The Cause of the Gay Gene Revealed

This country is going to drive me insane. I have to type this post at double-speed because there is no electricity in the entire CBD. For heaven’s sake, even the fifteen rebel groups that run Somalia are able to come up with a plan to ensure that at the very least, the Mogadishu CBD always has power. And here my laptop battery is about to go the way of Simba Makoni’s political party. This damn new government has enough money to buy our MP’s brand new vehicles but can’t upgrade a single ZESA power station. The bastards should walk, I say. Until we have clean running water and a continuous supply of electricity, MPs should get an allocation of strong Bata sneakers and Cabinet should meet under a tree and drink mahewu. Just the other day my gardener switched from borehole to Council water without warning me and after unsuspectingly taking a shower in it, I realized it had given my chest hair a perm. A few days later my skin developed blotches and I had to rush to the doctor before I turned into Michael Jackson. This is definitely NOT the Zimbabwe I want.

Our government needs to learn to spend money on the right things. We’ve had about as much of this profligacy as we can take. With the way the MDC MP’s have been baying for these new cars, I’m certainly glad I’ve kept my identity hidden, because they would be all over me like a coloured chick on a crate of free beer. They almost castrated Tendai Biti for daring to suggest that they should be allocated locally assembled Mazda vehicles from Willowvale Motor Industries.

Funny how the shoe suddenly fits when it’s on the other foot – I vaguely remember the MDC expressing unending disgust at the excesses displayed by ZANU-PF ministers and MP’s. They suckered us into believing they didn’t want the Mercedes Benzes and the never-ending perks that had become the sole preserve of ZANU-PF officials. Now, all of a sudden, they also want a piece of the cake – MDC MP’s are to be found at all sorts of lavish gatherings these days, some of which have nothing at all to do with bettering the plight of ordinary Zimbabweans. Last month sometime I saw some of them on TV attending the Miss Deaf pageant. Why do our elected officials always seem able to free up large amounts of time to go to beauty pageants and such, but can only dedicate minimal time to visit their constituencies? My new stance on politics is this: I don’t trust a politician farther than I can spit to hit him.

And yes, as difficult as it is to believe, there is actually such a thing as Miss Deaf. I find that mildly discriminatory. Why should deaf people get their very own beauty pageant? While we’re at it, why not have a Miss Cripple? Or Miss HIV? How about a separate Miss Black and Miss White contest for blacks and Caucasians respectively. Ridiculous. I didn’t go to the stupid Miss Deaf pageant, although I can’t say it was on principle. Actually, I’m waiting for the Miss Mute Pageant – my company will gleefully sponsor that one, because there is nothing more appealing to me than a beautiful woman who can’t talk. If I find one, I will divorce my wife immediately and elope with her so I can someday die in peace.

Which leads me to the subject of this post. Five paragraphs later, I know, don’t correct me, I know what I’m doing, I am vastly experienced at this whole blogging thing now. I had what turned out to be a less than civil discussion about the male-female relationship just the other day with a female friend of mine. She and her husband recently moved to a Western country, and she declared on Facebook that she has found that she is slowly turning into a feminist. I countered that in that case, she will soon find that she is also slowly turning into a divorcee. This simple but true observation brought out what must have been all the unshaven, square-shouldered, dildo-hugging feminists within range of the entire Internet. A huge debate began on whether or not I am a male chauvinist pig, a phrase I am convinced is uniquely Zimbabwean, yet whose meaning is unknown to anyone in Zimbabwe. Seriously, do YOU know what the word chauvinist means, without looking it up? And is it chauvinist pig or chauvinistic pig? No one knows, at least not within these borders.

Those of you have read my previous posts will find this easy to believe: Ten minutes into the discussion I had everyone so mad they resorted to typing in ALL CAPS. Man, women can be so unnecessarily sensitive.

Anyway, what made her so mad was that I said women are beautiful beings, but they are at their worst when they're trying to be men. I said women should be content to just be women.

I can right now hear a thousand Zimbabwean women across the world clicking their fingers and gyrating their empowered heads on their necks and declaring loudly, black American style: "Pshh oh no he didn't! I know he didn't jus' say we should JUS BE WOMEN! What the HELL does it mean to JUS BE A WOMAN!" Now, I am not sexist, but I believe...

