sleepy and nothing

i write this with my head lolling partially, my neck hinges bent over from fatigue... holding up a head that wont keep straight... very grueling. anyho, it is morning, another week of morning news and i made the mistake of having a 5.30am breakfast, now i am paying for it with a heartburn... i don't understand how i could be so foolish... but anyhow, the deed was done. there is absolutely no sane or poetic lead to this post. i am just writing because i got a free computer for hours on end to ward the sleep off, the TV wont work and i am afraid to proceed with the book i started reading on Saturday lest i sleep... great fantasy book just that its written by a woman... you know us... a full page of description...but
\ fact that she is actually writing about pirates and her protagonist is a man is interesting must be challenging, i am waiting for the 'war' parts coz there has to be war but of course...she does not elude letting us know how hoooooot he is, i imagine if it was a guy writing, we would have felt his 'hotness' nonetheless. he prolly would have talked about his unforgettable sinew muscular body within the rudely torn pirate waist-coat somewhere in relation to him bending oars with herculean strength... i think thats a woman's description...anyhow we would have gotten the point in not too many words....okay i am straying into a lot of irrelevancies and i think i need to turn in...find a comfy nook in this office, curl up and sleep for a while... i am ...so ...sleepy.

leave my crusts!

there are those days i am in a spoil-my-self-mood. it usually hits me when i have morning news or public holidays and town is quiet with fewer people around, so i stroll down to parliament avenue, to shake the sleep off with a humongous craving for coffee and toast or cake or a croissant...anything doughy really.
cafe pap is usually a good spot, or Nandos, especially when i am in a 'watching' mood, book the window seat and stare out at people coming to work. the distant sound of coffee mags being steamed and the smell of fresh coffee beans and baked rolls making my tummy churn, giving me that release i crave for when i am locked behind a desk with the cameras brimming in my face and the nation waiting for me to tell them what's happening... sometimes i wish i can just scream out 'freak out!' on air and shock my managers but really... i aint no Jim Carey.

so i love my bread at cafe pap, brown toasted with jam and butter, my coffee, usually decaf with honey, John always knows what to bring when he sees me. often times after i am done ordering and now waiting, i keep praying this time round my bread will look different. you see, i grew up on Hotloaf-fresh-from-the-oven-not-yet-sliced-bread and the crusts... the crusts, crunchy and crumbly...were heavenly, it made bread feel complete. i could feed on the crusts only and be in a 'bread heaven,' but Cafe Pap denies me my pleasure trip all the time by bringing me my bread, well toasted...yes... but with the crusts cut off. i have never summoned the courage to tell them to leave the crusts on. i keep musing over the response,' madam, it cant fit in the toaster' 'but madam that is how we do it. 'madam, it looks better' 'madam who cares for crust!'
whaaaaat! i care for crusts...
so i am planning my next trip with a new resolve, i shall boldly ask for my bread...with the crusts on!

story of my life...5 years ago....its real..names changed but it was a typical day back then....

