lace-on learned

So I hate tying my laces. For some reason this stage in my early childhood development was skipped. I had no idea how to tie my laces for the longest time and to tell the truth I just didn’t care. What I would do all through school was to make a little knot at the end of both laces so that they wouldn’t come out through the holes. This would be done once and only once at the beginning of the term, I would make sure that the shoes fit nice and snug and then I would forget about laces forever.

I finally learned in 4^th form or some other ridiculous age. I learned about the two bows and making them cross each other and then taking one under the other and back over and having these nice little rabbit ears hanging down. My rabbit however was always the first to be caught by the hunters. A few steps later the knot would come loose and I would have to bend over and do it again. And then again. And then again. And this is what my adult life became reduced to, tying laces over and over and over. I promised myself that when I grew up I would never buy shoes with laces again, I guess I’m not growed up yet.

I (like the archbishop of Canterbury) got a pair of leather shoes the other day, I thought that I’d just buy them laced then take them to the friendly neighbourhood cobbler and have them just as I wanted. On Saturday I went out with them. I met a guy I haven’t seen in a while, he was on a bicycle and we began talking about how long it had been.

“siku mingi sana, kwani ulienda wapi?” its been many days, where did you go?

“Nimekuwa tu, sijui mbona hatujaonana” i have just been around, i don’t know why we haven’t seen each other.

“Ni siku mingi sana, sijakuona tangu tuibiwe kura” its been very many days, i haven’t seen you since they stole from us the election.

At this I had to laugh. Straight up tribal profiling, and you know the weird thing about it, most times it works.

So I get to the cobbler and I take off my shoes and give them to him

“Shida ni nini?” what’s the problem?

“sitaki laces, unaweza nitolea alafu ushone na hapa ndio laces ziende” i don’t want laces, can you remove them for me and stitch over there so that there are no more laces.

“na, mbona hautaki laces?” and, why don’t you want laces?

“inanichukua mud asana kuzifunga.” They take me a long time to tie them

He took the shoes, shook his head and told me, “uvivu utawacha.” You will leave laziness

First he tightened the laces to show me how the shoe would be if he carried out my maniacal request. Then he asked me to put my foot in it (oh I did) and obviously my foot would not fit in there, I had to destroy the back part of the shoe just to get half in. When I was in he asked me to take the shoes out again, I had to hold on to the destroyed part and pull(it’s not actually destroyed just would be after a month of forcing my foot into it.) he explained , the way you would explain to an ignoramus, that laces are there for a reason. he showed me some rubber shoes, the lace less kind with the sponge in the middle, the bladder kind of thing and made me imagine the shoes without the rubber. well of course it won’t work, the rubber is there so there’s some elasticity and if you take that away the shoe will quickly get…MIND BLOWN. He informed me that if I wanted shoes without laces I should have bought shoes without laces and that I shouldn’t question the manufacturer.

“hakuwa mjinga akiiunda.” He wasn’t stupid when he made them.

Point received.

I went to watch Iron Man 3 with some friends. It was a really good movie, funny all through. We had gone to watch it at the Imax cinema in 20^th and quite honestly it’s an experience. At the end of the movie we followed the crowd of people going out and instead of being deposited in the plaza we found ourselves walking down stone steps to the street. It was confusing, disorienting. We had no idea what had happened, was the lobby turned into a street while we were in there? Then we got down and there was some kind of music video shoot going on.

Well I had no idea it was a music video shoot, all I knew was that there were cameras and lights and people on bicycles pedalling up and down Mama Ngina street. One of my friends makes movies, he’s the one who let us know what was happening. How could he have known? We askd. Well there were no scripts out, there was a lot more cast than crew, another reason was given that I can’t remember right now. Then he told us it must be a really expensive shoot. The lights they were using are hired for almost 100,000 shillings a day. Just the lights. In a addition there were all these people there the cast, the crew and someone had to jump through all the hoops in the world to get permission to shoot here. Standing there I learned another dozen things I didn’t know before.

This is something that could repeat itself over and over. Every time I get in touch with a career that I know nothing about I learn 10 new things in 12 sentences and it’s a great feeling. It’s also a feeling that reminds me over and over that specialisation is the most efficient thing that ever happened to the human economy. Its great as a concept, you learn how to do one thing. You be the best you can be at milking cows, another will be the best at feeding them, yet another at slaughtering. In the end we have the fattest, tastiest cow possible. What happens to the cow after that depends on the economic system in play but all of them without fail need this kind of specialisation.

I remember reading an article about trust, the guy was talking about how much we trust strangers in the world we live in. I read on curious about what he meant, aren’t we less trusting nowadays? His reasoning was though that 100 years ago we knew all the people involved in taking care of the cow. We knew the feeder, his uncle was married to our cousin, we knew the milker(isn’t he the chief’s son), we knew the slaughterer(the guy who’s going to get drunk right after this correct.) Now look down at whatever it is you are eating, chances are you have no idea who did what to it before you bought it. For all you know maybe some psychopath want’s to poison all the beef eaters. But you trust. You trust in your milk and your meat, you trust in your m-pesa transactions and your bank account, you trust in hundreds of angry, irate drivers each day. People you don’t know and never will and all of them hold your life in their hands. Tell me we aren’t more trusting of strangers.

And all this trust in the world because of specialisation. He didn’t have to explain anything, that cobbler, a person turning down money has good reasons for why he’s doing it, pride in his craft. But I’m glad he did. he made me want to learn a new skill, to want to do something outside the box of specialisation I have put myself in. I’m not sure what yet but it pays not to be comfortable. So go out and learn about something you have no idea about, its fun. Maybe I'll finally learn this laces thing.

sick of it

I woke up sick on Friday, well not sick, I woke up ok. There was just enough battery on my laptop to watch an episode of a series so I did that and since there was still no electricity I went back to bed. Then I woke up sick.

It’s been a while since I was sick but not so long that I can’t immediately recognise the symptoms I will then proceed to ignore. There was a pain at the back of my throat. The left side actually. It got worse, much, much worse when I swallowed. And then I realised I needed to swallow a lot. I took my first swallow as soon as I woke up, I don’t know if this is something I normally do but it was something I did that day and it hurt. It hurt so bad that I had a need to swallow again. Then I did. then I was thirsty and I wanted to drink some water and I took it in my mouth and realised I needed to swallow not just once but numerous times I forced it down (the first gulp), I forced it down (the second gulp), I forced it down (the third gulp) and I decided that no thirst in the world was enough to warrant a fourth one.

