RANT 1

I was gonna write something that had some kind of order. Something that had a destination. Something that started where I wanted it to start and ended up where I wanted it to end up. I wrote like two painful paragraphs and I stopped. I just couldn’t write the shit anymore. I have no order. I have no destination. Starting wasn’t my choice and I’m probably not gonna end up where I wanna end up, so why not let my writing reflect my life? Welcome to my first official rant.

There’s this thing I do with my phone. I don’t know why, and sometimes I don’t even know how. However, before you can get to talk to me on a phone, you have to have called me so many times that your phone is almost as pissed off at me as you are. And that’s how it is mayne. At home, everybody’s always complaining about me. Everybody hates me. Even when they offend me and they call to apologize, I still don’t pick up the fucking phone. Then they get pissed at me even when I’m supposed to be the one that’s pissed. It’s just a fucking thing.

Maybe I have a problem with control; or rather being controlled. The few times I have dared to ponder this problem, I have realized that I don’t like people calling me because when they call me, they don’t give me any notice. You see, you call me at your own convenience, not mine. And it’s my phone. I don’t see why I have to speak to you when I don’t wanna speak to you. When you call me, you’re speaking to me when you wanna speak to me, not when I wanna speak to you. So what the fuck do you expect me to do? I don’t wanna speak to you now. When I wanna, I’ll call you.

I guess many people would be fine with this arrangement. It actually does save them call credit. But my problem is that I usually don’t wanna talk to anybody. So if you leave the responsibility of making the phone call to me, we’ll probably never talk until we see each other face-to-face again. That’s why everybody hates me.

Typical quote from my mother “I call you, I send you a text message, you never pick up, you never reply. And you never call or send me back a text message. What kind of person are you?”

I swear to God mummy, I don’t know.

Do you know the other thing? If a text message is longer than two sentences, I probably won’t read it. Yes mummy, it’s true. All those texts you sent, I never read them; I just skimmed through. Sometimes I don’t even open the message. When I see that it’s a prayer I just leave it unread.

I swear to God mummy, I don’t know why I’m like this. I don’t know.

I love my mother to death. She would die for me even as flawed as I am so I would die for her even if she knowingly stabbed me in the back. But I won’t pick her phone calls. I won’t talk to her. I won’t send her text messages. But I will think of her. I will worry about her. I will do everything a human being does to another human being he/she cares about except do the things that she can see or hear or physically feel.

Up till today, I still feel awkward hugging my mother.

Sometimes she says she thinks that I hate her, and one time I cried because I thought she really believed it.

I confided in a friend about this, and she said to me “Why don’t you just tell her? It will make a big impact on her life.”

And it probably would make a difference. In fact, I came to the conclusion that it definitely would, but I still just can’t bring myself to do it.

I love my mother to death but don’t tell her, and I don’t show her; so how do I expect her to know?

On the other hand, everyday she shows me that she loves me. The endless sacrifices. The bending over backwards, forwards, and then backwards again.

I don’t deserve her. I don’t. She doesn’t deserve me. She deserves a better son. She deserves a better child. She deserves a better family member.

I think I’m just a bad person. There’s no turning it this way or that way. I’m just a bad person.

I don’t like people. I prefer to be alone. I only have one roommate and I swear to God, this has been the best room I’ve ever been in. We don’t talk much, and when we do we talk a lot. The room is divided by a little boundary, the lights are always off. Everything I like. This dude, no homo, has to be my favourite person in this school. Ever even.

I mean, I like other people, but they always wanna be around. Or they always want me to be around. There are only like two people ever that I wouldn’t mind being around 24/7. Me and Me.

I think that’s why I like Twitter. There are so many people I have conversations with on Twitter, and these conversations are so animated. You’d think we’d been friends since childhood. But I only like them because they’re not here. We’re talking but they’re not here. I like that.

When I see my ‘friends’ on Twitter outside my room, I try not to be too friendly. It’s because I like them and I don’t want to mess up our friendship by actually becoming friends with them.

I don’t know mummy. I don’t know.

The most ironic part is that when I’m alone for too long, then I crave human companionship. However, even in this weak moment, I don’t crave just any kind of companionship. I crave specific people. If it’s not them, then it’s nobody.

When they come around, then I want them to go.

I don’t know mummy, I don’t know.

I think it’s all about control. People are so unpredictable. Sometimes they ask me questions that I’d have never anticipated. The question is probably a yes or no thing, but because I didn’t anticipate it, I don’t feel comfortable answering it.

I wanna be able to control everything in my life. I hate unpredictability. I hate it. And I think I know why.

