The fight was imminent. It was like a boiling storm on the horizon. The signs had been there for months; the snide remarks, the eye-rolls, the passive aggression, small stand-offs here and there dispelled before it got wild. Yesterday it came to a boil after Chebukati spoke and the new president elect spoke and Rufftone, who didn’t look like Rufftone anymore, sung that song in that voice and the wounded went to a corner and started licking their wounds and the winners danced around fires.
Guy A said something about theft and principles. Guy B said something about demagoguery and foolishness. Then suddenly they were not going around in circles as they have the past few months, suddenly they were addressing each other, locking horns. They were directly responding to each other’s messages. The language got stronger, which Englishmen call, ‘tasteless’ which is weird because a strong language can’t also be tasteless. For instance if you tell someone, “your face reminds me of my toilet seat after a blind man has peed in it.” That’s a strong abuse but you can’t call it tasteless, can you? Because it comes with a strong bad taste. Anyway, now they were going at each other, going for the jugular.
This Whatsapp Group is for a small group of ‘like-minded’ [ha!] people who were supposed to achieve a certain, uhm, objective. It’s a group of creatives and thinkers but we have never created anything new in two years and there is hardly ever any solid thinking going on either. And because it’s 70% male, there are often a lot of penis contests happening there. Just chaps putting their penises on the table and saying, “there, I dare you to match this one.” A lot of pseudo intellectualism there, a lot of braggadocio and false bravado and so much fire without the heat. It honestly serves nothing and I have stayed in there because quite honestly it’s most often quite funny, a comic relief and once in a while you can feel the pulse of whatever industry through some commentaries. One time I “lefted” it at 1am but someone put me back in the morning and when the aristocrats woke up someone, a half drunk chap, wrote, “Cowardice rightly understood begins with selfishness and ends with shame.” He might have not been referring to me. I didn’t catch. I chose light and love.
Anyway, these two cats were fighting about politics because they voted differently as they should. When it had started building bile some member stepped in and said, “OK, fellas, it’s never that serious. Nobody fights over politicians.” But he was violently shoved aside and he tumbled into a festering sewer. There is that saying about mud and two pigs fighting etc., I forget it. So we watched as it escalated and escalated and soon it got tribal and then it got personal. Then it got very personal. These are people’s fathers by the way.
There are two types of people on WhatsApp. There are those who type one line and send. Staccato writers. Then there are those who can type for two days and then send a whole 3,800 word paragraph. Those are the annoying types because we have to bloody wait for your response as you type a tome. Guy A was the latter, Guy B the former. Which meant that the fight wasn’t flowing as it should have been, it had interludes. One person was slowing it down.
It went on and on and on and it got nastier and nastier until I finally went to bed. In the morning I reached for my phone to see how it ended and I found tables and chairs strewn all over, windows smashed, blood spilled on the floor. There were close to 500 unread messages and only half the people in the room. And there was silence. Someone’s hat lay forlorn in the middle of the room. I said, “whose hat is this and where is everybody?” Nobody answered. The two chaps who were fighting had been kicked out of the group at 1am. Some people had left the Group. It was a carnage. A purge. I quickly browsed through the unread messages. It’s amazing how emotions had run high, some friendships or whatever the relationship people have on WhatsApp, had been shredded and ruined. It was pitiful and sad and unnecessary and poor. All because of politics. It was the middle-class version of the protests in Baba Dogo last night. I took the opportunity to leave the group.
But it’s also a beautiful day. It’s 16 degrees outside – just cold enough not to kill us, cold enough to numb the pain of elections for those whose candidates lost and have a whisky for those celebrating. Maybe the sun will come out, maybe it won’t. My lemongrass is dead. The second one that is dying on me. It’s no big deal, I’m used to heartbreaks but I choose a glass full approach. I have other plants that are not dead yet so I prefer to pour all the love in them. There is a saying about letting sleeping dogs lie, only mine is ‘let dying plants die.’ I also bought a garden stool at the traffic lights at Riverside Drive. This fellow was flogging these garden stools that you can fold and put in a purse. I thought it was pretty cool and creative, plus they were only a thousand bob. When I got home I realised that its legs were uneven. I laughed bitterly and thought, sure, cheap is indeed expensive but then I chose to look at the positive, which I didn’t find. So I said, oh well, I know people who limp. And some of them are not bad people. I chose to see my stool as someone with one shorter leg, and people with one short leg also deserve love.
We shall resume normal programming on Tuesday when things really get back to normal.
In the meantime, remember that your ears never stop growing. These are just fun facts that nobody wants to talk about.
Stay safe, Gang.