The life of an individual person is multi-faceted. I am writing this perched on the arm rest of a couch. There is a song playing on JCTV talking about life being a second and you wanna try it before that second rolls. Next is an interview of a group of Christian men who are into stunt acts; extreme skiing and biking. Next is me singing although not on screen.

We are all leading a certain kind of life that is a routine. Years ago we expected to be along that line of life, we have now been there for some years and we know we will be in the near future. We work, we save. We study, we move jobs. Some are happy, some could be. We necessarily don’t hate what we are doing right now. I love what I do and want to do it for the longterm. As Pete Wells, a writer says, you make it through another day in which you manage to close another deal. You stare at the bumper stickers in the highway. At last you are home. What next? A jog? A dinner of Chinese tea and rocket leaves?

I’m curious. I’m curious of those things I feel capable of but cannot do because of time. The alternatives. Taking yourself out of circulation for some months and having your way or the way of your feelings and abilities. The appreciation of what I would call God’s manifestations of his creativity in our being. His manifold abilities bestowed upon man and woman.

I believe we can much more that we confine ourselves to either by fear, contentment or conformity. I have asked myself what it would be like to stop working for 1 year and travel the world. How fulfilling it would be to sing and preach in the Paris speed train, TGV, for 3 months. Whether it will be a challenge to live with the Touaregs in Niger and learn their language. When it is that I will enter the Dakar rally with an extra fuel cylinder KTM and wheel after wheel eat the Atacama desert or Peru wilderness. The more I think of it the more I feel it should happen. Our minds live the experiences exposed to them. The wide the exposure the more the ideas, but only for those who set out to explore with purpose.

This is an alternative life I would like to live but for a while. I always wished to climb mountains. Those I have, a indication the rest will be. Well, I won’t sing in the train station though. The way to do is to dare. It is absolutely hard to put aside a safe life that you are used to and wade into the dark. I know to well because last year in September I was to stop working and live another life for 1 year. Is it about having enough money to live off? Positive and negative. Yes because who is going to feed you anyway? Most importantly not because letting go is not for the conformist but for the daring and boldly so. The way comes if the will abounds.

I however did not take a break but that I write of it is a sign I will in the future. What is the drive? Curiosity and adventure. How do the other countries taste? How does singing full time feel like? For the weird people, how does sleeping full time feel like? I however will be careful not to do like a man I know.

Dugan [we'll call him so], worked for an advertising company for some years. He was then retrenched but with a pay off package. 130,000 usd. He paid all his debts and went to Indonesia, Thailand and Australia. He did all he saw Clint Eastwood doing in the movies, lived for the day, lived his fantasies and came back to New York broke. That is not wise.

I hope to live my alternative lives one after another by God. To keep my head and faith, the pillars of my exploration will be a journey to discover more of the Almighty, to make each day count and to eat well.

I had a happy childhood, quite in contrast with that of my friend Francky of Angelas Ashes, in his hometown, Limerick, in the Republic of Ireland. Ours was not in affluence but in satisfaction, just like that of Dr Primrose of the Vicar of Wakefield. We had most of what little children crave for, in terms of sweet things and playthings. We were happy and by God, healthy.

My friends were many and we met to play every morning at the field or around the stream of houses, during holidays and weekends. Our parents were friends. Christine was there, as was his brother Douglas, Eunice, Heze, Timothy, Rieu and even Joyce, the girl I gave preferential treatment. I loved Joyce so much that I one day gave her a tomato from among about 5 that my mother has sent me to buy. I can’t remember what I told mama but little Joyce had been taken care of.

Christine, as I now know was a hyper active child. We called her The Arrow for her dashes on the corridors. You could hear her small heels pounding the floor as she run all over the compound. The gang of Heze, Douglas, my little brother and I had the fun and adventure that any boy today would give a limb to have. We stole fruits. We smoked dead ciggie butts. We boiled and ate uncooked rice. With our slings we shot and ate doves. It was great. Douglas will later die at 17. We never imagined we could die young.

