For Cavalier

Day In The Life III

2011-07-15T01:49:00.001-07:00

It was a very short while after my office first moved into its new building that the excitement started to wane. It didn't last long, at least for me. The light brown wood that felt like plastic, the grids of green metal that lined the walls and ceiling, the fluorescent lights that hovered above us silent and obsequious as maître ds in those posh hotels on TV, their magic didn't last long and it was just a few months before I began to think of the warehouse we had worked from before we shifted. The way into this warehouse was a large door that slid sideways to let us in or out. We could see the sun on the lawns outside while we worked.

In here the windows never open. We have air-conditioning and when this air-conditioning breaks down, we call a mechanic, not a person to open the windows, so we have this chilly light whispering air around us all the time, air that feels televised and shrink-wrapped and purchased and unbreathed. And the blinds are always, always drawn, no matter how bright it is outside. If it's a nice day, we will find out from our facebook feeds, I guess.

There is something called Sick Building Syndrome. Apparently the recycled air, office chairs, the glare from computer monitors and the white lights have an effect on our health; they make us ill. I've been worrying about this lately, especially nowadays when I get to work and the moment I arrive I start feeling desiccated and listless. My mind clamours for things outside the office and it lands on facebook and twitter and gtalk, which are the easiest ways I can get out of here. It's desperate and anguished and though the people I talk to cannot see it, I can, when the net goes off and I'm stuck back in this seat, staring at the white lights above, which no longer look like bellboys and doormen. Now they hover like angels of death, watching me ebb, decrease, lapse, waiting for me to finally end.

I don't know if the building is making me sick, but it is making me stale. It's making me want to go outside.

Till human voices wake us, and we drown

2010-11-20T08:21:00.001-08:00

Then it happened as it always does. I'm always found out. I can't keep it a secret.

That I'm too selfish, too greedy or too weak.

Or maybe it's not things that I have in excess; maybe it's the stuff that I don't have in adequate measure. I'm not kind enough, not brave enough, not there enough.

She asked me, "What do you expect of this?" and I didn't tell her, though I knew exactly what.

I expect I'll make you happy for a while, then I won't be able to any more.

One of my favourite parts of The Great Gatsby

2010-10-01T02:02:00.001-07:00

"But his heart was in a constant, turbulent riot. The most grotesque and fantastic conceits haunted him in his bed at night. A universe of ineffable gaudiness spun itself out in his brain while the clock ticked on the wash-stand and the moon soaked with wet light his tangled clothes upon the floor. Each night he added to the pattern of his fancies until drowsiness closed down upon some vivid scene with an oblivious embrace. For a while these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy's wing."

Almost Doesn't Count

2010-09-14T08:34:00.001-07:00

It was supposed to be a great weekend. One of those great weekends. My lover was coming over. We were going to have a great time.

We would start by meeting at Garden City. Smile at each other from the distance. Soon we would be sitting very close together, closer than most people in public places sit. We would let our hands and fingers move over each others nape, knees, collars, waists, cheeks, with the same ease and familiarity with which they move over own own bodies. I would look at her as if she was the central point of all vision and she would look at me as if I was the only real thing in the mall and we would laugh and joke and laugh for hours. Then we would go home and walk around naked because we were not scared of arousing each other and when she would leave she would leave me happy but I would feel sad.

But that's not what happened. My lover and I sometimes pretend to be a couple, but we are not. I am not her boyfriend and she's not my girl. We just have these rare weekends when we get together to act like it. Neither of us mentions her fiancé or the fact that we haven't spoken in a month and a half.

This weekend wasn't a great one. In the morning she was distant and I was bored and she was thinking of her own problems waiting back at her home and I was reminded of how useless you are to someone when all you can ever give them is a weekend fuck.

Press Play

2010-08-05T01:19:00.001-07:00

I've been looking for Pavorotti lately. I'm not an opera fan, but I think Pavarotti would be perfect to drive home with. Seventy down the bypass chasing the beam of my headlights. With Pavarotti.

BB King makes my heart break in a beautiful way. Counting Crows shows me the shape and size and colour and weight of all my regrets and doubts and failings. Tupac is the reassuring hand on my shoulder reminding me that as long as I'm alive I have it in me to fight, and as long as I can fight, I have it in me to overcome.

Mary J moves me like red moons rising and setting. Billie Holiday electrifies my skin and Yvonne Chaka Chaka drowns me in sun and warmth and ocean water.

You've got to have music when you move.

The pleasure was all mine

2010-05-12T09:54:00.001-07:00

Sitting on a restaurant balcony, leaning back, wearing blue jeans, a button down shirt and a subdued manner while a pretty woman smiles and speaks and shines and glitters and tells me stories. The clouds are low and dark, threatening rain that will, it turns out, not fall until late in the night. The tea is tasteless. Four hours pass by. Somewhere a king is crowned, somewhere a hero slays a dragon, somewhere a deal is signed and billion dollars are made. The world is full of greater men and more momentous deeds but I think that life is contained in seconds, not in epochs. Somewhere a mountain is scaled. Here, here I made a pretty girl laugh.

End of Days

2010-05-11T07:38:00.001-07:00

Day ends and everything speaks to me in Eliot. "His soul stretched out across the skies that fade behind a city block" "the burnt-out ends of smoky days" "I have lingered in the chambers of the sea". Even when the words don't tally exactly, they fall with a slow cadence, a rhythm and a texture that settles easily on this hour.

