Time travelling in reverse order

Ever since the demon disease called chicken pox and the speedy passing of time combined deadly forces to whittle down the enthusiasm of writing about my twenty one days orientational experience in Kogi NYSC camp, posterity has been tormenting urging me to ink down something and so...........

Now, after I was shown my accommodation that rested on a rocky area which looked like the place the first man saw the stones with which he made fire; I was then taken to my Place of Punitive Primary Assignment (PPA).

From my visual expedition, I knew it wouldn't take long before my senses would start feeling like I’d mistakenly walked into a time machine that had teleported me to retro Nigeria.

If not for anything else, the fact that nowadays, my daily regimen most times include: chasing of squirrels and trying to smoke them out of their holes; climbing the ubiquitous cashew tree, telling folklore stories to my landlady's kids while cooking with firewood in the evenings. These are worthy testaments to my new found primitiveness.

In fact, I’d at one point pinched an acre of my skin to the colour red just to know if am not caught up in one of Achebe's classics bearing the name Chukwuemeka or Ezeugo.

But as a dogged student of the school of change, my transition to the ape-man reality has come with no obvious side effects.

I have even learnt the different shitty looks; that’s the look you give when you're just coming out of the bush after shitting doing the needful. The look that is between yes I just went there to shit defecate- so!? Or the one that implies no oooo!, I just went to the bush to check if I’ll see any baby left for dead in the forest by a heartless parent: it’s my passion you know.

I have mastered all these faces and I can reflexively display them depending on the divide of stupidity that person falls in my head.

Sadly, one look still eludes me. This is the one you defecate in someone's uncompleted building. Yes I know; my morality is now lower than the height of Aki and Pawpaw. Get off your moral high horses peeps! He who is without sin……where was I? right, moving on….. And as your coming out of the building, you see the owner of the building looking straight at you and you give him the can’t you see that there isn’t any toilet around and didn’t you do it in another's building at one point in your life kind of look.

As I said, have not mastered this technique because failure to execute it perfectly could take you to the hospital with a squashed eye socket or if you’re lucky, the experience will leave some vacancy in your dentition.

I have really adapted. Am even used to the drudgery of correcting my students that the expression is excuse me sir and not escuuhs sir.

Well, by some stroke of divine relocation, I moved away from my ancient-of-days accommodation to one that has the faintest semblance of what is defined as urbanization according to the Nigerian dictionary.

This is my bus-stop. Posterity hope you’re happy now and oh yea, today made it a year that I was attacked, incapacitated, destroyed diagnosed with Ebola Chicken pox. Health is so underated!

The impermanence of perfection

I have come to realise that love and in fact life isn’t as smooth as the voice of Adele. For the most part, it’s like Obasanjo trying to sing a song by Maxwell or worse, trying to sing through the treacherous inflections found in D'angelo's songs.

You know, watching a lot of "happily ever after" cartoons and movies have a way of feeding the HD of our imagination with inconclusive afterthought of a Disney princess loved forever by a perfect prince-charming both living in a diamond castle surrounded by beautiful lilies and talking cute animals. But this is without reality having something to say about it. Reality is one heck of a party crasher! More often, it slaps the taste off your lavender flavoured fantasy and spikes it up with the stench ingredients of a locally made insecticide.

Ok you are fortunate to see a beautiful lady with a nubile torso divinely mounted on perfect legs of uber-lusciousness and blessed with a toothy smile that would give Cece Winan's dentition a worthy challenge and you think: "this is definitely my ticket to “lala land” and then you marry her and after a while, her “anatomical blings” start losing their shine or worse, a sickness shrinks them away from their once enticing state of plumpness. 

Then what?

Believe me ladies, a lot of guys wouldn't come as Aladdin with a Genie-lamp strapped to their trousers and a flying carpet to glide you across the starry skies. Sadly, they might even come as the hunchback character Quasimodo in Victor Hugo's adapted novel: The Hunchback of Notre Dome. But not to worry, even that story had a pleasant ending.

Let’s face it; the blue-chip jobs might not pour like candy rain after school or you might even lose a good one if I truly know my people, some one must have spitted out the words: God forbid!

But that’s the realness of reality.

The baby might not be formed after three to more years of trying after marriage. How about the realisation that the kid you gave birth to is of the autistic spectrum or conditioned with Down's syndrome? I just heard it again - it is not my portion!

What kind of write-up is this: are u wishing me bad?

But truly, who deserves this portion? Does anyone claim ownership to this fate? Or as long as this stray bullet doesn’t strike your reality then the world is beautiful?

 Life is not a perfect script: get used to it! Its plots are sometimes murky and precariously uncertain. It is sometimes like a merry-go-round but a lot of times, you would not be merry in the way life goes round.

But fortunately, there is a lifeline - God. He is the grand-master of script writing and will definitely help you to cushion the effect of what reality throws. I didn’t say he will necessarily stop it, I said he will cushion the effect. So it would not exactly kill you if you hand over the rudder of your life-boat to him.