It is beginning to drizzle and I don’t know what to write…or if I should write. Oh yeah…let me see…hmmm. Okay. Here goes…urrrghhh… I really don’t know what to say. Suddenly my room door flies open and my little sister, Olivia dashes in. I groan. Not that I do not want to see her, but not now when I am thinking and she is excited.
“Guesss what!”
“What?” I feign excitement.
“My gosh, guess who is coming? My gosh! My gosh!” Her fingers are all over the place, on her face, on her hair… and I’m thinking why I don’t get used to this drama everyday.
“Who?” I ask trying to look concerned lest she get hurt that I’m not interested in what interests her because when I do act that way, I sit down to lectures from her about being compassionate, showing love, and her revealing her undying love for me , which must, and I say it again, which must be punctuated at the end with a hug and about ten kisses. Ugh! I wonder where she gets these doses of emotion from. So to avoid the sentimental ceremony, I act interested.
“Uh-huh…my gosh, my gosh! I was jogging with Crista and you remember that boy next door…Ken…oh gosh…we actually got talking…okay…anyway.” She sighs, sits down.
“You won’t believe it…anyways. Remember we went jogging at 5:00 p.m. My trainers were wet…”
Oh no! my sister has got this habit of relating an event detail for detail. It drives everyone nuts, especially my big sister, so she pours it all on me because our older sister just won’t listen. Crista is actually our cousin, a real girl talking herself into believing she is a tomboy, goodness, teenagers!
“You were not listening!” Olivia looks really hurt.
“I was!” I retort “The boy from next door…chewing pancakes…Crista”
“ No!” she is definitely hurt “ the problem with you is that you never listen to me when I speak, yet me, I listen to you.”
I feel guilty, because she is like my secret box, I tell her everything. Oh! Jeez, I feel the lecture coming and I have to stop the flow before it becomes a house issue before a panel of my brothers and sisters to judge the case of Lucy who is forever thinking and writing and does not listen to her “secret box.”
“Sorry, I kinda missed it. What were you saying, I’m really sorry. Please, start over again. This time I promise I’ll be attentive, okay.” I’m crying inside and praying, oh Lord, gimme patience. This is really trying.
She lights up immediately.
“Any way, so, yeah…where did I stop…lemme start again.” I shed a silent tear for myself.
Christa walks in to announce the boy from next door was coming any time as pre arranged and that my phone number, against my will, or my permission had been given to him in case he wanted to talk to either of the girls. Okay…I’m okay with that really, it’s always happening and when I am away from home, it is worse; lots of phone calls from little boys and girls and I keep thinking, why can’t my friends call that often.
Crista seems excited and when she is, she’s got a way of keeping her hands right by her side and moving only her eyes and of course, lips and oh, her voice is deep and loud and punctuated with throaty giggles. As Crista talks, Olivia keeps throwing in her “anyways”, “oh my goshes”, and “for reals” and a whole bunch more that are only in her dictionary.
Then my brother Ivan walks it. When these three are together, you’ve met the link, as they call themselves. He looks very cool, calm and composed as usual. He’s holding a bundle of c.d’s- my c.d’s. he throws them roughly at me onto the bed.
“Easy!” I retort angrily.
“Sorry…I finished listening to them, do you have others.”
Kids, I mumble under my breath, all they want is what they can get from you. I’m sure my parents feel the same way about us. Now I know what it feels like, and I can brace myself for when my kids come.
Before I can reach out for the c.d’s, Olivia and Crista excitedly bubbling about Ken, comfortably plop onto my bed, push away all the papers roughly to one side, throw the pens wherever and I am staring in horror.
“Hey watch, it” I yell, “That’s important stuff.”
“But Lucy, you are always writing, writing…now what’s this?” Comments Ivan as he picks up a paper with one of my stories and starts to read, mimicking my voice, “I walked into the café…” I grab it from him.
“Hey, easy, easy,”
Thankfully my older sister walks in, holding a mingling stick.
“You guys, what do you want for supper, posho and peas or spaghetti?”
“Spaghetti,” everyone shouts.
“Okay,” she walks out.
The conversation resumes; it is Ken this, Ken that, Ken, Ken, Ken! I am trying to disconnect myself from the Ken talk but I find myself writing “Ken”.
“Listen, you girls” says my brother in his usual sarcastic way, “that boy, ah ah, he’s so fake.”

