about a boy...

There once was a boy who loved to talk to strangers...

While you were sleeping...

You will wake, to the sounds of quickly rustling sheets
And dreamlike whispers that appear to emanate from lifeless tassels of brand new linen
Mangled into the urgent confusion that is quickly taking over your mind.

The curious breeze against your bare essentials
As you grope the darkness for what is left of your modesty
The old time friend you had kindly offered to share your bed, will be nowhere to find.

There are words we dare not speak, lest we give life to our mortal fears.
But heaven forbid that the sheets speak the truth
...then karma will be like a Birch tree
Savagely reduced into these jagged spears, that now stoke in smoldering embers, waiting for you...dear friend.

What the sheets told. .. her.

My one minute elevator madness moments, and being average.

I often consider myself to be a reasonably civil 'white-collared slave' in my starched shirt and professional 'poker face', until fate finds me in a lone elevator with my earphones plugged in, then all hell breaks loose.

Today it was 'black magic' crooning 'confam' with 'sasha p.' and it was friday morning after a long tiring week. My fumbled and ghastly laughable etighi moves took over.  This is my shameless confession - I loose all semblance of decorum and dance etighi like no man's business when I'm alone in an elevator.  It's like an evil spirit from 'Banky W' takes over my body.

I got caught out today. You know how it is when your song starts on the radio and you go "shoooo, that's my song!!!" and promptly, i leaned my neck forward like a starved turkey, stuck my butt out like a deranged fool and cracked one unconscious etighi side-step before quickly remembering that I wasn't alone in the elevator.

Two starched-faced white folks looked briefly at me, and for the life of me, I couldn't come up with a witty comeback fast enough.  To confirm my theory that my actions are manifestations of an evil spirit from my village, I returned a stupid cheeky smile that could only have looked like osufia's and hurried out at the next exit.

Someone asked me today how I often appear to be collected and in control (in other words, 'like a boss'. He didn't add that last bit, but it's good therapy to often massage your own ego). I thought to myself, 'you should see what I do in the elevator'.

I believe that one thing nigerians do best, is to not allow anybody make us feel inferior.  And i sort-of don't think this is another ego trip, because I've been told same by a few other african folks. It appears that a common opinion is that nigerians generally have an exaggerated / unnecessarily high opinions of ouselves.  Even for all the bad press that is hardly anyhing to be proud of.
I think that my many years of telling unruly danfo drivers to 'go and hug  transformer' has served me in good stead to generally not give a f&$....even when the truth is that, irrespective of my best poker face, all I often feel like is, plain and average- a crazed wanna-be professional who dances etighi when no-one is looking.

But if a two minute elevator madness moment continues to give me the pump to get through each day in this high stake craziness I have signed myself into, then ain't nothing wrong with that and God bless Banky, and Black Magic and Sasha P.

Everything confam.  Etighi etighi etighi...

Blog anonymously...Yes! Yes! Yes!

We often get caught up in fads and loose track of the reason for our initial standpoint. In this regard, everybody is becoming a celebrity blogger, so my insatiable need to be recognised is gnawing at my crotch, so i'm going to join the bandwagon aye?



Start/maintain an anonymous blog? My opinion to that is aye, aye! The world is too much of a noisy stomping ground not to allow your mind the simple, beautiful indulgence of being able to monentarily roam free without the constraints of identification. So for those of that falter in opinion, here are my few cents.

When i come to this place, i imagine myself on a holiday...a lone cottage on a hill side. My mind is like a restless dog on a leash, but what freedom once we step into those wide open fields and i let her rip. She'd scamper off like a mad hatter through the wilds..sniffing from one blog to the other, in search of gold, of truth, of mutual identification. (Admittedly often these days all i return with is boring trifling, but you get the picture.) You and your thoughts....heck you need that, how can you not have that single moment in time?! Every sensible person needs that respite.

I like to think that anonymous blogging is an artform, like Banksy or Lagbaja. And the beauty of the genre is in the unapologetic honesty. I have heard the alternative argument saying, 'whatever i cannot say to someone's face, i don't say it'. But we know that is a stark lie. Nobody is that brazen. We all save face for whatever the motive, hence 100% honesty in expression is non-existent. Life is just not that simple. We don't tell our bosses our true intentions. We shut the door when we take a shit. We don't tell the vicar that yesterday's sermon was boring as hell. The human being is naturally bound by the need to maintain a sense of respectability, and esteem, so we collect our scripts and play the lines of who we are expected to be, well until someone invented the mask.

Ooh the Mask.....mid 16th century: from French masque, from Italian maschera, mascara, probably from medieval Latin masca 'witch, spectre', but influenced by Arabic masḵara 'buffoon' - wiki.

