“You do NOT fear your OWN ability to COMMIT. Just think about your unwavering dedication to your career, your notion of sisterhood and friendship. You are tireless. That is why we all lean on you. Because you are totally committed to the lot of us. You do not have a “fear of commitment” that’s just an easy way out of all of this.

What you have dearest one, is a deep seated and totally understandable fear of OTHER people’s commitment to YOU. I totally wholeheartedly agree, you’ve never been in love. Until Zac, you’ve chosen chaps whom you’ve simply liked but who have loved you. so when it’s over, it hasn’t hurt you. Why have you done this, over all these years? I’ll tell you why, because what YOU actually fear is being left by someone YOU love.

Your fear of COMMITMENT centres solely on another’s commitment to YOU”

Yeah, everytime I read this I feel like Freya is standing over me wagging her finger my way and tut tutting. This woman needs to stop giving me hard hitting lectures in her books! Alright I gerrit already!

I just watched Ledisi’s ‘Take Time’. She sat, observed me, read my mind, psychoanalyzed me, and then wrote that song. I wanted to quote some of the lyrics, but I can’t. Because each word she sings, each pause she takes and scat she does is an illustration of what’s happening with me and what I need to do. So in case you have been wondering what I have been up to (which I’m sure you haven’t), here’s a status update.

Ledisi _ Take Time

Take time, to get away
Free your mind, and fly away
Take time to get away
Free your mind, and fly away

Ooh, sometime the days get so long
A cup of coffee just to keep you strong
In rush hour and you’re late,
There’s nothing to do, but sit and wait
So many things are on your mind, yeah
The start of your day, keeps passing you by,
Oh you wanna find a place to escape,
It’s your life, you gotta do whatever it takes, yeah

Take some time, to, free your mind, oh yeah
Ooh, oh oooh yeah
Sometime the days get so long, long,
Though sometime it seems, everything is wrong, yeah
Endless hours, you’re working so hard, yeah
In your fancy suit, exchanging business cards
So much pressure, need to run and hide, yeah
Get tired of the days, passing you by, ooh,
You wanna find a place to escape, it’s your life
You gotta do whatever it takes, yeah

Take some time, to get away
Free your mind, and fly away, oh yeah
Everything’s gonna be alright when you do it yeah,
Ooh ooh ooh ooh ooh yeah

Take time, let go, let go
Take time, yeah, it’s alright, take time, take time
Yeah yea, take a minute breathe yeah, just let go and
Leave it there, you gotta breathe a minute, take a minute
Breathe a minute, yeah, yeah, yeah, just relax and let it
Go, it’s alright if you should know, breathe a minute, take
A minute, breathe a minute, ooh yeah, take a minute, breathe
A minute, take a minute, come on, oh come on, take a minute,
Breathe a minute, take some time, and love yourself!!

(scat)

Take your time, to get away, yeah
Free your mind and fly away, just get away
Everything’s gonna be alright, everything’s gonna work out fine, when
You do it, when you do it, yeah
Take time (scat) oh yeah, yeah yeah (scat)

Be that as it may, do enjoy folks! (And by folks here, I mean my 0.0867 readers remaining – judging by my confuddlingly erratic update intervals here *le sigh*)

Pray
Meditate
Be good to
my inner and outer body
Develop
Evolve
Be kind to
Pamper
Create 

Devotion to
small things
Lost balance
I seek to tilt scales
Back to transcendence
To living in the moment
To erasing guilt
To being honest
To remember my beginnings
To be better
To always try
To energize

My self and purpose questioned
I drowned in the moment
Loathing every second
I dwelled in the moment
And owned self pity
Felt eaten whole
He was my only salva vida

Now, I can save my own life
By living by striving by stirring up
What brought me joy when I needed rescue
My mantras
My praying
My poetry
My sacred time and words
My ability to create whole cloth where nothing existed before

So I redevote myself
To me
Mi espiritu,
Mi alma,
Mi creatividad,
Mi intuicion,
Mi destino

With my salvation by my side
(always a comforting and constant presence)
I reinforces what the inner me always knew:
YOU ARE ALREADY COMPLETE,
you bring your blessings to you,
you change landscapes,
you craft dreams,
you bounce back,
you weave words that become scripture.
You ...

That’s it for now….. until my next absurdly mundane post.

Hang on to your bloomers folks, this is a long one. It’s got chapters; you might want to take that potty break now.

PROLOGUE:

Breaking: (v) def ~ the process of taming a wild horse.

INTRODUCTION:

“…we always said we’d resist and indeed we desisted…”

Imani misquoted.

CHAPTER ONE:

“Ladies and gentlemen, public service address: I just might make it home by 7.30pm! 7.30! *this day gets weirder and weirder*”

I tweeted on my way home from my first workday in 2011.

You see I usually self flagellate for no apparent reason by working quite late on a daily basis. Today was different; I had been forcibly evicted from the office early and was headed home. So it was a weird occurrence, but it felt good.

Unusual for Nairobi, there was only a light flow of traffic out of town, up Langata road, which trickled into the bottle neck just before the bomas causing slight traffic that crept along slowly up the hill towards the magadi road turn off. Indeed, a weird occurrence for a road that usually sees a maddening standstill jam daily from Barracks at that hour.

