Inattention and other things.......

Tsk tsk tsk my blog has been gathering dust. Not the best state of affairs to say the least. To be honest I have realized that over time I have been falling prey to the short attention span epidemic that is so rife here, so sitting down for a while to blog seems to be a big challenge yet strangely enough I can still find time to post the occasional tweet.

To be honest I do like twitter because I can keep up with people I know who also blog or I know in person but on the other hand tweets rarely have the same substance as blog posts and like farts in a hurricane they are gone in record time. A significant tweet is pushed down the list by other tweets which may not be half as good, so unless you are fast enough or just look out for a particular person's tweets, it's easy to miss what's going on. But I guess that's why they have tweets as 160 characters just like texts, make it quick and easy so people can stick with it. I must say we are turning out to be a generation addled with ADD.

Anyone who knows me knows I am a bibliophile (take your mind out of the gutter, it has nothing to do with children!). I have loads of books I have bought from thrift stores that I am yet to read, I have not gone to one for a long time but this changed 2 weeks ago when I discovered a Goodwill store close to my local mall. I picked up 5 or so books and it cost me less than $12! So to make space on my bookshelf I decided to read a Stephen King book I bought last year and never got round to reading, I am sure some of you have read CELL by Stephen King. It was a good read, flowed really well and had a steady premise (didn't want to use my cell phone for a while after reading it though). Given all the drama that has been going on in this country lately ie Health Care Reform chaos, Kanye West at the VMAs etc, I think I'll try and keep my head glued in a book.

Anyway before I get back to my everyday existence and the challenges it brings, I read this article and realised why I get complimented time and again about my handwriting. I'm sure many of us remember the hours spent learning how to curl your loops and the appropriate crosses that were part of learning how to write in cursive. Due to the prevalance of texting and computers in schools here and the preference of the simplicity that is print, cursive is more or less extinct in American schools. Damn technology!

Time for me to go back to life as usual, don't forget to dot your Ts........

Another Day On The Grind........

It's been a minute and a half since I blogged. There is nothing major going down in my life but I do find the occasional post as cathartic to say the least.

The economy here for the most part is still in the gutter. Almost all the fast food joints now have a "dollar menu", where basically most things cost a dollar or less. This is because fewer people are buying the more expensive stuff even though fast food is cheap. Starbucks has closed a few thousand branches and is reducing the prices of some of their drinks. I recently opened a bank account with a bank since they had a special offer going on, if you opened your account and kept $100 in it for 10 days they would give you $100 also as long as you kept the account open for 6 months. I'm not going to get into the unemployment rate but on the plus side, if you have money it's a buyer's market. A few month's back my loctiticians decided they were jacking up prices and due to the multitude of locs I have on my head I was going to be paying virtually $100 for each visit, needless to say I kicked them to the curb and have found more than one person willing to do my locs for half the price.

An Acolyte post is not an Acolyte post without story time!

There was this chic I was getting to know better a few months back, so we used to go out and do stuff together. So one Sunday afternoon, we had planned to go for an early afternoon event and then get something to eat and then we would part ways. At this point in time a certain saying about the plans and mice and men should have chimed in my mind. You see I had forgotten that this chic was one of those "quality and quantity time" kind of chics. So after we left the restaurant in the early evening, she chirps; "where are we going next? I'm not ready to go home now..."

At this point in time, what I wanted to say was, I have to work tommorrow and have to get my stuff ready, so I'm going home anyway; but instead I quickly thought up of somewhere to for us to go. So I ended up getting home close to 11 pm instead of around 7 pm as earlier planned. That shouldn't have been a problem since I had nice company and all right?

Oh no, it was a problem. You see I had done some laundry and hadn't dried it since my drier was messed so I had planned to go to the laundromat after my rendezvouz. But seeing as my date had other ideas, all the laundromats were closed when I got home. So here I was with all my work clothes still wet and Monday a few hours away. Lucky for me I had a spare pair of slacks but was out of shirts, so what did I do? I took it old school, I put a shirt on a hanger, attached the hanger to the ceiling fan and left the fan running till morning. So I had a dry shirt for the next day.

Oh and differences in opinion as regards how time should be spent torpedoed that relationship eventually........

Have a productive week!

ps: As regards the pic for the post, I found it in my pictures folder. Where is some scandal on the internets when you need it?????

I beg to differ.......

I've been caught in such a mundane routine in life that I realised that I had been forgetting to blog, in fact blog worthy material at that.

Anyway the other day I was talking to some female relatives about relationships, marriage and such and the issue of married people's friends came up. The ladies were of the firm opinion that married men should not have single male friends. Their reasoning was that your priorities are different now, so you have no business spending time. Of course this got me hot under the collar because it was obvious to me that she was looking at this from a completely feminine point of view with some sprinkling of bachelor stereotypes thrown in.

You see unlike women, men don't define their friendships or themselves by their relationships with other people in their lives. Men tend to define themselves by what we do, have or know (that's why being laid off hits men really hard as our work in many cases tends to define us). Add to the fact that men bond over shared interests, so if your husband is friends with a single man there must be a certain number of interests they share ie soccer, politics, business etc. Also being a bachelor does not mean that we do not have responsibilities of our own and are even more responsible than some married men, being a single man isn't a life of endless partying and debauchery (even though I wish it was).

