Hedonist Mode

Mood: Hedonist, Wondering if my cat is pregnant
[Toot!] Index: 3.2
Communism Bit: Off
Location: Job, of course

One of them days I picked up the cigarette and went to smoke it under the stars. And I was thinking about some girl, and seeing some profane nightclub pointing a blasphemous beam at God's window (past midnight!). And I realised that I wouldn't like to be in club at that time (or ever). I realised the stark differences between me and them. Me, a fine night is being at home next to a girl and listening to gentle North African music and we're shaking our cigarette ash into an empty bottle, and I'm sipping at iced tea, and every tick of the clock brings me closer to a Kiss, and (this one is important) I don't know (or, at that moment, care) what the future holds. So, I barked at the fun in the valley: I prefer it this way!

But do I? How can I say I prefer warm, sedate seclusion to the wild, sweaty reveling noise, when I've never tried it? Hence my decision, at that point, to start living a hedonist life, if only for a while. With pleasure as the only goal of living, you know. I've always had some tight little rules to follow, and it seems to me that rules only exist to limit how much pleasure I get to have, so I was implicitly sending them out, as well, and replacing them with a packed schedule of sex, drugs, sex, partying, sex, "trying that stuff", sex, et cetera, and, of course (lest I forget to mention it), sex. The only working in there would be to fund the Schedule.

But the best result of such serious choices is the discourse that starts in my head, between Ange and Jude. It's how I know there are three of us: three viewpoints that cannot even meet. (Mine is ignorant questioning, Jude is for hedonism, Ange against it.)
Ange goes off, Have you ever seen anyone say `I've had enough of pleasure, let me now have some displeasure. Even submissive masochists do it for pleasure. Hedonism tries to fill a bottom-less bucket. You're the programmer; you should know that this Bottom is not good.
Jude starts one under, after Ange has collected extra points for that occupational pun, but he flies in with all guns screaming: If pleasure were not for having, you'd not have the urge to have pleasure. I mean, okay, stop breathing if that bottom-less bucket is not worth filling.

So, there. As always, Jude wins. It went on a little more, but it swerved off-topic in a hurry, leaking into our unfinished debate on whether polygamy is the normal relational state (for both men and women), et cetera.
So, I'm going to get into hedonist mode, tentatively. I know there are some things that constitute pleasure for other people, but not for me. I should define my own idea of pleasure, and then follow through. The worrying part is that my version of pleasure is way too close to what I already do. Maybe I'm just brain-washed by me. So my hedonist mode may not be too different from my current mode, which would defeat the purpose of the experiment. But I should remember something Ange said:
These people see anything that requires considerable restraint not to do, and they just declare it `anti-freedom'. They can't concede to having no self-restraint; they only say they want to live free. And if you think self-restraint is a bad thing, we are not friends anymore.

---

In other news, I was at a party, last Friday. I was, for most of the time, seated in the back of one of the many obscenely-expensive wagons there. My boss' ride, I mean. I was back there with a girl, and my boss walks in on us. Well, he didn't see anything, as nothing was happening at the time. But he had to look away and back off, expecting the worst. It's not everyday your boss runs away from you, in fear. :o)
Also, I met two bloggers. In both cases, they remembered me before I remembered them, which can be a bit ... bad. Queen B, who I figured out before she told me, walked up to me at the close of the party, and I was shocked there was a blogger there. I had seen her shake that thing to some catchy Nigerian song, Goloco. You may have, by now, heard it; one of the few times Nigerian media doesn't suck that much.
Next came Dennis' brother, Ernest. It's almost scary how these brothers, plus Alfred Dickson, resemble. After he told me he knew me, that he was Dennis' bro, I had to fight the urge to call him `Dennis'. Likeness tends to leap out when you find out family ties. All three, for example, have that bushy chin and insistent eyes. Nice day, that one.

Trenchtown and Sinking Into the Ground

Mood: Propagandish
[Toot!] Index: 0.3
Communism Bit: On
Location: Job, of course, but written at home

I'm listening to what must be the strongest affirmation of love for the slums ever trapped on a music record, and I felt I should let these pictures out. I took these pictures, of a Kampala slum built upon shaky ground. Literally.

