Mantalk: Every man should reflect a little, I did, here goes

One of the perks of the ageing process is, when you’re young, you promise yourself you won’t be like the generation above you. You’ll be cool. You’ll say snazzy things like: “Freshi barida.” You won’t do listicles. But that’s like me saying I am not going to marry Miss World. Easy (and meaningless) to say when there’s no real interest from either party. Besides, what kind of birthday is it without drumming down the lessons you’ve picked?

Perhaps the first real lesson to be drawn from growing older, is that there are no lessons, that what really matters is, you know, the friends we made along the way, the show, the puppets on a stage. 

Here goes my unfiltered musings, complete with internal conflicts and dissonance, peppered by white lies and half-truths.

1. Do you remember what you were doing the first time you told a woman that you loved her? I do. I was lying.

1. Do we have men who still call ladies, “My dear?”

1. Our young men today are being told that women are tramps and loose and other unprintable things I cannot type here. Life is not an either-or situation. The 21st-century man, for all his freedom and evolution is wedged in ‘perpetual adolescence’—being told what to do, how to do it and when to do it—fashioning a tsunami of anxiety.

1. Sending Tik-Toks is a love language.  

1. Love as a gift, not as an investment.

1. I would like to assure everyone I have ever been in a meeting with, who, after presenting their very nice slide deck née PowerPoint that every time I said, “Do you mind sharing the slides?” it was a rhetorical question. I never open those slides. Nobody does. 

1. Twitter is like being able to read every toilet wall in the world.

1. It’s also an echo chamber because you keep looking for opinions that validate your own. Here, everyone wants to be the star of this theatre of outrage.

1. Still on Twitter, don’t you just loathe those shmoes who, thinking they have unearthed oil with their insipid thoughts, and in a bid to feel morally superior, end every tweet with “Let that sink in?”  

1. Avocado is the gospel truth. (I’ll fight anyone about this, and have).

1. Women need to know that panties are the last thing men think about when you come to our place. But, if you must wear panties, I, personally prefer thongs. Even just thinking about it right now—I can feel my halo disappear. Good grief. G-strings are what God would wear if God wore anything. Let that sink in.

1. Whoever invented G-Strings has my vote for anything.

1. Every man should read Robert Burns “Of Mice and Men.”

1. When Helen Hayes met playwright Charles MacArthur, who was to become her husband, at a party, he poured some salted peanuts into her hand and said, “I wish they were emeralds.” Years later on an anniversary, he poured some emeralds into her hand and said, “I wish they were peanuts.”

1. The government needs to regulate the price of curtains.

1. How to know when it’s over: She doesn't ask you where you've been, where you are, where you're going, or what time you're coming back. How to know she’s never coming back: She doesn’t send you Tiktok videos.

1. Sometimes, it’s easier just to say: “maybe you’re right.” That’s paying lip service to authority while subtly asserting its contingency. Not everything is an argument. For instance, if kanjo clamp your car and ask you to shut up, debate would be foolish. Ditto if someone you trust suggests a blowjob. But those are things you’ll have to figure out for yourself.

1. Cars are culture. You can’t say, okay, I drive a Juke because it gets great gas mileage. No, if you buy a Juke, you’ve joined a tribe.

1. Always know which café to go to (not that one). Call waiters by their name. The sweetest sound to any person is their name.

1. Women, eh? A riddle wrapped in an enigma, wrapped in a slightly tatty dressing gown.

1. If you can avoid it, never play poker with a guy called Pablo at 1AM in a downtown Nairobi club. Trust me. (Which, coincidentally, are also the words he said.)

1. Like most red-blooded African men, kindness is a soft power, unleashed at the most picayune of times.

1. Eye contact is an invisible grip. That steely gaze penetrates peoples until they cower in submission or look away. Very subtle eye contact can make people look at you longer or make strangers think you are genuinely interested in their opinion about G Strings.    

1. This is my guilty indulgence: I have been known to love a good bear hug. Research says that it helps produce endorphins which can help stave off memory loss and is good for your skin and can also give you stronger erections. Okay, I made up that last part.

1. WhatsApp Statuses are the schwerpunkt of personal attacks, the bête noire of passive aggressiveness. Dance with your demons but putting quotes on WhatsApp status as a subtle dig is buffoonery. 

1. I am indifferent to candles. And cushions. And lasses who, for whatever reason, deem it fit to have a bed half full of pillows. Exceptions can be made if she has a closet full of G-strings. Worthy compromise if I ever saw one.

1. I do know better, but I still believe, on a gut level, that we exist only in the eyes of the people who know or have known us. 

1. Now that I think about it, the allure of G strings, like mini-skirts, is that they are short enough to arouse curiosity but long enough to hide the subject.

1. Wilde said it best. Everything in the world is about sex, except sex. Sex is about power.

1. Without alcohol, the DJs in Kenyan clubs would be jobless. I’m not a DJ and I can tell you which set they’ll play. It’s as if they share the same hard disk. Scratch that, they do.

1. A man takes a drink. The drink takes a drink. And then the drink takes a man. That gorgeous line, from Stephen King’s “Doctor Sleep”, with its waltzing dactyls, pops into my head time and over again. Funny how life suddenly seems more full when the glass stays empty. You’d think it would be the other way around. 

1. Growing up, I used to think Kenchic was a place where all the heartthrob girls from Kenya were to be found. I wasn’t wrong. They started from there before hitting the club to listen to the same songs till 3am.

1. Someone’s daughter once asked me if I found a certain Susan attractive. Now, I am a practising Christian, with flexible morality and rigid immaturity. So, I said, what any man with a cool head would say. What Jesus would want me to say. I said, “Yes, Susan is pretty, but you, you are beautiful.” Pretty beautiful statement, no? I never saw Susan again. And now, I hate all Susans. Such a tasteless bland name. Susan.

1. What is it with Kenyans and shortening names? Yobra for Brian. Vasha for Naivasha. Sharas for Biashara.

1. My brother is in a serious long-term relationship. They are thinking about marriage. He is 21. And…I pay his rent. LOL. God, is this because of my contempt towards Susans?

1. Teenage girls want an ear, not advice. The same goes for their mothers.

1. I have never met a grandfather called Brian. Or Kevin. It sounds wrong, weird even, to have a grandfather called Kevin.

1. There are stories we tell ourselves; and then there are stories we tell of ourselves. Most stories however are hanging in the air, waiting to be clasped, to be written and read and rewritten and re-read, each time the broth sweetened with an extra ingredient—a forgotten detail here, an exaggeration there, each taken with a large pinch of salt. Most times, the hunters write the stories. Sometimes, the hunted get to write the stories.  

As I turn a year older, I ruminate on my privilege and my luck, despite everything. God’s been good to me. 

I love reading your feedback emails. Really. So…who invented G-Strings?

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