The Sum of All Relationships

How perplexing can life be! Imagine yourself in this state:

‘I trust you! But I’m unhappy that you are getting close to XYZ. I really trust you, and have no reason to doubt you, but I’m afraid that you’ll fall for XYZ, and cheat on me or leave me completely. And, yet, I trust you.’

There was a day Maya, Nuti, Eric and I tried to find a meaning of the foundation of all good relations without a dictionary. We wished to get as true and personal as possible. The theme that sounded repeatedly was ‘the peace of mind to expect that no harm will be done to you by a particular person.’ Let’s vacate the point a moment and go on to two closely related feelings, this time going by what ‘Oxford’ says.

The first has two primary meanings. One – a feeling of anger or unhappiness because somebody you like or love is showing interest in somebody else. Two – a feeling of anger or unhappiness because you wish you had something that somebody else has.

The second emotion is defined as ‘the fear or suspicion of other people when there is no evidence of this.’

Trust – the belief that somebody or something is good, sincere, honest etc, and will not try to harm or trick you.’

I reckon that there is a healthy chance of every relationship having some of all these feelings. I have come to believe that giving too much space to any one will lead to the same consequence – HURT!

If you’re still wondering what the full list is, they are Trust, Jealousy and Paranoia.

Man-ipulation

As I was about to leave home early this afternoon, a black VW Golf 4 wheeled past with two ladies in it. They boomed their music so loud that it heaved the carpet of dust on the street into the air in tune with the beat. Something must have been disquieting about their style because the metal grille across a drain leapt up to bite the right rear tyre into shreds. It took the rompers longer than present narrator to hear the tugging tyre over the stadium sound, so they only came to a stop four blocks away. Now, I ordinarily would zip over to help damsels in distress, especially as one bounced gigantic jolly jugs in front of her. But I felt just like the barbaric grille, so I allowed my genteel graces to hide in the gutter. Two ladies all dressed up with somewhere to go to would not lift a fingernail after taking a gas cylinder out of the trunk. It was rare riotous to hear them trying hard to outmanoeuvre each other by pretending not to know that the frigging black pneumatic that lay fastened before their eyes was the spare tyre. As Maxine and I drove slowly past, I caught the man, who was school-boy eager to help them, addressing his questions to the chest level of things.

Warm Days Are Here

The sunny days are stepping up! :-) I can discuss Accra again as a proper burg , with at least one thrilling thing to do in the day – swimming! True, this year’s rainy season has never really faded away, but, now, we also have the warm weather showing her face in between the legs of the rain. This is swimming weather, no? I took a few days off work for a woman; but now I have an added focus in the hols to slay the time. I have many new pairs of swimming shorts, splashed on me by Shiks, to outdoor. Back to the claim about Accra becoming a proper city, I do not know of many daytime pastimes in the city apart from the pool, the beach or private movies. Or do you?

Your Love Bores into My Very Being

Over the past few weeks, a refreshing and catchy love song has aired over TV. It did not win my musical soul from the start; but repeated play has made it bloom brightly on my mind. And, now, I look out long for it every night. Its title is ‘Odo Pa’ (True Love), and it is sung by Kofi Tanoh whose sin and suicide in not picking out a performance name can never be explained to me. Plus, he looks a bit too knobbed and knotted, ribbed and rugged, to be cooing love words while his poker face remains unchanged throughout the video clip. He features another, K Twum (alias Rasta). It is rather Rasta who appears to be swinging some wicked amusement, but the song comes across as older, richer and more mature than him. Especially devastating to any resistance I may have had to this song is the nonce word at the end of the second refrain, ‘Wo do n’ako me gedem’ (Your love has pierced / penetrated / arrested my very ... ‘gedem’ can only mean something like being or soul.

Opposites Attract

A deep-fried, corpulent chicken dressed all in white with lacy tails trailing her everywhere. She’s chunkily checking me out at Equator because she’s standing there alone, and I am all by myself. She greases this way and sashays that way half in dance and semi-tease, turning her beefy head over her soft shoulders to give me a sidewise look of rousing meaning. She seizes the attention of all fifty-something kilos of me for a moment; then her flabby overhangs take over. I turn away from her, and have to get a very strong drink.