See that there house, the one to the left? I failed to get something against which to scale it. But believe me when I tell you it is so short that the clothes line over there ends at a level above its roof line. It is uninhabited, because it sunk into the ground after a while of habitation, and it was abandoned.
I walked through this slum and noticed that all the houses were short, most shorter than myself.


Or, see this one. The men standing next to it can give a sense of scale. Or the size of its doors. Or if you compare it to the newer one to the right. Or if you look for where the wall should meet the ground. It is sinking into the ground.

See that one. The woman, seated, is higher than the window. Standing her full (even though modest) height, she would be at the roof's level. Nobody builds things that short. That house sunk into the ground. It is still inhabited, because it was cheaper to move the door higher (even higher than the ventilators) than to move out. (It is also quite patched, to the left.) The newer one to the left—yes, people insist on building here, where the Curse is clearly working—gives all the scale we need.

This one, to the right. The woman seated in the door-way of the newer one to the left is at the same height as the door of the one to the right. It has sunk into the ground.

Need I go on? No. But will I go on? Yes.

Can you spot the one that has sunk beyond hope?

Some don't need a scale. The air around the house, the neighbourhood, tells you that this one already succumbed to the Curse and sank into the ground.
The one whose doors were raised and raised and raised until they were about to go through the roof, and migration was not to be avoided: the house has sunk into the ground.

I have more pictures, but that will be all, for now. The houses that sunk into the ground.
Now, if I were one of them idealistic, finger-pointing pharisees, I'd let fly with a line about how `this government' is `not doing enough' to answer `the real questions, the real needs of its people', and how that is a sign of `bad governance', and maybe something like `corruption' and how `appalling' the `state of public housing in this country' is, and how we have an `irresponsible housing ministry' in `this country' and the like. I don't know about you, but there is nearly nothing I hate like those kinds of things. Most of the government criticism I see is just someone trying to sound smart by subscribing to groupthink and `demanding action' from `this government' with carefully-chosen phrases that sound educated and accustomed to expecting better things from the government. It's all shitty pretence, if you ask me. These fake bleeding hearts don't give a fuck about how we be down in our ghettos, and their newspaper columns, papers, books, blogs, radio shows, et cetera are really just an attempt at sounding smart enough for the rest of us. If you want a perfect government, die and get the fuck out of here: there are no problems in Heaven. The rest of us will choose to see these things as our challenges, and act like it, rather than as government failures and sit and whine.
(It's not my theme today, but I may not get another chance to strike out at them, those pretenders who have more failures in their bathrooms than any government can make in a year, yet who still feel the need to become the Jesus who never errs and is therefore fit to judge a whole fucking government. News: no single person, not even you, can be smarter than an entire government, however flawed it may be. So shut up, please, I already know what you want to say, and no government is so homogenously-blind as not to have anyone within it see what you are about to reveal long before you are aware of it.)

:o) I get healed by a nice, long rant. It's like a shower at noon. Now, I can carry on.
From those pictures, you can see that this government is clearly, visibly, not doing nearly enough to answer the real questions, the real needs of its people. Of course this is a sign of bad governance (what with all that disease-level corruption). Nothing else can result in this. It's shocking how appalling the state of public housing is in this country. We are just cursed with an irresponsible housing ministry in this coutry. It's obscene.

These pictures have one thing in common (besides being in the same geographical location): the people who stay in these houses work the hardest in Kampala. The law of life is that ye shall of the sweat of thy brow eat (eeewww). Yet they sweat the most and eat the least. Those who sweat the least eat the most. It's hard to think of this stuff and not feel the blazing red Communist in you rise to the front. This stuff is worse than, say, apartheid, because apartheid, at least, had people protesting everyday. There were armed rebels, even. (I'm proud that my country officially hosted these gallant warriors of Umkhonto we Sizwe, when it became too perilous for the fight to be lower south. Amandla!)
What we have here is a Capitalist system that is just as bad, even worse, than the Sud Afrikaan "Apart-ness". We pretend there is no segregation problem between rich and poor, and yet? And yet we do have our very own "apart-hood". Some people are isolated by the Capitalist structure, they are given only enough to keep them alive to fuck and make kids. Those kids are carefully isolated to be turned into the next suffering class.

