so apparently i have a blog …
there is much to update you on re: my life over the past 10+ months … but i don’t have time to bother with all that nonsense … so you are just going to have to settle for opening the book at chapter 8, and trust that the crucial details will make themselves obvious …
i am sitting in “Acro Cyber Cafe” … in “Adam’s Arcade” … just off Ngong Road in Nairobi, Kenya, Africa … i am absolutely certain as to why I am in all of these places, except for “Nairobi,” “Kenya” and “Africa” … which has be a little dumbfounded … i have tried shaking myself awake, and even had a go at the old “pinch the cheek” approach, before resorting to the “back and forth face slap” … none of which resulted in me NOT being in Nairobi, Kenya … so i must conclude that I am in fact there … though i have not the slightest idea how that happened …
long distance travel has rapidly become one of my favorite activities … it’s bloody miserable, don’t get me wrong … but that sort of delerium that sets in when you completely lose touch with what day and time it is … or when you were last asleep … or even if you were last asleep … and whether that last thing you ate was breakfast or supper or some kind of crazy 3:00am meal that they only serve on airplanes … is a bit of a mind f**k, and i am such a big fan of mind f**k’s, that if they started a band and went on tour, i would give up my life, buy a grateful dead t-shirt, and become their star roadie …
had an 8 hour stopover in amsterdam, so went out to check out the city for a few hours … that was fun … i think …
i arrived in Nairobi at something like 7:00am, greeted by the smiling face of an old friend …
Top 5 best sights in the world:
1. smiling faces of old friends
2. i am too lazy to finish this list
Kimutai is an amazing fellow, who, after giving me food and a place to sleep off the jet lag, promptly took me out for about 6 liters of beer and a kilogram of roasted meat … we sat in a small little cafe of sorts for quite a lot of hours … laughing and all that wonderful stuff … this cafe was no different than any of the thousands that litter the streets of Africa’s cities, with white, plastic lawn chairs … western r+b and african “country” music blaring … and bathrooms that can only be appropriately defined as ‘damp’ …quite nice really …
in the hours i sat there, i was fortunate to meet a handful of very cool Kenyans … there was Allistair … who studied computer science at the U of A, and now ran his own company … there was a girl … who studied medicine at John’s Hopkins, and was now studying Law at the Univerisity of Nairobi … there was Theuri … who attended university in upstate New York, and received a fellowship to research community health at U of C San Francisco … and finally, there was NgaNga … who studied something I have forgotten at the University of Leeds …we had some great conversations, them and I … about peace and life and ideas …
it’s funny, you know … i have spent my share of time with “development” types … i am speaking of white westerners with big hearts who want to ’save africa’ … they are wonderful people … truly, and i admire so much of what so many of them do … but still, we are racist … so terribly, terribly racist, and to escape the mindset that says “we know better, so let’s help fix them” is a near impossibility …
because really … we don’t know better … and we need to stop trying to fix them …of course, we can help them … because that is how a person should behave towards a brother or a sister in need … we should help them in every way we can … but there is a line between “empowering” and “directing” that, from what i can tell, virtually every western NGO seems to misunderstand … i called it racism earlier, and this is exactly what i think it is … of course, none of these people would openly admit to racism … they are, afterall, the very people who dedicate their lives to helping people of different races … but when one approaches another culture with the point of view that “i know better, and this is what you need to do to be better” … can it be called anything else ??? … the tragedy is that even organizations like Youth Challenge International, with whom i will be working for the next month … who put such a profound emphasis on ‘developing partnerships with local organizations’ … still must abide by a set of government imposed guidelines that say ‘if you want our money, these are the things you need to do’ …
and not only do they need to do them, but they need to be able to provide evidence that they have successfully created some outcome in the communities in which they are working … outcomes, as far as i can tell, can be defined as “changing them to be more like us” … which doesn’t sound racist to me at all …
it’s tragic really, because when you meet people like those bio’d above … and hear their stories and thoughts and ideas … you know deeply that the future of this continent is in the hands of an increasingly intelligent and talented group of young adults … i can only imagine what kind of incredible, uniquely african, world these people could create, if only they weren’t forced to work within a framework that is, in every possible way … not their own … i can only imagine what Africa could become if, for once, white people would get over themselves …
for my part, i plan to f**k s**t up as much as possible over the next month … seizing every possible opportunity to be a pain in the ass by not doing anything that can be better done by locals …
oh, one last thing before i go … having consumed 6 literes of beer … i promptly fell into an enormously gratifying slumber … for about an hour … before spending the remainder of the night in a feverish, shivering sweat … with a pounding head and stiff limbs … and vomiting my stomach dry so many times that i was a little worried about death by dehydration …
welcome to nairobi !!