It's going to be seven soon. The work day is done and I have left the office. I've slung my rucksack over my shoulder. I'm wearing rubber-soled shoes. I'm going to walk about 200 meters to the stage where my taxis wait.

I left my car at home because I didn't think I would need it today. Her brakes are bad and I'd rather not risk taking her out unless I really have to, but I'm beginning to think that maybe I left her at home because you can't do this with a car.

You can't plug yourself into a Lupe Fiasco mixtape and sigh at a pale moon rising over steeples of Nakawa and just roll down this hill. Lupe turning words into trapeze artists. The man is amazing. The whoosh of traffic—Kampala rushing out of itself. Everything hot and frantic and cramped and crowded and furious about the day is coming to an end. Night is falling. Sigh again. Exhale. Do you feel that?

Seven p.m.

Round Midnight

2010-05-10T08:08:00.001-07:00

This saxophone is made of miles of silver and each finger on each key touches the truth. His fingers dance over her keys like the crackle of electricity sparking over the eternal wires beneath the sublime, animating the ethereal under and around us. She speaks in riddles but just because we don't immediately understand does not mean she hasn't just said the names of each and every one of us and just because these stories have been told before, just because the same tale was told by Dizzy, by Ella, by Bird, by Miles, even by Kirk Whalum, doesn't mean that each time, each and every time, the tale was not freshly spun. The sound curls through the air towards us and cradles in our earlobes and, like a newborn child, declares this home and falls asleep.

Iguana.

2010-04-20T07:57:00.000-07:00

The ecstasy of artificial light. The beams that ricochet of the rims of brown and green glass and scrape off earrings and fly off teeth that grin like walls. You look into other eyes and find, to enhance your mounting euphoria, that these wet, dripping eyes see you the way you want to be seen.

Why should we sleep when we can dream here?

Above us the sky circles, insignificant and uncaring. We are as irrelevant to the universe as the universe is to us.

Tonight we stand on the broken bones of a thousand poor men. We built this city where they fell. We never meant them any ill. But we never meant them well.

The yard is a place where all the youngsters gather on Friday nights to meet and listen to music.

2010-01-27T00:54:00.001-08:00

The yellow light which washes over the paved land on weeknights now swirls and splashes and whirlpools over hundreds of frantic bodies rocking in erratic circles.

Somewhere in the turbulence is the girl who would make it alright, but like all needles in all haystacks, it will take a while to find her. Toto clutched the neck of his beer tightly and waited. The young are not deterred by concepts such as time. To them eternity is just a vague myth and chance means that anything can happen, even her, at any time at all. He forced a current through the wash and walked forward.

The roving nightlights shoved and nudged and shouldered through the shadows and landed on Irene's cheek and forehead, then they glimmered. And that is when Toto saw her. Bright, and explosive and reckless.

After he asked her name and told her his they ceased to speak and only said the things people say at each other in times like these. The words fluttered in the air between them like the sparks of a bonfire. Evidence of something more fearsome burning beneath.

Four months later when they said their goodbyes, their resentment for each other was deep.

Where the heart is

2009-10-12T07:31:00.000-07:00

The first time I came to Busia, the border post was old and run-down. Dusty and brown.

We had arrived by Kondele. A kondele was a Kisumu Matatu, an old Peugeot station wagon usually, frail and rattling but sturdy enough ,somehow, to carry a dozen people across the 200 kilometers from Kisumu to Busia,

On that day in January in 1988 I was one of those dozen. Myself, my mother, my two sisters and the few clothes, books and disappointments that were all Moi’s government had allowed us to pack when we were evicted from his republic bundled out of the creaking station wagon on the edge of Kenya. We stood waiting in the dusty sunlight for passports to be stamped and I looked across the brown gate for the first time at Uganda. Every memory of my childhood that I have up to that point is a happy one.

Things

2009-09-18T09:09:00.001-07:00

In those days we made a lot of impulse purchases. In clothing stores and electronic goods shops. New things made us feel good... The idea, perhaps, was that bringing something fresh and shiny and perfect and clean into our lives would banish the gathering sense of its staleness. I could not be old with so many new things around me.

But like all addictions it eventually lost its efficacy. And we were just doing it even though it no longer worked. The new MP3 players kept playing the same old songs. The new shoes took us along the same old routes and then brought us back as tired as always. And no matter what sunglasses I wore, they saw the same thing.

So I became sceptical of spending. Long losing bouts with being broke galvanised this, but even when I had money again, I was reluctant to let it go. I was no longer ready to let it chase the vain hope of my reinvigoration. I wanted to horde it, keep it close, to save it and wait for that one perfect commodity to show up in the mall. Shiny, gleaming, plastic-wrapped, seductive and ready. I wanted to make sure I would have enough money to buy it.

But that was as vain as spending. Because no one was ever going to stock what I wanted. We all know money can’t buy it.

Look at this morose mf here. Looks like somebody done s** in his cereal

2009-07-10T09:04:00.001-07:00

I know I should change. But I stay here instead, still waiting. The truth is I have become comfortable in this stasis, this sticky web that has coagulated around me, the messy room growing cumulatively messier. I sit here in the light of the silent TV and think, “I should change.” I want to be changed. But I am not so sure right now if I want to change.