The worst nightmare of the Blacks during apartheid must have been waking up and finding that every country in the world had implemented apart-hood, and that it had become the _accepted_ norm. They wouldn't even have a Uganda to run to. But that reality faces the poor among us, the poor us, because the whole world is a Capitalist system, and we have nowhere to run to. (Cuba, North Korea, yes, but the Capitalists hate us, so they starve us and kill our women and children. They say different sexual orientations are okay, but different economic ideologies are bad—we should all be one `correct' thing: Capitalists.)
This accepted inequality has burnt the hope of the majority of us, down there. Not the inequality, but the fact that it is accepted. Many of us down there even accept our poverty fate, much the same way Blacks in some places are still convinced they are inferior. We are being sunk into the fucking ground by you Capitalists. Literally. Maybe they should wait for our Revolution? At least there are those of us who are not resigned to this fate, and we are willing and able to fight. If it's already a fight to just be alive, why not let it be a fight to become alive?

In the Mosaic Law, in the Old Testament, there was something called the Year of Jubilee. Every forty years, all property bought was returned, all slaves freed, all land bought returned to the previous owners. The point was to reverse the detrimental (even devilish) effect of Capitalism in that society. So, if you got poor for some reason, it would only be until the next Year of Jubilee, and then there would be a Revolution—backed by the Torah—to restore Communist sanity. (I find that the Bible is shockingly-Communist, for a book held in high regard by the diabolical Capitalists. Jesus' move with the fish and loaves, for one example, was a concrete Communist act: from boy according to capacity, to crowd according to need. Et cetera, et cetera. Even: from Jesus according to capacity, to humanity according to need.)

But this has already got too long.

The slum is built on a swamp, hence the sinking.
Trenchtown, the slum where Bob grew up, had a big trench from which the name comes. The patterns among sufferers wherever Capitalism won are quite stunningly-similar. From apartheid South Africa to the slums of Kampala. The suffering, the creativity, the eternity of the human spirit. Slums are inspiring, because the are the face of Survival. (Survival also happens to be the name of the album that carries the loudest protests against this self-same unfairness.)
I've run out of space and time, but here is some part of the inspirational song:

Oh, my head.
In desolate places we'll find our bread.
And everyone see what's taking place.
Oh, another page in history.

But I'm from Trenchtown.
Most of them come from Trenchtown.
We free the people with music.

They say it's hard to speak.
They feel so strong to say we're weak.
But through the eyes, the love of our people.
Oh, they've got to repay.

We come from Trenchtown!
They say, `Can anything good come out of Trenchtown?'
That's what they say.
Say, we're the under-priviledged people,
So they keep us in chains.
Pay, pay tribute to Trenchtown!

Just because we come from (Trenchtown).
Just because we come from (Trenchtown).

- Bob Marley (Trenchtown from the post-humous Confrontation album.)

Naked in the Rain

Mood: Rainy
[Toot!] Index: 0.2
Communism Bit: On
Location: Job, of course

This is what she looks like when I wake up before her. Because she never ever sleeps indoors, she got pummelled by the rain. And she crawled as far as my door, and collapsed there. So, when I woke up, I found her there. And the night had been a tad rough on her, you could see. Her body would recount the dark things it had seen, if you let it speak. But I didn't let it speak, me. I just hopped over her, and turned around to take her picture. Four of them here.

She's not as pretty as Entebbe, but don't they all look alluring when they are nude under a steady drizzle? Happy voyeur that I is, I got you pictures of Kampala nude and sleepy under the early morning rain.
I'm no Tumwijuke, and my hand could do with some steadiness training, but still.

Whenever I take pictures, I feel like I'm stealing people, like I'm robbing them and putting them on this camera's card. Always without their permission. A kind of fierce, Konyist kind of abduction. Hence why I just rush past my victims. If the steadiness fails, the hazy lack of focus shall become part of my style. ;o) (I know the trick works: I pretend my failures are features, that I like things that way, that it is better that way, and I preach it almost offensively, and the whole world will believe. After a while, I believe it, myself, and it is no longer a lie, even.)