“He’s cool, Lucy isn’t he cool?” the girls protest.
“I guess so” I reply, I actually think he’s a bit proud, but I do not want to dampen their mood and sit for a lecture on not loving people’s passions.
Ivan interjects, “ He’s so tall! He’s thin like a stick! I think he even has grip.”
Grip is apparently slang for pimples, adapted from the feel of a good basketball. If it has got grip, it is a good ball because of the ridges and bumps on it.
My other little brother Benny walks in and has most probably heard the last comment because he is laughing absusrdly. It is the loudest, most annoying, most intimidating and yet funniest laugh you’d ever hear.
“Who has grip? Who has grip?”
The girls know they are in for it when Benny gets involved and when Ivan tells him that Ken who has grip is coming over for tea, he laughs louder and starts to tease, as expected.
“Olivia and Crista love Ken…they are up in a tree k.i.s.s.i.n.g. First comes love, then comes marriage…” I can tell this is the time when tempers start to flare, tears flow and there is laughing and teasing like mad. My room has become an oven of havoc. I do not think I am going to write anything unless I throw these kids out of my room.
“Okay, go quarrel from out there, all of you- go!”
Benny goes out singing “Olivia loves a boy with grip, you’ll marry him and your babies will have grip.” We all burst into laughter at this.
Olivia is mad, “Oh Shut up…” she begins.
I feel kind of bad for her, teasing is not her thing and Crista who is supposed to be her best friend is actually laughing with the rest of us.
“You guys are going to welcome Ken in your jogging clothes!” says Ivan, shaking his head.
“The grip boy?” shouts Benny.
“Ah...go away, go and play with your video games,” says Olivia, hurt and angry.
“Grip boy, grip boy” he runs out singing with Olivia hot on his heels” Stay away, it’s a girl thing anyway.”
“Grip boy, grip boy. Olivia loves a grip boy” Benny continues.
“Oh puhleeze, the line is getting stale,” I hear Olivia say.
Our youngest brother comes in “who has grip?’’ he inquires.
“No one!” Olivia is flustered, “I need to shower, Crista, Let’s go.”
Littlest brother follows, “tell me please, who has grip, I promise I won’t tell.”
And I chuckle… as though it had anything to do with telling or not telling. My room is vacated and quiet now. I sigh. Back to work…
Well… at least for quite some time before the gals comes in asking me for make up and nice tops or a certain pair of shorts or tee- shirt… little girls, I muse… well.. I guess that is what I should write about; little girls and the excitement caused by the opposite sex. I can hear them giggling and talking away about ken and a loud singing of ‘grip boy! Olivia loves grip boy’ punctuating the excitement… then… ‘Shut up! Get lost!..Speak to the hand! Puhleeze!’ spicing the air.

Not forgetting my big sister and Ivan laughing and my littlestest brother asking exasperatedly “who has grip? You people tell me! Ah! I’m going to tell daddy if you don’t”
Okay, I really have a crazy family… and if I don’t get out of here now I won’t write a thing… but I am curiously anticipating the ordeal between Ken, the girls and the rest…hmmm it could be a good story so for now story writing is suspendeds… the drizzle has died out and I think I need to step into this fun, maybe tell my littlest brother about the “grip boy” before he runs for parental enforcement . He does that a lot when we keep secrets from him… maybe laugh along…maybe tease, just maybe.

when they go too soon

din't think i could let the month go by just like that, with hardly any more than 4 posts, now could i? It's been a hectic month and my mind and fingers along with the pens...key boards have had a hard time coordinating to produce anything magical or worth reading , so my brain has stored all that i hoped to write and i hope that when this season of business in someway becomes manageable (coz i see myself busier) then i guess i shall put something down worth guzzling.)
not forgetting

my Literature teacher passed on..
. i recieved the message with shock and memories of her flashed before my eyes in little snapshots,
snap!
playing scrabble at her home after running out of school to avoid being dragged onto the field for 100metre runs on the shool's sports day with her daughter, who taught me to be a rebel.

snap!

listening to her correct our phonetics and pronunciations first day in the literature class, telling Julian, a gal in my class,that that possibly cant be her name, its a boy's name, she must be 'Juliana' and you would think she was the midwife at birth. oh and telling me my surname is no where on the Native language radar of Uganda. 'Chihandae? where is that from?'
and Jaque that that is incomplete for Jacques a male name..so she better write her name as Jackie or Jacquelin


snap!

asking me to clean her chair and pulling out the largest biggest tissue roll i had ever seen and telling me to keep the rest.