I don’t know what happened to those days, the power that drove us, when we called it destiny, not even dreams, when we waited for something different. Girls with silver wings on their backs, so light and precious that they could only be seen when the moonlight caught them just right, men who all had sly private smiles and secrets that no one but they would ever understand, and when they spoke, if they spoke long enough, they would spill out words that would give the mysteries of life true names.

I don’t know where those days are. Lost in the past where things are forgotten and wasted, or still ahead of us, waiting for me to stop waiting?

Two Men

2009-06-17T07:48:00.001-07:00

Once upon a time there wre two men. One was a rock. The other was a
wisp of smoke.
One would be here forever, because he was made of the same eternal substance as the earth upon which he stood; the other was at the mercy of the wind.
They were two men because I could not be both at the same time, and if I started the day as one, I was never sure I would not end it as the other. That is how we live: dark and light, right and wrong,
conviction and fear, rock and smoke.

Over the bridge

2009-05-28T08:17:00.000-07:00

When I started this blog all I did was post passages from other writers. I am going to do that again now.

Ah, the Brooklyn Bridge. You seem to be hovering over a shimmering beauty. The lights dance off of the top of Manhattan’s skyscraper spires and sweep the water, strike and hold your eye prisoner. These are wickedly enchanting depths; you gasp and hold yourself still, leaning as far out over the bridge as you can, and spreading your arms out.

From Princess here

So Long Since I've Seen The Ocean

2009-04-06T07:14:00.001-07:00

Many years ago some tourists and I set out in a boat with a glass bottom and sailed, if that word is applicable in the case of a motorboat, outwards into the sea until land was no longer visible. We landed on a sand bank, that is a sort of dune on the ocean floor that rises until it is just beneath the water's surface. If you stand on a sandbank's summit, it's like standing in shallow water.
I leaned back and fell and floated my ears submerged, my body a weightless piece of flotsam, and I heard nothing but the ocean and saw nothing but the sky.
The ocean is many miles and many years away now, but I think of it still and I when I do I miss its constant power, its endless roar. I miss the smell of salt that filled the coastal city we had set out from. I miss the sense that infinity is palpable and I miss how unavoidable it made my own insignificance.
Floating still in the middle of the sea you realise that this world is far far greater than anything you are, and just like that, you stop worrying.

A Day In The Life II

2009-02-13T10:16:00.001-08:00

I don't really wake up until I am out of the house, though. That languid semi-awareness of morning doesn't fully disperse until I am out of the house and walking up the narrow meters round the corner to the shop where I get my daily airtime and then to the taxi stage.

If it is a bright morning, wakefulness will come in a blast of green: bush and grass and weeds and shambas. There will be some naked or half-naked kids whose only English is the word "ba-bye". Their mothers or guardians will grin at the glee with which the kids wave and will
greet me, too.

Morning will come with a pleasant surprise, with the sudden realisation of how vigorously life proceeds outside my dark, airless home.

And then the taxi. If we pass the good route, with the good road, at one point, roughly eight minutes of smooth cruising from home, we will pass under a hill that over a couple of years has transformed from wilderness and is now built up with new mansions. They are bright
white, gleaming and seducing you with the hope of how much is possible in Uganda.

Or if there is a traffic jam, we'll cut through the murrram, the rough, crooked, difficult murram path, over crumbpling, tightly-huddled hovels of mud, tin and plastic. On this route the taxi
is closer to the homes and you can even see sigiri steam emerging from behind the sheets of cotton that serve as doors in the daytime.

There are more naked kids. They say byebye as we roll past.

A Day In The Life

2009-02-03T07:02:00.001-08:00

It's hard to get out of bed. I snooze the alarm one and a half dozen times each morning. I cling to my last dreams like a suicide to the wall.
When I finally open my eyes I can't find the energy to move. I just lie there, prone and silent, weak and helpless, tangled and pinned down. When it rains my brain whispers to me, to urge those five more minutes, the words: "You are not going to feel better than this again." And I surrender to that sweet warm moment.

Of course when I do rise, brush my teeth and start the coffee, once the day is underway, I forgot completely how ensnared I was. All it took to break free, I'll think, as I sip strong and black, was the mere decision. Just say the word and you will be free.

But tomorrow I'll hit the snooze button 15 times again. I'll languish in that spiderweb of half dreams again. Every morning is a lesson I don't learn.

Similar Story (From somewhere on the Internet)

2009-01-11T23:57:00.000-08:00

I still don't know where this passage came from, but I wish I did. I hope you like it.

You never said you were sorry, so it’s such a similar story. I waited for your call until the sun was creeping backwards along the halls, a solicitor shrinking from a slammed door. My home was textured in black burlap folds and spring cold snaps. My feet scraped across a dirty wooden floor, watching and waiting for the static secrets the telephones hold in lines across the sky.

I never learned why you damned my name, never felt that ecclesiastical shame that was my inheritance of memory from you. I feel the tremor in my hands, regular and precise, when I grip the windowsill and look for your coming at the driveway. And as I sink into the rocking chair I dream of a wiser thing to say.

Believe in the green light. Happy New Year?

