Epitaph of a friend

It took me all of six hours to get me a bicycle when I landed in the Netherlands; this inclusive of the travel time from the airport to Delft. I’m not sure if this is a record but I’m pretty sure it’s right there among the top times yet but I digress. She was an awesome machine; a sturdy Dutch city bike of original models thus a reason for great envy amongst its peers. She? You ask, well following the standard naming convention worldwide of pretty much everything (islands, planets, cars, hurricanes). Blackie she was named promptly as she was quite the black cycle and creativity had taken a day off then and so it stuck.

It took a short while to notice things about the character of this machine. She was a beauty; when she was younger I think. The black shiny coat was still there in bits and pieces; perhaps I daresay she was not as aesthetically pleasing as she once was but not everything can be as perfect as we want it to be. She was a sturdy bicycle once but exposure to the elements over time have eroded that structural integrity and thus contributed to her lack of aesthetic pleasantness. Basically that is code for the fact that a layer of rust had invaded one of her sides and threatened to spread like some crazy virus across her whole structure; however, this did not deter me from keeping her.

The main reason for my refusal to let her go was the fact that she was magnanimous to levels that would put any human saint to shame. No sound would pass her by before she quickly adopted it and made it her own. At first I thought it was a slight nuisance; a passive hobby that would pass in time, when she learned better I thought perhaps but how wrong I was. No sound and I mean no sound however loud, horrible or unbearable would ever be allowed to stray away form her. Thus she was aptly named St. Blackie. She picked them all up and after a while the constant clanging and banging away of the various squeaky parts of her frame slowly began to sound like the world famous song Eye of the tiger by Survivor. I should have dropped her then but it was pretty entertaining to have the soundtrack as I cycled and besides having that bike was a conversation started beyond all others. Eventually the bike sounds have developed and are slowly starting to sound like a brass band in practice so much so that I began to consider having a banner printed and stick it on the back of my bike emblazoned across it BRASS BAND AUDITIONS that way the strange looks I elicited from the people would stop but I didn’t.

Word got out of the things I had been saying about St. Blackie and the other bikes in the bike park began to poison her mind against me. They made her think that I was the enemy; they made her hate me; they made her want to eliminate me; they made her evil. It would have been a pretty excellent end for them had she succeeded but she didn’t; she went of a corner, grew wings and flew and took me with her. As she slammed into the tree it dawned on me that this was an attempt on my life but it failed. They say hell hath no fury like a woman scorned; I know.

So now she rests in the basement of a building somewhere; bereft of her ability to be ridden anywhere as she bent her tyre into an insufferable knot in an attempt to get back at me. So I moved on; I had to. They say its better to have loved and lost and I believe it now. Every now on then as I move around on my new bike and I wonder, what new thing would St. Blackie have done now that would have led to yet another conversation? What new sound would she have picked up this time that would have made me ever so mad yet ever so happy? I can only wonder and mourn my fallen bicycle, St. Blackie.

In loving memory...

Hello my friend, we speak again, it’s been a while where should we begin? It feels like it’s been forever. Within my heart lie the perfect and well guarded memories, a perfect love that you gave to me; that I remember. I just want to say hello again.

I thought of you again today, as I have every year for the past four, and I just wanted to say hello again. Whether you have been following my progress in general is not in doubt; I’m pretty sure you’ve been checking in on me once in a while just to make sure that I didn’t make too many mistakes. In fact, I’m quite sure you’re the voice that has on so many occasions stopped me doing things that I would have probably lived to regret.

I just want to say hello again and tell you things haven’t been the same since you left. True we weren’t the best of friends but that’s because you always believed that discipline in life was key and I was headstrong and fighting my way out of teenage and still trying to work out my identity and niche in life. Too bad I spent half that time with a blurry haze shielding my eyes from the important things in life. If only I’d known then what I know now maybe things would have been different. They say that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone and boy don’t I know that. It’s amazing how these mundane statements we make come back to slap us in the face.

I just wanted to say hello again and fill you in on the things we talked about last. Yes, the girls are well. I have done all I could to make sure of that just as I promised. One is busy criss-crossing the world singing her heart out and exercising her talents. The other is in the land of our former colonial masters working on bettering herself. The last is at home, and it is for her that I have looked out for most. She misses you more than I do, or ever will. I do so hope they let you go every once in a while that you may check in on her and let her know that you’re never too far.

I just wanted to say hello and tell you that all those things you told me when I was busy sulking away like some whiny child have come to pass and I only wish now that I had paid more attention. It’s been hard converting from boy to man in such a short time but I made it and I think you had something to do with that, after all I do suffer from good upbringing.