Last Christmas eve as we sat late in the night stories of childhood came up. They always do when the family is together. We reminisce. We remember. We ponder. We thank God. It’s an invaluable moment. On this night the topic was radios. You know how stories spin like yarn from one to another all related by a word here and there. My father was now telling of how he got the family its first radio.

The family of Christine and Douglas was doing a little better than the rest of the families. They had a big radio before others could. I loved radio a lot as news was very captivating to me. I was always second after father was done with the newspapers. As he arrived from work one evening, he saw me with the ear dead stuck to the wall of Christine’s house. We lived in town houses, lined up one next to the other. I was too attentive to see him. Father says he watched me for about 5 minutes but I was so sold to the radio to notice. That is what touched him. He says he felt it so sharply and decided it was time the family got a radio to listen to whenever they wanted. He told mama of the incident and it was agreed that the family was going to own a radio.

The next day he visited the ART shop and made his selection; A Sanyo 2 speaker cassette player of a mighty thing in those days. It was expensive he says and had to take it on installments. I do remember when he brought the black shiny Sanyo and showed us how to operate it. I could now listen to BBC at 6:30pm, my mama could play her favorite gospel cassettes and they could together listen to Jangala, late in the night, a program on TBC – Tanzania Broadcasting Corporation.

I have the Sanyo in my collection of things with memories to them, one more reason why a father would get another score on his card of good deeds.

…and we indeed are still grateful.

I have friends who do and who don’t attend Church regularly. This month of September I set out to drag, cajole and if need be whip those who last went to Church months ago. So far so good. Two of them have accompanied me and we have sat where I do – middle pew. We have listened, we have had holy communion.

Apostle Paul in the Bible – this man was a philosopher of high schooling and practice. If you read his letters, you get the finesse of a man who has made language his slave and who is totally sold out to his faith. He speaks and defends it without leaving any grey areas and if he doesn’t convince you, he awes you – writing to the people of Corinth, asks them to eat before coming for holy communion. His advice must have become after an foul incident of faithful grumbling that the bread was not well buttered or was small. Like Steve Harvey says, Sit down you. This ain’t no meal. It’s a holy ritual!

On Sunday the service was with a bloke whom we grew up together, did the same bad and good things and even went to same schools. He might have been worse because he sold his clothes on the snooker table to keep on playing. He knows my kitchen better, I know his better. A good fella.

If you have read Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, an ‘award-winning, tragicomic memoir of the misery and squalor of his childhood,’ then you know how religious growing up in 1930s Ireland was. School children swallow strips of newspaper to symbolize holy communion and the teacher orders then not to speak because can’t they see that God is on their tongues! It’s the book to read and the film to watch. Franky observed his father pray but could not quite get the ending of his benedictions. And so when he prays for the first time after his little sister dies and is ‘put in a box for the hole in the ground’ Franky finishes his prayer with the words; ‘In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy toast.’ He later becomes his family’s shoulder, taking over from his drunkard of a father.

Not all people attend church for various reasons but if you have and stopped, there is a good feeling to it when you once again show up. It’s better than remote churching or mouse click fellowships. After the service my boy says he feels good for attending. That was cool and I hope he picks up the noble habit again. Try it this Sunday, if you may.

Photo credit: cartoonstock.com

Hold on right there, baby! There is absolutely nothing wrong with the bloke. He is just alone. I have written about loners a while back here and will again today. I strongly believe that great creativity is to be found in 2 ways of living; 1. Being a loner and 2. Not wearing clothes.

Clothes are a form of distraction and inhibition to great exploitation of the full capabilities of the human body and mind. Originally meant to cover the human body from extreme weather conditions, I believe, the cleverest among those first humans, and the most given to being merchants, added new elements to basic garments, e.g. shiny objects. The disposition of a man or woman is such that we want to be different and better than others.