Then the Capitalist. When it rains, he goes to where people jump off the taxis and stuff. These are people who came from where it wasn't raining. Or who boarded before it was raining. So they don't have umbrellas, you see. Smart idiot, yes. Ambuleela, ambuleela wano! I'm certain he makes money.
But he is, at the same time, a nice example of why I'm frustrated with Uganda's business model. I don't know if I have enough space for a rant of this nature. I'll try to compress it.
Thing is, we are yet to recover from that survivalist mode our business environment entered between the rise of Amin and the boom of this here Revolution. We mainly produce and sell for poor people. That is not just wrong; it is evil. (I know they are the wrong words for a Maoist blog, but work with me here.)
So this guy sells umbrellas. He will live to tomorrow, but he'll never get wealthy. Same for these other people who pretend (even believe) they are employed while they hawk little snacks (divine little groundnuts!) and sit at pay-phones and in prison-cell shops that don't see more than ten customers a day. Or in the slum bars that sell very cheap hard liquor that is mostly drunk on credit.
Imagine, for example, if that liquor was packed in weighty bottles, given a nice logo, given a sufficiently-distant year (1759, 1420, et cetera; heck, even the more-honest 52BC), and given an insane price tag (70 euros; no charging in shillings) and limited to thirty bottles a month. And maybe laced with an aphrodisiac. And, for snobbery's sake, a rule is written, in Amharic script, on the label, that a glass of this drink SHALL NOT be held in the left hand or placed on the floor, EVER, as a pact between the drinker and the `ancient practitioners of this old, old distilling secret'. And no cameras allowed onto the streets where it is made. You know what would happen? The same poison would have become for the wealthy only. In other words, for a little effort, it becomes a luxury product. And luxury products fetch more bang for the shilling. It's the only way poverty can go, because to rise from the bottom when everybody else is also rising you've got to use more speed: luxury products (or sheer volume, like the Chinamen, which we can't do because we don't have one billion people, you see). People pay a lot for exclusive shit, where exclusiveness is the only real value there, where exclusiveness is bought (logically) by the heavy price tag and scarcity and mystery. Not that Johnny Walker is that much better than Uganda Waragi or anything. Oh, well.
Whatever. I know that guy would make more money than he does, if he ran an expensive service like Rainfall Surprise Insurance. (You pay [much] money every year, I'll have people show up with a free umbrella wherever the rain may surprise you. 600 euros per year, only. 800 euros, and it is a car, instead of an umbrella.) Next!

I wake up before the Sun is up, but she is usually done brushing and freshening (and, sometimes, even doing the light breakfast) by the time I get to that spot. Then she roasts our little Equatorial place all day long, before she gets sleepy and falls into the Occident. And, tomorrow, same thing over again.
(You can tell from this paragraph that, before I was banished from Ggulu and stripped of my god status, I had a thing for Musana, and she said No. And it hurt. Now, as a mere mortal, I'm not even allowed to look at her at all! But hey, the mortal women, I'll confess, are quite fun.)

The sombre, dark insides of the Big Fish that swallows fourteen people at a go! :-o I swear, I saw it in the big city! Then it groans and chugs until one of its evil devotees (you can see him standing guard in there) lets you out after you've paid the required ransom. I swear, I saw it. Many such fish in the big city. They'll tell you, if you ask, about the Big Fish (Kigege).
The funny thing about these morning taxis: I sit with the same people many times. The school kids, the old men working over-time (in terms of years), the taxi crews. There is a kid in there with a Boy Scouts' uniform—kid made me proud. He had a stately little march of an over-confident, idealistic boy scout. :o) I find all these kids in clean little uniforms with little, smudgy exercise books that have pudgy, uncertain handwritings and funny spelling, and think Well, nice. Now she can't spell; I just corrected her `shcool' to `school', but she won't remember me when she's President, and I won't remember either, but I'll have sat next to the President at some point, and corrected a President's spelling.

That's it. I'm playing Jammin' from the Babylone By Bus compilation, and, Lord, no better music to write this to. It won't happen again, but I lived to catch the moment. A lot like a photograph.

[Also, the Dear Leader's Country is Our Dear Friend. Shine on, Fire of Juche! Blaze on, Utamed Flame of Songun! :o) Ah, to God that I rest these eyes upon the Glory of Pyongyang before my days are through!]

Pic Into My Abode, My Humble Abode

Mood: Baring-A-Bit
[Toot!] Index: 0.0
Communism Bit: On
Location: Job, of course

Okay. I'm going to give y'all a chance to peek into my crib. My little prison. If it ever seems too well-appointed for a revolutionary's place, you are seeing it wrong. It's just a Maoist soldier's tent.
By the way, these pictures were meant for my Ma, but I'm giving y'all some of this (the ones that aren't too personal, which is just a few).
Nobody has ever seen the insides of my place. You're the first. Nobody even knows where I stay. I'm ducking the 'Mericans like that. :o) We go.


