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I swear I have been battling with my discipline and am confident that I lack it. Self-discipline.

Men, it’s likely that I need enforced discipline for the consequences of violating a rote. I wish I could administer this penalty to myself where, “Forgetting means push-ups. Bowing to temptations means sit-ups. Loosing things means docked wages. Lack of respect means seriously long runs with heavy back-packs. Desertion means confinement and other punitive measures that makes one a have the regimen of a uniformed officer”

Temptations. They are like a virulent virus that attacks the body riding it of vital immunity to fight it off. If you think that struggling with disciplinary issues is thus bad, wait a minute. My crystal balls tell me that temptations and indiscipline go hand in hand. If only I was self-disciplined, chances are I would have changed my fortunes given that I would have been able to finish some of the small projects that I work on when I commit. When I don’t, I end up having hanging projects.

You are probably wondering about this indiscipline thing. Well, I promised myself that I would write at least once a week and be consistent. I have lost that war. I write only when I feel like and given that I don’t subject myself through any  pain, I end up being the regular joe who has nothing to die for other that seeing the next day.

The last time I wrote about a writer’s block which I am slowly accepting is inanity from a lazy writer like me who felt like we suffer from it at some point. Serious writers don’t suffer from this illusion. You don’t get a driver saying he is suffering from a driver’s block, ok. I think serious writers wake up and realize that, “I have to feed myself and those who depend on me for survival. And maintain a certain standard.” So, they write. They do it by wreaking havoc, chasing adventure, building castles in the air, mulling somewhere in an isolated sanctuary or even in the bed after sex.  Even if what they write does not make sense. Because there is something spiritual and emotional about penning a thought, that jiggy jiggy feeling.

Officially, I can confess that I write illegibly. Two guys can't be wrong to say the same thing in a span of one week. That they could not decipher what I did put down in black and white, telling me, “Come up again, try it in another way”, it only means that I should simplify my words. Or better still, I need an editor to offer free service till that time I will feel charitable and philanthropic enough to dish out some few shekels by advising if am going overboard.

My indiscipline has cost me. You see, I have been writing in my dreams, splendid openers, delectable bodies and edgy conclusions that are not necessarily an anticlimax. Sadly, most of my stories never see the light of day. They are decoded but never encoded (Whatever! Whichever comes first). A while back when I used to love reading, an author told his audience that in the interest of retaining those abrupt thoughts, you always need a small notebook to pen down the thought because you can easily forget if you try to recall later. It’s true because all I had mused over, contemplating to write here has failed to summon up.

Back in the days when I had a smartphone, I would do that with ease, occasionally when I felt like. Thus, the writing app that I have forgotten the name became my notebook. I would scribe down the thoughts and wait for a time they would be relevant on this blog because my social media platforms are as barren as the ideas that sometimes never see the light of day in my writing. One day, when I grow up, I will be courageous enough to introduce guys to my ‘illegible prose’. When am sure that I have come of age. When I have money, and am independent and can be able to promote the blog on two serious social media platforms with financial ease.

The worst form of indiscipline that will eventually wreck my desired career is procrastination. By now, I should have got the result of a certain application I was making online whether I was to go to the next stage or not. I procrastinated a lot never did the second stage which had a timeline of the online application having finished the first. I did simulations of what I was expected to do, failed lugubriously and got discouraged. I ended up blowing the chance, the only one that I had in probably being a better paid proletariat. Hey, it’s never that serious, right?

My current employer also invited me for training to supplement the few skills to reduce on uncertainty when there was paucity of tasks online. I am currently doing what I came to learn are called secondary skills and men, it’s a hustle. I think, I probably went low on confidence, and when I was finally assessed for the task, a primary skill that has continuous workflow, I failed to reach the pass mark. Like the job I had applied for, there was the training bit before finally doing the final assessment that is graded. I flopped and am now thing of retaking the exam. I don’t know when but I will retake it, another episode of derailing from the norm.

