Title to be announced in body of text

This is going to be one of those rare occasions when I blog about what is going on in my life; what is on my mind, you know, my true feelings and stuff.

I call this post “Die, Bitch Die.”

 Bernadette, my laptop computer, a Dell Latitude C600, was old. She had been old for a long time. If you are not a geek about these things, take a minute to locate one and repeat these details to him or her. Most likely him.

Say, “Cecil, there is a Dell Latitude computer that was bought second hand, originally had Windows 2000 on it and had only one USB port. And that was in the back. Is that old or what?”

At this point Cecil should collapse in derisive laughter. He should be stuttering through his braces about how inappropriate the word “old” is for such a relic.

But even though I paid more for her than the asking price of the LG Celeron Internal Cycle Modem Gigabyte thingammy being advertised in today’s Game Store pullout (I was ripped off. What do you want me to say? I’m sorry.) I wasn’t entirely unsatisfied with her performance. She could handle my typing speed (I am fast as greased lightning) and she wasn’t subject to the New Vision IT Department’s restrictions on being cool. So I had downloaded fun games, deadly-ass fonts, and nifty programmes.

I had Katt Williams’ Pimp Chronicles there too.

Most importantly, I had the entire Never Man manuscript, the next Nerd’s Eye View chapters, I had whole albums by dead prez, De La Soul, Joe Budden, GZA, Royce the 5’ 9”, Phil Collins… give me a second. Sniff. I need to pull myself together.

Many nights I lay awake in my bed hacking out long blog posts, reading stories downloaded from Slate and Salon, making lolbesigyes and conceptualising shit for Uptowner while thinking to myself, I need to buy a new laptop.

One of these days.

On Saturday I was at Garden City waiting for a client. The waitress came over and asked me if I need anything. “I can has cheeseburger plsthnkx,” I said. She smiled before she left, but I doubt that she got the joke.

I fired Bernadette up, wrote the coolest story ever eyvah and then hit save.

Nothing.

She froze.

I happen to be a great lover so I am not accustomed to this sort of thing. I had to take a moment to remind myself that even though she has a chick name, she is not really a female, she is just a computer. And when a computer goes frigid on you, you don’t descend into a spiral of self-doubt, you just reboot.

So I switched her off.

And that was it. Never to come on again.

She is dead now. The experts told me that her c-drive suffered an aneurism or something and it cannot be resuscitated. I can’t say I never saw this coming. I knew she was on her last legs, but the manner of her expiry—with no prior notice, no warning— just pissed me off. I have valuable information on that computer and she wants to die with it?  We have work to do and she just thinks she can just croak before it is finished?

This is what my chatroom OMG Like TOTALLY !!!111one! BFF said when I ran to her weeping for a shoulder to cry on.

Kenyanchick: But, and I mean this kindly, hasn’t she shown that you can, indeed, take it with you?

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Update. Lolbesigye No. 004

 

Verbatim Vs Verbatim IV

 

It is three-thirty in the afternoon on a Sunday when our hero is roused from his weekend nap by a noise at the door. He stumbles angrily over to answer it. He is angry because he hates being woken up from his weekend naps. It is the three-year-old from next door, Screaming Lizzie.

 