Wait, a random thought just crossed my mind: can one be mute, but not deaf? Because that future wife I spoke of earlier wouldn't be of much use to me if she can't hear me barking at her to bring me more ice for my whiskey. I'll have to research that.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, I'm not sexist, but I believe women should stop trying to compete with men. It's gotten completely out of hand, and someone needs to put an end to this equal rights bullshit. There is no such thing! Women only want equal rights when it suits them, but are quite happy to let the housebreaker bash their husband’s skull in while they cower in the bedroom. Do you know what equal rights means? It means if we are in bed and something goes bump in the night, I have to leave the bedroom and go check out what the problem is. On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. If it happens on a Tuesday, Thursday or Saturday, I stay asleep and you drag your equal ass to the living room to see what’s going on. And if it happens to be a housebreaker, you’d better fight. If you decide your balls aren’t all that big after all, you’d better run in a direction away from me and the rest of the family. That’s what a real man would do.

Equal rights means if I have to put the toilet seat up to take a piss, you should equally have to put the toilet seat down when you want to take a piss.

Equal rights means taking turns to take out the garbage, mow the lawn, replace the oil in the family car, or change a flat tyre on a freezing freeway in the middle of winter. Next time the car dies on the road, let’s have the woman get out and push the damn thing while the husband/boyfriend sits inside with the 3 kids and the luggage.

If I was president of this (once, long long ago) great nation of ours I would have long since banned Generations, The Bold and the Beautiful, The Young & the Restless, Oprah, Tyra, and other similar trash that is poisoning the minds of our once gentle African women.

It's terrible to be a man these days. Women want you to cook, change diapers, mix your own drink, and braai your own meat. What rubbish! This is not the way of our forefathers! Incidentally, that word gives us a hint of a woman's place in the world - have you ever heard anyone talk about "our foremothers"? Men used to be leaders. Bushmen used to go hunting for supper, and didn't have to worry about coming home and being told to wash the bushbaby's little turd-encrusted ass before skinning, cutting and cooking the kudu they would have killed and dragged home all by themselves.

Women want to play rugby and soccer. Why? You don't see us men rushing to learn netball to prove a point. Women want to be soldiers and karatekas and gladiators. For God’s sake, I don't want to lie next to someone I know can deliver a rib-cracking punch to my side, a skull-fracturing roundhouse kick to my temple, then stuff a grenade into my mouth all within 3 seconds just because I turned in my sleep and inadvertently pulled all the blankets from her. This is not my idea of sexy, and men want sexy.

No man wants a stinky, rugby-playing, bicep-flexing domineering woman for a life partner. I don't know what the hell has happened, but Zimbabwean women have lost the essence of what is to be an African woman. No wonder there is such a proliferation of gays; men can't stand it anymore. (Although by that statement let it not be misconstrued that I support gayism; I do not, but that’s a topic for another day).

I always work myself up and can’t complete my posts. And my battery is about to die anyway. Trust me, there will be more on this topic later…

Come One, Come All...

So, here's an exciting development:

I have decided to migrate my blog to Facebook. Anyone wishing to continue reading my senseless rants and then being insulted at the end of it all, please feel free to search for me on Facebook.

Caveat Emptor: By requesting to be my Facebook friend you explicitly and implicitly agree to the following terms and conditions:

1. We are not really, actually friends. Because Facebook does not offer an option to accept someone as a pen-pal, an enemy, or even simply a subject of potential future ridicule, I must unfortunately accept you all as "friends".

2. Everyone will initially be accepted as my "friend". However, if you post a stupid comment, you will be summarily removed. What counts as a stupid comment? Anything that disagrees with anything I say or think. I am so intelligent that the thought that I have made an error in thought or writing should never cross your mind. If you really feel that I have made an error somewhere, go and lie down until the feeling passes. Whatever you do, do NOT mention it to me, because I don't care what you think.

3. If you are a woman, you agree that should I ever request it, you are ready, willing and able to lie down and allow me to have my way with you because not only am I severely blessed with super-galactic intelligence, I also possess literally deadly good looks. Just the other day I took a five minute walk in the CBD to a Nando's and caused a seven-car pile-up when women drivers lost concentration and rammed into each other and parked cars as they stared in disbelief at the flawless work of divine art that is me.