It was only natural, then, that garments with new elements would be admired by those who did not have such, and that among those have-nots, would be some willing to acquire the different garments. This had to be at a legal cost, a need which created commerce and with commerce comes competition. Fashion is then born, clothes are emphasized as a mark of rank, careers, class, wealth etc. and many forefathers later, here I’m blogging in a laFuma jacket, a pair of Diesel jeans and unequally low price pair of socks [50 usd cents, to be precise]. This post thus becomes quite removed from what best I believe I would produce if my state of mind was not corrupted by the covers I now find thrust upon me.

Alright, I will expound on this in another post…and I’m all cool in the head. It’s just convictions. I set out to write about loners and share a few lines I found on the web as I munched waffles.

Loners, if you catch them, are well worth the trouble. Not dulled by excess human contact, nor blasé or focused on your crotch while jabbering about themselves, loners are curious, vigilant, full of surprises. They do not cling. Separate wherever they go, awake or asleep, they shimmer with the iridescence of hidden things seldom seen. ––Anneli Rufus, Party of One: The Loners’ Manifesto

Anneli may have taken it far into exaggerated glorification but solitude is a most welcome gem. Loners have always found themselves behind the shield as nonloners beat it with shouts of lonely! Crazy! Proud! Depressed! Timid! Shy! Selfish! Incapable of love! Serial Killer! Vampire!

They have thus set out to make it known that it’s only a way of life which they hold dear. They find life’s best moments, not in the banter of the crowd but in the quietness of themselves even in the midst of the crowd. They smell the wind and take time to listen and separate that smell into shades of what it actually is. That is, they go beyond the shallow because their thought processes have time to roam without being caused to process the next person’s verbal opinions. They have a sense of humour and for the record, nothing of elementary kind.

You think that I am impoverishing myself withdrawing from men, but in my solitude I have woven for myself a silken web or chrysalis, and, nymph-like, shall ere long burst forth a more perfect creature… –Henry David Thoreau, journal, February 8, 1857

The word alone should not ring cold and hollow, but hot. Pulsing with potentiality. Alone as in distinct. Alone as in, Alone in his field. As in, Stand alone. This word wants rescuing, this word wants pride. This word wants to be washed and shined. – ditto

Thinking of God, He will make much more sense to you when you contemplate Him alone in your mind. His reality becomes clearer when you very quietly listen to God. It’s a way He recommends since He is not an attainable subject for the intellect. This however doesn’t mean His true manifestations is only to loners or in solitude, only that in silence, He is loud.

True, a person ought to set time to interact with others as there is much to observe and learn from other people, through eyes or ears. That person will however raise a finger and ask you to stop it right there, when he/she feels that the time to be in ‘open’ fields is up.

Photo credit: cartoonstock.com

Marc is a colleague at work. He smokes and smokes a lot. He tells me he is 2 packets a day serious into smoking, on any worry-free day. Well, call it 20 ciggies because the bowl he uses as ash tray is full of half burnt sticks. When I was little and active we would pick those half smoked sticks and light them up. Puffing on an ‘adult’ cigarette was an elevation from our usual thin newspaper rolls. It could either be newspaper or brown sugar wrappers sometimes stuffed with tea leaves. Yea, your normal chai leaves. We were blessed boys.

Smokers then, went all the way to the brown ciggie butt. Times were hard or they were better money managers. Inside the stud, as you know, is cotton for filtering. We went further and burnt the whole butt till our tiny fingers could hold no more. If there are boys who never smoked, I would like to meet them.

In the office, there is something called a Japanese meeting. I invented it – started is more precise. A Japs meeting is a short one of about 10 minutes, conducted while standing. Last week Marc called me for one of those and he also asked Mads to join. Mads is the marketing chief. Marc outlines his agenda quickly and goes straight into it. Then I hear a familiar noise from Marc. Once. It’s long since I heard such but I know that sound.

