were going to be mauled, we were going to be killed and we were going to be eaten. We would be lucky if we were spat out.

I mean you don’t expect caresses from a wheelbarrow pusher who you call stupid and mean it. Which is what the professor was doing down here. I mean it’s bad all right to call someone stupid. But what’s worse is to call someone stupid and explain to them why you believe they’re stupid. And to make sense with your reasons is suicidal. Which is what the professor was doing to this assorted group of wheelbarrow pushers, butchers and lay-abouts.

“But you’re fools, you are more than fools. You’re stupid!! Yes, you’re stupid! You get your little money and you come and waste it here when you have 8 kids, a pregnant wife and you live in a kazigo? What are you thinking? Aren’t you stupid?”

I’m all for cajoling the masses into development but I did not think this was the way. Pyro did not think either this was the way. The wheelbarrow pusher, the butcher and his three layabouts in tow especially did not think this was the right way. The shack had fallen silent and guys were edging towards the one small door with their tots.

But the Professor was not letting up. “Kale, you look at you. You’re what? Manual labourers? You’re big like bouncers. Why don’t you make extra simple money by selling your sperms to banks? But I think you must be impotent!”

They were standing over us, arms like gorillas. “What did you say, you mosquitoes?”
Pyro was brilliant. “Not we, him. We don’t actually know him.” I had a sudden urge to discover where the toilets were. When I tried to sneak to find them, the butcher’s warning look made me firmly believe that I could hold it in forever.

In a flash, the Professor was dangling in the air, courtesy of the wheelbarrow pusher’s thigh-size arm, like a coat on a peg. “What do you say now?” he thundered.
The Professor replied, “If you can get it up the way you’re lifting me now, I can give you the address to the sperm bank.”

They paid for all our drinks immediately and after. When we finally managed to leave, we had firm friends.

“You were going to leave me to have my face bashed in?” the professor accused us bitterly as we stumbled through Kivulu, “Why?” It was a dangerous moment.

“I’m too pretty?” Pyro suggested.

We were cresting Makerere Hill, between two worlds, and suddenly we burst out laughing.

i dare u!

2004-11-19T11:18:00.000-08:00

We were broke. When Campusers say that, they usually mean that they don’t have money to lend out to someone who wants to borrow some. But we were broke. In various ways, the Sambo party and jail afterwards had cost me and Pyro too much.

In a stupid impulsive move to be rid of Plain Girl (yes, I’m beginning to figure out I’m quite stupid), I had insisted on paying back all the money she had used to bribe me out of jail. Sixty hot thousand! Half my campus allowance and I was not getting anymore for a month more.

Pyro was having to work in the family business. Pyro had become a hawker, a phone hooker selling units on the street. That’s how we teased him. He was not too happy that he had to front in one of the family shops that deals in phones and airtime as his punishment. As much as me, he needed a beer. In the service business you cannot maintain all week a sumbusa smile and not feel like your jaws are almost cracking unless you get them some massage.

Campusers are a gifted lot. Somehow being broke makes you walk different, changes your body odour even. Campusers can sniff poverty even before it announces its intentions. Everyone was a “Sorry, I’m doing badly also.” Every Campuser but one: the Professor.

But with the Professor nothing is ever straight as a ruler (what’s wrong with my friends?!). While we were busy slowdancing with the cops, the professor had been up reading the biography of some poet. Alexandra Pushkin, I think. From this silly book he had got the notion that ‘slumming’ was a good idea.

“Kisenyi, Kivulu for a drink? Are you mad?” Pyro exploded.

The Professor said quietly, “I have the money.” We slunk into Kisenyi uncomplaining.

Pyro did win on one wing. The bar shack we deposited ourselves in was the furthest from the roadside, in the center of Kisenyi. Less chance of being seen by any straying Campusers, Pyro reasoned.