Snap

asking me why i had failed literature paper two (plays and her paper) and giving me the greatest ever motherly advise that took me through that lit class. i remembered feeling elated, feeling i could do this for Her, to make her keep feeling proud of me
and i vowed never to fail that paper again... i didn't. my life was changed by a teacher who believed in me and let me know even when i had failed that i was a champion.

snap!

listening to her talk about her younger days

snap!
i just got nostalgic, thinking about secondary school, my literature class
oh and yeah being the teacher's pet then... of all my literature teachers.
being class prefect of the lit class, being privileged to go to their homes or be sent to their homes and being able to get presents from them, chocolates and etcs

i guess i owe my literature teachers alooooooot for my writing now, they pushed me to realise my potential. cant forget Mr Mugasa encouraging me, one day to the deadline for the writing competition with NABUTO to write... i wrote all night, running on coffee, a dim corridor light to compile my poetry collection.... and finally coming second in secondary level, scooping an award,and a prize....!

may you rest in Peace Mrs Tiromwe

the leak

(A single from my anthology 'the elegy of love)



The leak in the ceiling had been getting bigger and bigger and when she left, we were both not sure if we had been too blind to see the empty cold clammy fingers of the raindrops that filtered into our lives- our beautiful home.
I am sure I can remember now what I had seen when I had dismissed it two months back as an insignificant dot. It never occurred to me that something so small could be a colossal invasion into a delicate structure put together with so much warmth and care- a year since we moved in. Suddenly the little dot, like a little weed was a leak crumbling the very core of what was¬¬¬¬¬¬¬__ home.
I wish I did not miss her, the way she read the morning paper, the way she laughed when he tickled her, the deft way she poured coffee from the coffee maker for them both and the way her hair gently blew into her narrow face when we walked together. I wished I did not miss them together.
The picture is all different now. Sam lives every day in a bubble, floating in and out of some dream and the puddle forming in our lives on the floor of our boarding has turned into a cold breeding nest for whatever vermin that aims to feed off the rotting tissue.
Once or twice he’s picked up a few boards, a saw and even a hammer and after a few haphazard attempts, we were back to where we were a few days later…awaken in the middle of a storm with the icy cold blob of a leak embracing a bare back or foot. When she saw it she tried to get it fixed, they talked about what was wrong, she did all she could, but I guess it was too late, the leak had eaten into the plaster so fast we had not noticed it was peeling away and yet, he was always tired, too tired to fix the ceiling.
Back then, it was nice to saunter in and sit by the fire, eat meatloaf with baked potatoes and have the usual trend of conversation passed back and forth punctuated with Becky’s loud shrill hearty laughter about the usual things- the zany neighbours and their outlandish kids that seemed to belong to the Addams Family, crazy traffic, work but most of all, the wedding plans. I loved that bit, I knew now we would be a family- a huge step into transforming the warmth engulfed in the house into something more intimate. After the hearty meal, as seemed the tradition cans of Heineken kept us absorbed in our Tuesday night show ‘I love Lucy.’
But since the leak grew, we talked and laughed a lot less and a lot tensed. There hung a cold apprehensive presence in the atmosphere…and when it was all silent, I could hear the faint drip drip drip sound, soft, slow almost impalpable but definitely there. It carried an uncomfortable dump draught with it and very soon a stale odor.
I heard them quarrel for the very first time a month before she left. She complained he was always tired, they never touched. Love that made them and brought them together was a strain tearing them apart and she was not sure he wanted to go on with it. He told her not to be crazy. There was nothing wrong. He wanted to get her pretty things, make money for them both to be happy and comfortable and she told him, for her to be happy, he needed to see the leak and fix it, the house was beginning to rot. They fought more and often; love was dying. She ate dinners alone, the leaks grew as frequent as her own tears widening the chasm within their lives, dampening all our spirits. Till we woke up one day and she was gone. And there was a bigger puddle at our feet. Overnight the leak had eaten into the wall and seeped progressively onto the ground.

