I just stole back my gas cylinder from Yengis’s apartment.
Well it’s my gas cylinder to begin with. It’s not really stealing if it’s yours right?
No. No I don’t think so.
I don’t think so.
Well I was hungry. And Yengis was asleep. So I had to silently creep in through the window. I tiptoed across his studio apartment- across the strange smelling Senegalese rugs and grotesque traditional masks and a sound asleep Yengis, and and re-obtained my gas cylinder.
I needed to cook some food.
I saw Izmir Bamba wearing my boxers yesterday afternoon. One pair of the three dark-grey Old Navy boxers I bought in San Francisco.
Dude didn’t even have a care in the world, strutting across the verandah of my living space wearing my underwear- my fucking underwear.
Like what the fuck dude. At least try to be a bit discreet with it, don’t flaunt my own boxers in my face guy.
I honestly do not know how he got a hold of it. I’ll seriously need to count my underwear to know how many I have left. Everything has been disappearing recently.
I think first it was my binoculars.
No no, first it was the ten escudo note that was on the stool by the wall when the police arrested me at the beach.
Neighbours didn’t even care that I was languishing in the cell at the police station the night before. Without having committed any actual crime.
Day broke, and then they also broke into my apartment to see what they could salvage.
And then there was my binoculars. Initially they used to borrow it. Especially that Lucio Cape Verdean guy. He is an annoying guy, I don’t really like him.
There was this day he was telling me I needed to learn to speak better Creole. With a very heavy air of condescension.
I was so annoyed. I felt like letting him know my thoughts on minority languages and their current state in the world regarding their relative incapacity to provide speakers with generally desired social mobility and the worldwide language shifts that occur as a consequence of that, but I decided to just let it slide. I was transporting a substantially voluminous container of water from the well behind the hotel back into my living space- I wasn’t really in the mood to engage in an argument.
And then like every two hours some random guy usually walks by my living space screaming “O LUCIO!!!! O LUCIO!!!!” At the very top of his voice.
It’s very very easy to dislike someone whose name is a recurrent source of disturbance to your life.
So yeah initially they used to borrow the binoculars. And then each time it got more and more difficult to retrieve it.
The first time they returned it after like a few hours, marvelling at the thing and wondering what end they were to look through.
The next time it took a bit longer.
The time after that I had to go upstairs to extricate my binoculars from the evasive hands of the pesky Cape Verdeans that lived there. It was broken. I was annoyed. I had to fix it with some glue. There was a part of the binoculars that the glue could not quite take care of- I left the entire thing to hang on the wall by the cord while I figured out how to fix the issue.
And then they stole the entire thing.
Motherfuckers.
I played some soccer today. With the Cape Verdean guys.
I haven’t played soccer in years.
I was surprised at my performance. For some reason I seem to be much better at soccer than I remember. I scored like three goals. And I was generally a considerably contributive member of the team. I wasn’t expecting that. I wasn’t expecting that at all.
I’m thinking maybe it has something to do with mind-body co-ordination. I haven’t experienced much physical growth in the past few years, given the end of adolescence- and so maybe that has given whatever part of my head is responsible for physical co-ordination, time to become accustomed with the way my body has turned out to be post- puberty growth-spurts and all. Mind-body co-ordination is possibly not as good when your body is changing so quickly. I don’t know. That’s just what I think though.
There are teenagers who are extremely prodigious at football. And their bodies are changing very quickly. I don’t know. I don’t know. The co-ordination thing is probably just one way of looking at it.
Today has had its ups and downs. I was expecting some funds from the NGO in Nigeria that I have some sort of an AI research associate arrangement with. This afternoon’s walk to the bank turned out to be purely recreational, with absolutely no funds reception at the end of it.
I do not even have much time to dwell in this disappointment. Nino told me the Cape Verdeans are making some cachupa this afternoon. Cachupa is this interesting traditional Cape Verdean meal fundamentally based on boiled corn. Nino said the food would be ready in about an hour. That was like forty-five minutes ago. I need to get back to the hotel. Like now. Like right now.
The funds coming from Nigeria can keep doing whatever it is they are doing in international airspace, en route this island.
I need to get back.
I have to get some of that Cachupa.
Image:
Some dope ass Senegalese food. I had no idea people boiled carrots in stew before this.
Mayowa Osibodu's Blog. 