2009-01-02T05:07:00.001-08:00

Something might be made out of this one. Maybe this one will work. Maybe this one won't collapse to flaccid waste beneath our feet. This time something might be achieved. It has happened before— seeds have brought forth fruit, goals have been reached, there are days that have been seized. It has happened before. We might be pleasantly surprised, this time, to find that the weariness that was our only inheritance of the past year only inured us to coming winters and the feeling of weakness actually made us stronger. Who can tell yet? Maybe we have learnt our lesson. Maybe this time we will do better.

The sweet, slow, silent passage of time. Or, Still Life With Candle

2008-12-10T09:10:00.001-08:00

The candle beside my bed was hissing and sputtering. Something must have fallen into the wax and it was sending up little sparks. It was eleven forty-eight. I had just popped a piriton and was smoking. The nicotine and the antihistamine had found each other and blended in my blood, my narcotic intravenous lullaby. In a few minutes I would slip softly into the thirty-fourth year of my life. I blew out the candle so that I could fall asleep in silence. Happy birthday, loser.

(Photo from SridharanVenkat at Flickr)

It's going to rain.

2008-12-01T04:24:00.001-08:00

This day was hard and cold and gray as knives. The sky hung low. The distant detached voices of life as it is lived in this place zipped from face to face with the urgency and impatience of bullets. Things were being gathered out of the world, collected into shelter before the sagging sky finally collapsed. I felt in my pocket for my phone to make sure it was still there. On a day like this, I wanted that sudden buzz through the denim to vibrate against my skin, a call that would bring her to me, she who was brighter than the darkest rain.

In Situ

2008-09-29T04:04:00.001-07:00

I look at this room, the littered surfaces, the overflowing bookshelf, the bare tabletops, the fridge squatting apologetic and inappropriate in the corner and the vast empty swathe of floor under the bright naked lightbulb and I realise that this is not a place to live in. This is a place to light a desk lamp and work in. This is a place to adjust a tie, gulp down a coffee and go to work from. This is a place to pass through. This is not a place to live in.

The World I Know

2008-03-17T09:39:00.001-07:00

All the words that I've been readingHave now started the act of bleedingInto one. Into one.So I walk up on high, and I step to the edgeTo see my world belowAnd I laugh at myself as the tears roll downCos it's the world I know.(Ed Roland, lead singer of Collective Soul wrote that in 1995 (youtube of the video ).News is that the new Counting Crows album drops this month.

Like Novocaine

2008-03-07T08:52:00.001-08:00

She's got a dazzling smile
Brilliant white,
bright
enough to outshine my glaring deficiancies
She's a sweet distraction
she's pop music, she's comic books
she's novocaine.

She's novocaine. When I'm with her, I feel no pain
She's novocaine. She's novocaine. When I'm with her I feel no pain.

For Cavalier

2008-02-15T08:46:00.001-08:00

… and I am a Kampala city desk jockey with a moderate middle-class income. I live alone, a quiet, sub-ordinary life between the cigarettes I smoke to get me to sleep at night and the coffee I drink to keep me awake by day. I hate my job, but I have learnt to tolerate my workmates and I don't go to the bar when the day is done because I get too tired. My life has ground, over the years, down to a monotonous routine. Every day as grey and endless and devoid as the last. It seems that, like the tragic pawn in a horrible movie, I am trapped in endless rehash of the exact same day that I have to live over and over again. The only difference is every morning I launch into this day a little bit older. My life is being wasted right before my eyes.

And to make it worse, I can't find the energy for outrage. I am too tired.

I live in the third world and realise that this stupor is only the calm at the eye of the storm; that beyond this ring of bland yuppie routine furious streams of destruction whirl. How can I complain about my life when my own direst crisis is mere boredom?
I am less than a day's journey from the LRA, Darfur and Kivu, just two paychecks away from the slums at the bottom of the hill where the children die from the water they drink. I am less than a generation away from Idi Amin, and no idea how far or how close from whatever doom the future holds.

I don't know the future, but I know the past. I remember the past held moments of brilliance. One of those moments was a whole year long. Our veins coursed fire, that year, our laughter mocked the sky when we ran through bushes drunk and frightened, aware of every inch of our souls.

Maybe that is why I write this. Because I think that maybe I may still be …vital. Maybe if I look closer, more keenly observe the details, I will find a pulse.

Or even more: wonder, beauty. Maybe even meaning again. And it will be like that time we swore we were indestructible and dared fate to prove us wrong.

End of Days

2007-12-31T00:34:00.001-08:00

Flickr.com Photo from Laurel Harrish.

Does it bother you? After all the money, all the lovers and admirers, all the songs and all the praise, does it not bother you-- the lack of kindness? You have been a good Christian, but you have always been a mean person. Your heart was small and cruel, and you have always known that. Does it bother you? That your sins never caught up with you?

December 2007

2007-12-18T01:46:00.001-08:00

Taxi detours off the main road, to circumvent the traffic jam by squirreling through the pathways inside this neighbourhood. At some point I am looking through the open door of a guy's house. His walls are painted blue. Suddenly I feel disappointed. And I know it isn't the mundane discontentment that every sunset settles like dust over lives like mine. It is greater.

I feel let down by this millennium. The whole thing should have been... more outstanding. I don't expect any favours, I didn't expect life to necessarily be better, but I thought it would match the spectacle it came with.