The worst of it all is starting to write, then, in the middle of the collating those thoughts into a seamless flow, an imp comes, tells me to visit the net to find out what others are saying about what I am writing. Obviously, I should do this before I start writing, steal a few phrases and lurid thoughts here and there before I can finally put down my rumination on paper. Folks, I swear I am the reckless type who writes and when I feel like I need a certain phrase, I switch tabs to Google, then searches till I find something I wanted or next to what I wanted.

That boils down to the fact that I rarely have all words as my own, it’s natural if you are not a fulltime pen pusher. I search and get befitting thoughts from various sites online and to be true to myself, I steel some with no reference, in a nutshell, I am a sentences thief. And that is a plausible reason why my cogency is at stake given those two guys I have intimated about earlier could not comprehend what I was annulling at. Which is bad, bad because a writer should be understood at the first glance failure of which you risk losing an audience.

Looking at my fingers, there is dirt under the fingernails and this grey gunk is making me feel like I have turned into a skunk. Some guy wrote online that those stuff are keratin debris that should not worry you because they are ‘pretty harmless’, but who knows.  Not that I am normally dirty, it’s only that I love keeping my nails short to reduce the hatred I have for crap under my fingernails. Boy, I love my nails short, but the nail cutter I have that is almost celebrating its fourth year is not doing me any justice. It has become hell of a blunt cutter but I rarely buy nail cutters, and if I do, they get stolen or go misplaced. Luckily, this one has survived that long because I normally hide it inside my hanged coat once I have finished using it.

My neighbor is one crazy chap. I have a love hate relationship with his free Wi-Fi. Browsing through the net, I realized that Wi-Fi is probably not the abbreviation for ‘wireless fidelity’ as some chap tried to argue. BS.  Apparently, this neighbor only feels like he should put the Wi-Fi on when he is feeling like and not when I need it. As opposed to a certain burger who wanted to hack into the neighbor’s free Wi-Fi on his android phone and he got a just answer on Quora, I managed to find the password to their free Wi-Fi when someone ‘accidently’ logged into a gadget that I use and I realized it saved the password. And because we have not renewed our own subscription on this end, I normally creep on it when I want to access the net. Cost cutting measures unorthodoxically, but do I say.

The other day while working, I was about to enter the submit button and when I checked down on the network signal, I saw five empty bars looking at me given that the network had shown remiss moments before, which I had overlooked. Of course, I had been saying, “I will buy airtime to counter the likelihood of lost Wi-Fi to take advantage of my modem.” That only happened happened when shit came to shove and I had to wake up very early probably being the first guy in the neighborhood kiosk. Yenyewe, kutegemea vya bure ni kutupa mbao.

Talking of free things, I have postponed finishing online courses that I should have finished by now because they are free. As such, we should hate free things  reason being they are free. And we should hate free things with the contempt it deserves because they are not worth the much. Free things more often than not abridge the quality of what we want. They also make us lazy. They induce the 'mbekho' mentality, reduce the incentive the donor affords and encourage lethargy among us. On my part, I seriously need deliverance and cure from free things. Do you?

Hasta la vista baby.

P/S: If only it was free wifey. And I will reward myself when I manage to stick to a rote for even a month.

[Picture source: Google Images]

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AND THEN THERE WAS DREAMING

Events happen that we never plan, but they just happen.

A cousin and an uncle got really sick they had to go for medical checkup prompting me to make a crass comment that the number of my kin kicking the bucket had slimmed down in the recent years in my extended family.

Well, there was a time my old man would journey from one interment to the other and I kept asking myself what spell had befallen us to witness so many relations succumbing in quick succession in a certain season. The portentous spate would cease then another would befall us, again. One time in a skewed pattern, the other in a string of events. Unforeseen as it was, the experiences were chilling. Obviously, then like now, we talked about the probability of the cause being the dreaded disease in hushed tones.