My head was aching in a dull, faraway kind of way. It felt like I had been standing in the sun for way too long and all I needed was a shade except it had been hours and hours since I was in the sun. The shivers shook me and I felt cold, no actually I felt that I was cold what I did feel was hot. I put my hand to my forehead and it burned. Then I began thinking that this was probably a horrible diagnostic tool. If my blood was hot then I would be hot all over, there’s no way I would have a fever in my head but not in my hand.

There was still no electricity so I went back to sleep.

My brother came over with some of his friends and an offer of alcohol which I turned down. I sat with them though and for a while I didn’t feel so bad, it was a really fun conversation, I asked:

“Where’s your I-phone?”

“It got spoilt”

“Eh, what happened to it?”

“There’s a button I press all the time and it got stuck”

“Oh”

It took a couple of minutes and an intervention to realise just how much of a fool I had been taken for. I ate and went to sleep thinking I would feel better in the morning, thing is I did not.

In the morning the fever was full blown. My teeth chattering and sweat pooling everywhere as I tossed and turned. I got up at around midday and had a meal of bread and tea. Then I went back to bed and had another bout of sleep. By this time I was compelling my body to sleep because I felt horrible, the sleep didn’t feel much better but it felt better and that’s always something. I kept having what I refer to as text dreams though there is probably a more technical name for them out there. These are those kind of dreams where the hardware or software that goes into dream making isn’t advanced enough to make images so the images come to my mind as thoughts, when I slip a little bit into the dream I can see one image but its dark and far away and as soon as I concentrate on it I can’t see it anymore. I’m not completely immersed in the dream world because I’m not fully asleep but the things I’m thinking don’t have the texture of real thoughts. They are usually fantastical or illogical and they just run and run with no pause. It’s like narrating a dream to yourself. For example I dreamed or thought that I was a nuclear scientist. I can’t remember what I wanted to figure out but I knew that I didn’t have enough expertise for it however I also felt that it didn’t matter since…. I’m not sure things went a little dark there.

I woke up and I wasn’t hungry but I forced myself to eat. I know that sickness has this habit of making itself become bigger. You have no appetite and you feel too weak to eat anything so you don’t eat and since your body can’t digest anything you get weaker and weaker and then you feel like eating even less and the cycle continues. I got up at 6 and had a meal of bread and tea because that’s all there was. In between sleep I had been able to read, while eating I had been able to watch TV and these were all the things I could do.

All my cravings were gone. I hadn’t had a hard-on all day, not wanted a smoke, not felt like a drink, not been hungry. All the things that made me feel alive by active participation were gone. My life had become one long stretch of passivity. I wanted to sleep and so I lay in bed and slept. I could read so I lay in bed and read. I could watch TV so I slumped in front of my laptop and watched. Nothing that could be called living my life was happening and maybe this was the worst thing.

Maybe the worst thing was not being able to feel warm, getting in bed and shivering between duvets and then feeling that stench of sweat that tells you you have a fever. Maybe the worst thing was the swallow that I had been doing all day. I had no idea how much I swallow spit before right then. I kept on swallowing and swallowing and swallowing. No idea why this compulsion was so present in me. Maybe those were worse. But no, the absolute worst thing was getting in bed on Friday evening all feverish and asking God in a serious tone to let me into heaven if I should die before I wake.

I kicked my ass off to the pharmacy and got some antibiotics. I had told the guy that I needed meds and then he began working on his calculator as I listed my symptoms. I told him that I did not have nearly the amount he seemed to be working at. In fact all I had was 10% of it. He told me he could work with that and gave me only the important drugs. It seems he knew what he was doing because I feel all better now. Also who knew you could negotiate in a pharmacy, was he just going to saddle me with thousands of shillings worth of drugs he knew I didn’t need? Who keeps such things in check? Though as the provider of my medicine I am far too grateful to the man to question what he was doing.

Here’s hoping there’s another few years before I get sick again.

space to dream

Its a plan straight out of an action movie. Some friends of mine and I board a plane. We rob the inhabitants and contents  one of my friends gets out a parachute and jumps the rest of us leave the plane with the rest of the passengers and somehow avoid detection.

The next scene finds me in my bed unable to sleep because of how stupid all this was. How could I go out and rob a plane with my face in full view. All they need to do is look at the flight manifest, get the picture from my passport, show it to a few passengers and they have me. I’m worried that they’ll come, break in the door and pull me half asleep and half naked from my father’s house. That they’ll charge me with this heinous crime, that I’ll get to go to court as a defendant and leave as a prisoner and thinking of all the horrible things they do to people in jail I can’t get to sleep and I’m breathing really hard.

Then I realise that it must have been a dream, that there was no way I robbed a plane. As soon as I tell myself this the air rushes right out of me and I can breathe easy, much , much easier. I was filled to bursting with tension, anticipation and fear and now I’m good in fact I’m great. It happens for me that some dreams seem so real that I am convinced they are and I worry that I’m going to go crazy if they don’t mean something or go somewhere.

I met a girl the other day who told me she was a fashion designer and I smiled.

“Why?”

“Because anyone who’s a fashion designer is doing exactly what they want to do with life.”

This is probably not true and a fault with reasoning. But my logic for jumping to this conclusion is the state of our economy right now. It’s still at a place that rewards traditional career paths, at least that’s what the people who pay our fees think, that’s what the people who give us advice and influence our future decisions think. To become a fashion designer or musician or artist is something you do against the grain. It’s a thing you do against enormous pressure to do otherwise and it’s a thing you do when you are really, really good at it. The truth is our economy does still support traditional career paths over the more daring. There are plenty of mediocre, even bad lawyers, doctors and accountants making a living off of practicing their trade. There aren’t that many mediocre musicians and fashion designers and artists making a good living out of being mediocre, it’s just the way that particular cookie crumbles.