I remember the last night of 1999, lying flat on my back on the lawns of Speke Resort, drunk witless, fireworks raging above me ripping the sky to shreds.

I left Munyonyo right after midnight, for Lugogo, where the convert was. Loud drums and guitars, Bell in plastic tumblers spilling their bright gold glow, stupid friends shouting dirty words, three girls squabbling over my bandanda; these were the first hours of the next thousand years.

How could they have come to this? Morose and exhausted in the back of a taxi, gazing listlessly at the open door of a poor man's house, his walls painted blue.

A long December

And there's reason to believe

Maybe this year will be better than the last.

I can't remember all the times

I've tried to tell myself to hold on

To these moments

As they past

Counting Crows

At Eight

2007-10-25T01:09:00.001-07:00

Good food, good company, a smile that sets eyes to music and afternoon slowly, gracefully fell away to evening. Eventually it was time to return to the litter of socks and buveera scattered all over my floor, the evidence of my act squandering all its opportunities of getting together.

But outside the café night had opened. There was thunder, and lightning; rain in rapid shards flashed through headlights. The easiest thing would be to surrender to warm desires, the hearth, and give up the night to entwining fingers, but life calls. Life demands. The socks, the kettle, the ironing board. The alarm clock.

A brief walk to the cab under a shared umbrella, a very bad joke about Rihanna's song that was as hilarious as it was awful, and I wondered for two seconds whether it bothered the cab driver very much when couples made out in his back seat.

Finally goodnight.

Not finally. She lingers and remains, in the tips of my fingers, until the next cup of coffee.

Friday

2007-10-04T00:26:00.001-07:00

The crisis of the week is behind me and the crisis of the weekend is still ahead. The road from the office to the taxi park is a silent interim between then and then. The flat soles of my sneakers pad slow steps out of the tarmac, my shoulders are low, my hands are in pockets and I am exhausted because I don't know how to relax.

The tasks of the next day loom, clumsily shaped, too bulky and for their insufficient hours. The image of rocks in a Pringles can flashes.

"I need some distraction. Some beautiful release."

The taxi. Whooshes into town. I wap on my phone, as if I haven't been on the web all day. Nahright.com, cracked.com, blogs, MSN Entertainment, I wikipedia every random question that flashes into my head.
There are eight planets in the solar system, and three dwarf planets. The dwarfs are Pluto, Ceres and… the taxi reaches my stop.

Luwum Street is quiet and empty at this time. But CD Electronics is still open. It opens late.

We used to communicate in Luganda, mine faltering, his fine; now we communicate in English, his faltering. I get The Hustle Season II and tell him I will be back for Kanyimbe tomorrow.

I shouldn't be watching DVD shows. I have so much work I am supposed to be doing.

I also get some airtime because she's waiting for me to call. I said I'd call before I go to bed. It is a quarter to ten and I know it will be 11:30 when I finally get home. Better call her now.

Dial while inside Mask Foods waiting for my chicken. Her voice is slow and sleepy. Sweet dreams.

I hate the taxi park and avoid it as much as I can, but something cannot be denied, certainly not now, caught suddenly in the swirling and writhing in the darkness of downtown. I realise that I have descended into the city's entrails. From its powdered face, to its guts.

Something cannot be denied. That even though I do hate the park, it is the part of Kampala where I feel most at home.

Fantasy

2007-08-22T08:46:00.001-07:00

I think of getting a call at 11:08 am, from a number with twelve digits. Her plane just landed in New York. She has just got her luggage and now she's sitting in an airport restaurant waiting for the ride to her hotel.

We are going to talk about the fat guy in the next aisle who kept hitting on the stewardess, and we're going to talk about the New York accents; we'll talk about the movie that was showing on the flight and she'll make me promise to rent it. I'll say I'll do that when she gets back.

And then ten minutes later she'll have to hang up because the taxi has arrived. I'll say goodnight and laugh at the obvious joke.

I am not fantasising about meeting that kind of girl. I have met her several times before.

I am fantasising about becoming that type of guy.

Give it a name

2007-07-23T04:15:00.000-07:00

Ma told me, son, one thing I know is true

Poison snake bites you, you're poison, too.

At night I feel the poison running through my veins…

(Gave it a name-Bruce Springsteen)

I used to want to be something great. Something noble, you know. Something I could admire. And up to very recently I believed that if I just got through the night, a few hours would meld into a couple of years and become enough distance between my failures and me. The failures of what I am will cease to be the failures that I am.

And then I could pick myself up and proceed to my something great.

But on this particular night, this still night, the water falling away from my walls, I know, what prizes were too costly. Forget glory. I will settle for peace.

I just want to sleep.

I have soared to and through enormous heights, and I have plummeted downwards, and through these altitudes and these depths the thrill of motion was rapturous.

But something was always missing, the very thing I held in my hands was the thing I never new. Greatness was always tarnished by its own lack. But now I want stillness. Just that.

And now I remember who has my matchbox 20 CD

2007-07-13T10:50:00.001-07:00

She said, "While you were sleeping
I was listening to the radio
And wondering what you're dreaming when
It came to mind that I didn't care
So I thought - hell if it's over...

"I had better end it quick
Or I could lose my nerve..."

Now. Moment.

2007-07-03T09:51:00.000-07:00

I have been reading and listening to dark, broody, melancholic or angry music for the past few. Time to offer something to the universal forces of Inspiration and Hope. This is something I stumbled upon quite by accident on NTV, would you believe it?