Unfortunately, as a guy who has come of age, there is never an explanation about the cause of death and how abrupt these folks die. Death just comes, perhaps, it should be planned. No, it shouldn’t, because I also fear death, the abruptness is just fine for now. The only part I hate is that it intrudes unexpectedly and robs us of loved ones we never expected would give in that fast. Thus, sometimes these are the incidents that take me to the countryside. To go grieve with kinfolks and rekindle and strengthen filial bonds that have been weakened by capitalism and distance. Albeit work and marriage distances us, still, blood is thicker than water. Oh, Christmas also takes me back to my roots but I don’t feel the vibe like I used to when I was growing up.

I reminisce with nostalgia the yore days that have evanesced. Apparently, I have even forgot what I wanted to write about here because of looking up for something I had written down. Poor me, am I this poor in memory? It was a hot thought. Something that you get the gist of while scribing what you had planned. It really pains that I am struggling to remember it like an exam question that will give me the coveted grade. It’s not right to admit that you have forgotten something as a writer. It seems that the cues that I normally rely on to recollect the pieces of thoughts have also failed me. Oh boy, that’s life.

Moving forward. Owning an analogue phone has never been this nice. I remember watching a certain program on telly where a young couple were planning to go for a vacation in some lonely island in Tahiti. They had a choice of three destinations. The first was a well-manicured island that was nested in a 20-acre piece of land going for $21,000 a week. The second was an island that offered a perfect scenery for viewing the sea underneath from their bedroom and it had been constructed by a carpenter giving it a unique touch and feel but also offered internet available for $12,000 for 10 days. The third was a semi-private sanctuary with an amazing pictorial sense of the mountains they had to share with 2 others in what offered the best bargain in terms of luxury, I thought they would settle for it since it was on offer for $13,000 for ten days. The body language of the lady in their final interview before settling on the priciest island gave in to suggest she wanted the more expensive one even though the man had talked about cutting costs and getting a place where they would be comfortable and free from the hustles of work.  In a way, ladies sometimes are no different in their life’s desires. They still love the costliest and if you can afford, give it to her because you never know when the chicken will come home to roost.

So, like the couple who went on vacation to relish time away from the constant noise of computers and phones, and let their minds roam free, I decided to take a sabbatical to go to the rurals with my phone that has no internet and away from my computer that is constantly keeping me abuzz because of Wi-fi. I wanted a destination that discouraged connectivity and the dings and beeps of modern technology. I wanted to unplug; to feel relaxed and rejuvenated by visiting the countryside.

Obviously, I go for days without receiving phone calls, so si ati I was being distracted by it, it is just that you must mention some things because unataka kujaza kurasa. That’s how unnetworked and seemingly unimportant I am. On the positive side, the phone has Tetris, I loved to play it on Brick Game when I was young. These days when I am bored and want to induce sleep when am insomniac, I play it the same way guys become busy with their Whatsapp, Facebook and social media manenos et al. But given that the game can be boring, I sometimes just make castles in the air thinking of my next big write up. Which may or may not be effectuated because when Bruno Mars sang the ‘Lazy Song’, he had buggers like me in mind. A guy who doesn’t feel like doing anything but wants to have a girlfriend he cannot maintain. Oh, a guy on Twitter did tweet that only broke buggers don’t have girlfriends. Kaboom. A guy who thinks that he can outpour his emotions on the web because that is another avenue for being lazy because writing is like a lazy job. But hey! Am just a man. So, I can be lazy sometimes.

Sometimes back in what used to be described as the ominous month in Kenya, that is in August, I had about three or four dreams about quietus. By death I mean I was seeing images of those long gone in my dreams doing normal stuff in my presence. If I was to interpret them the way I felt then, I had a feeling that someone I knew was going to succumb but I never knew who. It’s only while writing this piece that I decided to find out the correlation that exists between death dreams and life situations. Clicking on the first link which I believe is truthful to some extent, I discovered that such dreams normally signal something new in life. It means that a certain phase has elapsed and a fresh one is bound to begin. Or it can be an attempt to resolve anxiety or anger directed to the self. I will stick to that latter version of interpretation and try not to overinterpret the real meaning that has been researched by academics and professionals of repute.