Oh where is my road, my precious road, where life is only what it is, and what it is, is freedom?
Today, I am trapped, held prisoner in a world of ignorant indulgence. Forced to live under a skin of lies, I conceal all that i am inside. My jailed soul screams out from my silent depths, starved of genuine human kindness in a world of ‘me first.’
Daily, I am blessed to live in the powerful love of my family, my friends and the pleasant stranger across the counter. And while my friendly smile is true, I am lost and alone in a world that is no longer mine. My own deep inner peace rests far from this world of tomorrow’s predictions and yesterday’s news. Canada, infatuated with its ever growing pile of possessions, is no longer my home.
There is such beauty all around us! Oh the precious beauty, shoved beyond the margins by the grammatical order of line after line after line of perfectly formed emptiness.
“I will be a good boy and do what I am told.”
“I will be a good boy and do what I am told.”
“I will be a good boy and do what I am told.”
What is a tree, planted in a sidewalk, surrounded by a perfect circle of decorative stones? What is treated water, flowing over the straight and even edges of the mall water fountain? Such perversion of nature’s infinitely flawed perfection! And us, animals, beautiful and unique as a bird in flight, chained and constrained by order and rules and the way things simply must be.
What of freedom?
What of life?
Oh, to just run away! Of course I can’t. After all, one must be reasonable right? I don’t have the slightest idea why one must be reasonable. Being sensible and realistic sounds truly like the least reasonable choice of all. To be reasonable is to buy our cages, and sacrifice the very meaning of freedom. To be reasonable is to surrender the priceless individuality that is the gift of life itself.
I close my eyes and I am on the Kenyan savannah, in depths of the Great Rift Valley, where our species first took shape. I am on foot and alone, sharing the silent serenity of sunrise with herd upon herd of gently grazing animals. At once, they sense danger and flee, flowing like a wave down one hillside and up the next. My breath catches in my throat, and I feel in my heart the wild beauty of life itself. Tears fill my eyes, as for the first time in my life, I am as one.
The orderly chaos of hundreds of animals in flight, and the exhilaration and awe give way to envy. Anatomically, my body and theirs are identical. Heads, limbs, organs and emotions; our differences are mere variations on the same blueprint. And yet, there is no reconciling our distinct animal experiences of life. They live as one with all that is alive around them. I live in a box made of concrete and steel, breathing re-circulated air and eating processed chemicals.
What is this uniquely human ‘gift of reason’ if not a wall that separates us from everything it means to be alive? There is no moment more human than the moment at which death becomes possible. In that moment, all that is empty and meaningless fades away, leaving only life’s love to fill the void. So what of our world, our lives, riddled with self-indulgent distraction? Where is the unique beauty of the urbanite, except in the colour of their tie or the make of their shoes? Where is passion’s wild expression in a school system designed to make everyone the same?
In our world, to stand out is to give a different answer to the same question asked of everyone else. To succeed is to get exactly what everyone else has, only bigger, better, newer and more expensive. I have seen nothing in my life so quintessentially ugly as the sub-urban subdivision. Home after home, identical except for the shoes and tie. They represent the realization of success for millions of people, and yet are the very epitome of conformity and thus the destruction of what it means to be unique. Our world is founded on the obscuring and obstruction of the individual. We are raised from birth to fit into the slots of our well oiled society.
