Men no longer bring anything to the table, they just turn it over
A rather absurd figure, as bland as he was unintentionally amusing, at 23, he has three children.
What you need to know:
- Too bad we will never realise what our parents have long known to be true – good sex and endorphins don’t equate to a healthy relationship. Even if you use a condom
- The night was young, yes, but the revellers were even younger and throats were being irrigated in a manner likely to suggest this was actually the El Nino
Last weekend I was invited to a shindig in the tail end of the city —Rongai. That’s something you wouldn’t expect in October. A party in mid-October—in this economy—and me actually going.
But off I went, because I still want to have friends who can say I show up for them, and because I was promised there would be free meat. If you can get anything for free, modern-day economists would tell you to take it. I am a modern-day economist.
The party was lively. The night was naughty, providing the perfect canvas to exhibit every evil thought—from lechery to vanity—held up before my eyes. There is a life outside Nairobi, you know? And this was the day the night shimmers, shakes and struts its stuff.
The night was young, yes, but the revellers were even younger and throats were being irrigated in a manner likely to suggest this was actually the El Nino some chap in the Kenya Met Department had predicted. And you know what happens when beer flows like water? Tongues break out of their cage, words are let loose—which is where I thrive, mopping them up with my ears.
We got talking with this 20-something-year-old sod. 23, actually. He could be my younger brother but the things he was telling me, I felt the naïf in front of his eyes. A rather absurd figure, as bland as he was unintentionally amusing, at 23, he has three children. That’s okay, you may say, mapema ndio best.
But, at 23 he also has three baby mamas. Three! Has any man ever produced so much hard-end product from so little foreplay? This is a man shaving the garlic so thin it liquifies in the pan.
Less is more? I don’t know about you but having one child and a wife is more or less a headache. Now three from three different women?
Do they know each other? I asked. “The children?” he says. No, I pushed him back with words. “Well, the baby mamas know what they need to know, which is that they are the only ones,” he says, swigging his beer. “Variety is the flavour of life.” At the back of my mind, Shaggy is singing Mr Boombastic.
I ushered him to the nearest chemist, one to introduce him to this new revolutionary act of condoms, which clearly, he had never heard of; and two, to buy antiseptic to clean my jaw which had just fallen to the floor.
I pressed further. Why stop at three, I wanted to know. “I am taking a break,” he says. From the children or the baby mamas? He laughs.
“Well, all my baby mamas are richer than me, and all of them are outside the country.” One, he says, is in the States. The other is in Australia. “But,” he says, “I will be leaving for the States soon. Baby mama number one wants me there.”
I know it doesn’t make sense, but it actually does make sense. I see his logic. Knock up a rich kid, and hope they will tie you down. It used to be the sleight of hand for many women, but now, men are no longer bringing anything to the table, they are instead turning it.
I stood there taking notes, me the elder statesman, who has evidently misused my 20s. Here I was, with the world’s favourite youngest professor from the Harvard College of Street Life. I blame the president.
His mantra of life purports to be pragmatic and practical, but the only parties who are going to be truly satisfied are his loins, and you, the reader, for living vicariously through this column and getting served hot gossip of my friends. Maybe we could argue on the morality of the issue, but this was a willing buyer willing seller market. Those children will/might/should grow up without a father, but isn’t society culpable here? What happened to mtoto being wa jamii?
I ask him if he is planning to have more children (or more women) and he says he will think about it. I hand him the condoms. “Ama I just settle down?” he asks. I want to tell him he should quit instead but I am a one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind. Where I come from, we have a saying: You would rather be inside urinating outside, than outside urinating inside.
But then this is the glass-half-full angle. Maybe we try too hard to make life make sense. Life itself is not immoral, just amoral. The more I drunk, the clearer it all became – how we get bored of our childhood and rush to grow up and long to be children again, living as if we’ll never die and dying as though we’ve never lived. It is all stuff we already know, or stuff we do not want to know anyway.
That’s why I was there being an African firstborn, which is basically a deputy parent. I wanted to be his catcher in the rye. Upuzi!
But this was not just any 23-year-old. At that moment, he was a father of three. I may have been the older guy, wanting to advise him, but I had no leg to stand on. What I know about parenting is one (questionably) healthy cactus and a dying snake plant.
I have a 50 per cent success rate. I was at my wits’ end. I was blowing hot air. The odds were not in my favour. Hii, imeenda.
The truth is, we are living in the age of sexual liberation. These are its fruits. For instance? Well, for instance, self-control is an illusion. You want romance? The price is sex. A guy with three baby mamas is a walking advertisement of sexual degeneracy.
He has no self-control and there is more than a 50 per cent chance he is still sleeping around. Ladies take cue. There is a reason men say they will rarely start a match one-nil. The desolate soul knows this immediately, and only the trivial pretend that it can be otherwise.
People much wiser than me say this: The owner of the well does not queue for water.
That’s the philosophy of this generation. Too bad we will never realise what our parents have long known to be true – good sex and endorphins don’t equate to a healthy relationship.
Even if you use a condom.
PS: There was no meat. Free or otherwise.
