There’s this musician I’ve been listening to recently. A rapper.
His name is Tumi. I think his music is cool.
He’s from South Africa.
I’ve had his “I’m killing” song on replay for a while now. The song has some seriously dope vibes.
The whole Spotify thing is still somewhat surreal to me. Streaming songs on repeat.
That is something I probably would’ve never done about a year ago.
In Nigeria I always had to conserve my internet subscription. Internet subscriptions cost money, and so if I planned to listen to a song more than once, it made more sense to just download it.
But that’s not the case here in San Francisco.
There’s wifi everywhere. Our college dorms have super fast wifi and that’s just wonderful, but even out in the city free wifi is not hard to find.
That sort of access to the internet makes you see things differently.
Now if feels like my computer is really just a screen, a keyboard, and maybe some RAM.
And the entire internet is my hard drive.
Because you can access files on the internet so quickly- it’s almost like they were already on your computer.
I find all that really interesting to think about.
My roommate isn’t around. I’ve got the room to myself this evening.
I think I have some weed in one of my drawers.
A while back this Israeli guy was hanging out at the dorms. I think he was couchsurfing with an Israeli classmate or something.
I went to the patio downstairs to do something, and we crossed paths there. We got talking.
His first name was Roy.
His last name was literally something from the Bible. Like, the name of some fire-bending prophet or something.
People in Nigeria are generally very religious and so names from the Christian bible are very common. But physically meeting an Israeli guy with a Bible name made me see Bible characters as being much less otherworldly.
Like, these people in the bible were human beings. That clairvoyant prophet I’ve been hearing about in church since I was a baby, was just like this guy that’s smoking weed across the table from me.
They were all human beings, not surreal mystical characters existing on some esoteric metaphysical plane.
It felt like a very profound realisation and awareness.
Roy said he spent like the past few months working at a weed farm.
Sorry, a what?
A weed what?
I thought that was super interesting. I had never heard anything like that before.
He offered me some weed.
I took some time to weigh the situation.
I had class the next morning, and I didn’t want to be disoriented from the weed or anything.
I probably thought: I don’t know, I’m probably enough of an unserious student already. I don’t think I should aggravate my situation even more with some impromptu weed.
But he seemed like a really cool guy, and I felt like I would enjoy spending time with him.
I obliged.
We spent the next few hours smoking different strains of weed and talking about a bunch of different random stuff.
We talked about surfing, and about his time in the Israeli army.
He said the stress levels in the Israeli army could get very high. And that people relieved the stress in primarily two ways. Jerking off and fucking.
We talked about Fela Kuti.
Everybody knows Fela Kuti.
With a lot of people I meet randomly, whenever they hear I’m from Nigeria, usually Fela Kuti comes up in the conversation somehow.
Like, everybody knows this Fela Kuti guy.
At some point Roy would open up another small weed container and be like “This one. This one makes you laugh a lot. This one makes you laugh for no reason at all”, and he’d proceed to roll it into a joint.
It was a super interesting evening.
Surprisingly I did pretty well in class the next morning. It was a Formal Analysis class, and during my pre-class preparation I sort of independently came upon the concept known as “regression to the mean”.
I think it was “regression to the mean”. Some concept in Statistics.
I mentioned it in the course of the class, and was surprised to learn that it was an actual thing. Like, an actual statistical phenomenon.
That was really interesting.
Hm. Maybe I should smoke more weed.
Hm. Or maybe not.
Hm.
Tumi’s “I’m Killing” is still playing on Spotify.
Earlier in the day, I was playing the song on loudspeaker while I walked to the bathroom for a shower.
A classmate was walking by and she started nodding to the music and smiling at me.
I felt very good about that. Very very good.
I’ve had a crush on her for a while. But she doesn’t pay much attention to me. Or at least I don’t think she does.
She has a boyfriend. Some guy like that. Also a classmate. I’ve got mixed feelings about him, but generally I think he’s cool.
He can be kind of an asshole though. Everyone in the class generally agrees on that. He just has this persistent tendency to disturb and rile people up.
Hm, maybe I myself should begin to disturb everyone a lot more.
Maybe I should begin to play my music on loudspeaker, and make sure to bother everyone with it.
Maybe then my crush’ll begin to pay me more attention.
Hm, maybe that’s what makes her like that guy in the first place.
Hm.
Roy- the cool Israeli guy, he left me with some weed.
By “some weed”, I mean like three different strains. Or four even.
I’ve had them in one of my drawers for a while. I haven’t touched any of it since he gave me. That was like over a month ago. I’m not really a weed guy- I just don’t really have the space for it in my life.
But this evening I’m especially free. And I’m kind of in the mood.
I go get some.
I think smoking in the dorms could set off the fire alarm.
I heard something people do, is to head out onto the fire escape to smoke.
I’ve always thought that was kind of exciting, but I’ve never really given it too much thought.
But this evening I seem to have a lot of free time, so I find myself actively contemplating it.
I’m on the fire escape.
The night is dark, and California street is glittering with electric lights.
The air is chilly.
Tumi’s “I’m killing” is still playing in the room.
I light up a joint.
At some point I hear giggles.
I turn my head to the right, to understand what is going on.
There are two smiling faces in the window.
It’s Jakob and Fiona. They’re on the bed in the next room. They both look very excited.
Fiona opens the window and calls out my name. We all spend some time exchanging thrilled pleasantries- They from the warmth of the room next door, and me from my chilly spot on the fire escape.
We laugh and talk for a while. We’re all very excited to interact in this exhilarating situation.
At some point they close the window and return to indulging in their enviable romance.
I proceed to take a few more puffs at my joint, feeling accomplished to have scored some “cool guy” points in the books of two people I admire.
Image: View down California street on a random night.
Mayowa Osibodu's Blog. 