Well fuck that! Fuck money, careers, homes, cars, iphones and rooms full of useless shit. To hell with passive entertainment, canned opinions, suits and ties, sidewalks, malls, Wal-Mart and ‘don’t walk.’ I do not choose 3 square meals a day, or going to bed at night and getting up in the morning so that I can afford to conform.
Give me family and friends. Give me lust and pain and hunger and fear. Give me mountains, forests, oceans and animals. Give me food that doesn’t need shit poured on it to do what it has been doing for the last 3 billion years. Give me freedom and fun and life and love. I have one life to live, and I don’t want to waste another moment purchasing chains for my soul or the cage in which I will die.
“Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves”
–Henry David Thoreau
Peace and love.
Filed under: Canada | Tags: Africa, Aid, Bob Dylan, Poverty, Stephen Harper, Trade
You’ve thrown the worst fear
That can ever be hurled
Fear to bring children
Into the world
For threatening my baby
Unborn and unnamed
You ain’t worth the blood
That runs in your veins
the Canadian government has just announced that it will be changing the way it distributes foreign aid (link) … aid will now be focused on the americas … as they are our ‘backyard’ … and as we work to increase trade within our landmass, aid money can be used as a powerful tool for diplomacy …
stephen harper proves again at how good he is at being a politician …
but it strikes me that what we are talking about here is not politics … or perhaps more accurately … that maybe foreign aid could be one small shining star where politics don’t need to matter so much … i mean sure, it is likely the ’smart’ decision to use our ‘giving’ to ‘get’ … so to speak … but isn’t the point of giving and generosity and charity … to help without strings attached … to help because help is needed … and because it is the right thing to do ??? …
and yet … the poorest people in the world … in the poorest countries in the world … on the poorest continent in the world … are about to find out that Canada really doesn’t care how much they suffer … Canada really doesn’t care about schools with no water or half-built hospitals with half-trained nurses … Canada doesnt even care about its own integrity or doing what we said we would do …
Canada, it turns out, only cares about what it can do for itself … and so, as hundreds of projects across Africa lose funding in mid-stride, and thousands of Africans lose jobs that support whole communities … our aid money will go to the Carribean, and Peru, and Bolivia … where by most measures, the citizens are better educated, healthier and richer than their brothers and sisters in Africa … it is tragic irony that, once again, the only mistake made by the African child was to be born on the wrong continent …
and … so, as the wheel of time spins … here once again, the message from the developed world to the people of Africa is the same … ‘we would like to help you, but we can’t, because there is nothing to gain by saving your life’ …
i suppose i should stop being so negative and look on the bright side …
it won’t matter so much that the school isn’t completed, as malaria and hiv and diarhea will take care of the additional students it was destined to serve …
it won’t matter so much that there will be no more support for the small group of single mothers who banded together to create an economic co-operative, so as to feed their families and strengthen their community … as the children it would have allowed to live to the age of 5 would have now found themselves without teachers or school books anyway …
it won’t matter that we have stolen hope from so many who saw a beacon of light in our flag and in our name and in our words … as those africans so foolish as to hope for integrity and honesty from the rich … will die young and illiterate and never understand the betrayal of trust which our prime minister has cursed us all with on this day …
shame on you prime minister, you destroyer of dreams … shame on you …
Let me ask you one question
Is your money that good
Will it buy you forgiveness
Do you think that it could
I think you will find
When your death takes its toll
All the money you made
Will never buy back your soul
- Bob Dylan
Filed under: Canada
“… but every junkie’s like a settin’ sun”
they are so easy to despise … the abominable addicted … cocaine, crack, crystal meth, heroin …
walk down the right street and they are impossible to avoid … accumulating like garbage in the gutters of the city … walking skeletons, dead eyes … desperate, degenerate and depraved … one after another after another …
we look at them as we would look at pigs in a pen … strange, separate, different …
avoid eye-contact … noses held high … pretend you don’t notice … careful not to touch …
’such a shame’ … ‘wasted lives’ … ‘weak and pathetic’ …
what a joke …
am i any less addicted ??? … are any of us ??? …
coffee shops are the easy example … blenz, waves, timothy’s, second cup, starbucks … timmy ho’s … how many canadian street corners spew legal speed to the desperate masses … i can’t work until i have had my morning coffee … can you ???
