Darkness na mimi

Manze tangu I blogged let there be light, kumekuwa na darkness ingine ya kimataifa at my diggz. Am amazed vile nimesurvive mpaka nao. Candles zimekuwa piled up like I was expecting a tsunami and the only entertainment left is my neighbor’s battery-operated Sony (or is it SQNY) radio that croaks strange dombolo music in the late hours of the night when all my mind is thinking of is sweet sleep. Yes, i have a clean mind.

As if that isn’t enuff torture already, imagine coming home to a foodless and freaky cold joint. They need a Mc Donald's near my place, they'll harvest millions! Trying to cook in my house has been a tremendous challenge for me. I should put it in my cv as one of those insurmountable things. Any roaches up in here would have long migrated to the Dirty South even with the enticing promise of perpetual darkness. So anyway, my candles provide husky lighting and warmth before I can generate enuff of my own to last me a night between the sheets. And this june-july weather doesn't make it any easier.

Most of these times before sleep beckons, I sit in the dark, stare at the white screen in front of me flickering “toshiba warning - you should change your battery soon” before realizing its bedtime. Bedtime nowadays comes pretty early. Bedtime is when the laptop decides it has had enuff action for one night and goes off, most times unceremoniously leaving me to redo work I’d halfway finished - and illustrator/photoshop rework is nuts! So I too follow suit, unceremoniously going to sleep.

Then there’s the phone. Two short messages and its off. Nowadays am bila late-night phone sex (yes i wrote it!), bila the naughty messages streaming in, bila virtual goodnight kisses. If you thought the bilaz train was bad, try riding it without a phone! Then the morning comes and Mr. Ironbox gets tortured on the gas cooker. Yes, its called surviving in darkness. LG, life's good doesn't apply to this ironbox!

Anywhoooooooo, am glad to report that I think I’ve overcome my ambitions to really hurt the caretaker. I gathered am better off adapting to the situation. Still, I can’t dismiss that I’ll gladly and swiftly rush to the site if I heard he was getting a thrashing. Mind you, I’d do it even if it was just a rumor. That should brighten up my days kidogo!

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On other news, I rediscovered just how briliant Ice Cube was and still is - i got Westside Connections two albums, Bow Down and Terrorist Threats. Manze, trax are tite, been banging my head track after track. Talk about pure vinyl genius.

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I missed this past sato's Wapi, was head over with work and the slight monotony of the event didn't help - i sent a spy though, and am glad to say it turned out mzuri! Once i compress some of the images, i may upload them lakini i think kuna maboyz flani wataziupload before me, so check out kbw for that.

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Nairobi right now is cold! Freaking cold. Winterlike. Am having Java coffee, in a fortified sweater but my joints still freezing. Nani, i think times like this is when you realise being single is domeez!

Verbal Cookie Crumbs

Hypothesis: I get a call from a chic I don’t know
Listening to: Shy Guy // Diana King
At: 2141hrs
With: Coffee, no cookies

The other day someone I was with got a call from a stranger. Happens every other day. What was strange (at least to me) about this situation is the fact that she continued talking to the stranger for another 10 or so minutes.

Now as a jamaa, it resonated with a funny side of me. I was transported to the other side of the line and started thinking how I would be laying out my words if I was being given verbal clues like they were being handed out by Santa himself.

At the end of the other line was a man who didn’t know this chic. But being exactly that – a strange man, he had all the ingredients of making a plot from nothing. Through her nearly naïve responses, he concocted a thread of stories to keep the conversation going – this being a man’s way of creating an opportunity from an almost insignificant and minute window.

I was dumbfounded coz she was still talking to him even after telling him that she doesn’t know him, she ain’t Grace, not Catherine nor the other two names he called her, that she doesn’t know a guy called Charles (which was supposedly his name) nor Jackson (he’s name after Charles was rejected). She was still inquiring him about who he is and I was thinking, wow, what opportunity! This here came with a silver platter and a serving spoon!

You better believe it, if any man was given a map laid out like that, he’d generate vibe like a fish laying eggs.

Like a party ribbon spray pressed hard.

Like a fluffy feather pillow burst open.

Only a percentage few of us would pass up that door. By few I mean those numbers that don’t appear in a normal census, those numbers rounded off to the nearest ten. Suffice to say, here was a chic on the other end, forget she’s a stranger, forget she just told you she doesn’t know anyone with all the 6 or 7 names you just came up with, forget all that. A dude will only cling to the fact that you were still on the line, talking. That’s a big fact – you can also forget what you were talking about, just keep moving your lips and the sliver of hope won’t fade from him.

If you still doubt the way a man’s hunting instinct switches on at the slim touch of trigger then consider those and the following facts. The guy on the other side knows well the chic is a stranger. That somehow isn’t a big deal anymore. He knows she just dumped his first few maneuvers at conversation, still it don’t matter. All that matters right then is she was still on the line. He whiffs at this slim opening from a voice miles away. For the man, this is an expression of interest.

An expression of interest ranges from her replying the “hi” to that near-smile she plays on her face as she looks your way. A second glance is a confirmation of interest. A stranger’s voice that keeps the faintest interested talk is a go-go!