A few weeks ago I went to a music video launch at a club called aqua blu. This club is on or near bandari plaza (this sounds ridiculously like legal phrasing but I’m just not sure where the club is.) its themed water. Water and it solid equivalent. Not ice but glass. There are glass doors leading to the toilet which is on the other side of a corridor filled with glass and blue. Inside there is a fountain gushing out water and outside there is a zone for smoking all kinds of legal inhalants. It’s a beautiful place one of the few where the owner seems to have paid attention to décor and atmosphere in a quest to be different and see his dream come true.

10 to 15 music videos were launched that day from artists I have grown up listening to those I have spent the last few months hearing about like octopizzo.  I asked a friend of mine how this was going down, how it was  so coordinated. He told me it came from the brain of a guy who is a content service provider and owns a company that I’m going to assume is called bernsoft because this was splashed at the beginning of every video. Basically this guy provides funding, distribution and promotion for artists in exchange he takes a cut out of their royalties. In this particular instance he even funded the music videos that were dropping that night.

By doing this he helps the artists achieve their dreams of making music, he gives them someone who believes enough in them to front them money and if musicians are anything like writers having someone believe in you is a nice balm for that plaguing self-doubt and he makes money in the process. Probably doing something that he wants to do with life. This got me thinking about all the business opportunities available in Kenya. There are the big leagues that are controlled by those in powers and their cronies(you cannot be called a crony unless you too are powerful in your own right) those deals that make you billions of dollars require you to know someone. They require you to be able to navigate the system of kickbacks, tribalism, politics and hand-ups that pervade the world economy at any higher strata. However there is opportunity to do things at a few levels below that. To do things with people who respect the power of a good idea more than the power of a man with cronies(well maybe not respect more but because cronyism is out of their league they better are able to appreciate idealism.)

I do have faith in Kenya for the next couple of years. I remember arguing with a friend of mine about the unique position that Kenya is in right now(this was a couple of months ago) a country with a free press, one that has experienced a fair election and bears the scars of an unfair one, a growing middle class, huge literacy rates… our history as a whole is too complicated to believe that what happened in other countries would have to happen here. There doesn’t have to be bloodshed for there to be peace and plenty. In a few generations what’s happening to Greece may happen here and poverty will begin knocking on our doors again. However there will be the 7 fat cows in that dream the pharaoh had. We are lucky enough to live in a time where the grass is being grown for those cows to feed on and maybe feed on the cows itself.

There is space enough for all our dreams or at least there will be. A lot of people call me an optimist and an idealist because I see a rosy picture in the future no matter what the present seems to hold but then it happens for me that some dreams seem so real that I am convinced they are and I worry that I’m going to go crazy if they don’t mean something or go somewhere.

Mutula Kilonzo

http://www.worldpress.org/Africa/2108.cfm

the above link is where i got most of the information used in writing this piece. If you want more direct and therefore more reliable information about Mutula click and read away.

Mutula Kilonzo died last week and I feel strangely sad. Strangely sad because people don’t really grieve for politicians, aren’t they the ones who take away our money and don’t care one whit what happens to the rest of us. But he seems different, I haven’t heard stories of corruption or greed or him using any of the divisive politics that everyone else employed. I know nothing Jon Snow about anything wrong this guy ever did. That’s not enough though for how I feel about his death, there’s something sad about a death so sudden it makes us forget that it was 64 years in the coming.

I looked for articles about him and read about his amazing life, his rise from rags to riches. He wants to be a lawyer because someone takes away his parent’s land. He succeeds and is  the first student to ever get a first class honours degree in law from the university of Dar-es-Salaam which is the only university to offer law in east Africa. He goes on to make his first million within 8 months of finishing at the Kenya school of law. It must be remembered that this is 1975. A million in 1975 is significantly worth more than a million now. And even now anyone who makes a million within a year of finishing school is still lauded and on a slow news day gets an article written about him or her. In a twist of fate right out of a Jeffrey Archer novel he buys back the land that initially inspired him to be a lawyer.

He buys more land. He buys enough land that he can buy lions. Lions! Lions!! Lions!!! This is Lannister wealth now. Lions eat a lot of meat and he is rich enough to keep them in the fat for years. How he made his money is not something we know but can put together from breadcrumbs along the way. Right place at the right time. The brilliance of mind that led to a first class honours in law and the charisma that was on display every time he went on a public podium. Also that time Hosea Kiplagat, former President Daniel Moi’s nephew, asks him to shave his goatee and takes him for a meeting with the great man. A meeting that turns into a most profitable relationship professionally, financially and personally. These are things that can make you enough money to buy lions. Lions! Lions!!! He says he is once offered 60 million shillings to sabotage a case by another advocate. He turns it down, “I work with my daughter and son, what moral teaching would I be giving them if I could accept financial reward for misrepresentation?”

In due time he turns to politics. First he resists pressure to join. Then he begins to appear on Crossfire on kiss fm. And this was probably the first we ever heard of him. There are vague stirrings of those memories as dreams, I’m not sure I actually heard him but I feel like I did. Later he is nominated to parliament by Uhuru Kenyatta. He joins, he serves and like everyone who has a taste of it he finds that he enjoys politics. So much so that he wants to run for the post of chairman of Kanu against Uhuru and Biwott. He pulls out of this though and in one of those classic he-said, she-said cases of political wrangling and manoeuvring we will never really know the reason. However talking about it he displays a kind of political idealism that’s sweet to find expressed in the mouths of babes, whether or not he actually means what he says is not something I can speak to, “I could not believe it, here was the official leader of the Opposition, an alternate president of this country, in the presence of all his supporters including myself dishing out thousands of shillings to delegates in full view of journalists with their cameras rolling, how can you expect any election to be fair after that? I was glad I pulled-out when I did. Biwott was giving out money and so was Uhuru. I feel like I have failed in my process of attempting to revitalize Kanu … I feel really terrible about it.”

In 2005when he goes against the government trying to enact  freedom of information act the KRA attaches his whole salary as an MP. He goes home with nothing but an offer to retract this if he plays ball. This is the same guy who turned down 60 million shillings and owns lions, lions. Lions!!!. Needless to say he doesn’t budge.

