Christmas beckons like a ghoulish character in Harry Porter. The year is pretty much a dodo. There are many things that went wrong this year, days spent in the trenches. But there were also some very great moments, very many great moments actually. So I’m not going to whine about the bad moments, not when I’m in good health.
This is my last post this year (until 3rd of January) and to finish off this year I thought I would document moments that defined the year for me. Personal stuff. So here goes.
Joining Twitter
The only reason it took me a while to join Twitter was because people I met insisted on calling it Twirra. I find that level of phoniness overbearing especially when the person saying that went to campus in Mysore….er, Mysore is in India. I imagined that it was very yuppie (Twitter, not Mysore) that guys on it are those people who where those dreadful skinny jeans that they made those poor guys in Tusker Project Fame wear (I can’t think of a worse insult to masculinity). So for the longest time I avoided Twitter but one day I joined after I was convinced of its professional merits. I like Twitter now, at least better than Facebook. The guys I follow are witty mostly and the guys who follow me are getting a raw deal because I hardly ever update, unless I’m drunk. The thing with Twitter is that you can put my pulse on what’s going on; a trend, a conversation. This keeps you in touch with people’s lives in a weird way and before long you start feeling like you know them personally. Plus, unlike Facebook, nobody bombards you with pictures of how they went to Cape Town and spent time at the beach and how their life is much better than yours and how they have better friends than you do and how they are just happy, happy, happy!
Writing for a living
This is an old hat; but I have been self employed for a whole year now. In January this year I wondered how I would get by, I wondered if freelance writing would pay all the bills. Somehow it did. Where I come from men don’t eat from plates. They eat from their egos. And where I come from a man’s ego is borne from being able to care of his shit. And to do it without whining or expecting a medal.
This year has been generally kind for me in terms of making my hay from writing. It’s kept me afloat but it’s also taught me many things that I wouldn’t have learnt if I had an 8-5. It’s taught me to prudence. It’s taught me to negotiate. To be aggressive. Taught me deadline discipline. Taught me to call someone up and say, “I swear if I don’t get that check when I show up, there gonna be blood on the floor and I can assure you it’s not going to be mine.” In my world there is no end month, there is no “pay day.” Sometimes I miss having an end month because indeed some months are tough months but those are the best months because in those months I learn something new about myself. But there is a lesson here; that there is no deep hole you can never climb out of. Unless of course you love the hole.
Hitting a man
Thursday. 7.46am. I’m rushing for a meeting at Nation center. It’s a crisp morning. I want to park at my brother’s office along Harambee Avenue. I’ve just made the turn into Harambee Avenue from Parliament road. I don’t see him. I swear I don’t. It happens in a flash. I hear a sickening cracking sound as the side mirror hits him and he doubles and his head crashes into my windbreakers. Fiberglass meets flesh; sickening. I stomp on the breaks and in the rear view mirror I see him, stooped over holding his knees with both hands. I step out of the car and trot towards him.
He is in an expensive navy blue pine-striped suit. A blue shirt. He’s still clutching onto his beige laptop bag; a Mac. His Blackberry lies shattered a few feet from him. He’s bleeding from the face, bleeding profusely. I feel people gathering, enveloping us. Just when I get to him he keels backward and plops on his ass. He sits there, legs splayed out before him, head bowed as if in prayer and he bleeds, oh boy does he bleed! His fancy blue shirt is now brownish, soaked in blood. A woman screams, a chocked but still horrifying scream. I didn’t wake up hoping I would kill anyone.
I gather bits of his Blackberry and stuff ‘em in my pockets. I grab his Mac and hoist him up to his feet. Someone – an oaf – asks, “Unampeleka wapi?” I want to tell him, “For pizza,” but I would be wasting my sarcasm.
I’m driving him to a hospital in Nairobi West. I give him a small towel to press against the wound and the towel becomes soggy immediately. He opens the car window and spits blood out and it trickles against the side of my door.
Fifteen stitches. A CT scan. Repeat visits. Drugs for a month. That’s what it took to patch him up.
His name was Njogu. He was a lawyer. I almost robbed three kids their father, one who was only 5months old at that time. I almost made some woman a young widow. I almost took away a business partner from two guys.
