Some work of noble note may yet be done

It’s Friday.

I am supposed to be explaining the odd events of the past two posts. From Violence and Alcohol? What violence, and what alcohol?
Considering that I don’t drink and am a wuss.

(By the way, don’t test me on the wuss thing. I may just be being modest.)

It is a long and laborious story, about destiny, and courage, and adversity, and flagging courage, and doubts and, finally, our hero saying, “Destiny schmestiny, I want money.”

But I need to make it short, so here is the short version. I have retired my first novel, Violence and Alcohol.

Initially titled Run, but when I found that I could not incorporate the song into the book, I changed it.

Several years ago I developed the idea that I had the capacity to produce a decent work of literary fiction and I set about writing Run. During the half a decade or so that followed everything else took second place to this. Run was a good reason not to return those calls.

The result wasn’t half bad, if I say so myself. Nice things were said about it.

Until we tried to publish it. Then the general opinion of publishers’ editors was, “Nice writing, but we don’t like the story.”

So I have retired the thing. Now I am looking ahead. I just got the newspaper's permission to compile my Sunday Column, Bad Idea, into a book. I guess that’s what I shall be giving my dear Mummy on Christmas instead of a story of loser debauchers who try to pick up girls in bars with stupid lines and then end up, at the end, articulating the crisis of the modern urban African youth and its parallels with the ongoing development of a third world country like Uganda.

But I can’t just shelve it. At least lemme let you guys take a look at bits.

And now, for this weekend, I shall be obsessing over what to do for the cover of the Bad Idea Book.

From: Violence & Alcohol

Desire wasn’t phenomenally attractive. Idle men, when coaxed by other idle men to grade her on a scale of one to ten, routinely found her to vacillate between a five and a six point five, depending on the time of night, and the depth of their drink. She wasn’t remarkable or outstanding. In braids, sunglasses and metal-sheen nail-polish, she couldn’t help but sink into the grey. Just another Kampala babe. Just another piece of the noisy trinketry adorning a gaudy and pretentious city.

She wanted to be a model. She called herself Desire. Now that name should communicate something. It should imply that she was, well, desirable. At the very least more desirable than someone named Jane or Mary. But to us idle men it just implied, “My gosh, this chick certainly feels hot about herself.” There’s a temperature range in which New Kampalans are expected to stay, and we don’t take kindly to those with ambitions of exceeding it.

But Desire was hard-headed is she was anything. She wasn’t the type to let anything other than her own imagination decide what she could do, where she could fit, and what she was. Reality was a thing that happened to other people. If she felt she was a ravishing diva then the grades of the idle men meant nothing. She was going to be a model.

There. A salient personality trait. It should have made her unique, but it didn’t. Fact is, in this dusty city, wannabes come a dime a dozen.

I spotted her at the bar. She was chatting with a friend. They seemed so engrossed in the conversation, you could actually believe that they had something worth saying to each other. Look at those jeans. Unconsciously swaying to the music. There’s magic in those Calvin Kleins.

Now, since I had been drinking heavily and wasn’t in any position to know better, I cut through to where she was, stood next to her and let it be the beer talking. “I’m here,” I said.

“Who’re you?”

I sighed. She wasn’t getting it, was she? “Look, you are going to go on, in your life, to have a series of empty, unfulfilling, desperate relationships with men you don’t really care that much about. You’ll end up marrying one, living in misery with him until, after a while, your ass begins to sag, your belly begins to grow and your face begins to wrinkle. One day you’ll find that you are not the hot hot hottie you are now, and then your identity crisis will start. You’ll have spent your life defining yourself by your looks. Now those looks will be gone and you will feel like you should be gone too. Only, on this day, you’ll notice that you’re still there. Then you’ll begin to question everything you’d been believing all those years. What was it all about? Is this what life was for? You will ask, is there really a man for me? A soulmate, a special someone? What if I met him once and I let him slip away? What if I lost my one true chance at happiness? I’m going to answer that question right now, before you get to the age when you ask it. I am that destiny. I am your one true love. In fact, I shouldn’t be offering to buy you a drink, you should be buying me one.”

“What are you talking about?” she asked in a way that showed she really wasn’t seeking an elaboration.

“I want a Guinness.”

Before the fullstop she and her friend had walked away. I watched them go.