Before every semester, it is always uncertain as to whether I’m going to school or not. You have NO idea how much torture this is. It is totally out of my hands and in the hands of two people who are not thinking rationally.

I think this is why I have to control everything. It’s just safer.

This is why I need to know everything. My ex-girlfriend used to hate that. Even if it’s unnecessary, I wanna know. I just wanna know because I don’t wanna feel like you’re hiding anything from me. I think she realized this and ended up hiding way more from me than she ever even told me. She’s clever.

Because of my thing for control, I am probably the one most susceptible to it.

I don’t know. It’s probably why I don’t seek out musical and writing opportunities as much as I should. They control the opportunity. If they don’t wanna gimme the record deal or the writing stint, then I’m done for.

I don’t like that. I could kill myself over that shit.

Control. Control. That’s what it is mummy.

I’m just a fucked up person. You deserve a better son.

THE LEGEND OF THE NINJA COWS

I mean, you’ve seen them. You’ve seen them. Big fat blobs of pure beef, and a couple horns. They’re big. They’re fat. They’re cows.

Have you seen them move at top speed? I have. When they have to cross the road real quick. When they run, they cause a mini-earthquake; you can hear them from a mile away, but they’re not really moving that fast. I’ve seen them move at top speeds and the herdsmen outrun them easily.

Have you ever seen a lion or a dog run? They’re graceful in their speed. They’re slender and muscular and their bodies are streamlined so that they literally break wind. I dare you to try outrunning a dog or a lion.

This has always been the problem for cows. For centuries, they have been the brunt of the animal kingdom. Other animals made fun of them. Apparently, the highest honour you can receive in the animal kingdom is the title of ninja. And you have to train to become a ninja. You have to be a certain weight, flexible and fast. Other animals taunted the cows saying “None of you can ever become ninjas.”

Cows are stubborn; to an extent. It’s probably because they’re big. It takes a while for their herdsmen to keep them in line with canes, or make them run. Because of their stubborn nature, they never gave up on becoming ninjas. They sat around and discussed their problems; all those reasons why they could never become ninjas. The complained about how evolution was making them bigger and heavier. They had conferences and seminars to talk about the problems of their cows.

However, only a small herd of five cows acted upon their goal of becoming ninjas. These cows, despite their body stature, crept into ninja camp and learned painstakingly to become ninjas. If the lions ran five laps a day, they ran five hundred. If the lions lifted other lions, they lifted unwilling elephants. They trained until they gained unofficial ninja status. Since then, these five ninja cows have been attacking different kinds of animals just so they know that they too can become ninjas. I know they exist because they attacked me two months ago.

If cows can become ninjas, then Nigeria can become a world superpower.

However, we’re like those other cows. We just sit down, day in day out, and talk about why we’re not making it. We talk and talk and talk and never do anything about it. The most annoying thing is if we modeled the world into an animal kingdom, we wouldn’t even be cows. We’d be cheetahs. We have what it takes.

Have you heard your parents talk about how culture is dying? Culture is dying, they say. Our children no longer know how to speak our languages. They have no respect. They don’t wear traditional clothes anymore. In a few generations, our languages will die out. They say all these things, but what do they do about it? I don’t speak Yoruba to my parents; they speak it to me. And they don’t give a fuck if I speak it back.

You complain about your culture dying out and yet the worst-taught subjects in our secondary schools are the languages. And almost all subjects are badly taught. Nobody gives a fuck. If the teachers don’t give a fuck, how do you expect the students to give a fuck? The curriculums for these languages are so basic and dry. They don’t inspire the student to want to learn shit. In most cases, they are modeled after how the English language is taught. Write an essay in Yoruba. Who the fuck wants to write an essay in Yoruba?

In my secondary school, we didn’t have a Yoruba teacher for over five years. Or an Igbo teacher, or a Hausa teacher. Fucking inspectors from the Ministry of Education came to our school every fucking term and they didn’t give a fuck that we didn’t give a fuck about languages. Yet everybody complains that our culture is dying.

In JSS2, when I did Yoruba, there was a brief period when we studied Ifa and all the Yoruba gods. I swear to you, if you give me an exam on Ifa and the Yoruba gods, I will not obtain less than eighty per cent. I can never forget those lessons because they were interesting and fun. The teacher taught according to the textbook, which was very nice, and guess when they were written? In the seventies; when people gave a fuck.

It’s the same thing about everything. About Nigerian politics, about Nigerian movies, about the Nigerian music industry, about the Nigerian educational system, about our roads, about our prisons, about our immigration policies, about the Niger Delta, about Jos.

