rambling

Here I am, vaunting myself. On how laser focused I am. Forgetting so soon that the USSR is no more. Well, whatever the cosmonauts are labeled now. Probably Russian. Why this unease. I am never the life of the party, hell!, I don't go to parties at all! But I'm no misanthrope. And the last time they updated the Penal Code I don't remember introverts being declared outlaws. The French say it well. Je suis mal dans ma peau. I am uneasy in my skin. Not the fact of being African. The fact of being human. Being in Paris a decade ago wasn't the life-changing experience it was touted to be. I just saw, with prematurely jaundiced eyes, a bigger, more expensive, certainly more permissive Nairobi. Without the charm of chaos. A strange sterilized European world where order is the be-all and anything judged strange is met with comical horror. But then again my Nairobi isn't any better. Only smaller. And Mombasa, of beloved little forays, is nothing more than a barely camouflaged brothel. But I'm not here, in cyberspace, to moralize. Merely to record my thoughts. Its cheaper than the shrink's couch, ha ha... In space no one can hear you laugh. That thin line. Between sanity and madness. Easy to cross. An old friend, much taken with feminine wiles 24/7, finally succumbed in a sanitarium, screaming obscenities. A mathematician of the first water and a physicist without equal. Brought to grief by that which he so obsessed about. Well the worms made short work of you pal, too soon. A whimsical deity, or a quirky evolution, gave you too much of that male hormone that has been tarred by everyone from boffins to maiden aunts. But what am I on about? There are no maiden aunts in Africa. Everyone gets married. Except the Catholic padres. And they too want to have their cake and eat it...cue insane laughter... I guess the white man did his job well. Maiden aunts indeed..

calling earthlings

In deepest Africa, straddling the equator, a son of the much maligned continent, caught squarely between a rapidly vanishing yesterday and an already present tomorrow. Today. Am I. Pouring libations to my ancestors, feeling a kinship with the soil that to non-African sensibilities is so much mumbo jumbo. Yet, even without Desiderata to affirm it for me, I know that I do have a right to be here. As much of an earthling as a Wall Street broker or a Soviet cosmonaut. And yet. And yet.