Still Waters – The Prelude
Like every gentleman in our ranks, I do accept that my pedigree is nothing short of anything else debatable. I have to start by nailing my shortcomings across in order that this story may maintain a better balance than that of fantasy tales. That done, I would like to state that I did know a few things. The indignity of my own mother’s wafting smell of the mispronunciation of my name could not stand in my way of knowing what it was. That was before I decided to tweak its spelling in order to make it possible for her to pronounce it without mispronouncing it. It worked.
These were the small pleasures that no one would deny me. I was not gifted in many things that every little Tom, Dick and Harry in my age-group was. When (if) we sneaked out of our homes for unauthorised (no one ever authorised it) football, the rest of the mob would chuck me between the two sticks or stones that were improvised goal-posts. There are a few times when I was lucky enough to be in the same team with someone who was less gifted than I was. How lucky that may have been, I cannot tell since I always went back to my mother’s house with a ‘sausage’ toe testament to the imbalance between friends and foes in my age-group. Then of course, my mother’s word was final – “Eat the football for dinner!” I never gave up, albeit the brewing rage deep inside of me.
As I sought solace in the written word on a piece of paper, the sun was slowly disappearing beyond the reach of my eyes and darkness encroaching. The chicken hovered around the doors. The constant calls of my mother became more vivid as the silence of night settled in. At this point, she was ordering me to take the cows back to their shed, something that meant more than just that. I had to literally, with the help of a rope, take the bull by its horns and direct the angry beast to its resting place – hopefully for the last time. Regardless of how sorry my mother would be, I could not help but pray for some thief to come by in the middle of the night and coerce with Simba to let them steal Nyundo. If they managed to get through Simba’s five-star security system, however, Nyundo would not have been an easy nut to crack. I still fantasised that somehow, the bull would disappear out of my world and let me grow up fearlessly – or with lack of anything to fear.
I awakened from my fantasies soon enough to maintain my distance with the bull. I let him know the size of the stick I had in my hand just in case he was brewing any trouble. The response was one of a kind, one that made me sigh with relief. This was one of those nights when I would go to bed happy just because a bull obeyed me and did exactly what I expected of him. You could tell I was happy from the boyhood tunes I was humming soon before the singing spontaneously went off-key – then silent. Boy down! The reaction speed of the beast was more impressive than what the creature had achieved for its CV. Perhaps even more impressive is the figure of a mother standing there sympathising with you.
Brand Jamesy: Part 6, My Buckingham Palace Christmas Job
Jungle bells and jingle bells and folks having their grannies for dinner and others having just turkeys for the same. Christmas. I love the taste of Christmas and all the stuff that comes with it; that puts in a brave fight to defy description. Here then, is an attempt at describing things beyond description or may be describing things that are beyond description on (and results of) my escapades during my Buckingham Palace Christmas Job.
- Buckingham Palace
How many are there that know that Queen Victoria served for a period of 62 years – the longest anyone in that family tree has ever done? And how many know that the current Queen (I have forgotten her name) is just 4 years away from breaking that record? Hold on, one more question: How many know that the line of succession was completely changed when King Edward – whose seven names I remember (Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David) ludicrous - decided to marry an American double divorcee? Thanks to Christmas, I am about the only bozo who can rack this off their memories. And if there exists any other, then I am one of the few (Just a little disclaimer – don’t want anyone reading this to have their self esteem dwarfed!) You will be pleased to know that Edward’s brother (George) then took the mantle completely changing the line of succession and thus allowing the current Queen (whose name I still can’t remember) to have a go and keep it in her descendants.
Christmas is a time when you dig deep beyond the depths to do something different or differently. I personally like sitting in a corner and bursting my pimples. I also like daydreaming and not paying attention to anything else but the off-key sound of madness between my earlobes. Sometimes, I like to sleep and avoid talking to people or animated objects in my dreams in the name of sleep-talking. When I can bear it, I like to eat a lot of starchy food until my system demands a pit latrine – in which I, in conjunction with gravity, have devised an efficient way of balancing the act for maximum accuracy. And when I do finally talk, I mumble in such a way that my fart would be the more pleasant of the two. While people like History and others burn their midnight oil making love (whatever that involves) and being loved, I simply like my Maths and Computing. Those close enough to have heard me talk will agree with the rest of the world that hasn’t heard me talk that I potentially would do with filling my head before empting my mouth. So this Christmas, I set out to fill my head.
