Teller Of Tattered Tales

Menial is just a word invented by people who never had to count coins for bread. No job is beneath you. None. You find yourself face-down in the dirt? Pick up the goddamn bucket. Wring out the rag. Scrub whatever filthy corner they point you toward. It doesn't make you an object of ridicule. It makes you a living member of a hyper-competitive environment performing a very vital function that has kept human society from utter ruin. The true patriots of society do not man the trenches, they do not defend the borders they fight against germs, they hold mopping sticks not rifles.

Humans continue to progress because of contradictions. Some cultivate the soil, some are watching the soul. Some sharpen spears to fight wars, some are sharpening the pencil to teach. Some live full of doubt, some live full of certainty. Some would dupe others, some will bring salvation. Some are marked by lower pursuits, some are marked for higher pursuits. Some are in the ring fighting, some are in the monastery searching for peace. This same Promethean fire that burns in the heart of a man who is searching the trunk of space for stars he would name and moons that would call him father, is the same fire that is burning in a man who is casting his fishing net for creatures he would enslave and feed on. The farmer's callused hands and the astronomer's telescope are both gripping the same burning coal.

The idea of love is too puritanical. Okay you love someone, what next? You start feeling that just because you love them, you should become agreeable towards their needs and demands and then just because they love you, you think they should also reciprocate and be agreeable to your needs and demands. So now you are in season 7 episode 5 of The Office fake laughing just to make them happy. You are smoking with a crooked smile just because they find men who smoke sexually appealing. You are eating yam just to avoid a potential conflict on a Sunday afternoon. A quiet annexation of another persons will. Love wants perfection. It wants proof. But these things require self corrosion.

"I will show you mine, if you will show me yours". We were listless, left alone by parents who were more occupied with work than with us, so while they built our future we were building mud castles and touching the strange parts of our bodies, discovering biological geographies that were magnificent and magnetic. We negotiated behind curtains, behind the chicken coop, the bush behind the compound was our Eden. We stayed hidden. We would exchange our underwear like sacred talisman and tokens. We painted the red earth with warm arcs of yellow piss or spell each other's names in the red dirt. And often we had a lover's quarrel. We fought like the French, passionate and merciless, and she would hit me hard in my stomach with her small fist till I felt the paradise of our little world tilt.

The reason why a group of Fulani will stop a GUO bus containing 20 grown adults is simply because they are aware no one inside is holding a gun. This is the same reason why your ballot box is snatched and stuffed. There is no equilibrium of violence. Two solutions to choose from, one is better and less violent. 1. Give everyone a gun. Distribute the means and make violence a fair game. 2. Remove the right to guns completely. This includes taking it from the police and the soldiers. Let everyone be metally naked. This is the only way, the majority decision can be decided without interference from the few.

Anytime someone tells me "I am not a religious person but I believe in god", l am almost forced to hold their hand to explain that both statements are factually and theologically inseparable. Your belief in god is a religious concept by itself. Religion and god are not horse and cart. You can't simply remove the rotten blackberries from the basket and choose the basket. It's not that simple. Religion is your source of meaning, it is the material that gives your god its geometry. If you subtract religion from god, there will be no god.

Love does not have a measurable density. The best you can do is guess if someone loves you or how much. You will never really know.

People do not become more or less reasonable just because time has passed. The calendar changes, the man does not. The mere passage of time does not upgrade a person's capacity for reason. Any fool you knew 10 years ago, whom you had to flee from, for your sanity, isn't a better person now. After the "long time no see", you will be faced with the same irrational animal again. You want them to change, to be better, but unfortunately reason is not a seasonal crop. It does not ripen the way a fruit does on a tree.

A man who drowns in a river saving his goat, was he killed by the river or was he killed by the goat?

Practice does not make pertect it you are rolling a dice. The mathematical expectation of every dice roll is independent from every dice roll. If you roll a dice 9 times, and you get 6, the probability of getting six the 10th time is still one over six.

Waiting for discount, waiting for Black Friday, waiting for someone else to buy it so we can borrow, waiting for the second hand to show up in the shop window, waiting for month to end before we can buy what we saw last two weeks, hoping no one else has bought it, waiting for the illegal website to have the movie instead of going to the cinema to see it. Do you understand that this is what poverty is? Poverty is waiting to have something that is not even in its best state again. Poverty means that everything you get is delayed and deformed.

It has become too economically devastating to love anyone. Any attempt you make to stretch your hands towards another human being now, to cuddle and seek love could lead to your financial ruination. Poor economies create poor human relationships. Relationships become revenue streams for some and for others it becomes too costly to afford. It becomes too costly to afford a cinema date, to pay for drinks, to organize a small get together. Poor economies does not only empty stomach, they detach the human heart from its socket. It becomes easier to get a new friend than to maintain an old one. Because nothing lasts in a poor environment, not even love.

There are three types of envy. 1. I wish I have what he has 2. I wish I have what he has and he doesn’t have it. 3. I wish we both didn’t have it. The third is the purest form of envy and the most malicious. Here the desire for the object has been abandoned. What remains is the demand that the object cease to exist for anyone. “I wish we both didn’t have it” is not envy of possession; it is resentment of the fact that the good exists at all when it is not equally distributed or equally unavailable. The preference is for mutual lack over unequal possession.

I will never participate in war even if my life was on the line. Even if I was 100% sure that the other side was the aggressor, I still won’t partake in it. I will run. I will run away as far as I can if I can. I will never accept any political form that authorizes collective killing as a solution. If the State will not permit me to settle my own grievances by killing, it cannot then require me to settle its grievances by killing. You cannot withhold violence from me and then extract that same violence from me on demand. I refuse.

The car did not fly. It jumped. The car left the ground, rotated and returned. That is a hop with attitude control, not flight. Flight implies sustained, controlled movement through the air. Calling it a “flying car” is marketing inflation and a misplaced language.

If you think anyone is going to suffer just because they are bad, you are a big fool. The good suffer too. Suffering is not dependent on which side you are on the moral spectrum. There is no just world. Whatever calamity that meets the evil man will also meet the good man. You think calamity chooses whom to fall upon based on their moral choices alone? You think war wrings only the wicked? You think diseases picks people based on their deeds? You think chaos pauses to examine a a child’s character before placing him in a coffin? You and your foolish fantasies.

"My ex is so stupid, my ex is very wicked, this my ex, that my ex". You think that this is a coincidence? You have dated multiple men who treated you like shit and you still think that they are the problem? Think of your situation as a math problem and ask yourself a simple question. What variable has not changed? You are the constant. At best, it means you have a selection problem. At the worst, you are the problem.

The gravity of another day presses against my naked skin. Forces the idle hand to wake, holding the pen in an iron grip. The previous day, the evening sun had staggered and collapsed into my chest, the silkworms began to dress me in darkness. Dust on the skull of the moon, the wind will not carry. The sourdough sits in the open oven. No appetite will take it. The pollen stayed on the flower, no birds would take it. Bards unsung in the throats of goats. A cursed chrysalis opens, eyelids swallow crusts from the sun. The foreskin of another day. Gravity again, attempts to dig my grave.

You have heard hundreds of masses and you are still the same. Inhaled Sunday incenses fail to fumigate your soul. What the soul desires is not religion, it is not worship, it desires passion in small portions, it desires room to roam, it desires poetry even though it does not know it. Not in a book brandished every week written in the same vein but in something it discovers. The church is too narrow, too myopic for something as verdant as the human spirit. The soul does not crave for cathedrals or creeds, it craves for people.