CHAPTER TWO:

And then the madness began.

“Seeing matatu driver’s bumper riding ambulances just to get ahead DISGUSTS me to the very core of my being. Utter fuckery!!”

I tweeted as a patient bearing ambulance, sirens blazing, rushed to save a life, and tailgating it, causing all sorts of mayhem in its wake, an errant matatu bulldozed at full speed. Bile welled up in the depths of my bowels.

You see it made no sense to me, that one human being would recklessly endanger his 14 passengers, trying to save a couple of minutes by bumper hugging another human being who was trying to save the life of his one charge.

You’ll have to bear with me, but I’m the type that gets incensed by nonsensical overlapping on the road.

CHAPTER THREE:

“And so the friggin matatu crashes while at it!! Fuck you dude, you’re everything that is wrong with humanity!! NKTEST!”

I tweeted as we caught up with the same matatu 5 minutes later.

The tosser had gotten into a fender bender with an oncoming motorist while in pursuit of idiocy.It was nothing serious, divinity had intervened and no one was hurt. The bile rose up to the base of my throat.

Venting on twitter, I shared my frustrations with @egovanego and @madnjomz.

“Ok Loco… calm down luv.”

@Archermishale intervened, advice that I was about to heed, but then surprise surprise, WTF of WTFville, IT HAPPENED AGAIN!!!! Same script different cast!

FINAL CHAPTER:

“Just saw it again!! The fuck?! I’m not giving myself ulcers over this, won’t even be sad about it. I’m done giving a shit.”

I replied to Archer.

And just like that I was done caring, done feeling. You might have to bear with me again, I’m the type that gets affected by 50% of what I think is rotten with the world, and the only reason the other 50% doesn’t affect me is because I don’t know what it is yet.

I want to remain an idealist, a humanist even, but by Jude I can’t. I won’t. It will be the death of me. So you may now call me disillusioned, jaded even. I need to become a drone, a bot even. Report to work, slave away mindlessly till the end of the day, trudge home unfeelingly alongside the masses and repeat sequence until numbness is achieved.

CONCLUSION:

I may not be wild and in need of taming, I may only bear a fleeting resemblance to a horse, but you could say I’ve been broken.

EPILOGUE:

Check with me tomorrow, I just might give a fuck again.

~ DEUCES ~

Samahani, mteja was request uliyotoa hapatikani kwa sasa, na hatapatikana kabisa!

So I was doing my regular interweb trolling and I happened to click on a link that sent me right to this firefox declaration! So typical of Loco, first I LOL’ed, really loudly at that! And then I got to thinking;

Ladies, have you ever been hit with one of those pick up lines that left you shaking your head wishing you could say:

Dear pickuper,

You mean to tell me that despite all the brain cells you have lost along the way in your pick up career, and even factoring in your astonishing lack of intellectual prowess plus considering that no one would expect you to be shakespearian in your pick up prose…. THAT is all you could come up with??!

Yours,

Thoroughly disappointed by that pick up line

I’m sure you know the type, “Oh bebe, please be my martini and I’ll have you shaken not stirred!” (Yeah, shaken about my faith in humanity!!) or “Oh bebe, I am donating my organs to science, will you be a science?” (Err, I’m sure you should consider cremation as a more viable project sir) All these delivered by some sleazy chap who would make cows cringe with his use for leather in a suit and has sleaked copius amounts of grease a top of his head in the name of a hairstyle.

So anyway, my point was, I shall print out all those firefox error messages into little cue cards so that next time I have one of these encounters I won’t even have to do any tallking, just whip out my little firefox “request-denied” cards and hand them to the culprits! I shall especially have fun handing out the ones below:

There’s once lived a lovely lady in the state of New York; Queens to be precise-ish. Brilliant wordsmith and literary mind. She was also blessed with the most sublime of features and a body that elicited nothing but sinful thoughts in the gutters of men’s minds. I had had a crush on her and would walk by her building on my way to the train home from work hoping to catch a glimpse of her smile and maybe a wave too; fuel for my dreams.

Then one day, my balls dropped, and I mustered up the courage and audacity to walk up to her floor, bang on her door and say “Look woman; this is what’s going to happen. I will buy you coffee this evening and you shall drink it and entertain my small talk and midget humor. That is all. Dress snazzy.”
I got to the door and barely tapped it when it opened itself. “Aha! I thought. This is a sign.” but before I could proceed on one of my power-trip self-gratifying solliloquies, I noticed the lady in question passed out by the bathroom floor, foaming at the mouth.

A 911 call, ambulance ride and hospital night later, I found out that she’d had the severest of depressions and had tried to bottle it in and act normal. But the pressure of her family telling her she was sulking for no reason, her friends being jealous of her beauty(mind and other) and her job, her neglectful boyfriends and the ever intimidated passers by who never said anything more than hi, she decided the world was better without her. I tried talking to her, even convinced her to go for professional help a few months later. I moved out of NY to ATL but still swung by to visit and check on her. It was clear that she was struggling without a support system. And the medication did little to help.