More recently he is made the Minister of Justice and Constitutional affairs a post held by other Kenyan political legends like Tom Mboya and Charles Njonjo. This happens at a time when a new constitution has been passed, a constitution that needs reams and reams of supporting legislation. He works diligently at getting bills ready and trying to pass them. He is rewarded for his sins by being moved to the ministry of education. Now, Kenyan cabinet reshuffles up until the new constitution started working have always been a game of musical chairs with the music being the ominous horror of the omen series. While Moi was president you would watch the 1 o’clock news to see who had been fired and who hadn’t. Kibaki famously fired his whole cabinet, the whole cabinet in 2005. And ministries have been used as an R and R scheme mixed with tribal placation for so long it’s difficult to think that anyone is ever fired because they did a less than stellar job.

As minister of education he dances, and dances and blasts teachers for forcing girls to wear mini-skirts. Our girls are not nuns and what do you think it means to make them dress like nuns. Of course there is blowback from this, this is a Christian country after all. However as recent events show this is a man who knows a thing or two or maybe all the things about raising a daughter in this crazy turbulent world. In one of those things that makes me believe his life really is a novel the last law case he is involved in is the biggest one the country ever sees. The Supreme Court election petition of 2013 where as he watches proudly his daughter puts out one of the most endearing, emotive performances ever seen by a Kenyan lawyer on television. She speaks and argues with the dexterity of a master. When she makes a reference to his tenure of service as minister of justice the whole court erupts in laughter as he tries his best to compose his face into stone. This man raised Kethi Kilonzo one of the  brainiest, beautifulest , eloquentest women ever and we think he doesn’t know what he’s saying when he says girls shouldn’t wear mini-skirts?

Last Saturday he visits his farm. Maybe he sees his lions. He enjoys the stars. Has a dinner of githeri and nyama choma(because rich people are eccentric.) Goes to sleep and never wakes up. And when I hear about it I am unaccountably sad. I know nothing of his story until later when I start reading about it. Yet I feel sad, strangely weirdly sad. I don’t know if I’m the only one who feels this way like they don’t know why they are sad about his passing and so try to find out about his life. I don’t know. But Mutula is dead and that’s one of the saddest public deaths to happen in a year that already had a lot of famous people drop out of the world.

RIP is what I’m trying to say. You went out with pride(because…lions! Lions!! Lions!!!)

the revolution was televised, book review and nostalgia trip

Sometime this year I heard that Alan Sepinwall, a great television critic had written a book. The book is called the Revolution was Televised and its concept was to track the changes in American tv over the last decade or so using 12 classic or at least game-changing television shows, he would interview the creators, the businessmen and financiers who made it possible and write a series long review of each looking at the sore points, the great points, the point that anyone who had watched them would remember. The 12 shows were Oz, the sopranos, the wire, deadwood, the shield, lost, 24, battlestar galactica, Friday night lights, mad men and breaking bad.

This list includes some of my favourite shows, shows that had given me hours and hours of viewing pleasure. i haven’t religiously watched all the shows, I remember Buffy from this really grainy KTN we used to have where static would break in every few seconds and words were more of an approximation than an actual sound. Oz was a show I enjoyed watching though I had to be on the lookout to avoid the gay scenes and maybe I was too young for some of the themes it explored of dehumanisation and loss of liberty, of racism and the various ways people use sex to assert power. I had never watched the Shield, in fact all I knew about it was an article in the time magazine about the very last episode of the show. In it Jamie Poniczwez goes on and on about how beautiful an ending it was, perfectly fitting to end 7 seasons of a show about the most corrupt policeman I had ever seen. So I began watching the shield and watched it and watched it. And that ending really was something. As close to a perfect ending of a long protracted series as I have ever seen and maybe ever will.

Then I read the book. There are ways American television has changed over the last decade and anyone who watches it can tell. There was a time you could drop in at any point in a series and pick it up and watch it just like you still can for an episode of CSI or almost any sitcom. The baggage of memory is not necessary to get the full enjoyment out of them. However there are other shows that need you to know the characters and care about them, that need you to hold plot points that seem very obscure when they first pop up but on closer inspection point to a larger plan. Can you imagine for instance anyone beginning game of thrones somewhere in the middle of the second season. It would be impossible to get a grasp of the people and their relationships, what beefs they have with each other and what history led to those beefs. Another way its changed is the nod to the morally grey areas of life. There was a time where the good guy was obvious, you knew who you should like, they were the great and the good but now the main character of the sopranos is a gangster who kills people, runs prostitutes and commits crimes for a living. Walter White of breaking bad becomes more and more unlikeable as the show goes on, everyone makes excuses for him and his actions but there is a breaking point for many and I came to mine sometime in the middle of the 5^th season and I can’t like him anymore, he’s the villain of the piece. Don Draper can only find fleeting moments of pleasure in alcohol and adultery, Al Swearengen from deadwood ordered a hit on a child and her entire family and these are the people we should support.

I realised while reading the book that the best chapters or at least the ones that resonated most were the ones talking about shows that I had already watched. In the chapter about the sopranos (by David Chase) he talks about the “Pine Barrens” episode. This is an episode where Paulie and Chris, two of tony’s underlings try to kill a Russian. They think he’s dead and have to dump the body at a forest as snow is coming down all around them. The Russian jumps back to life and runs away. A few seasons later we are treated to a remembrance, the Mafiosi are playing a game of remember when? And they start talking about the crazy Russian they tried to kill laughing all the way, and because the viewer is in on the joke and the event the memories are that much more beautiful. The book goes all the way to the end, an ending that has been parsed and thought over by so many people there is actually a 20,000 word essay out there somewhere detailing why the ending means this and not that.

Next he talks about the wire by David Simon and I can’t begin to say the ways in which I love this show. Everyone describes it as a novel, as a really long novel. It starts ostensibly as a wire tap investigation into drug dealers, as it goes on it shifts focus every season expanding its scope until the activities of the police are just an excuse to tell the story of the city of Baltimore. The story of the decay of a city, of the futility of the institutions that people insist on believing in and a story about what the war of drugs means, “nobody wins, one side just loses more slowly.” In addition to all the bleakness there is plenty of humour. One of the drug dealers, Stringer Bell, has been taking economics classes and begins to introduce business practices to drug meetings, including proper meeting rules like yielding the floor and using a gavel. One of his lieutenants, a little too enthusiastic starts taking minutes, “you’re taking down minutes to a criminal conspiracy?” he asks in obvious shock.