I thought by now I would have got over it but five years to the day the wound still hurts like it did then. They say time heals all but this is one that time may just have glossed over. I just wanted to say hello again and let you know we miss you now as much as then and that you will never be forgotten. Your spirit lives on in all of us and even as the warm tears course down my cheeks, you should know that. You were, are and will always be not only my father but my friend and nothing in this world shall ever change that.

I miss you dad and that is why I just wanted to say hello again.

Ngeli ya Baiskeli IV: Brass band auditions...

St. Blackie is one heck of a character; one worthy of being placed in a bicycle hall of fame somewhere in this world. These are sentiments you would most definately agree with if you had been following the serialisation of the life and times of Dude and St. Blackie (hmm, theres a ring to that, a story in the offing, but I digress). Thus far we have established a couple of amazing facts, noteworthy on so many levels and to some just a chronicle of a timewaster (another ring...hmmm..)
One must have realised by now that the Mother Teresa of bicycles has come into my possesion and is now my faithful mode of tranpsortation to pretty much anywhere. Second, you must have noticed by now that St. Blackie is more that just a saint-bicycle; she has proven to be a multi-talented fabricaton with a keen 'ear' for music.

Well, theres a new sound in St. Blackie's fold. A drumming and clanking sound. Sounds like a not-so skilled drummer on a brand new set of drums hammering away at it and driving me mad. A lesser man would have gone mad by now, but not me. I have actually started to pick up songs from the infernal racket being emitted by this saint of ours. The other day I could distinctly pick out the beats to 'Real World' by Matchbox 20.

In this vein, methinks I will paint a banner and stick it at the back of the saint, with the words BRASS BAND AUDITIONS embalzoned across it seeing that at this rate, I will soon have a choir riding behind me to make use of the beats being belted out by St. Blsckie. I'm thinking of picking up my guitar and writing a song accompanied by St. Blackie; only problem is, someone needs to be riding for the music to come forth; any takers?

Ngeli ya Baikeli III; Eye of the tiger

There is this general notion in the world that every single entity has some semblance of existence in it, be it living or dead. It is strange I know, and maybe one of those theories of existence that those who have beliefs but had rather not have them tagged as religious follow; as I said I don't know but day by day I am begining to believe in that theory; not in its enterity, but small aspects of it.

How so? Well, if you have been following this by now you must have herad of St. Blackie the most magnanimous and selfless bicycle invented. I am honoured to get onto that bicycle daily as it makes my daily commute possible. Perhaps maybe if you are lost at this point then go a step or two back and figure out just why St. Blackie's magnanimity is noteworthy.

My baiskeli, St. blackie, has been upto her mischief again. The cacaphony of noises it has picked up of late sounds like the introductory beat of Survivor's Eye of the tiger. I know this becasue;
a) I happen to really like that song and it a superb moment when I play it off my machine before I head off to campus; and
b) I have to listen as the little gremlins in the structure of St. Blackie playing as if auditioning to be part of the Beatles all over again.

I have often snickered at this bicycle of mine and made loud noises and a couple of big worded insults at it whenever it makes noise and believe it or not, I'm quite inclined to believe that she heard and understood me. No don't sit there with that look of perplexed indignation; it is not only plausible , probable but also downright possible.

The other day as I was riding home, I went over a speed bump then she intentionally moved the pedal one cycle back so that it clonked (yes that is a word!) me on the back of my heel and at the same time she assumed control of the bike as if to show me who's in charge. Of course it was a struggle of epic proportions to calm her down. When calm was finally restored and a sort of equilibrum was achieved, she picked up her infernal racket again and after listening to her for a while, I'm thinking of recording a whole set of her greatest hits and making them a CD and sell it off for a whole load of money and perhaps some fame. Perhaps then I will finally get a chance to repaint her and replace all those squeaky gremlins with quiet, more efficient ones who will only keep the bike moving.

Oh, ps, St. Blackie has picked up another sound, a rasping one that sounds like a wood chipper turned to low power, it is a quite a bike I tell you.

Ngeli ya baiskeli II: Adopt a noise week

The most Dutch thing in this world that a foreigner can do is get a baiskeli. Considering just how many baiskelis there are in this country and what with the soaring costs of gasoline in the world and the fact that it cost one arm and part of your leg to get a driving license in this country, perhaps a baiskeli is not so bad an option.

Well in the spirit of my living in this here parts of the good Lord’s earth, I had to comply with being Dutch. So a day after I landed in the Netherlands, I got a bike.

My bike is a story on its own; its an absolute student bike. It has a good solid layer of rust on one side and a squeaky chain in-between the rusty guard. Its lights didn’t work and still don’t but somehow decided to start working one random evening so I guess there is someone out there looking out for me.