• Yoo-hoo! Hello! Kodi! Baz, dear, open the door!
• It is you, Lizzie, the sum of all my loathings! Questions tumble around in my enraged brain like metaphors looking for subjects. What did I tell you about waking me up when I am napping? What did I tell you about my desire to ever see you again? And most urgently, what did I tell you about calling me mbu ‘dear’?
• I will pick the last question and ignore the others. You said some yaddayadda blah-blah about my being only three years old and then you went on an irrational rant about how patronising it is to have a three-year-old calling a grown man dear. But I can’t resist it, Baz, you are so adorable! I swear, if I was tall enough I would reach up and pinch your cheeksies!
• Cheeksies? Lord, smite this child! I am opposed, in general, to the physical punishment of children, but I will make this compromise. When you are 20, Lizzie you have an asswhupping due.
• Hah hah! You dinosaur! Do you think that by the time I’m old enough to catch an asswhupping you will not be too old to give one? I mean, look at the way your fists are trembling right now. Is that the waragi you had for lunch or is that the early stages of arthritis?
• It is rage. I am furious at having been woken up from my nap just before Beyonce, Shakira and Sheryl Lee Ralph arrived in their limo. I am made more livid by the fact that it is you who woke me up, and I am incandescent with ire at all these mean things you are saying to me and how much they hurt my feelings. Whooozaaaaah. I will try to control myself. I will suppress my anger and simply ask what it is that brought you to my door, in the hopes that an abrupt refusal will be enough to get rid of you. What do you want?
• Well, it is about your CD player. You are playing that Blackstreet album. I have come to ask you to be a bit considerate to your neighbours and turn it down.
• Inconsiderate? But you guys regularly play your Young Jeezy album at wall-shaking, stadium-blasting, brain-pulping volume…
• It is not the volume I have a problem with, it is the age of the music. Dude, us young and funky cats don’t want to listen to guys who shaved their names into the backs of their heads.
• Lizzie, at three you do not even qualify as young yet. And nothing funky wears pampers…
• Either way, can’t you update your music selection? Like get some Akon or something.
• Akon? You know what Akon does to little girls? No wait. I won’t tell you until 10 years from now when you are young enough to know these things.
• You are talking about that other chick you wrote about in the papers? I don’t see what she would be complaining about. I mean that Akon is a hottie with a body! I would have snuck into the club too just to get a piece of that! Whooo!
• Argh! My ears! I can’t believe I am hearing this sort of smutty talk from an infant! I mean, WTF!
• Watch your language, Baz, there are kids present!
• You are worried that I might traumatise you? You are the one traumatising me with your being there three years old saying you want to do the dirty dance with Aliaune “Akon” Thiam!

And our hero runs screaming back into the house. He quickly replaces the Blackstreet CD with Bebe And Cece Winans and cranks it up to eleven to drown out the protests of Lizzie at the door.

Update: This is for Mataachi and Ish.

The turntables might wobble, but they won’t fall down

First of all, I would like to reiterate: I am the baddest deejay in this city called blogtown. When I lay down the tracks, I lay down the trizzacks! In case you missed it in my last post:

  6. Update. This is a special dedication to rev, matanda, sav, Iwaya and Deg. Fire up your iPods boys. Some blues. Some 
More blues .

 Now, I cannot actually tell whether the following links are going to lead you to any actual viewing pleasure, because whatever gods may be, in this case the IT department at my office, do not give personnel like me priority when they distribute what the rest of the world’s computers consider as standard as earlobes. That is right, I have no Macromedia Flash. There IS a computer on the planet that does not have Macromedia Flash. And I am sitting right in front of it.

No Youtube, niggaz! 

Because of this deficiency I am unable to confirm that this works, but if it does, as I hope it does, please feel free to tell me so.

Dripalong Daffy.

This is for all the laydeys in the hizzouse (still talking DJ talk). But is a special dedication to my friend Chwintu.

 On a more serious note; you may have heard me sing the praises of Bruce Springsteen, and when I do, I mean every word. You may have heard me gush about Iryn Namubiru and a few other R&B singers (Nicci Gilbert, Monica, Tamia, Brandy, the constituents of En Vogue etc) and said, “Lo, behold a dude with taste. I am sure he cannot stand that rap nonsense!” Ech! Wrong! I looooove this hip hop!

Man, I have been a hip hop fan since Breakin Electric Boogaloo.

This song however, is not just for the more youtube-equipped hip hop fans in the webosphere. This song is for the unbelievers. I found it on Channel 5 this morning when I was running late for work and was so blown away that I knew I will not rest until have alerted the entire universe (or that portion of it that is here with us tonight) to the rhyme stylings of this rapper called Piper.