Deadwood by David Milch was a show about a town in the wild west. It was about gold prospecting and bars and prostitutes but it was also about the formation of laws in a place without them and the signing of a social contract by the people who wish to be governed by them. It was also about all the beautiful words used to express these ideas, in one of the first episodes one of the characters gives this monologue, “I tell you what: I may have fucked up my life flatter’n hammered shit, but I stand here before you today beholden to no human cocksucker, and holdin’ a workin’ fuckin’ gold claim, and not the U.S. government sayin’ I’m trespassin’, or the savage fuckin’ red man himself, or any of these limber-dick cocksuckers passin’ themselves off as prospectors had better try and stop me.” It was the words that did it for me, everyone spoke as if reading from a dirty, prose poem. The town itself was dirty and muddy, fights and brawls ended with people smeared in mud so brown it looked like shit. And of course there was Al Swearengen the man who stole eloquence away from all of us. When comforting a co-conspirator who has beaten and beaten badly he says, “Pain or damage  don’t end the world or fucking beatings. The world ends when you are dead. Until then you got more punishment in store. Stand it like a man and give some back.” And it all came from the mind of a man who was expelled from university and said,” There were guns. There were police. There were street lights. I got arrested. I had become involved in quite a protracted pharmaceutical research project involving hallucinogens. It all seemed to come together so I was asked to withdraw.”

The shield by Shawn Ryan is a show about a corrupt police unit and the department they work out of. The main character is vic mackey who is a man’s man. This is a cop show where the cop will catch the drug dealer who ran away, he will break through doors, pull him down from fences, beat him up and coerce a confession out of him. it’s also a show that has you wondering why you support vic. In the end he is just as bad if not worse than most of the criminals he’s after. He justifies all the crimes he commits as being for the greater good, as cutting corners for the sake of getting to the destination faster. It also moves fast, it was a show that told 2 or 3 stories a week as opposed to most cop shows one. The pace was relentless and as Alan Sepinwall said, “you didn’t so much watch the shield as you got beat up by it for an hour before it went to grab a couple of beers and hustle a pimp.” However over those seven seasons you got to know those characters and care about them. This is why the ending was so amazing. There were moments of character, reminders of things that happened in the first episode a laying out of all you had seen in such stark terms that you couldn’t believe all the justifications you and vic had made

Lost by a lot of people but mainly damon linfeloff and carlton cuse. The chapter on this begins with a description of how the show came to be made. The way it was a perfect storm of disasters that led to it, a confusing hodgepodge of ideas and people and chance encounters and what-the-fuck? Why-the-fuck-nots that anyone who watched it through will remember as being familiar from the answers we got to all the mysteries on the island. The polar bear, the statue with four toes. These clearly pointed somewhere but just forgot where that somewhere was. This show had an ending that divided people clear down the middle. There were the people who wanted answers to the mysteries and an explanation of the mythology that they had been drawn to for nearly 6 years. They wanted the ending to give them that and that ending was never written. There were the people who loved the characters so much that a neat resolution for them, a chance to see them be happy was all they needed in order for them to be happy. That ending was written. For both groups though it was a wild ride, surprises, mysteries, shared parentage, emotional moments, tear-jerking reunions all of these and more were dumped in there during those 6 years and for some you had to love it.

24 by joel surnow. What to say about this show. Heart-pounding excitement is the nearest I could get, remember that time in season 5 when the screen split into six as they revealed the big bad? Jack bauer was a hero’s hero,  the man who never slept or peed. Not for him the tongue twisting techniques of most police dramas. He would ask “where is the bomb?” ask again, “WHERE IS THE BOMB ” and then shoot you in the leg. To think that the reason the show was made was because one of the creators was tired of doing shows that had only 22 episodes a season and wanted to try something different and so made one with 24 is a good thing to think on. One thing mentioned in the book that was clear to anyone who watched the show was that it ate up plot. There would be a bad guy and then a decoy bad-guy and then another guy who was pulling the strings and then the actual person and of course the mole at CTU. The creator talked about giving a character amnesia and said that he understood why daytime soaps kept returning to this plot point, its just what you have to do when something is this long or plot driven. 24 was also about all the horrible things that the American government allowed to happen to Jack Bauer and all the horrible things that he did on their behalf. All that blood and torture that haunted his dreams until in one of the final episodes he gives this speech to one of his protégés when she asks his advice on torture “You took an oath,” he tells her. “You made a promise to uphold the law. You cross that line, it always starts off with a small step. Before you know it, you’re running as fast as you can in the wrong direction, just to justify why you started in the first place. These laws were written by much smarter men than me, and in the end, I know that these laws have to be more important than the 15 people on the bus. I know that’s right. In my mind, I know that’s right. I just don’t think my heart could ever have lived with that. I guess the only advice I can give you is, ‘Try to make choices you can live with.’”

Battle star galactica by Ronald moore was a sience fiction series that started off with a bleak premise. The humans have created a race of artificially intelligent robots. They then go to war with them, there is an armistice and peace for a few years then the robots attack committing a genocide that wipes out all of humanity except for the ones aboard the battlestar galactica and companion civilian ships. From here it sets out to tell stories about what it means to be human and how far we would go to preserve our race. There is an episode about abortion and whether it would be right to allow it to stand as legal in a time when there are fewer than 50,000 humans. Each episode begins with a count telling you how many humans still live and as the series go on you see that number reduce steadily. The race of robots, called cylons, are also explored.T they have a religion, they have different personalities, they have conflicts. They have all the things that make us human and the question becomes whether or not they are human. There is a sequence of  episodes concerning itself with the moral and ethical issues behind suicide bombers and an occupying force that almost any country that has been colonised or done colonising can relate to in its cultural memory. The humans are on a search for a lost colony called earth and the last season deals with despair of the kind that can only happen when your last hope is gone. Suicide and love and complicated father-son relationships along with an education minister who is promoted to presidency because of the line of succession and takes the mantle over so well that when she threatens war and destruction even the audience shakes in its boots all thread through a story that’s ultimately about survival and hope and all the things we hold on to until there is nothing else.