Two Faces of Tilapia

It offered savoury delight in the golden ages, and was prized with tenderness before the Europeans made landfall. Then, the civilised (as if they were formerly benighted) and the sham-show nouveau riche came to look lowly upon the fish as cheap chow.

Money began to drip into the doddering economy in the 90s. The condescending gentrified or dolarised saw their indifference curves shift right. Demand hit the ceiling overnight, outstripping the Volta supply, and now poor men cannot buy the 'poor man’s food'. The rich like it so long as it is too expensive to be bought by just anybody.

One day soon, roast plantain (called Kofi Brokeman) will also be priced out of the average purse.

Few Live; Most Exist!

A quaint quote that flashed on TV. I have no naked notion what this maxim means to you. Language has mutated into a baffling, defensive tool today. We shudder at the fishy smell of our own prattle in the mouth of another person. ‘Few live; most exist’ is as clean, clear and classic as human expression will ever get. I have an idea – think over the quote and, if you will, share what it means to you in the comment section. Inspire us all!

Untitled

I dismissed it,
not denying.
And it grew up,
while in hiding.
Now it's screaming
wild confessions!
You have me yearning
ten times ten!
So, yesterday,
I came to start accepting!

The Talent Tizzy in the City of Accra

Shall we honour it the bounty of an economy now light of heel that T.V. is turning out talent finds everywhere? I do not fancy that the talent fund in the City of Accra is swelling or that it will ever wax or wane. It is the avenues to descry and hone the fine faculties that ring the changes, no? It may well be a direct answer to the hoggishness of producers to come out with money acts, for most of the talent hunts stalk only musical or football talent. I nurse a funny little idea that two out of every three young persons in the City of Accra think they’re an undiscovered diva or lion. But it is not too bad, as there appears no intention of the city’s rich and powerful to share a bit of the mainstream money. And I would rather have barely-gifted, tooth-skin surviving performers than red-eye desperate hard broke.

Confusion Twice Confounded in the City of Accra

They stand like sentinels at the skirts of the streets burgeoning higgledy-piggledy from shrimp size to big-as-a-house. They stunt, check and colour out the red, white and blue regular road signs. You’d be pardoned for confounding that the City of Accra had dada place names like ‘Dressed Chicken for Sale’, ‘Local Brown Rice’, ‘Moringa Sold Here’ and ‘Great Provider Furniture Works’,

Don’t get me wrong – the signs are helpful if your car would crab-crawl at that awkward spot, or if you were taking the air on foot. But, at 60 kph, when the boards flash just a quick blip in your sight, the advertising principle is crowded out. Besides, if you aren’t lost, or are simply sight-seeing, the pesky collection simply gangrenes the scene.

No-Jabber Day

What mithers the Nokia N Series that terrifies so many of them to just freeze? My four-month old suddenly iced over at a morning meeting, while we were exploring information technology! Usually, you can eject the dry cell, leave it an orphan for a minute, and the phone is fired when you re-insert. Tricks tried, experience employed but, still, phone paralysed!

So, today, I’ve strived and stayed alive sans a running phone, and it is oh sooooo sweet! Nobody has called, or succeeded anyway. I have now up-ended my punishing policy of keeping my phone on at all times. The peace was pampering, and I will be sure to repeat it as often as I safely can. Noticed served!

An Inconvenient Itch

Of luckless late, I’ve lost my second sight, and I’ve been itching cacti for some wicked, unrestrained inspiration to zap me back on track. You know, it’s not an undemanding engagement of throwing your eyes wide to catch the telling detail. When true second sight strikes, the inspiration or the scene will seize you!

I went out and bought myself a little present today – a writer’s notebook. It is my first purpose-book for creative non-poetry. That should do the trick, no? Nature wound some of her mystery too, and granted me an extravaganza in Dzorwulu, in the City of Accra. With war-front features in a pair of tight, oily-fabric, white trousers, she needed only a few drive-by seconds to shock my hair to barbs and bristles!