Immediately we entered, I sensed we shouldn’t have. But the Professor acted as if he had come home. One swig of waragi and we were in trouble. The Professor had had his eye on one barmaid, all the men had. When she passed our way, the Professor leaned forward and smacked loudly her protrubent behind.

“What is that?” she snapped, spinning around, murder in her eyes. She was two times bigger than the Professor.

“I couldn’t help it,” the Professor replied grinning, imagine, “I have been seeing women who are bubawo all day and all week. I’m appreciating.”

The barmaid burst into raucous laughter, obviously taken. But one hit was not enough.

“You,”the professor said, pointing at five men in the opposite corner, “you what are you ogling at?”

“We leave him here,” I suggested as the men approached.

“I don’t think they want only him,” Pyro said.

...sweet day dreams...

2004-02-09T11:04:00.000-08:00

I have been caned, sometimes I was made to kneel in gravel (if you have ever been slashed by razor blades you know what I’m talking about), tried eating less and damn coffee does not work but I have never failed to fail to fall asleep in class in the afternoon. University now and the affliction continues!

There was incentive in primary school to stay wide-awake in class in the afternoon. In my primary school from my class window, the rest of the class and I had an uninterrupted view of a furniture workshop where the durable bamboo canes used unsparingly on us came from. Whenever a new beach chair was completed we groaned because it meant the leftover bamboo were promptly bought by our school do some work on us.

In such terror did we live of Mr. Bamboo that one pupil who often fell asleep in class was more than once heard whimpering, “Oh, Mr. Bamboo, you are so handsome, don’t put it there.” This unfortunate sequence of utterances always happening only when the bamboo wielder, the teacher himself, was waking up this particular pupil.

So desperate were the times that one afternoon we were all shocked when the pupil did not fall asleep. Only after a little while did we notice the pupil was not blinking either and that the eyes had become unnaturally red with tears. The pupil had glued the eyelids just below the eyelashes to stay awake! That pupil was me.

In University now we are all adults though we may not often behave like we are and the humiliations have only got worse. A certain aspiring politician, you know the timid loud mouthed kind, who announced within a week of our starting at this university that he would be the next guild president experienced an irrevocable plummeting of his fortunes after just one such experience. We were in a tedious afternoon lecture, I’ll spare you the course name, as I want to pass, when the droning lecturer’s voice was ruptured by enormous pooooow!

The smell that quickly permeated the room was so bad we had to evacuate. Our aspiring guild president in a snoozily delicious dream had ‘gassed.’ We now hear he has transferred to the evening class and is diligently studying to get his first class degree and get out of this university. That student is NOT I. I repeat NOT ME. When I’m bored in afternoon lectures, I play with myself. That’s afternoon lectures on campus for you!

bachelor blues theory

2004-01-09T10:48:00.000-08:00

Getting Accustomed to a Bachelor Life

Remember those ‘You can tell if’ articles that categorize human beings in types? Well, they were onto something. You actually can tell who is a ‘fresher’ in bachelorhood. They have a favourite phrase: “Come over to my place.”

At first, that phrase can be a plea because of the boredom of living alone can be unbearable especially if there is no television in the one roomed palace. It doesn’t matter a radio is in the house because most of the time there is no electricity, and not because the bills were not paid. As for batteries, what? But 500shs is a whole rolex!

But inviting friends over excitement wears off very fast. Especially when personal habits of these friends that were charming in say a boarding school environment become a nuisance. It is not so easy to laugh loudly when Jose comes over and with that prodigious appetite devours everything in sight.

It was fun to see how he wolfed down the school posho and beans and went for ‘nyongeza’ so many times that promptly that became his nickname. It definitely is not fun when he is pulling the same act on your snacks budgeted to last a week.

Neither is it fun when after a hearty meal the ‘crew’ lounges in your admittedly rickety chairs without a thought as to who is going to wash up all the plates, the cups, and the container covers that were converted into plates.

The one offer to help wash up is very half hearted. Culture demands of course that you refuse the first time so that you are asked again. And of course when you refuse the first time, no one is going to insist here!