3 years and 3 suicide attempts later, she finally made it to Walker Funeral Home.

And her family sat there crying wishing they would’ve listened.

Everybody is worth worlds or more.
Don’t listen to the funk. Well, not that funk at least.

Stay up Loco.

See I’ve romanced the thought of death once or twice before, teased it, played with it. I’ve attempted suicide once before, on a day just like this, because I was feeling just like this. Like nothing really matters, like everything I do is destined to be one failure after another. Ever felt so useless and inconsequential that you are convinced primordial ooze is more relevant than you are? Well, that’s how I was feeling then, when I took pill after pill knowing I was going to sleep and not wake up. And that’s how I’m feeling now as I write this.

You see I sometimes get into.. funks. That’s the uptown word for it. The real word is depression. To be a little more clinical, I live with a condition called AADHD (Adult attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) and the depression is as a result of comorbidity, that is, when the AADHD makes me feel like a dysfunctional adult, I sink into a depression. So really, if you look at it, I’m a tad manic depressive, the too highs and too low lows.

All that I can deal with. What I usually can’t deal with to be perfectly honest is the judgement from people. If I had a dime for everytime someone told me “AADHD? Thats a disease for white people” (From my brother) or “Stop making excuses” (From a close friend) Oh boy wouldn’t I be rich. And because of this, I spent a very long time thinking that I was just a really bad person. Even now, knowing the underlying psychiatric issues, I pretend that I’m okay with people not understanding, but I’m not. It kills me a little when people think I’m faking my… funk. makes me think, why should I even bother, drives me deeper into the… funk, and brings me where I am today, just wanting to die.

But that’s just me. My mind, my… funk.

According to the WHO (World Health Organization) Mental Health and Development report 2010; 151million people live with depression globally, 26 million with schizophrenia, 40 million with epilepsy, 24 million with Alzheimer’s and other dementias. Yet another 12.5million live with alcohol and drug abuse disorders and approximately 844,000 people die of suicide each year.

What about their minds? Their… funks?

MOTHER TO SON;

Well son, I’ll tell you, Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair,

It’s had tack in it, and splinters, and boards torn up,

And places with no carpet on the floor – Bare

But all the time, I’se been climbin’ on

And reachin’ landings, and turning corners

And sometimes goin’ in the dark, where there ain’t been no light

So, boy, don’t you turn back, don’t you set down on the steps

Cause you finds it’s kinder hard, don’t you fall now -

For I’se still goin,’ honey, I’se still climbin’

And life for me, ain’t been no crystal stair.

So go forth and climb, even though, as the perona in this piece puts it, Life ain’t no crystal stair.

Situation: Loco is minding her own business as a good little commuter making her way to work, you know, “Kutafutia watoto school fees” (Nevermind that I have no children). In comes a tout who insists on scrunching his way into my slice of matatu and then raising his arms as though it finally dawned on him to follow rapper’s instructions and “Put your hands up”. What followed…. (Pause as I shudder at the memory of this near death experience) a putrid mixture of acid, bile and various other body fluids I care not to imagine all coalated into this horiffic sweat vapour hits my nostrils like a police baton born and bred in Kiganjo. AT 11.00AM. IN THE MORNING!

As anyone who has had a near death experience will probably tell you, I saw my life flashing before my eyes. Okay, maybe it was the acridity induced tearing reflex that caused that visual hiccup to happen, but if you were seated where I was seated at that particular moment then you would see how I thought I was about to die a painful Chernobyl-like death!

Anyway, riddle me this bloggers and bloggettes, given this very accurate (if not grossly understated) account of events, was it wrong for me to immediately reach into my bag, pull out a can of deodorant and proceed to first-aid this man’s clearly direly affected underarm area, as I gave him directions to the nearest water body and prescribed a bath?

Anyway, of late I’ve been living a very interesting life, the kind that takes about 59 therapy sessions to understand! I however have found, that witty literature has been one of the most theraputic escapes for me in the midst of all this “Interestingness” (Forgive my murder of the english language). Well that and coffee abuse, happy pills, nicotine, debauchery and various morally corrupt vices, but let’s not dwell on those!!! Hehe!

So I present to you some of the brilliant quotable gems I’ve stumbled across in the course of my literature trawling. Enjoy.

I never let schooling interfere with my education.

Mark Twain

You can do a lot with flowers. Girls love them. And what is more, there is a recognised language of flowers. Shoot in a rose or a calceolaria, or an herbaceous border, or something, I gather, and you have made a formal proposal of marriage without the trouble of rehearsing a long speech and practising appropriate gestures infront of your bedroom looking glass.

P. G. Wodehouse (Something To Worry About)

It is one thing to be cosmetically defiant of authority, by wearing unconventional clothing _ what social scientists call “Cheap signalling” and another to prove willingness to translate belief into action.

Nicholas Nassim Taleb (Black Swan)

This is not a search for self but he creation of it. I shall play and I shall act and I shall have much fun. I shall be the conductor, The baton is in my hands and the balls are in my caught!

Freya North (Sally)

That’s all for now bloggers and bloggettes!!