She was walking fine one moment; dithering in the next; splaying her legs out till her fat thighs no longer kissed. She pigeon-toed her feet and hoicked up her pinpoint posterior at a gross gradient. Something was missing from the scene – her right hand! It crawled out of its burial ground, inch-deep in her rump! Before fifty pairs of affronted eyes, at a swarming intersection, she’d just liberated herself from an inconvenient itch!

The Ill-Favoured Furniture in the City of Accra

The wooden train courses round the sketchy streets in supplementary neighbourhoods where most of the buildings are still young and growing. The carpenters’ strokes are sure and steady. They tell of long hours lent to learning the patience of whittling and splicing. The finishing may sometimes even be fairly flawless. But the material models arrive too ginormous and in droll patterns – equine, leonine or Dalmatian coats or some un-tellable, textural, textile torture. It is an open orchestra without a master conductor; cunning craft craving art.

The Twice Married in the City of Accra

Many people living in this unconscious, self-conscious city are twice married to little purpose, and do not even know it. They credit the first in time as the primitive prelude to the higher other, but the law secures both on the same pedestal. It is a cheerless throwback to time no-more, when kids were named and then christened or baptised with a ‘Christian name’. Then they’d injuriously insist at home on being called ‘Kwabena Paul’ or uncultured crass like that. We denigrate the African marriage as the engagement, and elevate the European marriage (also called ‘Civil’) as the real thing. And yet, you can call yourself Mrs. Something-Something after the ‘Engagement’. So, is there a difference? A certain kind of man chooses only to get ‘engaged’ so that he’s not limited to only one lawful wife. Get it?

The Prado Wins the Girl

H, the office manager, traipsed tardily into my office on his daily morning constitutional. He sauntered towards my bird’s-eye window to manage the ante meridian view below. All of a sudden, he called out to me to come and take a quick street scan.

A girl! Slender, tall; still magnificently delicious womanhood! She was tucking in her shirt, which the tight pants on her canyon curves were constantly casting off. Shirt in straight, and she started cheesecaking away from under my look-out.

He wondered if he should call her. Cheerleader-I said yes! As H managed the window into an open-slide position, a parked white Toyota Land Cruiser Prado backed up into the street, and pulled up beside our girl. Quick words were swapped as H’s hellos were deafly disregarded. She half-glided-half-galloped into the SUV, and they were gone in a wisp.

Were we livid? No! Were we sad? Not at all! Were we beaten? Twice soundly, thrice roundly! And it was not even the real Land Cruiser, but its less charming cousin!

Saturday-Night Showdown

Three Levantine leches leaked into Sankofa Night Club, in Akosombo, looking limpid to whisk women away (they were not merely there to whirl and twirl - they were drawing the women, in turns, to shadowy corners, through a jersey-clad cowboy pimp, for smutty brokering). For a short spell, they didn’t come near us, but after selecting and deselecting their wholly willing quarry, the leader of the raiders posted one of his lackeys to call our B.

I leapt over a low table and belted him on the arm, screaming all the while at him to “leave our girl alone”. El jefe employed bravado, but when I was icily intrepid, he backed down dispirited. K (B'S man)was watching unruffled as a tempest threatened, secure in the knowledge that B required no help to sweep off the effluence (but K knows I menaced for a different reason). They ended up sneaking away with three victim vixens (of whom one was just a cub).

Zest for Life even at Z

Persona grata in my life know that I have loathed to double check the surest path to a long life. But I just took the measure of an 83-year-old woman on KSM’s TGIF tripping the light fantastic to vigorous 2008-highlife, and her gung-ho cling-to-life made me modify my mind.

Life is a precious thing! The only affair we’ll have just once. I will love it, live it, share it, give it, dream it, build it, stretch it, rest it, till it’s time to let it go. Then, maybe, if I’m 83, I’ll execute the pommel horse at the Accra Olympics.