Trampling upon the cemetery (of those that have gone dust-to-dust from the beginning of timed time) in search of knowledge, wisdom, madness or anything different from my normalcy aforementioned, I then came across things that automatically qualify as bizarre in my reckoning. While some farmers painted their sheep blue just to distinguish them from snow (stupid, right?) was well within my standards of normal things, finding out about the head of the family down at a home called Buckingham Palace in a city known as London could well have landed me in prison – if I were the judge and my norm was the law.
During Christmas, we break from the norm and rest, eat, drink, tell jokes and stay with those we love. But these being the norm to me, I don’t break the norm to rest, I fast on food for a few minutes, I drink but water, I become boring and last and least, look for someone to love. Yeah yeah, after you are done having a great festive season, please put in a word for me for my next year’s Christmas Job at your sister’s.
Promoting Brand Jamesy
©Jamesy 27/12/2010
Brand Jamesy: Part 5, Stop Making Noise
I am a noisemaker. If you never knew it, now you know. And if you knew it, I am a silent noisemaker. I can carry twigs and chant names, and swear and curse, and walk, and talk my voice hoarse. I can protest and sing songs with political inclinations greater than angle theta. And I can flip my lid on the reasons why a government as conservative as it may claim to be in the comfort of its bedroom, may then wake up one day and decide to escalate the fees that genuine students want to pay to earn a genuine education. I can point fingers and swear to reduce the pain and the heartache, and I can even shut up and be the old introvert. But I ain’t gonna do any of that. Not now. 
I am taken aback by the quantities of skirted people who certainly look the best catch. Everyone has their hormonal pipettes and mine is not faulty. Given the necessary upthrust (ie skirted people), I can certainly sip my hormonal levels accurately to the tabulated levels. Of late, I have not only been able to suck that liquid up my criss-crossed system, but also achieved levels that I can comfortably tell you, are not of the accuracy that normalcy may dictate. Some people (ie. me, in the mirror) look at me and wonder whether I should be an actor whose everyday life is one big rom-com with more of the second part than the first. And memories come to mind.
You see, I never told you one thing that I believe. I am gonna tell you in the next sentence and the rest of this paragraph. I believe that many of my ‘close’ friends are not normal. Regardless of the amount of normalcy that is contained in me, I don’t think anyone should think I am abnormal for undergoing heartaches as a result of social repulsion from an approached skirted person. Worse still, from the skirted person in question. To defend my case, it takes a big heart to see someone beyond their face-value, and it results in ages of a throbbing heart to be put off in a sentence that would conveniently be ‘f**k off’ if we didn’t know more than just the two words. I really am not gonna mince my words on this one, but you know what; life’s a big female dog that’s gonna suck itself out of you any time you give it a chance. If out of the bushes comes someone who understands your value and appreciates it, even if out of your own bushes cannot come equal appreciation, at least don’t send them back to the bushes with a ghaslty verbal. Humans have six senses, and that of sight is just one of them. Appreciate those with evidence of usage of all the senses they have got. Excitement is not = happiness!!
Phew! That’s off my chest. But I am still p*ssed off! I get very emotional when yanking weeds out of the heads of some people. And sometimes I wish that I would be given a guest appearance in Shangri-La so I can go and apply my experience of human psychology in creating a human being update. I believe Human 2.0 should have an artificial intelligence that reminds them that they are not vending machines. I put it in, I pull it out. DEAD!
Last and least, all girls are beautiful. I just don’t know why?
Promoting Brand Jamesy
©Jamesy 17/12/2010
Brand Jamesy: Part 4, I am Very Normal
Ever wondered why when you make eye contact with people especially in Britain, they smile at you? Well, it is because of culture. After 4 years of research, I am pleased to announce the results of my findings on this experiment. A lot of energy went into it including reverse psychology. This finding has prompted a new research into the reasons that make me ‘normal’. Well, you may think I am by default normal, but I am actually very normal. 
In my previous life, I was a prince – but no one knows this, so don’t tell anyone. The few who may know probably can’t recognise me and I am not fazed, I am not dazed, I am not hazed. Being underrated is a very familiar position and very comfortable for that matter. There is a lot of fuss around, much of which I like diving into. But when I want my sleep, my whatever-my-favourite-food-is, my football, my Southern Comfort (you didn’t see this coming, did you?), my woman (laugh out loud, in fact, choke on a bar of chocolate), my poetry, my puzzles, my music and last and least (don’t tell her), my mother, I cannot stomach the weight of a pregnant world hurling verbals at me or breathing their breaths onto, or worse, into me. At such times of my life-cycle, I like to just exist and I am very sure I can just exist. You can call me a larva if your former Biology teacher has a money-back guarantee on your school fees (read this as, they did a good job).