My mind tells me this is a free world and birds could be chirping. Mads recognizes it fast and says, ‘We’re getting bombed.’ Marc rips the second one, this time luxuriantly because he twitches. It’s like squealing or shrieking. A bum screech. I get what’s going on and it’s annoying. You can see Marc is ashamed and he starts blaming Mads for a pizza they had the previous night. He accuses Mads of ordering a capricciosa pizza with too much pepper than what he normally handles. It doesn’t matter what they ate but you just don’t do that especially on a sunny day, I think. Mads is uneasy as well since Marc is senior to me. I am in a meeting with a senior colleague who appreciates liberty in a very windy way.

I later have time to think about the incident and the limits of self-expression. At times our bodies overcome our manners. The pressure within is so strong it comes pushing the walls and things fall apart. Especially when our orifices cannot hold anymore, we are bound to lose face when it happens in public. Should we call you bad mannered or unfortunate? If you know pizza capriciossa loudly rips the cork off your gas cylinders, why order one on a Sunday evening? You know you don’t have, attached, like a Yamaha bike, a chrome exhaust pipe muzzler, don’t you dude? Unless your mind works as fast as Marc’s to know you can blame it all on pepper, how can we avoid calling you arrogant? One act could be forgiven, but two?

In my opinion however, it’s all OK. If you cannot control some body matters, well and good. Declarations of health have always had a priority, no matter the surrounding, the clout of the performer and or that of his/her unfortunate audience. Maybe Doctor Miriam can give a medically informed verdict of flatus but you’re good, Marc.

That said, choose your pizza carefully, people. The Japanese meeting ended in its time, though.

Photo credit: cartoonstock.com

Last weekend, almost halfway into the ceremony, I discovered that I was glorying in the wrong wedding reception, several other peoples’ chicken drumsticks already in my stomach. Spectacles are expected to follow a stomach that rarely sees chicken tumbling down the way of the throat. I will post this in detail next after writing about tips.

Giving tips in restaurants and hangout dens in Kenya is not common. Kenyans don’t expect to give tips; well some of them. Why give a tip when she or he will be paid anyway? It’s their job the waiters are into. Looking at their eyes when the bill hits the table, log or floor depending on location, you can tell the waiters don’t as well expect to receive any from their fellow country men and women. It’s a pleasant surprise if they do.

What is a tip? It is not short for phrases such as “To Insure Prompt Service”, “To Insure Proper Service”, “To Improve Performance”, “To Inspire Promptness” or “To Insure Promptness.” A tip, I’d say is in most cases a monetary appreciation of decent service. It is also very cultural with its form varying from places to places. It’s optional or should be optional. ‘Should’ because in some cultures a service charge is made part of the bill and that’s it. Service charge!

In China, Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea tipping is not the norm. In France and Finland, it’s also not expected. Kenya? Well, I wouldn’t say it’s not expected but it definitely is not mandatory.

The reason many don’t tip in Kenya could be out of taking tipping to be a foreign practice. I mean true tipping, not leaving small change behind. An act of riding on other peoples’ way of life to show a class you really don’t care about. An act of television. An unwise budgetary move because those tips you give eat away on your chances of having another meal or drink in this restaurant. Really? Whatever the reason is it’s not a common practice.

If the above is true in Kenya, then we have support in some economists like Ian Ayres, Fredrick E. Vars & Nasser Zakariya who have suggested that tipping is economically inefficient.

I do give tips but only on condition that there is a reason to appreciate. If the service was below anticipation, my coins are mine to the last. Well, still others tip or choose not to on account of faces. I must emphasis that tipping is at basic, an act of kindness. If you don’t tip, it could be you are chiche or maybe you express your kindness elsewhere in greater ways, even. If you do, you’re counted kind – even kind to a pretty face.

Service charge is what I don’t like at all. It’s imposed. Just say it’s 1000 US dollars for a cup of tea and that’s it. The bill will read better and clearer than $950 for tea and $50 for service charge.

However if you can, I find it a decent conventional and elective habit, to tip where due. Tip me for writing this.

