Common Decency Ghost, Meet My Neighbor

Hey Neighbor!

Yes, you, Mr. Mukasa.

No, it’s not a ‘hey’ like hi. It’s a ‘hey’ like prepare to die.

I tolerated you pouring the dirty water from your washing in front of my wall.  I tried to resolve, in as civilized a way as possible, you cutting down my beautiful green fence and replacing it with a hideous wall-house.  The time you dumped garbage right in front of my house, I bit my tongue and smiled pleasantly at your nosy wife.  I ignore your blaring car horn outside your gate every night.  I even smiled when you ogled me in church.  In church, Mr. Mukasa!

Now I’ve had enough.  My Colt Python .357 Magnum is holstered.

Prepare to die.

It isn’t that I begrudge you your happiness.  Clearly, your wild oats have borne fruit and your children are useful additions to Uganda’s kakistocracy.  Congratulations.  You’ve proved yourself a productive contributor to this country’s downfall.

Still, do you need to have a loud, wild party with drunks peeing on my flowers every time there’s a football match, omweso tournament,graduation, kwanjula, birth, death, circumcision or your first solid shit in 10 days?

Universal Truths. Perhaps.

Everywhere?

Fire, burns.

Friends, hard.

Family, hurts.

Babies, sweet.

Grass, green.

Wisdom, rare.

Rain, beauty.

Everywhere?

Of Color and Shadows

GREY EVENING

By D. H. Lawrence

When you went, how was it you carried with you
My missal book of fine, flamboyant hours?
My book of turrets and of red-thorn bowers,
And skies of gold, and ladies in bright tissue?

Now underneath a blue-grey twilight, heaped
Beyond the withering snow of the shorn fields
Stands rubble of stunted houses; all is reaped
And garnered that the golden daylight yields.

Dim lamps like yellow poppies glimmer among
The shadowy stubble of the under-dusk,
As farther off the scythe of night is swung,
And little stars come rolling from their husk.

And all the earth is gone into a dust
Of greyness mingled with a fume of gold,
Covered with aged lichens, pale with must,
And all the sky has withered and gone cold.

And so I sit and scan the book of grey,
Feeling the shadows like a blind man reading,
All fearful lest I find the last words bleeding
With wounds of sunset and the dying day.

Stripped

Naked is a funny word.

Bare, uncovered, exposed, desolate, stripped. Naked.

Naked like my emotions. Masking how hurt I am, how bored I am, how few the moments of joy … See me.  See me!  I’m bitter.  I’m lonely.  I’m joyful.  I’m mad.

Naked like my ambitions. Still wishing to be. Knowing that I never will. My ambition is to have ambition. My ambition is weak. Empty. My career is a lie. The end.

Naked like my religion.  The futility of my reason is exposed and found wanting.  My faith is fickle, but my God is strong. Choosing to believe when I’d rather not. “Foul, I to the fountain fly; wash me Savior or I die.”

Naked is a funny word.  A funny, beautiful, devastating word.

Catch the Sun

@Gardening Insomnia.

Grossness Galore

Breeding in my garden. Eek!

Seeing Dimly

“Cut down too soon.”

It isn’t death that mystifies me, but the reality that I will never, ever understand it.

I know why we die, of course. Learned that when I was five. All animate objects are born, grow, feed, breed and die. I will die. I’m prepared for that inevitability.

It is the shock at the death of others that baffles me. If my end is a reality, why am I surprised by the fate of others?  Why am I hurt by death?  Why am I grieved?  After all it’s the deal we make when we are born.  The Mortality Contract; and nothing is hidden in fine print.

So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory.

O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?

1Corinthians 15: 54-55

At our lowest points we go to the basics. We seek comfort in what we were taught by those we trusted. For me: my family and my church and the lesson of a death that leads to a greater life.  The lesson on Jesus Christ’s victory over sin, death and the grave.

I was taught and I believe, but faith is irrational. I grieve. I am shocked and the certainty of death mystifies me.

Futility and Hope

Benjamin Aineboyna

1981 – 2011

Rest in Peace

Help Me, Help You

Looking for help to end this -

@Gardening Insomina.

Willing to pay for any organic solutions guaranteed to work.

Also, offering to purchase any current pictures of the Bigo bya Mugenyi earthworks and Sango Bay.

Holler back.

Last Meme of 2011

I’m not an ambitious person.  Ambition is for the unromantic.

Six resolutions for the next 12 months.

At best, I’ll accomplish none.  The worst I can do is become the woman of my dreams. She’s an irritating, overachieving, capitalist pig-dog. I’m a sweet, loveable, pseudo-Bolshevist.

Then come comrades rally
And the last fight let us face
The Internationale
Unites the human race!

Resolutions:

I.   To become an arms dealer.

“Stones sir?”

(In the event that the election season turns into a civilized democratic bore and there is no need for satellite-guided rock missiles, abuse bombs or tree branch bazookas …)

II.  … to become a pacifist.

I’ll rest in the reality that although war is exciting, deadly, destructive and ultimately developmental, I am in fact a coward.

III. To get a corn.

Because nothing is as satisfying as peeling away the layers of dead skin in public. I’ll get a nice festering one courtesy of the three-inch heels I’ll be wearing this year because it is my goal …