That's the computer, that's my desk. That's like the heart of my crib. Everything is referred to with that seat as the axis. What you see there is my humble, old Apple iMac G3 where I seat and hack. Sometimes I write my blog posts there. It's like some kind of profane altar. From the way it slid, you'll conclude (correctly) that good photographs aren't a pre-requisite I've ever faced.
That coffee mug. Ah, the stories it would tell! The names I've cried into it! The tears it has collected and then served up! That mug, I'd hold a sombre funeral if it broke. It even has a name. Also, notice the film of beige on the wall lip. Speaks of desolation-by-laziness. :o)

That's Space, the cat. And that pose, I don't know who suggested it.

More Space. Notice her gold-leaning, calico-leaning patterns. She's quite a cute cat, that one.

And the Mac again. Don't look at the sides. Concentrate on the center. You're feeling sleepy ... There is a novel above the computer. Two, actually. The pictures are a tad dark, yes. I took them at night, under my shy lighting. I code and read and write a lot on that machine. Main programming languages (taking the excuse of a geeky picture, you see): Haskell, SML, and Ruby in an order I find difficult to explain.

Then this. I thought it was a little too personal, but I just let it out so you see how I repeatedly lose the war on trash and dirty clothes. (I cropped it a bit.) There, the dirty heap has executed a successful coup, an inside job, an overthrow. The dirty heap is above, not down. And you can see how alarmingly-bare my place is. I will be rich, some day. :o) Actually, I just love to have little shit. There's a weird freedom about it; can't explain it. I hope I stay like that, for that is the Right Thing to do. The trash at the bottom, it had been two weeks old.

Food! From right to left, naturally. Buns. Hard, cold buns. I'd even have them unleavened, if I could. Last-resort food. Watch my military-green lighter! Yay! If you thought I was faking the whole soldier thing, there is also the military-green `standard army issue' cigarette. One lone, Sweet Mao cigarette that I got from some girls last month. Sweet Menthol, whatever.
Do you see the sugar cane? Guerilla food. I think the pics are just way too dark. Then the banana. I didn't like this particular batch, by the way. It doesn't feel like bananas should, you know. It just slides down my throat apathetically, not hugging my throat in a romantic one-last-time snog-hug, you know. Something is happening to my country's bananas, and nobody else seems to care. :o( Eggs—hard-boiled eggs—to the left of that. It's just stand-by stuff, you know. Throw it in and sleep. Then, lastly, the American Conspiracy To Poison The Whole World And Render It Barren By Obesity And Toothless-Inattractiveness, aka. Coca-Cola. I know, I shouldn't do this, but ... I have no fridge. The fizz adds drinkability. That's the last time, alright. Wish they had Sprite down there, which is safer, because it was invented in Uganda and stolen by Them. These things have to be close to the computer so that I can sate any hunger pangs without moving. :o)

My keyboard. First, it was a Belgian layout. Then I turned it to Dvorak layout. Can you type on that? But I tell you it feels so nice when you type lots. It's more-comfortable than QWERTY. (QWERTY was made to slow typists down, so that the keys in them older typewriters don't get stuck.) It takes a bit of getting-used-to, but it's worth it. I removed the left SHIFT key because it was tempting to hit, but my finger was getting hurt (I use the SHIFT a lot in programming and prose).

Gadgets! UTL phone, MTN phone (Kabiriiti), MP3 player, ivory lighter (okay, not ivory, but that's between the two of us), and my Sony CLIÉ. And the Macintosh, alright. Dante is laughing. Dante. Dante. Dante! :o( Don't laugh at your friends' misfortunes. One day, I'll be rich enough to buy a million iPhones and I'll play with them alone and not let anybody bisturb me.

And when I've been hacking for six hours straight, Space will figure I'm a dead tree stump that happens to have a bit of warmth ... and sleep there. For hours.

And, on occassion, I do offer lessons at a reduced fee for all members of the Gallant Revolution who show enough enthusiasm. (I took that one a longer time ago.)

This one felt a bit too personal, but I let it out anyway. I do get out on a limb. That's Space, again. The serenity is infectious, sometimes. You find yourself calmer by just letting the little thing's calmness waft over to you. It's much help when I'm depressed.