Back to our little situation :– she keeps his hope alive coz she’s still asking him irrelevant questions – at least to him – instead of doing a simple “wrong number” drill and the story comes to closure. Instead it lasts for another 5 more minutes and ends in an agreement to continue the conversation - more like the questioning, later.

That overflows my dumbfounded-ness, I mean why couldn’t she just as well give him her real name, house, bank account numbers and a date with promise of marriage?

FYI - It's called Plagiarism!

Plagiarism (from Latin plagiare "to kidnap") is the practice of claiming, or implying, original authorship or incorporating material from someone else's written or creative work, in whole or in part, into ones own without adequate acknowledgment.

Sometimes i ain't in the mood to follow up triavilities. Most times am not in the mood for creating beef where one doesn't exist. So the other day am skimming thru the KBW feed and come across a blog i wanted to read, click on it and when it opens, behold! There sitting pretty on the sidebar, one of my artworks. For a moment am kinda jazzed that the owner of this site thought it worthwhile to put that pic there - but am also slightly disturbed by the fact that they didn't acknowledge the source.

i write to him/her suggesting its good practise to do that. i write in the most understanding way possible (no lawsuit talk yet). i write coz as much as i'd like the acknowledgement for my work, i also like the appreciation of it. i tell him/her that the artwork can stay on, i've no beef with that, all they need to do is, yes.... you guessed right. Simple pointer.

then i get a comment in both my site and theirs. they're going to remove it, they are so very sorry, but comments like ".....LOOOOL am really sorry .... apparently am an online thief.... So today i'm using my blog as a tool to help promote marazzmatazz and ..." come across as unrealistically unapologetic as you can get.

i laugh too (tena loudly) ..... me? Need promoting? Where the hell did you get that idea from?

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image courtesy of http://www.oldwestbrew.com/thief.gif

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stuck

stuck
in the middle of the days woes
not knowing if its forward or backward
i go
stuck
in the little meaningless exercises
of wanting to please someone
without
the thought of what it is i do
stuck
in the thoughts of what it is i do
without
understanding why i do them
stuck
in this cold
this heat
this moist dampened world
feeling like i need release
i need fresh star-kissed air

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Marital Violence

Whilst I was talking about the almost unrealistic nature of the marital violence case that was brought before a Kenyan court just a few days past, I did not mean it to come across as being insensitive to the poor woman - or to the fact that marital violence is real and out there, shuttering and sometimes claiming the lives of many a woman.

Within those thoughts, I was trying to comprehend what made that woman stay that long (24years) in an abusive environment, beget not one, not two, but three children with this foul man and still go as far as claiming that she had NEVER had consensual sex with him.

I needed to understand the meaning of "consensual" in this context. I needed to understand the meaning of "rape" as she views it and not as the women NGOs see it. I needed to understand the intricacies surrounding her life with this man, in this "marriage" if this is what we could call it anymore. I needed to understand where we demarcate "institutional rape" and "comical exploitation of the law" within a case such as this. Above all, I still need to understand all these things.

As much as this one case sheds some light on the plight of many women (and men) in abusive relationships, I reckon understanding such cases' matrices, metamorphosis and implications is what will in the long run change people's attitude towards marital violence and violence in general. Nothing changes if nothing changes.

Your thoughts please.

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image courtesy of : http://survivorsbychoice.bravehost.com/purpleribbonani.gif

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Sex Sales

I’ve been toiling with the idea, the notion even the reality that sex sells. As to the idea itself, lets leave that for another forum, but as it were, I’ve concluded it’s true. An argument I heard sometime back that everything we seem to do revolves around sex sounded downright Freudian at that moment, but letting it vibrate in my mind for a little longer and it started making more sense. Of course that’s not to say we do it consciously, but we do it a lot!

Kiss FM’s new “ad” on Virgin Atlantic puts that perspective bluntly - “losing your virginity starts with a kiss”. I’d thoroughly argue against that – najua at least 4 other ways you could lose it without the kissing stage, but still, that simple one liner has created a lot of buzz in Nbo. If it was your kawaida airline advert, no one would have noticed. Insert (pun) some kidogo mojo spice huku it becomes almost award-winning.

The goodness of falling back into this kinda strategy for advertising is that you don’t need any market research blah, blah, blah yakedee shmakedee. Everyone relates to sex, and most of this everyone crowd love it. It’s like throwing a stone in Limuru and expecting it not to hit a kiuk. It’s why car dealerships use bare-chested models to sell when there’s no correlation whatsoever with that car and those juggz.

Which brings me back to this idea stroking my thoughts. It’s abit too early to unleash it but the foreplay in my mind is slowly building up…..

On other related views, this mama a few days ago sues her husband of 24 years and asks the court for a restraining order on him not to have sex with her. And not to come within 100 metres of her too. She says in the entire period they’ve been together (yes, you read right, 24 years), she has NEVER had consensual sex with him….. the jama just does his thing and maisha inaendelea. Dude, it took her 24 damn years to register what she calls “rape”? And yet they have 3 children? Would this be classified as institutional rape or a comical exploitation of the law? Granted, maybe for the longest while she couldn’t come out of it, lakini kuna vitu vingi in this case that don’t add up which makes me curious to see what turn it will take.