Give me an unrecognized anonymous blog over a thousand psychophant followers to play the gallery to. Do you see my point? A small church is great and will meet your spiritual needs until it starts to expand and you find that the pastor's opinions start to get watered down and censored to suit the differing opinions of audience. Maybe its just me, but my idea of a blog is like allowing a stranger to sneak into your private space to read the pages of your life. And it becomes a give and take sort of relationship - almost noble in intent, because in the end every person finds recognition in one blog space or the other. You see, chances are that if you flipped through the pages of twenty anonymous-honest-to-goodness blogs, you are likely to find one person who picks his nose in the same manner that you do. Then suddenly picking your nose like an ogre becomes perfectly normal, and your deed to humanity is done.

Fault lines... divisive issue or difference of opinion that is likely to have serious consequences. There are fault lines...and ever so real, they are.

I think that the danger of anonymous blogging is the tempt to loose yourself in the freedom of not having an identity. And it works in two ways, the first of which is that you join the bandwagon of foolishness that the internet world has become. I.e, selling your foolish opinion for free and thereby contributing to the world stock on unbridled stupidity in opinion and integrity. The second is that in your quest to have an opinion, you become the daft opinion that you are marketing to own, so none is any wiser for the trade.

But the good thing about blogging, is that it easily weeds out senseless people, and i mean that literally. Blogging/writing takes effort, that is why you would be hard to find an unintelligent person who has blogged consistently for a time. Hence, the kind of errors/sins one is prone to is bolstered by the corrals of reason / common sense. It is useful to have faith in these matters, because admittedly grace keeps one in that regard. But would you, for the error of triffling in an instance forgoe the benefit gained by solitude. I thought about it and the benefit seemed to outweigh the error--in my own opinion, at least. But i dare say, if you must fall, then fall you will and you must, so stagger and carry on. I say we get better for every step we falter on.

I have grown in this place. I have understood my very essense in this place, such that today my opinions are grounded on the solid foundation of me, who i am and who i am meant to be. Nobody has an opinion these days. People just retweet bullshit without thinking. I love Davido; Beyonce is so amazing, so imma twerk like this and bobb my head like that, but you don't know crap about any of these people. What do you kow about yourself in the first instance?!


Like i said, my opinions are mine opinions, and these are mine. Find yours. It does make them foolish or in any way correct. There are no black or white in these matters, except that the opinions belonged to you or not. I have erred on every side of the sins of anonymous blogging -.............
 because admittedly, it isn't only about the simple words on the pages, the complete stories are i what happens after the posts have been published and digested by the few.......... -but here is a code of conduct which i recently concluded made a whole lot of sense: As far as blogging goes, i think that there is beauty and art in the original artform, i.e without disclosure. But to each his own, every stock of trade has its place of appreciation. So write what you will, and how you will, bearing in mind the sobering truth that if heaven and judgement is real like they say, then even blog line might just as well contribute to the spoken words to which we each must account for.


This is a quick scribbled response after reading Nutty-J's musing...one of the few good ones left.
So excuse any errors...and blah blah blah...i'll likely return to edit later.

But, blog anonymously, yes yes yes, and let the world see how beautiful your unbridled mind is!

Mazel tov folks.

Hehehe Kasala don burst...all up in this place!!!!!

I wrote a piece herein some months back, about a very random incident where i discovered that a friend's wife owns an annonymous blog, and she knew that i knew. My ever-sleuthful and resourceful self, I had neatly peeled away every facade and firewall she had set up, leaving no room for denial until she broke and begged me to keep a secret. I cannot recall if i ended up deleting that particular entry, but anyway, I received a frantic call late last night, asking me to meet K up at a local KFC. My spider senses immediately went hay-wire, because responsible married women are not allowed that level of fine randomness at 10:30pm.

I met a lone K behind a tall glass of pepsi and an untouched KFC snack box. I slid into the booth next to her, forcing a toothy grin into what was obviously a strained situation. She didn't allow any complimentaries.

The situation:
K had dozed off with an unattended private brower left open and her husband, J had returned home from work earlier than usual. She said she woke up to find him reading the blog. She panicked and left the house.
Admittedly my response was not the ideal one, but i could not help the involuntary cackle that escaped my mouth "Kasala don burst all up in this place mehn!"

I am usually not one to do the 'I told you" routine, but i definitedly told K-and she did not listen. People need to listen to me more often, i tell ya. I recalled how i had dissected and fully explained the precariousness of the situation to her, even citing my own dilemmas with "blogging and the unknowing partner". Thing is, if you have blogged for..let's even cap at a minimum of twelve months...chances are, a significant part of you starts to get unravelled on these pages. And when the blog is annonymous,and your partner is unaware, then it becomes a certain type of infidelity. Private browsing, late night blog posting, unexplained friendships with people that you cannot rationally explain the origin of where you know them from...such is the life. One time, i watched K laugh off an enquiry from J, saying that a certain random female friend (blogger), whom she called up to get her out of a fix during her trip in gidi, was...just a friend who fell from the sky! And the lies and necessary deception carry on like a ball of hay down a straw mountain.

My advice then was simple: Kill the blog, OR run a massive EDIT programme and confess your sins to your hubby. She did neither and so here we were, watching an asian immigrant mop up KFC tiles at 11pm whilst ignoring a blarring mobile phone's incessant ringing.