It’s a quiet night. Well, not eerily quiet. Just harmlessly quiet. I love the night. That’s when my productivity is prime. I work best then. Two PDF documents reviewed and sealed, it’s time for supper and the hot mug of chocolate that takes away your coat and leaves a smoking hot body behind.

I then open a book and cough. That happens always with Astronomy and The Bible by Lucas Reed. My copy is so old the front pages are caked. I have to lift to turn them since flapping would leave me with pieces of a page. The book is golden.

Astronomy, the study of nature, the starry universe and the movement of all the stellar worlds, is very interesting because of the amazing facts it tells. Lucas, like many other Christians astronomers, looks at the wonders of the universe through the Bible. He follows some of the most common verses and interprets them in a way that leaves one in awe of God’s command of his handiwork.

I love philosophy, astronomy and all those other disciplines that stimulate the mind into critical thinking and search for knowledge. A mind that questions does not conform. It beats its own path and believes by choice and convictions. As the Chinese say, it goes out to meet the intention of a topic as a guest, and that is understanding. It is rich. It is armed.

Lucas says the Bible gives us a working hypothesis regarding all fields of knowledge. If we attempt to unite truth and error, or good with evil, the statements of the Sacred Writ drive a line of cleavage between the two extremes, separating them from us. We are thus saved from error which is the perversion of truth and from evil, the perversion of good. The study of astronomy in the light of the Bible is therefore the only rational study of it.

If you ever fall in love, tell your loved one that he or she is as beautiful as the constellation Orion. Afterwards take them to see Orion through a telescope. Both of your will live happily ever after. Astronomers regard Orion as the grand spectacle of the skies; one of the most remarkable nebulae supreme in the glittering skies, the most brilliant of constellations.

For me the greatest satisfaction from astronomy and the Bible is the attempt at grasping the splendor of God and his magnificence.

‘Standing on the verge of the planetary system, we find ourselves surrounded by a multitude of shining orbs, some radiant with splendor, other faintly gleaming with beauty… the suburbs of God’s boundless dominions.’ O.M Mitchel, The Orbs of Heaven.

I need to eat now.

-When do you want to go?, he wants to know.
-Friday and be back Saturday. Is it possible?
-Yes it is. So you travel at night…where will you spend the night?
-Not sure but as long I can make it Friday night, good.

Friday 7pm I buy a ticket from Madzhandu Bus Service at the Lusaka bus terminal. It’s orderly and clean. I get my street dinner; fruits and super fat smokies. 8.30pm I board, squeeze the rubber soft LG earphones inside the ears, choose the album, wrap the scarf warmly round the neck and recline the seat. The blue bus is as comfortable as it is new and at 9pm – precisely the time indicated on the receipt – the 6 hour journey begins.

It will be a smooth ride on the new Lusaka – Livingstone road with several pit stops. At the appointed time, the conductor – sounds bad to call the good man so – serves biscuits and apple juice. I know it’s real apple juice because I’ve had fake apple juice before. Zambia is great. I look up and notice reading lamps for every seat. [The last bus I rode in had head lights only. The rest were passenger procured lights aka torches and matches]

At 3am we hit Livingstone. Vibrant Livingstone. I have 3 hours to waste till dawn and then go looking for the falls. Choice is to enter a club and watch people till morning, which is what I do. Rhapsody; I don’t like it so I look for another. This one is a hall with nothing but the counter; no seats no tables. I then find Chez nTemba. Chez nTemba is cross border and very popular. It’s big as well in Lilongwe, Lusaka and Kinshasa. That’s where my night ends. I perch my backpack and myself on a stool and chase hours with Schwepps after Schwepps.

I see white guys with dread locks, shy hookers, lame dancers, good dancers, poor dressers, patriotic DJs. Hookers fascinate. I find them enigmatic and very bold. This one is tall. She speaks Nyanja. I miss all the words and tell her so. She leaves. I then turn to a guy on my left after noticing we are both just staring. He is a South African on his way back home from Lusaka through Sesheke, Windhoek and into Cape town. I tell him I’m from Nairobi and we bond even more. He too is waiting for the same morning.