Being very normal requires that you often use brackets to synthesize information for your audience. Sometimes it even prompts an ‘open bracket’ and a ‘close bracket’ during conversations with the wide world, something that actually is part of me by induction. It also helps you see that all women in the world are very beautiful. Like the three seated to my left as I write this. Stunning! But the catch is that, you cannot recognise a single one out of all of them as being beautiful. Surely, if this is not a symptom of very-normalcy, nothing else is.At the same time, it also makes you see men as very handsome, while at the same time barring you from being gay. (Put exclamation here)
If there was a technical error in the human-making factory somewhere in Nirvana and I was fortunately born a woman, that would be the best thing to have happened to the world after the current me. The first item on my mind, right from emerging out of teenage (I guess it couldn’t happen earlier – am African mark you), would be to flaunt my backside. I am assuming I’d be having any although during the few times that I have caught myself noticing my fleshy vertebrate parts, I have reckoned that if my gender was any different, I’d be heavily endowed in that sector. So, I’d give people a 3D movie without the 3D glasses to compensate for my inability to see my nether-couple as often as I would (if they were in front of me, say). I’d make maximum use of tight dresses just for the heck of it. Having been a man (I think) in this life, I know the whistles that accompany a majestic her-majesty when she passes by with nicely shaped flesh swinging like a pendulum (see your Physics notes).
But I actually love people. I love people although it is not very clear that I can work with them, or them with me. I enjoy being hated because that is the only way of getting some enemies on board. The thinking here is that the people who love me actually hate me, or worse still, they don’t know why they love me. I can assure you the feeling of being hated by a person who loves you is much worse than that of being hated by people who actually hate you. Being the person who looks at the problem and possible solutions, I can extrapolate that the best solution here is to get as many people hating me as I possibly can. Very normal that.
Yesterday I met a lady who smiled at me for about a mile before we actually met. My visibility is like 5 Metres but I could feel the smile. And I really was tired of smiling and so I wasn’t gonna do my usual snap smile. It didn’t work. Arousing is the word. Her very normal height, her shapely chin, her gibbous smile, her fibrous hair and least, her half-brushed teeth forced a genuine smile out of me. In fact, for some moment, I forgot about the Rubik’c cube I was trying to solve (actually unsolve) and looked over my shoulder to return the ‘hi’ she had propagated my way without my immediate notice.
Only if the rest of the world smiled at me… I would smile back, albeit at the feeble effort with which they may have afforded their teeth a wash.
Promoting Brand Jamesy
©Jamesy 03/12/2010
Brand Jamesy: Part 3, I Talk English, But NOT in English!
Once upon a time, there lived a man called Dr. Johann Ludwig Krapf,
Ludwig Krapf
a German in his own right but employed by the English to go to the Kenyan coast and translate the bible. Into Swahili. Such men as Johann brought to my forefathers what would later corrupt my authentic native tongue (or tongues) under the catalytic influence of Queen’s English. So the story goes.
I was born 141 years after Johann’s arrival, into a community of people wielding the Luhya language threateningly at me and speaking gibberish. Before I noticed it, I had been immersed into it and become a Luhya.
Then society brought the so called Swahili along, through interaction with those in my age boat, who could not make out a word I said nor I theirs. And so I learnt Swahili. But my dear mama, having gone through the centres established by Johann’s mates, commanded me to call her ‘mummy’ and also took me to a thing called ‘school’ where they tied another thing called ‘disk’ around my neck and forced me to speak ‘English’. You should not be surprised to hear that ‘disk’ was typically the skull of an animal, or in it’s absence, the largest born some scavengers could garner within the precincts of the so-called ‘school’. At least you are only reading this, I carried this thing as a necklace quite frequently for a few years.
Those days, they called me ‘Billy’, a short-form of ‘Jubilee’ which was my mom’s joke at her doing the Fergie time thing of ‘the match doesn’t end until we score’. So picture Billy carrying a kg of a stinking animal skull around his neck, with a dictionary of two pre-loaded languages inside him, and being forced to install yet another language – ‘English’.
I learnt, anyway. Going through those morning and evening strokes of the cane, crying my throat sore, hiding in a maize plantation on a few occasions to evade some strokes and other stuff that came along,…I made it. In fact, so good have I been that I can spell my name backwards while on a full tank of Bacardi (37.5%). I rest my case.