Njogu didn’t sue. Njogu didn’t show any sort of aggression towards me. Not in the car as I rushed him to the hospital and not when he had a huge bandage over his head that made him look like a mkorino. His partners, fellows who were obviously more learned than I am, never scolded me or made me think they would have me for lunch for knocking down their mate.
Common decency is a greatly humbling thing. Those folk were polished. Even when the cops at Central station wanted to sweat me, wanted to bleed me for every penny I had, Njogu discreetly mentioned his profession and they backed off. Then he wrote a statement absolving me from the accident. Then he signed it. And later while we stood outside the cop station, under the noon glare of the sun, I apologized to him for the umpteenth time and he smiled and asked me to forget it. He said it could happen to anyone and that he was on the wrong. He wasn’t. I don’t think he was. We exchanged numbers.
Class is not what you wear, or where you drink, where you live. Class is what Njogu embodied. Class and common decency, traits you don’t meet often in this town. If a there is a drop of greatness in every man then there must be a whole jug of greatness in Njogu.
Man Talk
Any writer who doesn’t think Oyunga Pala is a literary icon of our time is either a liar or is not a writer. He informed my writing and I – like the whole world – read him religiously in Man Talk. Then in 2007 I wrote for a magazine which he edited for a whole year plus. It was an honor having him edit my copy. He didn’t have ego issues. He didn’t turn my copy into an egoistic platform where he would want to stroke his greatness. And he was respectful. And generous. We got along like a house on fire. And he still remains my Go-To guy when I’m having writing issues because he has over 11years of experience on me. I can tell you that counts for something.
Then an opportunity came to fill his huge boots when he decided to let go of his column. Of course I questioned myself. Of course I wasn’t sure I wanted to write under his long shadow. But I needed the money, plus I’m a hungry guy. While getting smashed at his house one day before I started writing the column he told me, “There are people who will hate you just because you aren’t me. Then there are people who will love you for being yourself. It doesn’t matter what you can do if you worry about what people will think of you.” I hate people who make sense when guys are drinking.
But taking up this column that he had written for 10years was the most difficult thing for me this year because it meant trying to find my own voice. It meant trying not to be Oyunga. It also meant fielding foolish emails (at the beginning) from his dyed-in-the-wool fans that would email me and say “Oyunga wouldn’t have written that topic like that.” or “You don’t even have a motorbike.” Ok, I’ve made up that one.
But taking up that column meant playing to a bigger stage, a more unforgiving stage and that means it meant manning the hell up. It meant growing up. From this experience I learnt one thing: If it seems difficult, do it anyway. You’ll be fine.
Being hospitalized
While a guest of the hospital a few weeks ago I slept with a drip stuck in my hand every night. Sleeping with a drip stuck in your hand is not easy. At 1am the nurse would wake me up to give me more medication. Going back to sleep would take another hour, and in that hour when the hospital ward was quiet save for an occasional cough, a subdued moan and the occasional car passing out at the deserted road, I thought about my life. I also thought about the pointless hedonism that had brought me there, the senseless pursuit of happiness. And I thought about my mortality. But most importantly I had time to listen to my body. And when I walked out of that ward three days later I had learnt one thing; that we abuse our bodies, that we don’t appreciate our bodies, that we take good health for granted and that tequila is not my friend.
One day our bodies will stop working because we fed it junk and booze and we didn’t give it enough rest. That day will come, you can be sure of that.
Juliana Kanyamozi.
There is a vital lesson here for every man; never form an opinion about a woman until she stands up. That’s all I will say about this.
Starting a blog.
I could say how I wake up early on Monday mornings to bang up a 2,000 worder for this blog. Or how Sundays nights I hunch over my laptop pecking a story. I could wax how this blog has grown in many incredible and unimaginable ways. I could even say that this blog stays up because it’s the hinge onto which my literary creativity swings on.
I could say all that gibberish but perhaps the real truth is that this blog is what it is because of you. It’s because of you that I write here because there is great – and horrifying – lonesomeness in writing for nobody. This blog comes up every Monday because I know someone will read it and feel something, anything. And if you want to know that matters to me more than it does you. And so you being here most Mondays to read this blog when you could be doing a thousand other important things is a great privilege. Thank you.
Merry Christmas and happy holidays.