In fact, I am going to briefly interject myself here and talk about Jos. I am blessed enough to be able to own a BlackBerry, and when the Jos thing was in full gear, there were display pictures and statuses that said “Pray for Jos” and all that motherfucking bullshit. What the fuck did you ever do to help them? Pray? If all they did for New Orleans was prayer, the place would be under the fucking ground by now. Nobody gives a fuck. Not the government, not Nigerians; only people who live in Jos. Now that the Jos issue has died down, nobody puts up those display pictures anymore. Does it mean that people are still not dying? No it doesn’t.

Nobody does anything about it. We just sit down and talk about it. Every day, there are millions of gatherings, I daresay, of old men and young men, sitting down drinking beer and talking about politics.

If talking did it, then we’d have been the only world superpower decades ago.

Fucking cheetahs acting like cows.

I hate this country so much, you have no fucking idea. The people make the country, and the people are just a bunch of lousy blabbermouths who will continue to rot in mediocrity until they learn to shut the fuck up and do shit.

You’re proud to call yourself a Nigerian? Then you’re a fucking fool.

All y’all are fools if you can’t see what’s going on. What you’re doing to yourself.

Name one aspect of life that Nigeria surpasses anyone worth naming in.

You say Nollywood is better than Somalia’s movie industry, but they are elephants, and you are cheetahs. You should be ashamed of yourselves. Every day you wake up, you should cry and slit your fucking wrists because you are fucking wastes of space. Just a large collection of buffoons.

If a cow can become a ninja, then Nigeria can become a world superpower.

Long live the Ninja Cows.

AIN'T GONE NOWHERE

When I was a little boy, about eight to nine years old, I had this yellow Bush walkman that my parents bought me. As you should be able to deduce, it played cassette tapes. If you couldn’t deduce that, no biggie; we’re all in Zion tonight.

So I had this Walkman. Beautiful yellow thing. I cherished this walkman more than anything else in the world. I used to go to sleep with the shit. I used to do random checks in my room like every five minutes, if I wasn’t with it, to make sure it wasn’t lost or worse, crushed. In fact, later that year when we were robbed by a vicious gang of armed robbers, I summoned a rare spell of bravery just to hide that walkman in a box of old dusters. Surely they would notice this bright yellow gem of a thing and leave everything else they came for because of it. So I hid it.

We were holidaying in England when I was bought this precious gem. Because my father was (Ok, is.) an intellectual, he felt like he should introduce me to the roots of music and not the very derelict offspring of music that they played in the nineties (I wonder what he’d think of them now; the crack-taking, throwing-babies-in-the-garbage, whore offspring. I think that’s what he’d think. Anyway.). So he bought me a double-cassette Motown Collection. These tapes christened my yellow walkman.

I listened to all the songs as you might do when you buy an album. But later, you create a playlist full of the songs you like on the album, and skips. I didn’t really need the skips for my own playlist. I settled on one song: You Gotta Be by Des’ Ree. That was the only song that I played on that album. In fact, because of this, it followed later that the first thing that got destroyed on that walkman was the rewind button. It caused quite a problem.

That song that I listened to, everyday for well over a year, I found today (I know, I know. It’s tainted. It’s digital. MP3 format, 3.18 MB.). As I write this, I’m listening to the song for the first time in over 12 years, and I feel like the little boy I was back then.

When I was a little boy, there was hope and promise and all those bright-light abstractions. There was a long way to go in this life but I was a little boy so I had no choice but to take a chill pill and just enjoy the world. I was naive. Everything was beautiful. Everything was nice.

The song just ended (For the third time. Ha. I guess old habits do die hard. (Like Bruce Willis. Ha.)). And I still feel like I did back then.

It might be a good thing to you, but it’s a motherfucking depression catalyst for me. When I was a kid, I was supposed to feel hope and motherfucking promise. There was supposed to be bright lights and streets paved with gold and shit. That was then. The real challenges of life were a long time coming then. If I still feel like that now, then I’m still that little boy.

And I’m not supposed to be that little boy no more. I’m supposed to have achieved those things I hoped for and showed promise in. It’s a bad thing.

I paraphrase from the movie Donnie Brasco; can’t remember it word for word.

Lefty: Look at that boy in there Donnie.

Donnie: Yeah?

Lefty: He was born here, in this hospital, 28 years ago. He’s done all sorts of things; one thing is the coke that always in his fucking head. Look at him now; lying down, a vegetable, in the same hospital he was born in. 28 years and he ain’t gone nowhere.

Ain’t gone nowhere. Thank you Lefty, for that revealing speech.

Ain’t gone nowhere.