If all humans in this world could adopt an attitude where they care for their fellow man, wouldn’t this world be a so much better place to live in? Remember the statements that have been repeated over the ages; I was hungry and you gave me to eat, thirsty and you gave me to drink and such like statements. In this light, my bike would be a saint by now. Yes, if I was you I’d also be struggling with the puzzled look on my face right about now but I will explain.

Ever since day one when I got my bike, it has been picking up stray abandoned and unwanted noises and packing them deep inside it. Talk of magnanimity; no noise is too large, or too horrible or too loud to be accommodated by my bike; a true saint indeed. I’m all for generosity and looking after the abandoned and lonely, but where do you draw the line on your bike’s chronic adoption issues? Is it when riding your bike sounds like a mobile orchestra as mine does currently? I think it is. Riding my bike is hard enough and only this week, it adopted two new noises; a squeak when I pedal and a clanging noise cause by a broken spoke sticking out of the standard position spokes should be maintaining. It was hilarious the expression I drew out of a lady as I was riding right by her; she almost stopped to ensure that the circus was not in town what with all the clanging and banging noises moving right by her. Classic stuff I tell you.

So really, I tell you when you get a bicycle, it should be like my bicycle; the kind which can be a conversation starter even with the people that you don’t know.

Ngeli ya baiskeli

Baiskeli is Swahili for bicycle; the rest you will pick up as we go along.

Where I come from, cyclists have very few rights...scrap that...cyclists have absolutely no rights. Shouts of 'jinga wewe toa mkebe barabarani' (idiot, get that piece of junk of the road) rent the air as the struggle for road supremacy between cyclists and motorists peaks right around rush hour. Needless to say, the motorists always win primarily because cyclists may as well be a non-entity on Kenyan roads, what with no designated bike paths, cycling is really at your own risk.

Be that as it may, there are still very many cyclists riding to their various destinations in Nairobi; surprisingly, most of them ride a black called a black mamba christened Blackie. This is typically a bike that is mainly used by casual workers as it is really really cheap...and in some areas, the carrier region is modified with a really comfortable seat and colours of all sorts and it becomes a taxi commonly known as a boda boda...

Flash-forward to Delft, where everyone rides a bike....and the most typical is the Dutch city bike which bears a startling resemblance to the blackie....so imagine my shock and surprise when on landing in first world central, I find a blackie and get this, its the coolest bike to have around and seeing as I tend to be a cool one in general terms and everyone here rides a blackie, I now own a blackie.

Isn't irony just the bomb?

The onion layer theorem; Dutch style

I’ve been in this country for all of four weeks now (give or take a few hours).I must say its been quite the ride thus far (no pun intended) but I’m settling into the ebb and flow of things around here. Be that as it may, there are still a few things that I have noteworthy and shall proceed to share them with you:
1. They have very subtle ways of making you learn Dutch(even when they say you don’t really have to); what with writing names of all the products in Dutch at the supermarket and all notices, road signs and such like items are all in Dutch;
2. A ‘high-speed’ head on collision with another bicycle is not only a possibility but a very painful reality and not as comical as it sounds; I know!
3. Onions are a very big part of the Dutch culture (though they don’t really know it yet or won’t admit to it).

The last of this we shall dwell on for a bit of a while.
I come from the sunny side of the world; where the only use for jackets is filling up the wardrobe except for one month in a year, after which they assume their prescribed purpose of filling out the space in the closet. With this in mind, its pretty evident to see why I’d learn to take good weather for granted. However, this is not the land of sunny days and warm nights; this is the land of schizophrenic weather patterns and misguided rainfall patterns- misguided mainly because the rain always catches me off-guard.

I have, through misguided bravado and really bad weather prediction skills, learnt that the weather cannot be taken for granted in this not so sunny side of the world.

The few Dutch friends I have made have taught me the layering principle i.e. to put on a ridiculous number of clothing layers to combat the cold and strange weather patterns and then proceed to shed off the unnecessary layers as the day warms up and layer up as it cools down. Needless to say that dressing up like this in the house is a bit retarded and thus one must strip down the extra layers and leave only the basic layer of clothes…just like an onion…

Doesn’t it make you wonder, aren’t onions grand?

Kinyozi hajinyoi...I wish I was a chamelon

Wahenga walisema 'Kinyozi hajinyoi' which when translated roughly comes to 'a barber never shaves himself'. The old folks, whoever they may have been, were pretty wise in their assessment and stipulation of the so called sayings and proverbs but there is always that idiot who will defy these sayings...

It is pretty obvious you realise when you think about it; its the same concept with the hairdressers, you'll never walk into a salon and find one of them trying to fix up their hair too much because really that is a bit of a complex application....

