I THINK I'M GONNA CUT MY HAIR

My hair is really curly and it doesn’t grow more than a certain silly height. Leaving it to grow in this rough and jungle way has never really been my preference. I think my preference has just been to leave it the way it is; not doing anything about it. I comb it from time to time, but it never makes me feel any different about it. It’s just there.

The power of the tongue. I remember at one time, I used to say that the state of my hair reflected the state of my mind, body and soul. I guess it has always been true. It’s like living twenty-two years and finding out in your twenty-second year that your name is truly your name. The state of my hair does reflect the state of my life. Just there. Curly. Tangled. No breathing space. An abandoned jungle of protein.

I’m tired of having life. It is such a feeble intangible wisp of an idea. Fleeting. Yet it is such a burden. Suicidal people complain and complain and they want to take action. They wanna fix things. They wanna take their lives. I’m past that stage. I don’t even have the strength to wanna take my life anymore. I’m just there.

I really don’t know what to do. I have no idea. Everybody has an idea about what I should do; what path I should take. Everybody seems to know what’s best for me. Everybody can point out the mistakes I’ve made. The right moves I’ve made. Everybody can tell me about myself. It’s like they feel the need to remind me of these things so I don’t forget; so I don’t forget about myself.

This ‘me’ is never gonna marry. This ‘me’ is never gonna have children. This ‘me’ is never gonna be a functional member of society. This ‘me’ might get a good job, and be an effective member of the labour force, but obviously, and I will not say why it is obvious, that’s not really hard to do. A mad man on the streets of Lagos can easily refine himself and become the dude you ask for a loan for your dead-end society-defined entrepreneurship business. It’s not that hard.

I don’t know what to do with myself, and I guess it shows in the way I carry myself, and in the way I walk, and talk, and relate with people. I have never met anyone who was not inclined to give me advice. I guess it’s a sign of weakness to show fallibility, and to show uncertainty. However, I think it’s the only way I can cope with this life. Accepting the characteristics of my life, extreme fallibility, uncertainty, and failure, and living them. It would cause me to be extremely deranged and insane to try and cover it up, and lie to myself.

So in light of these things, I have come to the conclusion that I should consider cutting my hair.

THE FRAGILITY OF THE MATCHSTICK

This is the eleventh time I have woken up today. In our line of business, all we do is wake up and feel fear. When I woke up, as usual, I looked left and I looked right to make sure my neighbours were still there. They have been with me since the beginning of time, and they’ve always been there when I wake up. I call them he and she. We do not have any names because our time here is very short.

I was one of those, along with he and she, who was lucky enough to be born at the bottom of the hierarchy. We are the elite. We are those who have a little bit of control; a little bit of choice. We can push those at the top around, and exert our will a little bit. Ultimately though, the real power belongs to the buyer. He can pluck us out from the bottom and end our lives with as little as a stroke of his hand.

They say the buyer bought us to die. That is all we were born for. At the end of the day, we are all going to die; one way or the other. We have no choice. We cannot fight back. We cannot move. We cannot escape this rectangular box that we call our planet. It is our job to die for the buyer. Whatever we do on this planet is inconsequential. When our time comes, we will all burn. When our time comes, the fire will burn us from head to toe, and we will feel excruciating pain, and we will die.

I’ve been lying down here for what seems like millennia waiting for you. I’ve been waiting patiently. Even though sleep is my calling, I don’t sleep anymore. More than five times a day, I see that little glimpse of sunlight, but you never take me. You always leave me lying down here wishing it was me. You always take another. And I always know. And you know I always know. There are these tender little moments when it seems that you’re going to lean in. That the lucky bastard is going to be me. But here I am still lying down at the bottom of the box, the bottom of the hierarchy. The lucky one. I will be one of the last to die. I will be your friend for a long time. We will talk and we will share moments, but you will not take me. Because I am at the bottom of the box. I am the last on your list.

I would burn for you. I would willingly jump to the top of the box for you. I want you to hold me in your hand. Burn me. Break me. Toss me away. Use your pretty feet to walk all over me. That’s what I want. That’s what I was created for. Don’t leave me in the box. Take me. Use me. Burn me. Kill me.