"What's your plan now?" I always believe that you should give everybody the first chance to dig themselves out of their own scrape.
"I don't know! Come home with me, and help me talk to him."
"And tell him what, exactly?"
"That it is not my blog."
"I thought you said he has read it."
"I know. I'm still going to deny everything."
"K, anybody who knows you and reads that blog with any tinge of suspicion will immediately put one on one together. How else do you think i found out? There is no lawyer on earth that can win that level of denial to your husband."
"There is no evidence. I've deleted the blog."
"When?"
She showed me her android and the blogger interface and i knew K had gone mad.

The situation re-cap:
Husband discovers questionable blog. Wife panicks and leaves house. Blog URL suddenly stops working whilst husband is reading. Wife returns home after midnight. Husband is livid and wants answers. Wife claims ignorance. Uhmmm....who's going to buy that?!!!

Ofcourse, the finer details of what went on - as far as resolution goes, in K&J's house is best left undiscussed for obvious reasons.
But the situation still begs the question:
Is 'I do" = "I do not blog?"

I'm not talking here about the fine literary accomplishments of the Myne Whitmans or the faithful opinions and litanies of the Inyamu's Eldorado or Miss Fab's, which in their own right ought to be displayed without abandon for the world to appreciate and applaud. Instead, i am talking about the cacaphony of mid-life-crisis-type blog rants owned by supposed masked crazies who drink their lives full like tipsy glasses of fine chardonnay and tip over every intricate detail with reckless naked abandon on blinking blogger cursors. It is the nature of honesty in those pages that nobody is man(or woman) enough to own up to...And so the entries get fewer and fewer, until a sad day like this morning, when i key in the URL to one of my favourite blogs and get the unfortunate response:

Blog not found
Sorry, the blog you were looking for does not exist. However, the name "abcdef" is available to register!

It is indeed a sad sad day when a blog dies - just evaporates into thin air as if it was never there in the first place.
So, not entirely permitting five faithful years of blog diaries to simply poof into nothingness, here's a respectful salute to my girl K!

To all the lost ones...Veni, Vidi, Vici.

Someone better write me a neat moving piece when my time comes!

One twitter morning...and some changes....

I woke one twitter morning and just decided that i don't want to become one of those people.

Self-proclaimed psychologists who dish out daily doses of their understandings of life with the audicity of correctness. And i'm not sure how many psychology degree courses we run in Nigeria, or maybe all you need to qualify is to live abroad for a few years, and that dons on you the qualification to be wiser than the rest of the lot. What do i know? But briefly excusing doing just the same, i think that all advice columns, radio shows and twitter nuggets of wisdoms should be caveat with '...based on my own understanding as a result of my experiences, i think that....'

Maybe then people can stop acting the stupid as a result of 'joe blogs said so and did same...'

Hugh Hefner wanna-be's. Admittedly, i have indicated quite a few within these pages, but to all of which, i plead the excuse of youth :) Things change as you grow older and hopefully wiser. You sort of have more to loose, so one tends to be less flippant about your reputation or the words that come out of your mind. The more sex you have, the less you inclined you are to rant about it anyways. For those who have not figured it out and still ask, this is the rite of passage for most popular blogspaces.
Talking Taboo is easy and cheap publicity, but talking too much can come back and bite your shiny behind. #ouch.

The City of Champaign popping and wedging dollar bills into red clubbing underwear...that ish is not real everyday life. The proper rite is to grow up and vacate the sit of exuberance to the next generation and in turn, become the cranky old bugger who sits on his porch screaming for the kids to keep the noise down. Egad, maybe i have just grown up is all.
These days, everybody has an opinion about everything....and we have all taken to the street to shout on the rooftops what we claim to 'know' about this and that, but in actual fact 'don't have any real clue about'....never admitting that neither opinion was ever given a second of prior sensible reasoning.

The big edit is thus defined: I am still who i am today, but foolery betide me if i have never changed from whom i used to be yesterday.

Welcome to my T.Notes.

From Tenerife...with Love...

Feet up...
Novels propped...
Well, it is not entirely summer, but you get the picture.
Vacation is Bliss.

I am pondering the future of these pages...
Certainly no longer my neat little private spot.
As i find myself having to often give consideration to audience.

It's the age old curse of exposure demands responsibility
When we become restrained to dance naked in the rain like yesterdays...
And seriously,linked-in and FB requests...clearly my annonymity is slowly becoming a breached b3st3rd.

I have tried to don a subtle new mask and slip into a new page...
But familiarity is where the heart lies...

So today i have walked the perimeter of this walls
and admitt i'd want to stay a while...
I'll be responsible elsewhere another day...

So, to all the hackers, let's cut a bargain...
Today, let my thoughts and soul roam free
None chasing any wishful stardom...only freedom.

And point me in the direction of the gates-to-identity i have ignorantly left swinging open

And when finally the curtains call,
we'll all end the show with a real honest toothy grin!

Deal?

T.Notes.