It is 9:37 PM, and I’m sipping on a mix of Top Tea and Nigerian rum.
I got the rum in the afternoon. Was out on a walk and I came across this guy- from Cotonou- he said his name was Wasiu.
I expressed my surprise at his name. Wasiu didn’t sound like a Cotonou name.
“Don’t you expect that there’ll be Muslims in Cotonou too?”
“Okay that makes sense. That makes sense.”
I met Wasiu at work with his presumably self-constructed alcohol distillation plant. He had two metal drums- turned black with soot from what was possibly months of sitting over firewood flames. Each drum was connected to a tube which passed through a pool of water in the ground before connecting into a funnel at the other end.
I imagined palm wine was heated in the metal drums by the firewood, the alcohol evaporated and went out of the drums through the tubes, condensed into liquid while passing through the section of the tubes immersed in water, and was forced out of the other end of the tubes by new alcohol vapor emerging from the metal tanks. That was my imagination of how the setup worked.
I left Wasiu’s place with two bottles- one full of frothing palm wine, and the second full of clear traditional Nigerian rum. He offered to give me for free, but I just could not agree to that. All of that hard work. Tapping the wine, kindling the fire, inhaling and blinking through the smoke till his red eyes became used to it. I could not take his alcohol for free if I had a choice. There were some damp pieces of paper in my wallet. One of them had “200” printed on its corners. I handed it to a perceptibly more smiley Wasiu.
Hopefully the piece of paper representing two hundred units of the currency designated as the consensual store of value in the nation of Nigeria would be useful to him for something.
I took a sniff of the bottle with the rum. It brought back memories of Grogue- the traditional rum I encountered in the Cape Verdean archipelago a few years back. I wonder how the Cape Verdeans get their rum though- I don’t recall seeing that many palm trees on the islands where I lived.
It is 9:49 PM, and I’m sipping on a mix of Top Tea and Nigerian rum.
I am thinking on the considerably displeasing events of the last few days. A sequence of cascading problems has me bothered.
I have electronic accessories to replace. Primarily as a consequence of an electrification complication.
I headed out on my newly purchased dual-sport bike in a bid to seek some clarity on the destructive extent of the aforementioned complication. The mercurial weather that seems to typify this rainy season took the opportunity to mess up the screen of the laptop in my backpack.
In the bid to fix one problem, I intersected another. Ugh.
I left the computer in a bag of rice for a day and some hours. I read or heard somewhere that rice is a pretty effective desiccant. I checked on the computer about an hour ago. Apparently the desiccative abilities of rice have got nothing on the disruptive capacity of the Nigerian rainy season.
Usually I go about in the rain with a MacBook Pro in my backpack, and nothing terrible happens. I guess things are just different in Nigeria, and I should have much more regard for the rain here. Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone and stuff.
The screen is still an exhibition of severely disheartening smudges and discolorations. It hurts my heart looking at what used to be a crystal-clear Retina display.
And from the look of things, there’s no actual Apple store in the country. Just “authorized resellers”. This makes fixing Macs considerably frustrating due to the paucity of reliable/authoritative Apple engineers.
People have been saying this year’s rains are heavier than the last. I’m tempted to attribute it to climate change, but that’ll be a pretty dubious attribution. Forcing such an inference from just two data points’ll really just be confirmation bias.
It is 10:10 PM, and I’m sipping on a mix of Top Tea and Nigerian rum.
Billie Eilish’s “My Boy” has been on repeat.
I’m pretty pissed at recent events, and I’m taking the time to think about how to appropriately navigate the situation.
I got some good news this evening. Some very exciting news from an academic institution headquartered in Italy. There are a number of considerable uncertainties ahead, but we’ll see how things go. We’ll see how things go with this very exciting news.
I’m using the WordPress mobile app thing. I just installed it. It seems alright. I’ll see what the post looks like after publishing.
It is 10:30 PM, and I’m sipping on a mix of Top Tea and Nigerian rum.
Mayowa Osibodu's Blog. 