And so, my learning of English has not been a pleasant one. And to cap it all, the addition of German to make it 4 languages in one head isn’t something my neighbours in the Kingdom are used to doing.But I refuse to learn ‘Sign’ language as a remedy for not being bothered to add to this, I must boast here, rather large dictionary of English language, different English accents to suit my listening audiences. I refuse on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday …trusting you to know the other days of the week and complete that would-otherwise-be-long sentence for me.
So when I speak, don’t ask me to talk in English, but rather, listen to the Queen’s English. Of course coming out of a head preloaded with Luhya and Swahili and infected with German.
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©Jamesy 27/11/2010
Brand Jamesy: Part 2, Dear God
Dear God,
I would like to apologize that due to unforeseeable extenuating circumstances, I have been unable to use the software you downloaded and installed inside me. I have been running procrastination operating system pregnant with trojan horses from malicious vendors disguised as friends. My anti-destruction has turned into a distraction especially with the noises that have been ever-present in the nightmares I have of late been characterised with. As a result, I have found solace in Mark Z. – the male goddess of socials and togetherness, who has promised that every minute I spend with him will be free of charge at least as far as I am concerned.
But sir, I am afraid that the goddess of love knows his tracks and how to make a dollar and another. And I, though finding solace, have been unable to reboot, recharge my batteries and press Controlled Alternative Repeat in order to clear my lines. It is in this regard, your excellency at the highest Helpdesk, that I contact you seeking your unrivalled consultation.
As a matter of fact, my friends have let me know that you have recently acquired yourself a brand new copy of the Samsung Galaxy tab to add to your nano ipod video ediion. About the former, if this helps my case, I would like to let you know that you could catch the latest football news and even watch video highlights by installing the ESPN application. You may be interested to know that the first 3 months of your subscription will be free of charge after which they will require of you £4 or something every month. But since you are the King of Kings, the Footballer of Footballers and the Provider of Providers, I am sure they can give you a deal like say, instead of charging you money, they could get a blessing in disguise.
And lastly, about the ipod, I would like one last favour. Could you please add me to your playlist?
With Kind regards
Promoting brand Jamesy @http://www.jf32.com/
©Jamesy 20/11/10
Brand Jamesy: Part 1, Poundland Tights
I consider it courageous for a woman to don a pair of tights with more holes than cloth material. And what I just saw put proof to my Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious theory that after all, I have got some dressing sense. It is quite possible to see me in socks advertising the word ‘Tuesday’ on a Friday, despite the obvious (you may think) hint that ‘Tuesday’ means, ‘wear me on Tuesday’. But those socks will not have a single hole in them, no they won’t.
Poundland
Poundland is a shop across town, that sells stuff for one pound only, at the expense of a manual, something that may be really detrimental when it comes to hairdryers. The latter always seem to come with an additional accessory: fire-fighters. But I would, if I had courage of equal measure to my dear sister (I am very polite, here) remind her that for a fare of £3, she could get herself to poundland and back, bringing home with her a brand new pair of £1 tights, whose use by date would be that particular night. Makes Mathematical sense, completely does.
Iam an MSc. student these days, you see. I am a really busy man who has no time to say/write nonsense. But somehow, I always get into the swing of throwing one or two words around, having a go at people I see, those I know and those I care not a single (place your favourite word here) about. Recently, someone had a go at me concerning the aforementioned socks issue. This time, I had worn half a pair of ‘Wednesday’ socks and another half a pair of ‘Friday’ socks on a Monday. But they didn’t seem to care that despite two tries, I still didn’t get the day of the week right. They cared more of the fact that I had two different socks on. What does it matter, if I had got an exactly similar pair at home? See, common sense.
So twitter has taken to me like a duck to water. I have been tweeting away all my love and sweat and no doubt, I have managed to make twitter esquire addicted to me. I love technology, something that is contrary to the expectations of the world that at least understands my name, but calls me ‘Jaymo’ or however they spell their version of my name. It bothers me that this world whose cosmology I cannot fathom thinks that I am rather vat ze German vould call ‘altmodisch’ – (and we’ll still have a few of these citizens asking, ah, what is altmodisch?). Google. I got swagger, I got so much swagger like a saint. Like, I don’t know what.
Last and least, I got the honour of sharing a dancefloor with a few Chinese buddies. The sentence afore would be almost unreadable to my British audience for some good reason. One of my facebook friends (I am sure he won’t read this note and so he’ll never find out that I wrote about him) asked me upon hearing this story: “How do you remember people as being Chinese?” Surely!
More to follow – promoting brand Jamesy @http://www.jf32.com/
©Jamesy 19/11/2010