Morning comes and I find a cab guy called Admin. What an apt name for a taxi driver! He is Admin the Admin. The real Admin. Once again, typical Zambia friendliness. He is a young man with a wife and an year old son. We chat. We head for Victoria falls. Mosi oa Tunya or The Smoke that Thunders. I’m excited as we take steps past Livingstone statue, down the path to the face of the breathtaking falls and behold;

This is November so the Zambezi river doesn’t have enough water to produce the thundering smoke. Across you can see Zimbabwe and the bridge with the 110m bungee jump. I have to catch the 9:30am bus which comes from Namibia with just a few empty seats left. Miss it and that will mean waiting 2 hours for the next. We go back to Livingstone, get a ticket, breakfast and wait.

Much of Zambia’s rural is uninhabited. Stretched fields with nothing going on. I’m told people here don’t develop their rural areas and a majority get lost in Lusaka. Some of the people chased out of Zim by Uncle Bob have bought land in Southern Zambia. About 8 hours later, it’s Lusaka again.

I hope with Providence grace, I’ll be back for the bungee.

Morning of wedding day. You are a bridesman [I always miss the word here, and when that happens, I safely call them men who follow the groom].

You gave the tailor measurements and time to collect the suit. You arrive at his shop.
Shock 1] It’s closed.
Shock 2] His phone is off.
Relief 1] He comes an hour later, but he come he does.
Shock 3] Jacket is minus buttons.
Relief 2] Buttons done in seconds.
Shock 4] Zip is faulty.

So do you appear in a wedding late with the fly completely down?

I’ll tell you what happened during a friend’s wedding last year. He asked me to be a groomsman. I said yes. It was to be the first time. A day to the Jour J we are asked to do rehearsals. Rehearsals? Like Steve Harvey I ask, ‘Wha fo?” It’s for marching on the petaled walk where we will show up from a corner, lift a maids hand kiss it like they commonly did in London before the plague came. I got this quote from a film called Black Death that tells of 1348 London and the plague. “Osmund’s heart turned cold. In the shadow of his grief he found hate and in God’s name he took up the sword and vengeance became his creed.”

That chivalrous act is still done today but selectively. Some hands and lips aren’t made for this stuff, really.

So you kiss the hand, smile, give the lady a bunch of flowers, she slots her arm into your and you march forward. I can tell you these people don’t know me because I can’t synchronize steps if my eyes are not looking at the steps I’m making. I have to calculate. That’s how geniuses are, sorry. All the same I decide marching isn’t a great deal and wait for tomorrow.

Come the day, here we are. Suits, cravates etc. Looking serious. Make the suits tighter, throw is some very dark glasses, give me a maize comb to stick in the belt and we are CIA personnel. Everyone looks different. It’s a wedding anyway so don’t be shocked by that.

The march on the petals and the first guy goes. He passes the test and so does the second. I’m third and now wait for drama. All eyes on me. I scare them back into their sockets with a teethfull smile. After all is John’s wedding and I know John. He is my friend. I give flowers, take the arm and we start the walk. Cameras zoom. I imagine John telling his bride, “Baby when I say I’m a turnkey husband, that’s the signed deal. You only gat me to plug and play. How does that sit with you?” Cheers John, man!

First step, pass. Second step, they play a song and that where they spoil it. I lose steps and confuse my maid. I’m supposed to look at the camera but I’m not. Focus is on my steps. Damn! We do chameleon – she lifts her leg waits for me to lift and synchronize as we put the feet down, but unfortunately that is the same time I’m putting mine down and waiting for her to put hers down.

People are looking shamelessly. I decide to take matters into our own feet and initiate a march with the natural-normal-everyday-going-to-work strides yo mama gave ya! She follows. No choice anyway. We cover the remaining distance like mercenaries. I take her to the maids’ side and my escort duty is closed.

People, know thyself.