Here is why. A couple of months ago I was feeling low and downcast. My morale was low and all I ever thought of was the fact that the world was against me. I hence retreated to my reclusive cocoon where I could hide and feel sorry for myself because life had granted me lemon at the expense of a lemonade even though I have toiled and moiled for quite some time now. I had so many insecurities, but now I am coping up. I am feeling like am rejuvenating. I am building up slowly, and that is why I can attest to the fact that the dreams were preparing me for steadfastness. Something new will surely happen.

Then………

When one of my distant grandfathers who was still in workforce collapsed and was admitted to the hospital, I had a feeling that he was not going to make it. And when results came that his brain was affected, I knew that it he had to fight for his life because the impact had resulted in brain hemorrhage. He finally succumbed after a while. Just about the same time he was admitted to the hospital, my mum broke her ankle and suffered a severe cut that almost cost her a leg because of the non-ending construction that my old man loves engaging in. Luckily, with his henchmen, they have sealed the stoned-filled-hole that would have posed a catastrophe to the many relations who visit my home because my mum does have an affectionate heart because she welcomes all and sundry who visit her without prejudice. I don’t want to speculate what would have happened if it were another person who suffered the injury because the gossip mill that find its way in the village can be quite venomous.

Consequently, two things took me back to the countryside, one was to go see my mum, the other was to go bury my distant grandfather. While I had not intentioned to travel back home, I felt that I had to owing to the intensity of the situation.

For someone of my ilk, I normally have the option of taking the modest Easy Coach or Guardian bus, a spacious shuttle, the comfortable Wish cars or a plane to jet out to the hot and lakeside city that is my hometown. Where the police were forced to erect a battalion to counter the bigheadedness of these folks who love truancy when they feel ‘Baba’ is aggrieved or under siege by the ruling class that has given the most beloved and hated personality with equal share from Bondo a run for his money towards being the president. As a matter of fact, my shallow pockets make me a perfect commuter for the less expensive road as a means of transport to my humble destination. Am aware that my body sometimes feels like it wants to take a flight but the fact that the plane is normally overbooked because reliable sources usually tell me so, I am obliged to use the road. (White lie because if I use a plane, I will be flat broke and may even fail to take the journey back to the city in the sun).

Going to Kisumu after a hiatus of about seven months means that I am bound to see new stuff while on my way. I had contemplated booking a night bus but rescinded the decision and opted for a ‘posh’ shuttle. It had been long before I went back because I normally use a personal car each time I snake out of this city, which was not available this time round. While I had thought I would part with almost a G, I parted with Sh100 less than the actual amount I had budgeted for. I realized that old habits die hard. While there are so many vehicles offering the same services or probably even better given that there are some that serve biscuits and bottled mineral water, I did stick to the one I have been using since time immemorial. Oh! Mineral water was at some point christened ‘funeral water’ because guys from the city would arrive clutching on the bottles afraid that the river water or pond water they were supposed to drink would cause them to have stomach complications after consuming the liquid. Kwani watu wa ushago wako na acids aina gani kwa tumbo wamesurvive hio miaka yote.

That day, I realized that there are sixteen seater matatus on our roads. Just tells you how clueless I am when it comes to long distance public haulage. I normally keep the cash I have in Mpesa to avoid the temptation of using it on unplanned spurges because like every other Kenyan, I join the bandwagon of the existential phrase that ‘Uchumi ni mbaya’, Times are hard for a guy whose income is so skewed that even if I tried to come up with a Kurtosis, I will end up with an abnormal curve. Mutatis Mutandis (sic). I feel like a faux hero barrister having erroneously used that legal phrase. Hio ndio ubaya wa kusoma kwingi. Unatumia maneno bila kuhakikisha maana falsafa, ati bora uonekane umetumia hio mistari, hili basi ni swala nyeti linalohitaji uchunguzi wa kina. Kubaff. Roughly translated, the best thing about reading a lot is that you develop an unrivalled diction so much so that you become very wise and intelligent even in matters law. And that bruh, is the reason why I bestow upon myself the phrase, the neo sagacious blogger- That Kubaff bit. It’s like what Thomas Edison’s mum lied about when she told him that he was a genius. That deserves a ceteris paribus. Can I get a kudos for my brilliance in getting things on point in Swahili?