Friday Night Lights by Peter Berg is a tv show based off of a movie that’s based off of a non-fiction book that’s based on a year in the life of an American football team deep in the heart of texas. The show itself is a fictionalised take on the book and movie. At the heart of the show are a coach and his wife and their marriage that’s at times difficult but ultimately very happy. The show also takes a look at the high school children who have such high expectations placed on them by the town they live in. they have to win the game and go to playoffs and go to state and win that state championship ring and carry the weight of the hopes of a whole town with them. In such times they turn to alcohol and sex and all the other ways of coping that teenagers have. The first episode ends with the paralysis of a star quarterback due to  a football injury and the rest of the season charts the struggle to both put him back together and get the team in working shape. As the show progresses the children get older and actually leave high school. It tracks what it means to have been practically a god and then have to fit into the skin of a college student. It turns its focus to the black side of town and begins to deal with problems of drug addiction and race and the kind of crippling poverty that America seems to reserve for its minorities. It does all this while putting on a game of football and a smile in everyone’s faces.

Breaking Bad by Vince Gilligan is the show that may be easiest to describe. It’s about a high school teacher who is diagnosed with cancer. He then starts cooking meth in order to put aside some money for his family. Except that such a description does not begin to deal with the layers and layers under the show. The creator has said it’s a story of mr. chips turning into scarface. I have no idea who mr chips is but I do know scarface as a drug lord who drove away or to death all the people who mattered most to him until in the final scenes his sister tries to kill him and an army of assassins succeeds where she fails. In breaking bad walter white starts out as a bumbling adult who you feel sorry for because of all the humiliations he has to endure. His obvious intellect isn’t enough to gain him respect in a world where money, fear and power rule. Then he gets his diagnosis and falls into the criminal underworld. A place for which he is remarkably well suited. This isn’t a campy comedy like weeds where the stakes are only raised after seasons and seasons. In breaking bad the drug trade is a dangerous world where you either kill or are killed and this is a lesson walt soon learns. He gets high off of the success and is soon afflicted with the kind of pride that leads a man to fly too close to the sun. in addition he does some reprehensible things to the people close to him. Things so horrible that I just don’t like him anymore and don’t understand the people who do, are they watching the same show as me? This show ends its run this year and I can’t wait to see the end of this character arc, the moral truth of the universe he inhabits and quite frankly some of the most beautiful scenes and cover songs ever put together for a tv show.

Mad Men is a show about an ad agency set in the 60s. at first glance it looks like an excuse for sexism and cigarettes and alcohol at the office. However when you watch it you find its about something much more important. The main character don draper seems to have all the things that a man would want out of life. Respect, power, a beautiful wife, a sexy mistress, a job that he’s great at. But he’s deeply unhappy. So deeply that none of his addictions works for very long. He sells these great ad ideas to companies. Beautiful ideas that sketch out the outlines of a life we all long for and allow the viewer to fill in the fantasy with his own details but he can’t sell the same to himself. When one of his mistress asks him what he wants for the new year he says, as he’s wrapped around her glorious naked form, “to stop doing this.”. In those words at that time you can tell he means it. He doesn’t want to be there in her arms or in any of the places his sadness drives him. its not all bleak though, roger sterling a happier man because he doesn’t seem to think at all about life brings to the show some of the best one liners ever made including:

(on the death of a secretary in the office), “she died as she lived, surrounded by people she answered phoned for.”

(an apology for hitting on a colleague’s wife), “at some point we’ve all parked in the wrong garage.”

“Being with a client is like being in a marriage. Sometimes you get into it for the wrong reasons, and eventually they hit you in the face,” “Jets are made for dropping bombs on Moscow, not French cuisine,” “Well, my wife likes fur, but you don’t see me growing a tail,”

“in greek nostalgia literally means the pain from an old wound,” Don Draper tells the man from Kodak. “it’s a twinge in your heart, far more powerful than memory alone.” This is what I feel is great about these shows. The time spent with them allows you to feel actual nostalgia for these fictional characters as they go about their daily lives and as you remember different facets of each. I felt nostalgic when reading the book and again when writing this pseudo-review that turned into a mini-summary of all the shows I watched and loved. So, was the revolution televised, I feel like it was when I watch shows like game of thrones with its nearly hundred talking characters or the americans with one of the most complicated and interesting marriages I have ever seen. But then I’ve always loved tv.

at the mingle

I always wanted to go for the mingle. I loved the idea behind it: bring your own alcohol, meet other people who bring their own alcohol and start doing it(this is what is known in some circles as a pervert trap) while the sun shines. On Saturday I finally did

The thing is though that until that moment when it happens you don’t really know what it means to bring your own alcohol. I called just to make sure, I took a ticket and did a very un-Kenyan thing, planned for the future. The person at the other end of the phone told me that you can bring a drink but not a soft drink. Make sure it’s alcoholic. We went on Saturday having stocked up in a bag that one of three would have to carry until we eventually went home. This time it was at the ngong racecours. They asked for id, they asked to search the bag. They warned us that we shouldn’t bring in any food.

“I hope hakuna food hapo, makali tu.” I hope there’s no food in there, just liquor.

“makali tu, hata wine haiwezi ingia?” only liquor? You mean even wine can’t enter?

Wine ni sawa wine is ok.

We walked in and someone offered to take polaroid picture of us, for free, we promised to return and did something that we would do a lot that day, we walked to the end. It was afternoon so it wasn’t packed yet. We said hello to a few people we knew as we walked to the edge of the field. There were all kinds of stands apart from the photo booth, there was basketball, there was a bouncing castle and a trampoline, and one of those catapult things you get inside that a launch you into the air, and a bubble of air in a swimming pool that you stand inside of and enjoy the disorienting pleasure of always falling, I mean who came here and didn’t want to fall for something. It reminded me immediately of one of those carnivals you see on American TV, I thought I would run into one of those shows where a guy swallows a sword especially after I saw that there was also cotton candy.

I had gone with my brother and my cousin and once we got to the edge of the known world we kept walking. The racecourse is made for watching and betting on races, there are stadium tents arranged all over it and the further away you get from the main action the quieter it gets. We went to the furthest one and had a seat. We took out our glasses, poured them for everyone and sat down to enjoy a drink. In the distance there were people playing golf because…diversify. Even further the forests of ngong began to come into view and just like that we weren’t in Nairobi any more. I love cities but after a while a view of green is necessary just to make you feel part of the world. On one side music and games played on the other golfers did. On the bench below us there was a guy with a gun. An AP who had been posted there for the day, when he saw us come with a drink he asked if we would share and after pouring some we took it down to him.