The show is called Jack & Bobby. Shows on Sunday nights.

"For some of you this night marks a return to your college life, for some
of you a new beginning. And so, upon the eve of the tremendous journey upon
which you are all embarking, I'd like to offer you a thought to take with you.
Listen carefully: you will fail here. All of you. College is not the culmination
of your high school career. It is the beginning of your adult life. Only it is a
slow sweet beginning that feels nothing like what life and all the attending
obligations will eventually bring. So fail here... This is your chance.

Do things you know you can't do, or think you can't do but hope in your
deepest most secret hidden heart that you can.

Be bad at things. Be embarrassed. Be vulnerable. Go out on a limb. Or two.
Or twelve.
The harder you fall, the farther you'll rise. And the louder you
fail, the clearer the distant bell of your future will ring. Failure is a gift.
Welcome it. There are people who spend their lives wondering how they became the
people they became, how certain chances passed them by and why they didn't take
the road less traveled. Those people are not you.

You have the front-row seat to your own transformation. And in
transforming yourself, you might just transform the world. Believe that, and
embrace the new person you're becoming.
This is your moment. Now.

http://www.jackandbobby.net/Scene_01.php

If I had known that earlier, I would not have hated Makerere so much...

If I could give all

2007-06-25T11:41:00.000-07:00

Sunday Morning:

Wrapped in a long towel and torsoed in a fraying wooly jumper, a tattered baseball cap sideways on his head, he is sitting on the veranda outside a messy house sipping at a mug of Good African Coffee, engrossed in the vigorous effort of trying to validate his stupid ass.

You see, the poor guy was both blessed and burdened with a restless mind, the kind that cannot resist obsession and yet is repulsed by the easy and the obvious.

Restlessness is my nemesis.

Sometimes I look on my achievements and appropriations, and say “I am a giant.”

Then at night, I look in the mirror and I am five-eight, weighing a buck fifty.

This morning it is cold. I didn’t sleep last night. My house is a mess. I am short and skinny.

Told you I was stupid.

Because none of that is true. Even I don’t know what my real size is— I am everywhere I have ever been; I am here now, I am then and I am everything I will ever be— Is that a good thing? Is that something to be proud of? Should I be ashamed? Depends on where I've been and where I'm going, I guess.

Sunday morning, I don't know where I'm going.

Then there is a sudden power cut. Game Over, by Dr Dre and Scarface, from ‘Face’s 1997 album Untouchable, had been on the CD player. Now murder and death, that had been tumbling out of the door onto my back, sharply ceases, and the house behind falls abruptly silent.

The day has returned. Time to go get a shower in, put on some clothes and go into the town. There are things to do.

Places I need to be going to.

Monday night:

I never lied, I never said those things! You lied! You lied to yourself, and then you lied to me with those lies; you made me believe that you believed me!

Now that the truth comes out, I am the bad guy?

Why do I feel guilty when I tell people I am not in love with them?

Monday night? I am small and brittle and light.

If I could give all my love to you
I would justify myself,
you're a pill to ease the pain of all the stupid things I do

Remorse, at last

2007-05-29T09:24:00.001-07:00

All my life I been considered as the worst
Lyin to my mother, even stealin out her purse
Crime after crime, from drugs to extortion
I know my mother wished she got a fuckin abortion
She dont even love me like she did when I was younger
Suckin on her chest just to stop my fuckin hunger

I wonder if I died, would tears come to her eyes?
Forgive me for my disrespect, forgive me for my lies.

-Biggie.

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A brief conversation with Sanaa Lathan

2007-05-17T03:17:00.001-07:00

I put the juice down. "There are times I have seen you on screen, and I have laughed and at times I have lusted, and I've looked and seen a two-dimensional, fictional being, a story device. Then at times when I have seen you and I have cared, you know? Really, deeply wanted you to survive, to win, to get through the crisis, and be happy. And not just because of how good you look, or how funny you are, but because of who you are. I fucking cry at movies. I am a wimp."

"You don't have to be a wimp to cry at movies," she said.

"Oh yes, you do. It's the definition."

She decided not to argue with that. "But you realise that when you don't want the bad guy to get me, that it's just a movie. It isn't reality."

"It's art," I said. "Art is superior to reality."

"But if it came down to a fistfight, who would win? Art or reality?"

"I don't want to contemplate that. I am afraid of what I'll find."

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People have called this the greatest rock song ever written

2007-05-16T08:00:00.001-07:00

You can hide 'neath your covers
And study your pain
Make crosses from your lovers
Throw roses in the rain
Waste your summer praying in vain
For a savior to rise from these streets

Well now I'm no hero
That's understood
All the redemption I can offer, girl
Is beneath this dirty hood
With a chance to make it good somehow
Hey what else can we do now

Except roll down the window
And let the wind blow back your hair
Well the night's busting open
These two lanes will take us anywhere
We got one last chance to make it real
To trade in these wings on some wheels
Climb in back
Heaven's waiting on down the tracks...

-Thunder Road

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White Lies

2007-05-11T11:29:00.001-07:00

We think we are more evil than we really are. We think we sin more than we actually do.