Okay. That's it. You can start laughing, now that I'm gone. That's a few spots of The Pad That No Other Humans Ever Inhabit, The 27th Comrade's domain.

Feminophilia (My Women's Day Post)

Mood: Feminophilia
[Toot!] Index: 2.2
Communism Bit: Off
Location: Job, of course

Men suck. It's why I like me some nice, smart, cute, strong-minded woman any day. :o) But Women's Day is specifically tomorrow, and here's my dedication to Women for their day.

As the eighties wound down, the records seem to say, the music above the Maghreb realised it was going to die. To make a fitting exit to an illustrious career, it gathered all its energy and tossed it forth in an orgasmic crescendo of music. One of the children born in this last coup was this Rick Astley song, Cry For Help. YouTube, lyrics. It's so rich, it's almost Congolese. But let's talk what brought me here, viz. Women.

Society looked at men and saw that they were usually bigger of build than the women, and made the grave mistake of thinking that physical strength corresponded with other strengths (psychological, for example, or even sexual). Both you and I are guilty of having this wrong idea. It's why both you and I can excuse a little girl for crying, but not the large-shouldered man. `You do well to weep like a woman for what you couldn't fight for like a man.' stinks of the same silliness. This is merely Yet Another Wrong Thing From Back Then, like the idea that the sun goes 'round the Earth, et cetera.

So, you know, men are not allowed to cry, to cave in, to give in. Yet I know that women are generally of stronger mind than men. If they had to endure the woman's world for a day—your bosom being forced to speak for you before all your achievements are looked at, unwashed idiots assuming superiority over you because their build is closer to that of an unwashed bull than yours, the danger of the sex-starved pervert that lurks in every umbra bigger than a hand span, the passive-aggressive sexual assaults that show up as hisses and signs and howls and catcalls and (Jah forbid) slaps-'pon-de-bottom, et cetera—men would be pale-faced suicides dangling from trees by their umbilical cords by the time they are six hours old.
Women endure this shit, and then go ahead and become wives. Treated unfairly, and yet expected to yeild the ... to yield it on demand, when his Urge strikes. Then they become pregnant. For nine under-appreciated months. Then they become mothers. Then they remain mothers. Shulehman, Mill'least philosopher of old, once said: `Omwana omugezigezi asanyusa kitaawe, naye omwana omusirusiru anakuwaza nnyina.' Mothers take the shitty end of responsibility, and none of the bright stuff. If men were abandoned with children for only two days, there would be no men left. Women endure lifetimes of being abandoned with children. Then they have to face job discrimination, and hit the real low to feed these kids. Then the child is, one day, dragged from under a car, or reassembled from the factory machine, exhumed from the mass grave, brought down from the noose ... and all this while the mother is sane; crying, but sane. And men just go mad and throw their daughters out for being sexually-alive teenagers (as though the men are themselves without fault, even when we don't count this as a fault).

Sometimes I am ashamed of being a guy. But that is nothing; I can take it (I have enough of my mother in me). The real killer is this one: men realise that they may be physically strong, but emotionally are just a pathetic failure, it is not even funny. But do they do the honourable thing, viz. cry for help? No, men—real men—don't do that. So we have men exploiting their only, single, lone strength to make up for what they don't have. That, if you look closely, is also what animals do. Beasts, all of them. Using brute force to get their way, when a smile could have oiled the machine. (And it doesn't help that men are obscenely ugly.)
Where women would know the value of just ignoring the adrenaline and moving on, men listen to the testosterone and fight. Where women would try harder, hope harder, pray harder, work harder, men drink harder, run farther, deny louder, go berserk. Where women live, men die. Where women let live, men kill.

Let me finish like so. There are like a million stories of men grabbing the knife and standing over their sleeping families. Think to themselves: I can end this. It's not a hard life when we are all dead. Glance around. Reach for the radio, to record the screams. Turn it on. Brace themselves. Swig one more from the bottle. Lift the knife. Start with the mother, so nobody can defend the kids. Because they know women will happily fight death for their kids, and take it in their stead. But the mother wakes up. Asks what he is doing with a knife. He says he wants to end everyone's suffering. Woman asks, why don't you ask for help. Man, because he is a man, says something stupid: men don't cave in. Death before dishonour, woman. You women don't have a sense of pride. You don't know how to live a man's life.