“I hope haujaweka mchele” I hope you haven’t spiked it (mchele is a word used to describe not only rice but a drug of a more potent kind, pour a little of it into a drink and the poor man-Kenya being so feminist that there are higher instances of guys being roofied than anyone else-  goes to sleep as you relieve his wallet of whatever’s inside. Someone told me once that one of the ladies who do this was interviewed and she said, “hawa walevi ni wajinga, unawawekea mchele na wanarudi kesho tu, wanadhani ni pombe imewapeleka drunkards are stupid you spike their drink and they are back tomorrow, they think it was the alcohol they couldn’t handle.”)

What I will remember about the mingle is how it’s a mini-walkathon, at least the way I do it. We got up from that place and began walking, looking for some trouble to get into and immediately looking for a way to get out of it. By the end of the day there were thousands of people there (maybe not though I cannot estimate these kind of things) I kept losing the people I had arrived with and then not caring about it anymore. I kept meeting people I knew from before, exchanging conversation, a hug, a drink, an awkward pause in conversation, a goodbye.

By this time it had roared into life. Over there a game of football was going on in earnest, over there people were playing in a pool, closer still someone just loved the way it felt to dance in the rain and still the alcohol flowed. The sun set and I played the only game I would play that day. I went and shot hoops. At first it was simple but I kept missing and then we got the hang of it and then it became complicated and I kept missing. Afterwards I was dragged to a trampoline. That was when I got a call to go back to the place it had all begun.

I went to sit and talk and drink. The view by this time was grey and the firs in the distance looked black. They looked like sentinels posted to guard the evening sky and make sure no one stole what was being provided at that point, a view to break your heart.

As we walked back to the party I happened to look down at my shoes. Because of the rain, because of my walking, because of the mud they were brown. There was an even coat spread all over them, thing is they were boots and I couldn’t figure out how all these other people, some of them in open shoes, some even in sandals managed to look so clean.

I took out a bottle of wine I had been saving for just such an occasion, all it needed was a corkscrew and I reasoned that there must be one in all these purses and so my search for that began in earnest. I got so much advice about how to open wine. I sometimes forget just how theoretical advice can be.

“just push it in” (that’s what she said)

(against my best instincts I said) “I don’t know how to” (and now when I look back at that interaction I wonder why I’m surprised she didn’t give me her number)

In the end I made for the bar. There is a Japanese word that means the bliss you feel when you are lost in a crowd. I felt it as I walked to bar, wine in hand, glasses in the other swinging both back and forth, being stopped by all these people who knew me or, at least, knew how a bottle of wine looked. I got a corkscrew from the barkeep and began walking back. Swinging more wildly, swigging a tad unwisely until I was back where I began talking to the most honest girl I had ever met, showing off my success about opening the wine and hoping this meant she would forgive that I didn’t know how to push it in. (the patron saint of lost causes is one of my best friends)

As the night wore on more and more people got more and more drunk. Thankfully I was not one of them because of a regime of water and water. Every once in a while someone would be dragged out by a bouncer for causing too much fracas. They also helped girls take care of their too drunk friends which was a great thing.

Towards the night when the stars come out I was wondering what looked so familiar. It wasn’t the carnival that I had come for because all that was was fictional memories put there by television (a cousin of mine when she was very, very young used to call out “TV, TV” when she saw white people on the street.) then someone captured it perfectly, “hii ni funci” it was just like those things, girls to meet, trouble to have except we had all the trappings of adulthood. There are very few feelings as nice as having the opportunity to do a childhood thing again except have no rules because now you are over 18.

So, my advice? Go for the next mingle.

my week in interactions

1.  I’m in a matatu and all I have is 120 shillings. I’m not sure what the fare is so when I’m asked to pay I hand over the 20 shillings and look away,

“gari ni 30” the car is 30

“oh.” So I give him the 100 shillings and he hands me back the 20. I sit back and enjoy the ride for a few minutes.

“umenipatia ngapi?” how much have you given me

“soo,”100.

“una hakika?” you are certain?

“ndio, nilikupatia mbao ukasema fare ni 30 nikakupatia soo ukarudisha hiyo mbao” yes, I gave you twenty you then said fare is 30 I then gave you 100 and you returned the first 20

“una hiyo mbao?” you have that 20?

I assume that what’s happening is that he needs the 20 in order to give me back change in an easier manner for us both and so I reach into my pocket and find nothing there. I reach into the other one and find nothing there. I do that half standing up thing people do when they are in matatus and their money is in the back pockets, I reach into it and find nothing there, I reach into the other one and find nothing there. I brush down my chest because I sometimes put money in my breast pocket and find nothing there not even a pocket.

It’s not a case of theft because I’m sitting next to people I know and in fact my phone is still there.

“siwezi ipata.” I can’t find it

“una hakika ulinipatia soo?” you’re certain you gave me 100

“eeehhh” this is say with a bemused smile.

“basi wapi hiyo mbao? Hauwezipatiwa pesa ukapoteza haraka hivyo, nisaidie hiyo mbao” then where is that 20?you can’t be given money and then you lose it quickly like that, help me with that 20

He goes on for a while and I realise I’m getting a lecture and this irks me.

“mi ndio nimepoteza pesa, usianze kunipatia lecture juu mi ni mcareless, already nafeel vibaya.” I am the one who’s lost money don’t start giving me a lecture because  I am careless. Already I feel bad about this.

“lakini, pia wewe unawezaje tupa pesa hivyo, kwani una shimo kwa mfuko.” But even you how can you throw away money like that, is it that you have a hole in your pocket?

I check my pockets again but now for a hole and I don’t find one.

“kama hauna pesa ungesema bado ningekubeba.” If you don’t have money you should have said i would still have carried you

“Si ati sina pesa ata we unajua nimekupatia pesa saa hii. ” it’s not that i don’t have money even you know i have given you money just now

“Usijali, labda utapata nyumbani, lakini ukifika uangalie, ukiwacha bibi akuvue trou atachukua na asubuhi utashindwa kwwani pesa yangu iliend wapi. ” don’t worry maybe you’ll find it at home, but when you reach, look. If you leave it to your wife to take off your trouser she’ll take the money and in the morning you’ll be asking yourself where your money went.