Flipsyde – Happy Birthday

 www.youtube.com/?v=-qj3nWy7HMs

Don’t skip the link, silly one. Go back and hit it. It is not a guy bragging about his bling or his gun or his prowess at doing it doggystyle. It is a very poignant, very powerful, very moving comment on the question of abortion.

And with that, I leave you all.

More thurrogits. Random ones.

1.  Whatever Jon Macgregor is smoking, I want some.

2.

 

Scarlet Ortiz, the star of all Spanish soaps ever made, is on record for saying that the most engrossing, most compelling, most thyroid-gland-grabbing, most scanless blog she has ever read in her life – which is considerable because even though she looks like she is 12 and still wets the bed, she is actually in her late forties—is this one that I am about to unveil before you.

3.  Why do you watch Smallville? I watch Smallville because of that chick who is hot in it. Kristin Kreaiuk. Otherwise the sexual tension between Lex and Clark really does little to entertain me. They be on scene making gooey googoo eyes at each other and I find myself screaming for the scriptwriter, begging him to please, see reason and find a way, for the sake of us all, to put Lana in the scene.

Most preferably in a little skirt and a kundi-show.

4.  Real Men Don’t Cry?  So real men should not mess with me. I am dangerous sometimes!

5.  There is that thing of where I tell you what my favourite internet sites (excluding blogs – Minty, do we have to sacrifice a white chicken? Again? Please, come back!) and I call it links of fire. Oba I tell you one other of them? Okay. That is what I shall do.

6. Update. This is a special dedication to rev, matanda, sav, Iwaya and Deg. Fire up your iPods boys. Some blues. Some more blues, with a rock edge.

Maybe this is why I have writer’s block

Circadian rhythm, as everybody knows, is the biomedical term for the body clock: that thing inside your brain that responds to your daily habits and schedules, accordingly, what time to release sleep hormones and what time to withhold them and release wakefulness hormones instead.
Some people have a circadian rhythm that makes them sleepy at night and wakeful in the morning. The biomedical term for such people is Normal.

Some people have a circadian rhythm that makes them sleepy in the day and wakeful at night. The biomedical term for these people is deejays.

No, watchmen sleep all day AND all night. As everybody knows.

My own circadian rhythm is— to put is as succinctly and precisely as I can — all fucked up. It is so irregular and unreliable that I have resorted to the vastest generalisation when describing it. I say, “I don’t sleep” when I am asked.
Going to sleep is not the simple, easy, process of slowly winding down and shutting off. You people fall asleep. I dig my way into sleep. It is a struggle that comes with effort and exertion.

I can’t even begin to describe it. Imagine being told to lie still. But instead of your arms falling limp by your side, you find them flexing, hard and tight, by your side.
That is what my brain seems to do.

I tried everything. Including the thing you are going to suggest and, though it does relax me, it also just makes me more wakeful.

Going face.

But at least there are the drugs. At least those get me through the night.

Yes, I found out where I can score valium. It isn’t supposed to be sold without a prescription, and I know this makes me a drug abuser, but what do you want me to do? If I don’t sleep through the night, then the circadian rhythm will decide to start shutting me down at three in the afternoon.

When the work is piling up (contrary to what you may believe, I am an extremely busy person with a lot a lot a lot to do) the eyelids start to droop. One by one. My moustache begins to tingle and soon I am yawning at a rate of four a minute. Then even though I am mobile and upright, my short-term memory and concentration are gone. Like part of me is asleep. Have you ever experienced that thing where you call a phone number and then forget who you called?
Of course you haven’t. Because you actually sleep on nights.

I have been sleeping relatively better for the past month or so. A combination of various approaches: Valium, piriton and chamomile tea. But you’re right. I need to stop abusing drugs. I need to develop a natural circadian rhythm.

So I am going to try, starting today, to sleep naturally. And if sleep doesn’t come, I stay awake all night. If the 3:00pm stupor strikes, I will take a powernap or chew coffee or get fired. Wish me luck. I’ll tell you how it goes.