Ridge Joe Blogs

I cruise by his candid cameo every morning, about a minute from work. I always behold this behemoth bounty from way off: big-big shirt, faded black jeans, moth-eaten cowboy hat and that totally tired swagger. The shirts are pitifully queer, quixotic. Mammoth short sleeves reaching down below the charred elbows of his bandy arms. When the sleeves are meant to be long, they do not reach the wrists, on which he tugs plastic explosives or dynamite that he would like to call watches (yes, two of them!). But, far above this frivolous frolic, the cockcrow prize is his serious, self-important, cyclopean face fixed funnily in my driving mirror and on my mind. Happy is my mood when I arrive at work at Ridge.

My Personal NPT

Beautiful neighbour to the west,
Your nuclear reactors behind
Are causing shocks and tremors,
In my southern regions,
While I try to run the state
from the rational north.
Please, switch them off!

Feeling With My Darling NY

A life is dead
Death is born
We've moved from A to Zed
The living are forlorn

The Ass in the Telco

Phone signals went dead
All through the night
It is a hoofed quadruped
who has the service oversight.

Poverty (a view out of Ghana)

It’s ARTIFICIAL!
Debasing; sacrificial.
It sloshes about in your wine glass;
forms moulds in your whole-grain bread.
It eats a side slope in the soles
of your sterile, patent shoes.
It screams at the vanity
of the carats in your cufflinks,
and runs in savage mascara streaks
down your thankless, overfed face.
It teases, tortures, torments.
It’s a shameful man-eater!
It mocks expensive phone calls
in the show of love,
while standing in the blind glare
of dying requests for human kindness.
It’s cursing loudly in your waste bin;
putrefying, stockpiling to revolt.
Then, it will have your head,
with some of your own tea!
It’s ugly, horrible!
It’s something really shocking.
Don’t let it live near you!
Don’t let it live anywhere!

The Private Viewing Curve

My friend, Ebo, runs a movie house for tucked-away, ‘private viewing’. Its windmill wonders work this way: you breeze gently in, select the same old movie again (but, then, it doesn’t matter because you still don’t know the story, although you’ve seen it three times here) and you evaporate into the next available, sizzling room – just the two of you.

If there are no idle rooms, you languish in the languor lounge long enough for others to study, keep and remember your fidgety face at another time, or you wisely retreat and wait in the car (if there is one). Just make sure there is a heavily-tipped movie attendant to come and get you, once a room is fling-free ;-). A particularly obese tip should ensure that they smuggle you in out of turn.

Ebo tells me that anytime a patron stops going to watch movies, it’s either because SHE got married, or because HE moved out of home, and found his own place! Really revealing reasoning, no? But he left out he or she who simply cannot or must not take their movie partner home, because their life partner lives there :-)

The movie houses don’t bother to keep up with clean or pirated Hollywood. You’re only there for the silver-screen skinny-dipping, anyway. You’re there till you walk down the aisle, or you walk out of home, or the third reason.

Broken Water on the Streets in the City of Accra

A pitiable, teen-age boy snoozes like a sculpture hewed out of the darkness at the roadside. A medium-size basin poses upright in the street, one metre before him. A half-dozen plastic bags lie scattered and flattened on the street; and the boy, the bowl and the bags all stand in a tiny wash of water.

The boy looks dazed, and utters not a sound. As every car schleps by in the half-light jam, he lifts his cheerless eyes to the window, and then into the black heavens. The first time I witnessed this, I worked out the obvious interpretation, and was moved to stop to give him 5 Ghana Cedis.

Not quite a week later, I saw the same woebegone scene re-enact itself in a different part of Accra, and another in another part, and another, and another…. And, then, I caught on. It is a new money-making ploy in the City of Accra!