“Lakini saa zingine nawacha hapo ndio anitoe trou. ” but sometimes I do that just so she can strip me

“Ahhh… lakini wacha nikuambie ukitaka kuweka pesa na uko na bibi lazima ufikirie sana, usiku ataingia na aichukue, ukiamka utashindwa kwani jana kuliendaje, na ulitaka kuiweka kwa bank. Ni tu ukirudi nyumbani na upate nyama ndio utajua Ilichukuliwa. ” ahhhh…but then let me tell you if you want to put money away and you have a wife you must put a lot of thought to how you will do it at night she will enter and take it and never let you know and you’ll  be asking yourself what happened the previous day. it’s just when you get back home and find meat waiting for that you will figure out what happened,

“Ahhh. ”

By the time I leave the matatu we are old friends and I woke away feeling like that lost 20 bob was worth that conversation.

2.  There are  these two kids who over the weekend asked for money outside school. On Friday only one of them was there. He had one of those signing sheets that show how much money you have raised for a particular cause and he was giving everyone he could meet to sign it before he took their money. I asked him what he was raising money for and he said it was for orphans, being in a good mood and feeling rich I gave him a 50(on the list thing there were only 200s and 100s beside the names) and I told him not to put that down there but to take it and go enjoy himself.

On Saturday he’s there again. He approaches me and I remind him that we met yesterday. His friend comes around and his friend is selling groundnuts. He has put them into these cones and made a cover for the cone just like it’s the 90’s. I’m nostalgic and a little drunk and so I get one. I see one of my classmates and I get him one too. Somehow I begin to have a conversation with the first kid again and he tells me the real reason he’s collecting money is because he needs it to buy unga. I ask him how much he has and he says 40, I ask him how much he needs and he says 200. I’m touched (drunk is a much better word) and I give him a 20 to help along. Then I go to some of my classmates and try to sell them a shot of my alcohol for a coin so that I can give the child. They inform me in stark terms that I shouldn’t feel sorry for the kids, that they are out hustling and this is their business getting hearts to bleed and wallets to open, that in fact they should be in school and what’s happening is they asked someone to sign the class register the way we usually do and then went out to make money (despite the fact that it’s a Saturday and we’re only here for the sports day.)

On Monday I see the kid again just after I bought a mango outside the school gate. He approaches me with his list of donors, stops and walks away with a rueful smile. I call him over and offer him a piece of the mango(the vendor peels them and cuts them into these tiny edible pieces and packs them in a small paper bag.) he reaches in and takes a piece and asks if his friend can also have one. He calls him over and he comes still selling his groundnuts. He reaches in and takes the biggest piece there is and walks away before I have a chance to smile at his balls.

3. I was having a beer with some of my high school friends the other day. A big, bunch of atheists. (Sample conversational throwaway "our pope richard dawkins says we should be more militant" another sample, "this guy needs to be put down he thinks he's Jesus Christ" "Jesus was put down too") Soon the conversation turned to griping about Christians and how hypocritical they all are, how they condemn everyone to hell and how the things they do are some of the worst sins of exploitation there are. One of them mentions this house girl who makes 5,000 shillings a month and promptly gives it to Margaret Wanjiru. This leaves her with 2,500 shillings a month to run her life with. A life that includes children and fees and clothes and emergencies. This money is given to a woman who will use it to buy gold, jewellery, big cars and fund political campaigns and maybe use some of it to help those less fortunate but this last one is the only one we are making an assumption about. The thing is though sometimes atheists are as guilty of being judgemental as Christians are. A Christian will say all atheists will go to hell but according to his religion that’s a valid view point. An atheist(not every, just some) will meet many, many such Christians in his lifetime and say that all Christians are judgemental hypocrites this statement though is contrary to the atheist’s way of viewing the world which demands rigorous scientific testing before claiming a hypothesis to be true. As he hasn’t met all or even most Christians this statement is patently false.

My friend did make the point though that religion has been used as a vast propaganda machine. He talked about how Ruto thanked God for a successful campaign and used all the Christian sentiments of how he couldn’t have done it alone and all they achieved was thanks to the almighty.

“Now how easy is for him to say to a believer, you know that IDP problem ?God will take care of it, you’ve been dirt poor all your life? God will take care of it. And just like that you remove all responsibility from the hands of humans and their leaders. If it doesn’t work out immediately...God works in mysterious ways, the time is not yet here.”

There are a lot of valid reasons for religion. The hope it give to people and sense of peace that they have but it is undeniably also a vast tool of propaganda.

This conversation reminded me of a conversation I had earlier in the year with a friend from school. It was just after elections and he was explaining to me the way amani (peace) had been used as propaganda.

“You know the biggest propaganda machine this election has been this idea of amani, let’s love each other. It’s been used to shut up people all over. No one can really say what they want to because they will be told they are against peace. Raila wants to petition the results he will be told now why, just accept what happened, don’t you want peace in our country, isn’t our peace more important than your win.”

I didn’t really agree with him, not completely. Peace is a good thing therefore  it can’t be used for propaganda, asking for peace can’t be a bad thing. The Oxford Dictionary defines propaganda as information usually of a biased and misleading nature used to promote a particular political point of view. Usually does not mean always and the point of view we were being asked to believe was that there shouldn’t have been any question as to the election validity.

5.  I got on a mat a day after chilling with the atheists and turning my mind to propaganda. The conductor had a gravelly voice, the kind that’s made of  rough stone that seems to keep falling off if you rub it really hard. It’s soothing at first but after a while it gets grating. He gave everyone the following good advice just before we came to a turn in the road.

“fungeni dirisha hapa kuna vijana wenye hawapendi kumwaga jasho ndio wapate unga.”

Close your windows there are some youth here who don’t like to pour sweat so they can buy food.

Earlier he was overloading and asking everyone to sit 4 to 4.

“si wote ni wakenya msijali…si wote ni wakenya…ni mzuri tukipendana hivyo tu, songa kidogo ti… si ni watu wa amani”

We are all Kenyans don’t worry…we are all Kenyans….its good if we love each other like this, just like that, move over a little…. We are people of peace

He said this every time he sent someone else to join us in the back.

Propaganda?