Kudos bro.

I chose the backseat where I could peer out of the window and thought that I could also open and savor the cool breeze once in a while when I was feeling like I was developing some beaded sweat on my forehead. A situation that came to naught because the weather worked to reverse the probability of such an occurrence. Since I had worked for close to eight hours nonstop that day before boarding the car, I thought that I would recline on the seat and sleep the exhaustion away. I sprawled uncomfortably on my seat twitching and turning to find a good position for seamless sleep. The legroom in the vehicle was terse. I slept intermittently and decided to sleep no more by staying astir.

A small-scale trader who was seated next to me was also encroaching on my space because he had very long legs and hairy hands. I could tell he was one because he was constantly looking at the goods he had carried when the boot was being open for a passenger to pick his luggage. When he arrived, he was all sweaty because he looked like someone who was rushing. I silently praying that the lady who I saw outside to be the person who would sit next to me because she looked decent and spruced. But when this ruffian of a guy who I noticed had traces of dirt on his trouser sat next to me, I cursed inwardly because he turned out to be a space bully and sleeping while leaning on me. At some point, he raided my space leaving my legs to squirm for a small section as he opened his feet as wide as he could. I felt like giving him a tirade of his life but rescinded and waited until that point when he had readjusted his position and I reclaimed my space.

Along the way, I could hear him speaking to various people on his two analogue Chinese phones with that annoying ringtone. At some point, he was saying he was interested in a certain lady but did not know how to approach her. She also talked to another who was noncommittal on him visiting her and checking on his various business that he wanted closed at around 2000hrs.

In Nakuru, which is the nourishing hub for those who are heading to or from the Western side of Kenya, I remember having a chat with a certain guy who started a conversation about the fact that the ruling party was already prepared for the next re-run election. He went on tell me that he had read somewhere that Raila had decided to step down in favour of Uhuru after many unsuccessful trials. Rogue bloggers have a way of writing what the audience wants to hear I swear. He told me that in the event Raila had gone to the media and said that in the past three elections he had participated in, the elections were being stolen from him, he would have cemented his position in history and would have received international acclamation. Well, I thought he was right but at the end of the day, a warrior in a battle never concedes until he has been defeated in the field of fury. I loved the way he was analyzing the political space in the country and like any other layman, he was just what I call a pedestrian analyst. There is nothing much I did pick from his analysis that I never knew.

I arrived in Kisumu late and took a bus to my village. The day I arrived was the wake night for my grandfather and I could hear dirges on the public address that was hired for the night. Feeling tired, I slept like a baby because I am the kind who sleeps and fails to notice that something has happened if I am tired.

I guess the fact that one stays in the rurals makes him or her develop a penchant for attending funerals as if it is a requirement by tradition. There is this lady who I met with an uncle a day after my grandfather had been buried asking whether the body of the person who was to be buried in the area had been bought. It was around 1400hrs and she was telling us how our Luhya neighbours bury people faster as opposed to us who sometime bury at 1800hrs because of this ‘neno’ thing. ‘Yawa jumalo iko pio. Parie ni ahae iko kuno to koro adhie e liel mokel cha.’

My old man had wanted me to accompany him to another funeral but when the politics of heading there became too much, I decided not to go given that I was also planning to drive my uncle who had offered a free ride for me back to the city in his car. Guys in love freebies back home but when it comes to work, they will never do voluntary stuff even though they may be forced to. I was planning to extend my stay but when I realized that I was going to save some chapaa and not have to struggle in a public car, I decided to take advantage of the offer. Not that I was saving much but it was an opportunity I could not resist. Public or private transport, private wins for me.