What can I do? Nothing. I can’t move. I am a paraplegic. I can’t tell you how I feel. I’m a mute. I can’t catch your attention. I am too little in your eyes. I can’t make you come to me; you determine where I go. I am but a matchstick in your hand.

That is how you make me feel; like a matchstick. A man with the fragility of a matchstick.

THINKING ABOUT STUFF

I was just thinking about stuff today and realized that time is an endless entity. It goes on and on forever, and everything we try to do to contain it is useless and futile.

If I wanted to create a clock where it was twenty-four thousand hours a day, time would be able to accommodate that because it is endless. Millennia of twenty-four thousand hour days would pass, and time would still be intact. You can’t touch that motherfucker. You can’t do anything to make it yours.

It just makes me think you know?

We humans have created this short-sighted calendar because we are well, short-sighted. We just divided time into pieces that we can comprehend. Pieces that our minds can understand and grasp without going cuckoo.

That’s what I think.

Know what else I think? Lots of stuff.

Hahahaha.

But seriously. Seriously. I went smoking with one of my dudes one time, and we were smoking at this place where they had burned tall grasses to the ground. The ground was black, scorched, and to a romantic like me, scarred. And I remarked to my partaking companion, “It looks as if two superheroes fought out here.” And then we began to imagine what the fight would look like and no matter the scenario we imagined, it was beautiful.

There was a tree right next to where we sat down, and there were a few birds nesting and making irritating sounds. Irritating sounds aside, imagine if we saw that fight from the viewpoint of the bird. It would be a totally different experience. One Superman punch would probably be like an atomic bomb dropping to them.

This is when I decided that God must exist. There are so many viewpoints that one can see ONE scenario from. From guy A’s viewpoint, what he perceives the situation to be, what he thinks about it, bla bla bla, for one scenario, it is possible to gain up to 7 billion viewpoints, thanks to Television.

We can only see as far as our eyes can see.

Someone has to have that magnificent viewpoint that can see everything on earth at once. And that someone would be so knowledgeable that he would be more powerful than the rest of us with our limited views of life. God.

We went to a bar in town a few weeks back and one of my dudes didn’t know what part of town we were in. I hadn’t realized where we were either, but then I saw a billboard that I saw every time I was going back to school from the bank, and then I realized where we were.

Do you know how much that little piece of information changed my whole viewpoint? In exponential degrees. That knowledge changed the picture that I had painted of where we were in my mind.

As you zoom out, you become more powerful. If I knew where in Adamawa Yola was, and where in Nigeria Adamawa is, and where in Africa Nigeria is, and where in the world Africa is, I would be one of the most powerful dudes on the planet. Not just knowing where they are on the map, but being able to visualize it, not imagine it, visualize it because I had seen it all before. Imagine if you could come up with a real image for where exactly you, this speck on the surface of the earth was on the surface of the earth.

What a beautiful view eh?

Someone’s gotta have that view. As you zoom out, you become more powerful.

When I begin to think of these things, I just feel like dropping all these worthless hustles I’ve come to school to do, and travel the world; go to outer space. Experience these things that the average Joe would never even THINK of experiencing. Not that they couldn’t but they would never even think of it. If they thought of it, they wouldn’t be average Joes.

The world is a beautiful place people, and thinking about stuff just makes me realize how much those motherfuckers say we are living in the world, and how much they are once again as far from the truth as possible.

We are living on earth, but we are not really living in the world.

How many of you are ever gonna get to see the world from outer space? How many of you are ever gonna able to look down at the world from Mount Everest? How many of you are ever gonna be able to see a Tiger give birth? Y’all are just gonna be cooped up in your individual metropolis not seeing past your nose and your bank account. It’s a fucking damn shame.

It’s like human beings have really created a matrix for themselves where they live in this beautiful beautiful world, and they don’t know what the fuck is really happening in it. We are blind to the real workings of Mother Nature. All we see is what they tell us to see.

Just thinking people. As you were.

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.