Well the idiot sits before you today...after literally defying the wahenga and literally tried to shave myself. There is a reason that the Lord created the human with only one set of eyes at the front of the face, so that for complex events as shaving, a barber is involved. its pretty easy to shave your beard but what happens when you try to shave the back of your head without a pair of eyes behind there?

The natural contours of the African head combined with the steel-wool likeness of its attendant hair make for a really tough shave even by a barber, so how tough would you assume that the action would be to one who cannot see the back of his head...
this story need not continue for you can probably assume how badly this turned out...

The chameleon can rotate its eyes 360degrees about their axes...maybe thus even see the backs of their heads...sometimes I wish I was a chameleon....

The gods have spoken

The gods of Mt. Kirinyaga have heard my pleas and sent forth a petition to the gods of the northern regions that I now reside in.
In the petition, they say that the reason an African is the hue that he is so that he may absorb the rays of the glorious African sun and in this way stem away such maladies as may be suffered by the fairer hued members of the human race.
In this very same petition the gods insisted that should an African be subjected to too few rays of the sun then his hue would be reduced considerably to the extent of the not so hued as himself and this would predispose him to the same maladies that the fairer hued members of the human race suffer from as a result of the sun.
It further stated that the weather gods in the north should hold forthwith release of such aspects as rain, snow and sleet till a date that shall be agreed upon by the council of the gods.
I, the African in question, think the negotiations worked....the gods of the north sent us sunshine today.
Tomorrow is up to the gods...

Murphy's law

Murphy's law is an adage in Western culture that broadly states, "if anything can go wrong, it will." It is also cited as: "If there's more than one possible outcome of a job or task, and one of those outcomes will result in disaster or an undesirable consequence, then somebody will do it that way"; "Anything that can go wrong, will," the similar "Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong"; or, "Whatever can go wrong will go wrong, and at the worst possible time, in the worst possible way"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murphy's_law
I'm not Murphy...evidently, but I feel for this guy (go to the link above).
My story is not as bad but absolutely catastrophic in my eyes so you must share my pain...
Thursday morning:I wake up a bit confused; the alarm clock didn't ring so I'm ten minutes behind schedule but I will live. I run to the shower and turn on the hot water and wait....1 minute, two minutes...DAMN, the boiler has absconded duty so it means no hot shower that morning but who's to argue at that hour.
after a cold-inducing shower, I dash out and do the whole changing thing and then breakfast and with twenty minutes to my lecture, I run out and as I hop onto my bike, I realise I have a bloody flat tyre....
Long and short of it, I get to class late, sweaty and tired and still numb from an ice cold shower but I lived to tell the tale...Murphy are you listening...

I miss the African sun

I've been here all of two weeks (give or take a few hours) and I have come to one conclusion: The weather has multi-personality disorder in this country and I will prove it.
When I arrived I was told its summer only to be greeted by confused looking raindrops at the airport but I didn't say a thing; we drove to my new apartment and then it actually cleared up, I saw the sun and a few white puffy clouds...so far so good I guess. Then night came (at about 9.30 the sun set - this is apparently only weird to Africans) and I went for a drink in the town only to be assaulted by large hail stones and rain with an attitude problem...all within the span of 6hours of my arrival.
Since then its been a wait and see kind of attitude with the weather; carry a jacket in your bag and such like things...and its still summer. On only two days since I've been here have I seen the sun fully and it was a weekend, a glorious I daresay hot weekend...no sweaters or jackets all day and night....
So please, understand me when I say the Dutch weather is schizophrenic, and I do so miss the African sun...

Language

If language is not correct, then what is said is not what is meant; if what is said is not meant, then what ought to be done remains undone; if this remains undone, morals and arts will deteriorate; if morals and arts deteriorate, justice will go astray; if justice goes astray, the people will stand about in helpless confusion. Hence, there must be no arbitrariness in what is said. This matters above everything.


Kung Fu Tze (Confucius)


Doesn't it make you think?

Generic....what the @"£$$?

There's a new fad in town...its the generic version of pretty much anything these days. Ever noticed the way you walk into a pharmacy and ask to buy some type of medication and the attendant asks, "Do you want the real version or the generic brand?!?!!!" aaaaaaarggggh! If i wanted the generic version would I not have asked for it?
This seems to have crossed over into the music industry....the other day I had the fortune or misfortune of watching 'Iris'. If you're a music buff, then you know what I'm talking about. Don't get me wrong, Iris is top of my list for all time favourite songs but this version of Iris left me a bit unsettled...
its the version by some chap called Ronan or Rowan or Rohan Keatin....its so annoying coz the video is about him on some horse just horsing around...
Dude, there's a reason THE GOO GOO DOLLS won awards with that song....has originality just popped right outta the window? someone please help me out there...

Normalcy?...at last...