Not because we are righteous, but because in an office next to a phone, in front of a keyboard and a monitor, you don't have a whole lot of room to manoeuvre. You are only as evil as your options, right?

You don't even lie that much. Not even white lies.

Tomorrow I travel out of town to attend the funeral of my brother-in-law's father.

Now, the crux: I don't like my brother in law. I don't mean the general grey absence of affection that most people feel (feel an absence?) for their in-laws. I mean I despise him. For things he failed to do, and mostly for not being ashamed of his failure. I have great contempt for him.

Also, I never knew the old man. I do have a picture in my head of a thin, tall, dark fellow with high cheekbones -- a rural face wearing an urban suit, smiling like a groom's father at the wedding almost ten years ago. I didn't even speak to him then. Just shook hands.

Tomorrow I will be standing by his grave, looking solemn, there because of his son. I would like to say to his son, "I wish there was less loss and sorrow in the world. I wish people never had to weep. I wish I was in Kampala with friends right now, and I wish your father was also elsewhere, perhaps at his farm, with his friends, and I wish all these grieving strangers had no cause for grief."

But I will not feel for him. I just do not feel for him.

So when the time comes, I will lie, and say, "I am sorry for your loss."

That is my sin of the week. A doozie.

"Beneath the dust and love and sweat that hang on everybody,

There's a dead man trying to get out."

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Noble Aspirations

2007-05-04T02:39:00.001-07:00

Go easy on my conscience
'Cause it's not my fault
I know I've been taught
To take the blame

As my soul heals the shame
I will grow through this pain
Lord I'm doing all I can
To be a better man

It's come to this. Quoting Robbie Williams...

Don't pick lemons.
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Hey.

2007-04-13T09:53:00.000-07:00

Lost in a gaze
The narcotic haze
Of who and what she is to me
Caught by surprise
Reflected in her eyes
The guy I want to be

Nandos at lunch time:

2007-04-03T07:22:00.001-07:00

Looking around-- a hundred people and a dozen perspectives, viewpoints, opinions, convictions. On God, destiny, love, family, money, morality, death

The thing with complex questions is that they don't have simple answers. That guy believes God is wrathful and intractable and must be approached with fear. You think God is merciful and loving. Your views contradict each other's so one of you must be wrong? Not necessarily. See that woman in the corner? She has a view of God that reconciles both your positions

It is possible that all these diverse views of the world are partly right, some more than othersthat we all have a bit of the truth, some more than others.

More likely, however, that we are all wrong. The history of man shows that we consistently cock things up.

We all believed that slavery was ordained by God, that women were inferior to men, that it was the holy duty of the white man to colonise the dark continent, that pagans and heathens deserved to die, that people from different tribes must not marry each other, that beautiful people were better people, money could buy happiness, you could judge a book by its cover

There are so many different worlds

So many different suns

And we live in different ones

Dire Straits

Our wills and stuff do so contrary run

2007-03-01T10:50:00.000-08:00

This is why I hate being human. It is these things inside, these renegade surges of hormones that will not submit to the governance of our reason.

Emotions. You can't control.

"Once more my feelings have succeeded in confusing me."

I know, for a fact, and I tell myself these things: She is better off without me. Hell, I am better off without her.
But still I feel hurt.

I tell myself I have nothing to fear, I can do this. People have have done this a million times.
Still I feel anxious.

I tell myself that these things they prize as prime values are superficial and trivial – gloss and gossamer. But still, in spite of all the tricks I have learnt to hide it, I am a shy motherfucker and even if I don’t show it, I feel it.

On this day I broke up with someone over the phone. I said, “We can’t do this any more.”
She said, “Okay.”

There.

Now the mad whirl of feelings can begin, soul in storm, heart to tempests. Because this is how it feels to be relieved. I hate this.

I am not overly concerned
With the status of my emotions
"Oh," she says, "We're changing."
"But were always changing," it does not bother me to say.
This isn't love.
Because if you dont want to talk about it then it isn't love
And I guess Im going to have to live that.
But, I'm sure theres something in a shade of gray
Or something in between...

-Counting Crows.

A very private joke

2007-02-27T08:11:00.000-08:00

"We carry within us the seeds of our own redemption. Remember that."
"Aphorims. You carry within your mouth the seeds for more aphorisms. I have learnt from observing you that those things breed. "
"What things?"
"Those cutesy little maxim-lets you delight in so much. The regurgitation of one inspires the regurgitation of others. I am sure this talk of seeds is not over."
"I am trying to give you advice, Junior."
"And you expect me to accept it graciously? Dad, have you learnt nothing in all these years?"
"You’re right. What was I thinking?"
"Hah hah! You let your enthusiasm override your principles! Hah hah!"
"Hah hah hah!"

You know those things...

2007-02-16T10:34:00.000-08:00

You tossed a blanket from the bed. You lay upon your back, and waited. You dozed, and watched the night revealing the thousand sordid images of which your soul was constituted. They flickered against the ceiling. And when all the world came back, and the light crept up between the shutters, and you heard the sparrows in the gutters, you had such a vision of the street as the street hardly understands; sitting along the bed's edge, where you curled the papers from your hair or clasped the yellow soles of feet in the palms of both soiled hands.

T.S. Eliot (Reconstituted)

Face of a sinner, hands of a priest

2007-02-02T09:14:00.000-08:00

I almost did it on the phone. She called at work. I wish I was a real asshole. A real asshole would have been smiling now.