4. If you are a man, you agree that should I request it, you will immediately hand over to me your wife/girlfriend/sister (I will delete inappropriate based on my impeccable judgement upon seeing the candidates) so I can have my way with her, or them (depending). You also agree that if you are such a loser that you have no wife or girlfriend or sister that you will perform gardening services at my place of residence for an indefinite period, because I am such a man's man and you need all the help you can get. You also pledge to me your first-born son, because after a few days in my aura, women will mistake you for a non-loser and you might actually snag one of them.

5. You agree to be insulted by me no end should I flip open my laptop and realize I am in a head-cracking mood. This is usually the case everyday, although on some days my good friend Johnny comes over to soothe me.

If you do not agree with any of the above, do not send me a friend request. Go to the bookstore and find a good book to read, and don't bother me again.

See you soon!

Hell in the Heavens (Part II)

Well, tickle my testicles and call me Nancy. Who could have guessed that a story about an anonymous idiot annoying me forty thousand feet above the ground could garner so much attention? Due to the sheer number and frightening intensity of emails I have received initially requesting, and then demanding that I finish this story, I feel it’s only fair that I preface this post with an apology.

Somewhere along the way, some readers of this blog have gotten the idea that I am interested in what they think. It must have been something I said, and I sincerely apologise for misleading you. The truth is it’s not so much that I’m not interested in what you think, as I don’t give half a damn. Now I know what you’re thinking (because you’ve emailed it to me every waking hour of my life since I started this blog), well, isn’t this guy just as arrogant a prick as ever there was in the history of pricks. And arrogance. My reply to that is: practice, practice, practice. One day you too might become as awesome a human being as I am and then have reason to be arrogant.

People make me so mad. I made it quite clear when I began this blog that there are only two sets of opinions that matter in the world: mine, and those of anyone who pays me a substantial amount of cash. So those that have sent money into my account, please share your views and comments. The rest of you can feel free to shut your faces. And while we’re on the subject of voluntary donations and shutting faces, the last time I checked my bank account the number of people who had wired money to me was roughly… zero. So guess who now has my official permission to shut the hell up? You’re welcome.

Anyway, I think I should explain my absence only because I fear if I don’t I may keep getting annoying, time-wasting emails. The reason I’ve not been updating regularly is that I was being a true black-blooded patriot, a son of the soil as they say, by drafting my own clauses that I think should be included in the new Zimbabwean constitution we are working toward. For example, one of the items I am going to put forward is a recommendation that we change our president after one term, or when he starts to look like a piece of biltong, whichever comes soonest. I remember watching a certain president of a certain African country (I daren’t say his name) on TV campaigning to be re-elected last year, and I didn’t want to vote for him so much as I wanted to cut him up into little pieces and serve him on a platter with ice cold beers at my next braai. With impressive suggestions such as these, you can rest assured that us Zimbabweans who are still in the trenches are going to deliver a concrete, people-driven, forward-looking law of the land for you yellow-bellied prodigal sons in the Diaspora. No thanks necessary; really, it’s our pleasure.

And then, there was this whole business of Michael Jackson dying on us. And our President didn’t even declare a state of emergency. I’ve been a fan of Michael Jackson from the time he was a cute little black boy right up to his death as a hideous crazy white woman. I needed some time to grieve.

Now, to finish off my tale of woe. So, I’m sitting in this plane trying not to scream and bash my head against the window until it breaks or I die, with the latter being the preferred option in the circumstance. I watch Asshole approaching with that frozen smile you get when you realize that what you thought was just a fart you were going to silently deploy is in fact something slightly wetter than a regular fart. And a little bit smellier.
I’m trying my best to wipe the smile off my face but I can’t. He smiles back. He scans the overhead bins for space to put his oversize hand luggage. I say three quick prayers in the hope that he won’t find space. One prayer to God. One to Allah. And I cc: a prayer to all other deities known and unknown. But the Devil is quick, if you didn’t know. He came floating down the aisle disguised as a butt-ugly forty-something year-old flight attendant to Asshole’s assistance. What the hell happened to airlines, don’t they discriminate anymore? Is there not enough space, sir? she says. Here, let me take your bag, I’ll put it up front there’s space there. Go ahead and take your seat.

What?