Now as we sit back on the couch, two desolate bachelors staring at the bucket fill up with grimy water for the nth time that evening, the rugs stuffed against the weeping wall, Sam will lean back, flap my ears, kiss my shaggy head and sigh.
‘Why didn’t I do it earlier? Why didn’t I see it coming?’
I stare at him knowingly. ‘I didn’t not realize we were growing apart so fast.’ He will run his hand over my tawny tangled hairy back every night now. ‘I thought I was doing it for us; working hard for a life for us.’
I will bury my head between my paws and whimper, my thoughts always the same. We just refused to see the leak.

i dont huv a title... yet

Revenge is a dish best served cold

Meaning: This saying suggests that if someone does something bad to us, it is better to pay them back later in time, not immediately. Vengeance may be more satisfying if it is not inflicted immediately.

I was watching Kill Bill the other day, actually all weekend, then before that on Friday, i watched Inglorious Basterds... i am so oozing Quentin Tarantino, his gorey yet hilarious way of 'skinning a rat,' makes him a Maestro at his film plots. now next to Mel Gibson, i think this guy is phenomenal . if you haven't watched Inglorious Basterds, i urge you to, i think Quentin outdoes himself in this movie. a must watch... only it has got my thinking twisted. next time i need to carry out some sick revenge
i will brood over it for years, then tell the victim, over a cup of tea or wine what i intend to do. how interesting, i used to think he was one of a kind, now i truly believe Quentin is the future for cinema...

rejection....soulful....

i am working on my second book. yup second coz i already have my first book published by fountain publishers, 'Brave Kemi,' can you imagine... it was the first coolest shortening of a name that came to me.... hope you don't mind Mrs B2B...
ANYHO , so i am working on my second book, a collection of short stories which i have changed twice coz the computer died and ate the stories so i hat to retrieve some and changed them... still searching for a title coz the first title was ...exact...now... i am still searching for something deeper....i am looking at the heart of the stories. my first rejection came then.
i wanna publish form out there, somewhere. so i sign up to this agent looking for writers to promote and l look at his work contact him...blablabla. anyway so i send him samples of my book
and i get the response after two days. i did not feel so overly turned away when i read his 'sorry, i dont promote this sort of genre but you can try someone else. thank you for keeping in touch.'
ouch!
i recalled so many writers that were bestseller authors after 40 rejections and a twinge of excitement shot through me, i was now one of them... a to-be- bestselling author!
anyway despite that hopeful thought i have been really slow about posting my work to another publishing house that is hounding me down to send in my work ASAP. and i think the first rejection really got to me.

anyho, I've been sleeping at 4am trying to patch up the stories. my only companions, tea and my top three songs,(they are all number ones in my book,) play repeat until i am done

1.Sean Kingston - Face drop
1.Shayne Ward- No, you hung up
1.Simply Red and Michael Bubble's version of - A song for you

oh ho, you need to listen to that song, soulful, melancholic, deep, meaningful(to me at least) this one version is by Donny Hathaway, it was danced to in the 1st season of 'so you think you can dance,' that's when i first fell for it after hearing its remix by Bizzybone

ladies and gentle men, i present y
to you..

a song for you
enjoy


Donny Hathaway - A Song for You

I've been so many places in my life and time
I've sung a lot of songs I've made some bad rhyme
I've acted out my love in stages
With ten thousand people watching
But we're alone now and I'm singing this song for you

I know your image of me is what I hope to be
I've treated you unkindly but darlin' can't you see
There's no one more important to me
Darlin' can't you please see through me
Cause we're alone now and I'm singing this song for you

You taught me precious secrets of the truth witholding nothing
You came out in front and I was hiding
But now I'm so much better and if my words don't come together
Listen to the melody cause my love is in there hiding

I love you in a place where there's no space or time
I love you for in my life you are a friend of mine
And when my life is over
Remember when we were together
We were alone and I was singing this song for you

You taught me precious secrets of the truth witholding nothing
You came out in front and I was hiding
But now I'm so much better and if my words don't come together
Listen to the melody cause my love is in there hiding

I love you in a place where there's no space or time
I love you for in my life you are a friend of mine
And when my life is over
Remember when we were together
We were alone and I was singing this song for you
We were alone and I was singing this song for you