He drove till Nakuru and boy, I hate slow drivers. But for a guy in his fifties, that was bound to happen. At the junction heading to Muhoroni, some boys in blue who were paper hungry stopped us for no apparent reason because the guy was doing sixty kmph and when the searched for mistakes and could not find one, the police decided to ask for lunch on realizing that my uncle works for a big parastatal. Obviously, being the kind of guy who does not love conflicts, he gave him some few notes and off we went.

When we stopped for lunch, we had this conversation about unemployment and whether I was employed and he was bitter that his two sons had worked hard in school, but were still jobless years after finishing campus. Then I remembered my uncle who dropped out of primary school before finishing jibing how guys have gone to school to university level but they don’t have commendable jobs while we were assisting a certain motorcycle rider who was transporting tents we had used for the function back at home. I felt like he was talking about me but decided not to evoke emotions because comments like those deserve silence as a response.

Hasta La Vista Baby.

[Picture Source: Pixabay]

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DEARTH

Writer’s block finally catches up with you. Your brain feels like mush. And procrastination takes the better of you. You try to mull deeply what to scribe about but nothing seems to be forthcoming, not even freewriting. It’s like you are in a desert and you cannot find your way out. This scarcity of thoughts gives you a blow like a Mayweather punch. You easily forget that which you wanted to put in black and white. Then you find you are wallowing in self-pity. Only fathoming but never penning delectable mental imagery. You wonder how you can channel the mental distress in a serendipity.

Anyway.

You know you had been having upbeat moments until the job you are doing decided to smirk you on the face through the adjustment of your hourly earning back to square one. Because they assigned you new tasks. Truth is, it’s not only devastating but also disheartening. That you have worked so hard to achieve a certain milestone, then all of a sudden that does not matter anymore.

I tell you, working online can cut both ways like a doubled edged sword. There are weeks you will find yourself having a reliable and stable income while there are others you will be in total disarray. Then you start wondering what is wrong. Then you remember you have a program as your paymaster which is thus bad. You work but cannot be able to ascertain how tasks have been codified using machine learning. You even don’t know how your earning algorithm is worked out. But you just work, work because you have a dearth of cash. And when you have no one to intimate the hurt you are feeling, you turn up to your blog. The blog because it also has no feelings but will tell the world if someone does care out there.

Plus, it offers solace, it offers an avenue to tell it that you have been having down moments after your pay was clashed by more than half yet you still struggle to do the same amount of work in the same environment but the motivation has dwindled. You no longer feel like you enjoy what you do, instead the deep-seated desire plummets as time flies. You try to piece up the reasons and even ask yourself, “Why me? And not the others”. Then you tell God, “You gat this.” Just to console yourself that things will look up like they used to do.

But this is not the first time that this is happening. It’s a déjà vu. Employers have reneged on their initial contract they had with you and this now does not look different in a bad way. It’s just that it makes you feel less worthy of a person. It makes you feel like a coin that can be tossed without care of where it lands. Or is it that a die has been cast and you are waiting while you should look for things abound other than restricting your breadth? Perhaps widening your perspective to get out of constantly being at a limbo.

That said, a real man never complains or becomes bitter. A real man learns from the past and make alchemy out of lemon situations. You push hard next time. Push till you cannot push anymore. If you get to that place between a rock and a hard place, you decide to face it one with an IED that you conjure up in the midst of time.

Enough of masquerading in this bulshit, well that word, the way it has been used was not the intention. It happened. Writer’s block is not real. It’s a mental creation and a dearth of imagination. You just kill it by sitting down in a quiet place, reduce distraction like internet and all that (me, I can’t write without net). And my paper writing using a pen is messed up. While you are at it kill the urge to throw in the towel by writing something as nonsensical as this piece.

Hasta La Vista Baby.

PS. Looks like I need read and apply the instructs of Graham Greene’s journal to liven my imagery and console myself after all.

[Picture Source: Courtesy]

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