There is also the oft aired belief that being friends with single men will drive your boyfriend/husband to stray. I hate to burst your bubble ladies but there are married men out there who are more than willing to drive your husband to stray and cover for him while they are at it.

So ladies, we bachelor friends of your boyfriends/husbands are here to stay!

Now that I have that off my chest that reminds me of how sad it is how so many women jettison their single pals the moment they get married or hitched and forget about them, but guess who they start looking for when things get rocky in paradise? Sigh, human beings, I'll never understand us......

Acolyte GIves Another Drug PSA

It's been a while since I blogged and I know I promised ya'll Part II of the Drug PSA; so here goes......

It was a warm afternoon and I decided it was a good day to explore the city. Despite being in the States for a while, I am not a big fan of driving long distances unlike many people here who have become used to it, so when I can I do like to take the train. Since I planned on going to the opposite side of town this was the best idea. I got on the train and got off at the West side of town. The part of town I was going to was a black part of town but not really the hood. I had gone for a few events in that part of town and had heard of a good vegan restaurant in the area so I decided to pass by and get myself a snack.

I walked into the restaurant and when I looked through the menu I saw that they had chapatis (under a different name but a chapati is a chapati irregardless), so I ordered that and some veggie stew. I hadn't had chapatis in a while since I hadn't gone for a Kenyan gathering in a while and it had been a few months since I had made my own mishappen ones. Anyway the chic manning or rather womanning the counter caught my eye and after I ordered my food we chit chatted. She was or rather is afrocentric and open minded, so we did strike up a connection and she told me to make sure I passed by sometime soon.

Okay I know some of you want me to jump to the weed part so I'll do so now. Needless to say we became kinda close over the next few weeks, I was ready to make a move but discovered that she had a boyfriend but she insisted that I visit them at their house and hang out. Since I had nothing to lose I did go visit them.

So I rolled into their place that Sunday evening, her baby daddy was on the way out (did I forget to mention that she has young son?) he had come to visit the kid. It was kinda strange to say the least, the boyfriend, the baby daddy and the loose kubaff (that's me) and one lady. So he left and the son had gone to sleep so it was the three of us. Anyway we got to talking about the universe, life and it's many lessons. My new chic pal had one eccentricity of her own, she doesn't like artificial lighting so we sat in candle light. That didn't bother me since the one thing that bothers me is artificial air, I don't mind fans but I don't like air conditioning very much unless it gets sweltering; I just adjust accordingly by adding more clothes or reducing what I'm wearing. Anyway rambling aside at one point she asks me if I would be offended if she decided to "burn" some herb. I was all for it.

So a small jewellery chest was unleashed, a blunt was rolled, blessed light and shared. After a few puffs, I experienced a that spacey feeling where you feel like the air around you is a bit thicker than usual and you feel like your body is 2 seconds behind your thoughts and movements. I also started losing words, as in we would talk and I would have a thought but could not find the words in my brain to express them. The night was running down and as the haze began to lift I made my way home but due to the effects of the herb slowing down everything I drove home at the neckbreaking speed of 55 mph on an interstate where people usually hit speeds of 100 mph, I did open the windows which did help bring me back to earth. I was lucky that she made us dinner so I was spared the munchies (unlike a future incident that may be shared).

We did and have remained good friends, and I did enjoy some herb with them a few times after that. I attended her wedding and got them a great gift that they hang in their living room and tell everyone about. She gave me the sad news that she is moving out of State soon so I am taking her up on a long discussed cooking class ( I get tired of eating my same recipes on the regular) which is what reminded me that this post was long over due.

So with all that being said it's time for me to leave you. Don't do drugs! Drugs are bad for you! Drugs will hurt you and desert you, leave you crying, empty dying (name that tune good people)...........

Yet Another Monday......

It's been a minute and a half since I was in this joint, so first things first; a quick tribute video to the dearly departed King of Pop.

Moving on, its been monotonus life as usual for me so nothing really major worth blogging about has gone down.

In other news, I am now just like the Hulk; I just want to smash. Yes that line cracks me up! For real though as a Kenyan rapper once said, "ni kama drought imevisit wakulima." It's a sad state of affairs, I am now a full time passenger of the B-train (if you don't know what that means, too bad for you). But I'm looking at the plus side, the longer it goes on; it shall be like I never took the jump in the first place and my innocence shall be restored in no time! Cue angels singing and halo over my head.

This is old news but how in the hell can Michael Owen sign the dotted line for Manchester United?!! I mean that's truely selling out your roots, I have no respect for that man whatsoever! Anyway he had taken out to sending out marketing packs to various teams to sell himself so it's obvious he was going to whore himself out to the greatest bidder. I'm just hoping he breaks a leg first week of the season! He deserves it since he did jack for Newcastle and ditched them as soon as they were relegated.

I know as a single dude I should be the last one posting an exit strategy video but the series has never failed to crack me up. Back to the classic episode 1!

I know I owe ya'll a part 2 of the Weed PSA and those are on their way. I just realized maybe I need to do something about my locs, I have had 2 of my very own Kenyan brethren pass me over to the Jamaicans on sight, what happened to being able to identify your fellow Kenyan from miles away without them speaking, maybe I need to grow a forehead or fivehead?

Anyway Monday is here, the one day in the week when I have to do all that I can not to wake up in tears. Have a productive week people, and smash on my behalf....