Damn, she had a fine ass.

-C&R99ii

I'll explain on Friday

From: Violence & Alcohol

I live in a city where the girls are so pretty it makes you want to curl up in a ball and bite your knuckles till they bleed. They fill the streets— every four feet there’s someone else to fall in love with. Wavy braids, lip gloss, tight tight jeans. The uptown girls with rich fathers, who go everywhere by cab and think in English and speak with the accent they got from schools abroad and honed on years of satellite TV. They wear the jeans like a second skin, and claim beauty as if it is theirs by right, as they flit around being colourful and alluring, trailing the admiration and wonder of strangers in their wake. Never a backward glance—it’s all taken in stride.
Then there are the downtown girls, who used to be poor and just discovered that money, once acquired, could turn them into little goddesses. They wear their jeans like a meticulous disguise, and learn the wiggling of the head and the fluttering of the eyelids and the drooping of the hand, and they act as if they are always enchanting. But they speak in Luganda so it isn’t hard to accept the possibility that, a few hours ago, when morning struck, they were in the cheap suburbs where there are no tarmac roads, and were waking up with unruly, chaotic manes of hair, in frayed and tattered old nightdresses. But that was then. They are not in frays and tatters anymore. Now they have their jeans, and now they are butterflies floating around the garden that is Kampala. Trailing admiration and wonder in their wake. Claiming beauty as if it is a treasure dug up on a desert island finders-keepers.

-C&R99

Music Break.

And now the moment you’ve not been waiting for. The uploading of the downloadable version of a song that has been referred to in such glowing terms as “Kinda catchy”, “not all that", “I’m feeling it, but I don’t know why” and “I am sick of it already.”

Without further ado, Tindatiine!

And as a special dedication from all of us here at Hot 100FM, to all of you. Brothers In Arms!

And that’s all we had time for. Tune in again next time for another great show.

I am off to get my Kanzu now. Got to meet the seyas and aboluganda at Rock Night.

Thoughts on DVDs and a paragraph including the term "Hep Cat"

When I put in West Wing, the dvd player glows with what I cannot fail to identify as ecstasy. I can almost hear it say, “That’s right. Right there. Right there. Oooh, yes! Ooooh Ernest!”

Jack needs a comic sidekick. A wisecracking black dude, perhaps, to follow him around saying stuff like, “Dayum, Jack! You shot dat nigga in da leg! You’s a cold muthafucka, shootin’ niggas in da leg like dat!” No, not Curtis. Curtis has dignity.

Someone I know who liked Prison Break would frequently gush about how cute the stars were. This led me to think that this show was just a bunch of pretty boys in a homoerotic jail drama. You will be surprised to find, though, that it isn't exactly that. It has other elements.

Speaking of homoerotic, what would you do if a dude with superhuman powers had the gay hots for you the way Clark has them for Lex? I guess it’s a good thing Lex is also gay. So when Clark is all, "You looking mighty fine in 'em jeans"

Desperate Housewives doesn’t suck, but I think they should cut out this nonsense about “ensemble” acting and focus on the true stars of the show: Eva Left and Eva Right.

Finally,
All the hep cats go to "Al Zwizzle" don’t they? Well, I saw them on Saturday: About half a million people trying to hang out in a little garage-looking place. The bulk of the clientele was outside in the parking lot, slurring and groping among itself. I think you can drive up and park somewhere in the lot, crack open that pot of enguli you brought from Kireka and still say you were hanging at Al Zwizzle. In fact I think I shall do exactly that. I shall get my boys wearing kanzus and we commune over a pot of Malwa as the hep cats mill around with their Smirnoff Ices. Haharing for World Cup as they say.