But if only they would lounge. ‘Pato’(Patrick) will pull out that toothpick he always has handy and get to work on his teeth. In between the conversation, he will pause to examine critically a bean morsel he has extracted from somewhere between his molars and premolars and then put it back in his mouth.

Chris, who always comes late, will explain at the doorway, “Gwe, it is muddy out there,” and trample in his shoes on. But leaving his shoes on maybe a favour considering he is wearing his jungle boots. The stench from there has been known to cause mosquitoes to fall dead.

So while Chris overturns everything scavenging for food, the only compliment to your culinary skills is expressed. Jose farts-very loudly and for so long you start to consider bringing out an earthquake Richter scale. Who needs scented candles anyway?

Protests to this pollution return a reply that cannot beget another question. “What? What? It shows am healthy! Ate, you know, we are all old friends here. This shows am relaxed. I like you guys.”

The absolute low comes when you are turned out of your palace because one of your friends ‘accidentally’ told a girl he is chasing like a drooling dog in heat that he has a place of his own. “I’ll lose marks if I tell her the truth! I just need to show her the place and that’s it.”

Four hours later turning the covers of your bed to sleep, you discover he “got it on.” It's right there and then you decide that it's time to learn how to play solitaire.

solving problems a man's way

2004-01-05T10:28:00.000-08:00

Women are so lucky. They can count on it that when one of them sniffles in distress, the girlfriends will flock round. Not the case with Ugandan guys. Will the guys drop everything and rush over? Phones will be permanently engaged and unending company meetings will suddenly be held every other day for the concerned friends making it impossible for them to come and visit that day but tomorrow...

But don’t take it that guys are completely heartless, thoughtless jerks. When the distress becomes a problem and the problem becomes a crisis, they’ll rush over quick as Superman leaping tall buildings in a single bound. Assess the crisis and make a sound recommendation you’ll find at the end of this article.

You see, it is in everybody’s interest that this party spoiler returns to his usual ebullient self. That he should not start to entertain ideas of checking out of this life. When one of us is down, all of us are down. We are all members of a brotherhood of man. Besides the depressive owes all of us money. He better get better.

So we gather too and try to figure out what is bugging our good friend? We talk. Is because your birthday is coming up? Have the years rolled away so fast that now you are wondering how it is that you do not even have a cow’s shed to your name as a house? Relax, you can still bed down in Mama Nalongo’s bar shack. She pays you shs 200 a night to be a watchman, does she not? And where will we get the nyongeza if you leave?

No money, no job and no prospect of either? But what’s new? We thought you were as used to this. Why not continue with the desperate schemes you resort to get good paying work? Like acting in blues in far-flung foreign countries Ugandans have never heard of. Kyrgyzstan for one. Oh, you think your contemporaries’ a.k.a. us fellow losers, have over taken you? That we have finally achieved some sort of standing in society and you still have none. What is wrong with you?? We are all still licking at the dregs of society, we have torn socks, and our mothers wonder sometimes why they allowed us into this world. We wonder too.

Family pressures, the realisation that you are the eldest and you are not acting as one? This is all part of growing up. You are still a youthful 29. Papa and Mama’s pressuring you to become more responsible is {we know, we never thought we should say this one day} good for you. It will all make sense some day. Just give it a few more years.

Love problems? The girlfriend is tired of sharing the master bedroom with three bawling bastards whose mothers dumped them with you? And you all are still in your parents’ house. Don’t sweat. You are not YET married. The worst begins AFTER you are married.Metaphysical concerns? A date with existential crisis? General ecclesiastical hopelessness of life and all. Nah, he doesn’t even know what the words mean.

Recommendation: you need a beer, man!

testing

2004-01-01T10:09:00.000-08:00

The entries you will be reading from this blog are scoops from down under. As in I don't how the story ends because it is still taking place.I promise you a rocky ride but what's life without a little danger? Enjoy!