Bitch. I thought we were supposed to keep our luggage near us at all times. All times! But I guess the spawn of Satan get special treatment on certain SAA flights.

He sits down next to me, takes a moment to buckle his fat belly in, and then turns to me looking like the cat that got the cream.

“Boss,” he says, irritating me no end with the first word out of his mouth. I don’t know, Zimbabwean men have taken to calling each other “boss” a lot lately, a trend I don’t at all understand, since most of them are not and have never been the boss of anything. What’s wrong with “bro”? Or even “ekse”? “I haven’t see you in so long man, are you still in business? What are you doing boss?”

I open my mouth to answer, but I guess in some cultures that’s a signal for the other person to speak some more.

“Boss, you wasted your time all these years in Zim boss. The States is where it’s at. People made crazy money, not this Mickey Mouse money ya’ll was making here.” Yes, he actually spoke like that. Since I left America, I’ve not heard anyone actually talk like that. Ya’ll was..? So now I can feel my blood pressure rising in my eyeballs. This guy hasn’t seen me in years, has no clue what I’ve been doing, but has the temerity to immediately conclude that I’ve been making Mickey Mouse money. I don’t know how much that is, but the derogatory tone of his voice informs me without further explanation that it is certainly not a lot.

“Well,” I say, “you know how Zim is, man. We’re struggling to survive…”

“See,” he interjects, “that’s the problem with you black people. Always jus tryna survive. S’why we don’t never become shit. I was doing my thang in the States, boss, we was making money, till this damn recession started. You wanna know what we were doing?” This far in the conversation I was smart enough to know that that question did not require an answer, so I kept quiet. “You know, we were simply taking out loans to build houses. After building a house, it’s immediately worth twice what you spent to build it! So we would talk to the lenders, the builders, the appraisers, and after doing the deal, everyone would take their cut once the house was sold. We made sick money, sick money, boss!”

I am not exaggerating (this time), this is actually how the conversation started and proceeded, with minimal input from me. In fact this version does not do this idiot justice because I have to summarize. If I had to type everything he said I would suffer from carpal tunnel syndrome the rest of the rest of the year. He just wouldn’t stop talking: “So what are you doing, huh? I know, ya’ll still running those little shops of yours. Boss, you need to up your game. I stopped by one of your shops. Pathetic. Boss, the first thing you need to do is change that logo. You need to brand your business. That logo looks like it was home-made in WordArt. Spend some money on really branding yourself, professionally, that’s how you make money. And the sound in your shops? Boss. C’mon. Invest in a Bose system. Spend that extra cash on your business. I saw your ML parked outside. What do you need an ML for? Sell one of your Benzes, and put that money into good sound systems for your shops. I’m talking about re-branding your business, throughout. What do your customers feel when they walk into one of your shops? Huh? Boss, what do they feel?”

Let me at this juncture inform you, dear Reader, of what I later found out about this guy, just so you can put his comments in perspective. Yes, he lived pretty large in the States for a while. After a few years, however, he was implicated in some type of tax fraud. The FBI and the IRS couldn’t pin the crimes on him directly, so rather than bother with an investigation, they simply served him with deportation papers. He was locked up in a detention center for two weeks before he was flown home. He came home with nothing more than a few bags of fancy designer clothes and a bad attitude (which is duty-free, unfortunately). As we spoke in the plane, he had been back a couple of months. He was living with his parents. He is thirty-five. Wife? Of course not. Kids? Plenty. Money? I’m willing to bet: none.

I, on the other hand, am only twenty-eight. I am married (sorry to disappoint, ladies). One child. I run a company with almost five hundred employees and well over two million dollars in monthly turnover. I don’t mean to brag but…well, actually I do, I love to brag. It appears to me that I’m not the one who actually has Mickey Mouse money, or a Mickey Mouse life, for that matter.

Aargh, you know what, I have to stop talking about this guy, on account of my blood pressure. He said so much more that I don’t have the patience to type. The only reason I didn’t knock him out with the mean end of my cell phone is that I know him. He’s always been like that. And also because I knew he was lying, because there are very few people in the world whose lives are better than mine (Will Smith and Hugh Heffner spring to mind). But above all, I ignored him because I learnt a while ago that most times, the best way to deal with an asshole is to shoot him. But I had already checked in my gun.

zakeozim@gmail.com