‘i’m not addicted’ you say … oh yeah ??? … if you are not addicted, i challenge you to give up television for a month … no ??? … ‘Why would i?’ … you say … ‘i like tv’ … hmmmmm …
one step further … i challenge you to go as long as you can buying nothing except what is absolutely required to survive … how long could you, could i, last before we indulge a desire … before we walk past something in a store and just HAVE to have it … how long ??? … a week ??? … a month ??? … what a pitiful joke we are … weak and pathetic …
coffee, television, consumption … what about food ??? … sex ??? … celebrity culture ??? … vanity ??? … we are all addicts …
you say ‘oh, that’s different’ …
but is it ??? …
how is it different ??? …
we feel a ‘need’ … by fulfilling it we feel a temporary, pleasurable physical and emotional sensation … that’s all it is, isn’t it, when you have a cheap orgasm with somebody you barely know, when you tune into grey’s anatomy, when you buy those jeans … temporary physical thrills caused by a sudden release of certain chemicals into certain pleasure centers in the brain … cold, hard cash for temporary highs … hmmmmmm …
you say ‘but they are destroying their bodies’ … and that fast food run you make every other day isn’t ??? … you who sit in front of the television for hours every night, passively entertained while your brain … your ambition … your imagination … slowly rots and dies … do you know how overweight our culture is ??? … best not to mention the emotional toll taken on insecure teenagers and adults alike by celebrity culture … and the desire to be beautiful … wasted lives …
‘oh, but what they are doing is just morally wrong, drugs are illegal after all’ … laws set by the powerful in their best interests … have you ever heard of coltan ??? … coltan is a wondrous mineral that makes things like YOUR cellphone possible … most of the world’s coltan comes from the Democratic Republic of the Congo … remember the Congo ??? … one of the poorest nations on earth … the bloodiest war since WWII … still raging on behalf of our lust for technology and gold and diamonds … war funded by wealthy foreigners, fought by cocaine addicted 12 year olds with ak47’s … morally wrong ??? … such a shame …
‘but i NEED my cellphone’ … need ??? … need ??? … hmmmmmm
there is one difference i will acknowledge … the man strung out on crack cocaine … the woman desperate to sell her body for her next meth hit … they harbor no illusions as to what they are …
can we say the same ???
we pretend to be clean while indulging our every ache and desire and ‘need’ with sugar, caffeine and prescription narcotics …
we pretend to be good while our greed and desire and apathy permits and supports unimaginable atrocities all over the world …
we pretend to be kind while pretending we don’t notice the stinking, suffering humanity crying out for help on the sidewalk under our feet … talking about meaningless rubbish on our $500 mobile phone …
yes … when it comes to hypocrisy, the ‘addicts’ and us normal people really are not the same … i am not sure, however, that this justifies our misguided moral superiority or self-righteous indignation however …
the reality is … we are all addicts …
we are addicted to ‘want’ … or rather … getting what we want …
we don’t know how lucky we are that our lives have never dropped us so low as to send us looking to relieve this want in the dark places of the world … places where the psychological imperatives we all feel; to have friends, to be accepted, to be loved … are speedily and silently perverted into overwhelming and irresistible physical needs …
because really, that is all that makes ‘them’ different … you are just as helpless in the face of your desires as they are … when they cave into their desire, at least they have the excuse that every cell of their body is screaming in agony for their addiction to be fulfilled …
what’s your excuse ???
what’s mine ???
peace and love …
a quote from his farewell speech …
“But good and evil are present in this world, and between the two there can be no compromise. Murdering the innocent to advance an ideology is wrong every time, everywhere.”
Definition of “ideology” from dictionary.reference.com/
= i⋅de⋅ol⋅o⋅gy
1. the body of doctrine, myth, belief, etc., that guides an individual, social movement, institution, class, or large group
examples of ideologies:
- capitalist
- democratic
- free market
what a complete jackass …
CELEBRATE GOOD TIMES COME ON !!!