Very very random thorgits

• Tune in next week when you’ll hear Miss Piggy say: “I was pleasantly surprised to learn that it can also serve as a marital aid device.”
• “If you can’t do nothing other than flow, life’s a bitch like the mother from blow.” – Jason Phillips, aka The Kiss Of Death.
• The singing is unremarkable unless you want to remark of the high nasal content, the trackwork is pedestrian and banal, there is a keyboardist in there who has ambitions beyond the capacity of his talent, and from what I can understand the lyrics are not exactly genius. (“I will let you take me. Take me wherever you go. I will not be afraid. Baby, you’re just too much and this is a beat that they can’t touch.”) Technically speaking, it should be a terrible song.
  But I can’t help myself. When Tindatiine, which I shall link up to this blog when The Genius sorts me out with convert-to-MP3 software, comes on, I am imbued with irrepressible joy-joy happy-dancy finger-snappery feelings and I get so excited I just can’t hide it. I lose control and find myself unable to hide it.
• Tune in next week when you’ll hear Miss Piggy say: “I asked for a Gucci handbag. Handbag. How can you possibly get the words 'hand' and 'colostomy' mixed up?”
• Remy Ma, Jean Grae, Bahamadia, Eve, Digga. Top Five.
• I had a deadly deal going down with some mega-corporation that keeps a satellite office on the campus of Makerere University. When I got there, they gave me an envelope. That was brown.
  The consequence of this is me walking through campus with a necktie on, carrying a brown envelope. Kwegamba looking like a fresher geek.
  A fresher geek is a freshman who wears a tie when he goes for registration.
  Really, if you are a freshman, wear a t-shirt and shorts. You are not fooling anyone: we know you are not a real human being, you are just a freshman. Put the ties away until you get a job. All you are doing is causing confusion and embarrassment.
• Tune in next week when you’ll hear Miss Piggy say: “Baby, this sort of fabulous doesn’t just happen. You work, you practice and you pay.”
• Another top five: Ani Akumanyi? Dave Koz, Air Force Ones, A freakin’ Hummer-for-crying-out-loud-what- is-wrong-with-people??!!! That is a top five list of the most offensive poser things in the universe. The hummer counts as three things.
• What, you think I don't have dreams? You think I have no ambition, you think I don't have dreams? I got dreams! I'm not just a wasted little loser drip. I got dreams. See?

One day I'm going to finally write this.

January 12, 2004

Have you ever been referred to as sweet? You have? Mixed reactions followed the reference didn’t they? I mean, whether to be proud, or to be mortified depends largely on the context, the time of the utterance, indeed on the utterer.

If you were between the ages of one and five then it was fine. At that age, sweet is harmless. It is just an unimaginative compliment, a way of saying you are not as absolutely repulsive as other children.

If you are a teenager, male, and have just been informed of your sweetness by this chick you fancy, it is cause for worry. For where you find the words you are so sweet, the words I only like you as a friend are never far off. “You’re really sweet, but I think of you more like a younger brother,” she says, causing you to get very angry with yourself for not being a bit more... whatever the opposite of what you were was. Ironically, because of this juxtaposition being sweet makes you bitter.

Then you grow older and wiser. Like myself. You find that in this society of ours the general vocabulary doesn’t provide for the simple basic act of being a good man. Unable to grasp the concept that the absence of malice, spite and selfishness can be a concerted effort based on principle, preferring to believe that one is only nice because one daren’t be nasty, they call you sweet. The same adjective they use for four-year-old toddlers.

I have been "sweet" for ages, but before that there was what we could call the dark ages, a period of deep misanthropy, when I listened to a lot of gangsta rap, cussed a lot and walked with a slant, courtesy of the chip on my shoulder. Cynicism is fun. It gives you the opportunity to mock and scorn everybody and everything, and to use sarcasm, which a lot of people think is funny. So if you lack a sense of humour, you can get by with sarcasm. Unfortunately, you cannot go through life acting like you are too cool for everything. Because, the fact is you aren’t. You suck just as much as everything you purport to disdain. Anyone can go about being unimpressed by what they don’t understand. It doesn’t take much brains. It’s not even clever. Actually its quite stupid.





(I never finished it.)

Hello, Mr Nice Guy

I have two kittens at home: Little Rainbow and Baby Sunshine. I dyed their fur pink and braided little pigtails into it so that I can dress them up with pretty ribbons. Every night I feed them supper of chocolate éclairs and strawberry-flavoured milk and then I sing them a lullaby—usually a karaoke version of something by Celine Dion or Barbara Streisand. Then I bundle them up in their lace pyjamas and give each one a little kissy-wissy on her nosey-wosey and I tell her “Daddy loves you.”

Then I shoot 300milligrams of valium up their jugulars. 'Cos I don’t want the little shits making noise for me at night when I am training Cerberus.