Feminist women have been duped into becoming cheap, imperfect clones of the failure that men are. It makes me angry. Feminists are more likely to act like men, like the guy up there. Women, feminism is not where you become imperfect copies of imperfection. It is where you remind the world where to look for inspiration. Stop this madness! Don't become equal to men, because that requires you to subtract of yourselves. Stop it already! Just keep reminding us that women are not equal to men, and that it is time for men to catch up.
And, if you are interested in the end of that story: he wrestled her down, cut her throat, and cut all the kids' throats, and cut his throat. The newspapers carried the story (but I can't find no links). And, no, he didn't cry for help. Because, you see, he was a man. You remember the story, don't you? And the whole ghastly thing was recorded, minute for fuckin' minute.

(Ah, the beautiful therapy I get from woman-worship! I feel great after this here rant!)

Avant De Mourir

Mood: Pensive-I-Guess
[Toot!] Index: 5.2
Communism Bit: Off
Location: Job, of course


Every once in a while, I get something happening to my life to make me totally revise how I see other people. You know, like if you kill a man, every time you look at a pair of eyes as dark as yours, you wonder if this guy has also killed a man, if that is the mark of a killer.
The uniform effect of these things is that I start expressing myself differently. I grow up, so to speak. I get wiser. This is the point of living—getting wise enough when it no longer matters how wise you are. Like all those relatives of mine who, days before the Virus delivered the final, fatal coup, called for the little twin boys, and started mumbling about how I should, above all else, practice my self-restraint like a builder's biceps muscle, or else AIDS would cut me down. (I love long sentences that have commas slashing away at their long, snaky shapes, to watch them writhe and wriggle in pain in my archaic Vim text editor.) I always nodded at these dying, and then, much later, I learnt what made them so wise in their final breaths. Like the snake charmer who passes down a new rule for the tricky trade his children will inherit: `Never forget to check if the snake has fangs, even if you checked it yester ...' Before he goes stiff.
Without living unwisely, you can't be wise at death. Downside of that: you'll be the only one who lived smart and died a fool. Live untethered, and you will die wise. Behold, the things I want to do before I die. Some I've done, some not.

Watch a public execution. Stand against a wrong-but-popular idea. Kill a man. Save a baby or pregnant woman from a fire (or similar horror-death). Attend an exorcism. Speak a curse. Climb the Rwenzori. Convert a non-believer. Fuck a stranger. Deny a son. Say `Okay, he is my boy. That nose, it is mine.' Walk to the head of a stage that has live coverage. Scream `Yay!' at a crowd of fans. Fuck before a fire. Have my heart broken. Break a heart. Shut up and listen to a divorcée and let her cry into my chest. Read an Ernest Bazanye novel. Learn the language of the Ishmaelites, and then read the Qur'an straight. Command a battalion. Have sex atop a number of engaged pistols with live ammo in them; the thrill of mortal danger. Finish creating the digital version of the Uganda Sign Language manual. Rock an upset baby to sleep. Help with a birth from unexpected labour. Face my internal demons, fight them, subdue them, banish them. Steal myself from the arms of a sleeping lover, never to return. Fight a venereal disease. Fail to retell what the dead woman's last words were, because I don't speak that language. Crawl into a lover's bed and be surprised by a second body—her husband's. Sail to French Polynesia. Make friends with a dolphin. Save a nestling from an immediate death on the ground. Live in L'île Réunion. Ask for forgiveness, with earnest tears. Hand out pardon to one not deserving it. Live under oath. Fuck a religious celibate (like a nun). Perform Lover, You Should Have Come Over in a dimly-lit bar. Have sex in a public place (concealed, of course). Deliver bad news like `Your son was shot yesterday morning, in the line of gallant service to the Party'. Have sex with at least one of all the distinct peoples of the Earth, all of God's children. Confess to having love for someone, to that someone. Smoke the cigarette the girls gave me on Thursday. Scare a girl off with the sheer intensity of my emotion. Be scared off by the sheer intensity of one's emotion. Shout something brave at my executioner, like `Shoot, coward, you are only killing a man.' or `Long live the Liberal Party!' but not `Okay, forgi ...'

Then I'll tell the tale. I'll see it in your eyes, if you'd have trodden where I did tread. I'll be different, and I'll die wise. This is not all, of course. Space, friend. Space.