  Remember, happily ever after is not the end; it’s only the beginning.

Who cares about height………

I always believe courage is best served when you are well equipped but if you’re a part of those Chinese Shaolin dudes that can defeat a nation of army with just a chopstick and insane fisticuffs, then I guess an exception easily shapes out. Now, before ladies swoon over the idea that I want to talk about leading men with bulging pectorals and big guns, let me slide in my real intent.

So I have this friend and by far one of the coolest cats you can have as a friend. He recently introduced me to this lady after swearing out his tongue that she would satisfy my chatty cravings. Considering my poor run of engaging in fickle and flat conversations spanning weeks now, my faculty lusted for a conversational intercourse badly. Well, we got on the chit-chat and after the usual tick in the box routine questions and answers, things spun out of control when I asked her “what are your essentials in a man?”

 I don’t even know why I asked. It’s not like am trying to make her my exclusive or am I?

 Anyway, maybe I just didn't want this conversation to fall into the countless footnotes of trashy discourse.  After naming what felt like an unending list of virtues consisting of the usual suspects from God-fearing to him having the strength of ten rodeo bulls combined good qualities, the epistle of listing was about to reach its climactic cliché when she said this “and oh very important: he must not be below 6 ft tall”.

Oh she didn't just go there!

Now considering the fact that I am some inches above the Nigerian national average height of 5.4 ft (am guessing some persons just got schooled with that info. Feel free to thank me).  Now, I've come to be quite happy with myself; at least for the fact that I've towered my mindset above my diminutive stature even though thoughts of my father being a 6 ft-plus-giant of a man still haunts me hitherto.

 God why?

To think that this girl just yanked me off her list of worthy suitors automatically because of my height was just something my head was finding hard to comprehend. The issue mentally teleported me to those dark days of fighting the Napoleon complex syndrome: days when I felt like my growth hormones got sieved out of my genes.

 But does the curse of the short man stand too great (pun unintended) to be overlooked for other qualities? or what are the reasons that feed our interest for height preference.

Would it be fair to poke out our blame finger and point towards traditional society that splits us along gender stereotypes: where a man is expected to be endowed with a tall stature and some brawn sprinkled around it while the woman should be slender figure and all pink in attitude? The society tries to fit them into one perfect circle of mutually complementary gender.

But are we not all flawed? Physically or character wise and that’s without me trying to sound like an advocate for the midget community. If our choice for a partner is prioritized purely on the oak-tree stature rather than checking out other character traits then I guess we are revolving towards the marginalization of the Akin and Pawpaw race? Sorry bad joke.

Well, for what it’s worth, maybe I will start looking for a tall woman to create the needed evolutionary drive to give my children a fighting chance at not being short. But as I said, my dad is 6ft plus and my mum 5.3ft and see how I turned out: managing just to be a few inches above the hobbit race (thanks mum). I guess that strategy might fall short in the end.

But what do you think guys?

Yeah, and about that girl, well lets just say we haven’t spoken since.

See y’all later.

MYSTERY OF THE STOLEN HAIR

Part of my tick in the box for today was to go to the saloon to cut my hair as i prepare myself for all things festivity. Now let me say this: i'm one of those persons that might be more faithful to their barber than to their spouse. I could literally swim the seven seas throng with monsters of the deadliest variety just to get my hair a date with his clipping tool. In fact, i always get that look of "guy are you insane!" from friends anytime they accompany me to my barber's saloon considering the pilgrim-like journey that it involves.Its not really because he's a master-class barber; rather, it's just a case of fidelity on my part. it's not like i have those barber's delight brand of hair.

Now after the usual trimming and shaping, i realised while looking at d mirror that the shaping around my temples were asymmetrical and am like "Guy!, this thing no arrange na?" and this was his reply "Bros, no be my fault: na because your hair don over go inside well well".

Believe me, at that point my life practically flashed passed my eyes. I looked at d mirror again and truly saw that they have taken a giant leap backward.It was like a war for land ownership took place and my hair nation lost the battle so it had to relinquish a portion of its territory and by implication, it retreated.

As i journeyed back home that day, different thoughts fell out sequentially like packs of dominoes in my head. I even made a roll call in my head of some of my friends that have enough hair to last them for eternity but ended up consoling myself with the fact that great and popular people not excluding Tuface and Ramsey Nouah all share d bald/receding hairline curse.

 Hopefully when it fully blossom, i will not be judged by it but if anybody as much as think loud enough for me to hear that they are questioning my competence by it, then i have to bring in Martin Luther jnr into d matter and say "i have a dream that one day, people would be judged by d content of their character and not by the backward movement of their hairline"

i think i should stop myself here. Sorry i had to go melodramatic on u guys. Lets just say am that guy that makes triviality a big fuss!