There's a moon over Bourbon Street tonight
I see faces as they pass beneath the pale lamplight
I've no choice but to follow that call
The bright lights, the people, and the moon and all
I pray everyday to be strong
For I know what I do must be wrong
The brim of my hat hides the eye of a beast
I've the face of a sinner but the hands of a priest
Oh you'll never see my shade or hear the sound of my feet
While there's a moon over Bourbon Street
-Sting

No, don’t worry. I am not going to hurt anyone. Just piss someone off.

How do you say No when someone asks you if you love them?

2007-01-25T10:28:00.000-08:00

Perpetual bewilderment. Every time I slow down enough for some-- even if it is merely cursory-- self-examination, I come up with this.

From the melancholic mornings to the euphoric evenings, then the insomia at night and the catatonia at dawn, just shuttling between altered states.

This is the cost of ignorance. This is because two years ago I decided that I didn't want to know myself any more. I decided that self-awareness as overrated and I just wanted to be normal.

Now I am a stranger to myself and look how I constantly surprise me with how cruel and cold-hearted I can be.

Like the present period

2006-11-02T05:41:00.000-08:00

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way--in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

Famous Opening of Tale of Two Cities

Charles Dickens

Valium

2006-10-20T10:47:00.000-07:00

Some facts about me: I think I am a broken person. I seriously question the road my life has taken and I endlessly rehash the compromises I have made in my life. I have an unsecure and vaguely crappy job with an amoral corporation so that I don't have to worry about money. I put up with halfway relationships so as not to have to worry about loneliness. I have lost the ability to recapture the purer feelings of my younger years in exchange for a streamlined narrow-mindedness that I assumed would propel me to "the top." What a joke.
Compromise is said to be the way of the world and yet I find myself feeling sick trying to accept what it has done to me: the little yellow pills, the lost sleep. But I don't think this is anything new in the world.

Douglas Coupland

From Life After God

Sound familiar

2006-09-25T08:06:00.001-07:00

It has been said that Vogons are not above a little bribery and corruption in the same way that the sea is not above the clouds, and this was certainly true in his case. When he heard the words “integrity” or “moral rectitude”, he reached for his dictionary, and when he heard the chink of ready money in large quantities he reached for the rule book and threw it away.

From The Restaurant at The End of The Universe, by Douglas Adams

Beginnings

2006-09-19T01:49:00.000-07:00

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour). I know, however, of a young chronophobiac who experienced something like panic when looking for the first time at homemade movies that had been taken a few weeks before his birth. He saw a world that was practically unchanged—the same house, the same people—and then realized that he did not exist there at all and that nobody mourned his absence. He caught a glimpse of his mother waving from an upstairs, and that unfamiliar gesture disturbed him, as if it were some mysterious farewell. But what particularly frightened him was the sight of a brand-new baby carriage standing there on the porch, with the smug, encroaching air of a coffin; even that was empty, as if, in the reverse course of events, his very bones had disintegrated.

-Vladimir Nabokov, from Speak Memory

I'm no different

2006-09-13T03:03:00.000-07:00

The skills I own have too many names. If I could take myself and put myself to one final, irrevocable purpose, I would do it. Even if it finished me. Because every man wants to know that he matters. You know? That he accomplishes something. Even if he dies. I want a fair maiden to rescue, dragons to slay. Or I could be the dragon: no difference. Not one that matters anymore. Every man wants that. I’m no different. The skills I own are repeated in a slightly altered loop. If I could perpetuate myself in a string of absolute variables, I would do it. Even if it stereotyped me. Because every man wants to be constant, a pole star of value, of frailties that can be acclaimed as the hubris of demigods, the kind of frailty that will uplift, not despise. The kind of frailty that spirals away from the loop, disintegrates it, so the loop doesn't matter anymore. Every man wants that. 'I’m so different.'

-Don't remember the source. Long time ago

For Cavalier

Day In The Life III

Till human voices wake us, and we drown

One of my favourite parts of The Great Gatsby

Almost Doesn't Count

Press Play

The pleasure was all mine

End of Days

Round Midnight

Iguana.

The yard is a place where all the youngsters gather on Friday nights to meet and listen to music.

Where the heart is

Things

Look at this morose m**f** here. Looks like somebody done s** in his cereal

Two Men

Over the bridge

So Long Since I've Seen The Ocean

A Day In The Life II

A Day In The Life

Similar Story (From somewhere on the Internet)

Believe in the green light. Happy New Year?

The sweet, slow, silent passage of time. Or, Still Life With Candle

It's going to rain.

In Situ

The World I Know

Like Novocaine

For Cavalier

End of Days

December 2007

At Eight

Friday

Fantasy

Give it a name

And now I remember who has my matchbox 20 CD

Now. Moment.

If I could give all

Remorse, at last

A brief conversation with Sanaa Lathan

People have called this the greatest rock song ever written

White Lies

Noble Aspirations

Hey.

Nandos at lunch time:

Our wills and stuff do so contrary run

A very private joke

You know those things...

Face of a sinner, hands of a priest

How do you say No when someone asks you if you love them?

Like the present period

Valium

Sound familiar

Beginnings

I'm no different

Look at this morose mf here. Looks like somebody done s** in his cereal