This post aims to express my deepest apologies to those aggrieved by my writing. I reckon this to be my first time of doing this; so it better be profuse. By that, I mean, you are permitted to imagine yourself subjecting me to despicable torture and agony as recompense for all the damage I imagine you have fought my writing from putting you through. Unfortunately however, you might have to widen your imagination a bit more and device more robust modes of torture. Reason being that, I still have an incredulously long way to go in catching up with this elite writing style that I've been mercilessly fastened to. You see, what you should actually feel for me is pity; a hotshot wannabe fraudster writing things he alone reads while groaning at how banal it is to even himself. But defiantly resist being carted away by my self-victimization. Stick to the initial plan of envisaging yourself relentlessly pummeling me viciously. I'm very sorry my dear.

My first book review

Yesterday evening, a bit fed up with the monotony of rubble I've been inured to, I decided to ingest a material I have long possessed but avoided for want of sufficient courage; a recommendable decision for every admirer of the English language. Being that, I belong to the school of thought holding the philosophy of there being more dignity in writing than there is in reading, any long read capable of confining my attention beyond an hour is worthy of ovation.
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My reading of this material was however, interrupted by short trips to my phone gallery, so I could cast glances at my woman's pictures and reassure myself she is the most beautiful piece I have laid eyes upon; although this one was a close call. Such was its elegance that for the first time in my reading life, I made markings beneath my favorite parts--indications for revisitation. I was coasting through its alluring pages--toward its back cover--before balking at a waned interest.
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"Just nine more pages!!" Inner man cheered.
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Fruitless: My attention had already been sabotaged by an erosion of indolence; drawing inspiration from the bit sized posts brimming all over Facebook and the websites I frequent.
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Nevertheless, I was going to be no pushover but would fight to the very end; if for nothing else, to brag to posterity that I consumed a 40-page essay in one sitting. Snacks, music and gymnastics were employed in my bid to accomplish the impossible. In the end, we hard-fought our way to victory!
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I'm just saying, even if your attention span did not come with more elasticity, or if your situation favours a perfectionist view to writing, get a copy of Immanuel James Ibe-Anyanwu 's "Essay on godism and moral relativism".

Redeemite:
O MY GOOD GOD'SINCE I WAS BORN,I HAVE NEVER READ A STORY LIKE THIS.. . . .I CANT BELIEVE THAT AM CRYING....OH! MAY GOD GIVE EVERYBODY D GRACE TO BEAR WATEVER SITUATION THEY AND THEIR FAMILY ARE PASSING TRU RIGHT NW,AND THE GRACE TO ENDURE TILL THE LORD WIL CUM TO ALL OUR RESCUE IN JESUS NAME AMEN.OH! WAT A STORY.ONE LOVE TO MY DEAREST AND BELOVED WIFE (TEJIRI)

Nganga
Mpompo
Mpako di ka Nebuchadnezzar

Andres Iniesta's modus operandi leaves the impression that the obstructing hip-bones in his waist have been traded for a pair of ball bearings; so as to significantly facilitate streamlined gliding across the field. The way he twirls around charging opposition with equanimity--seemingly impervious to their wiles--leaves them marooned, even robbed of the tremendous motivation that gingered them to stand in his way.
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He is an absolute joy to watch; making the impossible seem easy, with each and every one of his touch sparking that brilliance, elegance and grace commensurate for a bishop or other well mannered high ranking religious figure. Other times, he comes off as an adult meddling in the affairs of children. You should see the degree of urgency with which defenders approach him and the nonchalance he subdues them with--almost admonishing contemporaries with the ball; just like a more advanced person would. All the time, disciplined and content with sliding passes into the 18-yard box and going no further.
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If I can have such dazzling testimonies proclaimed--by my peers and admirers across even the continent--about me in any profitable endeavor, I believe I will die a satisfied man. But Alas! That satisfaction might have to be found elsewhere, God forbid.

Young Husband energetically steps out of his car and marches towards his apartment, swinging the car keys around his index finger playfully. Using the keys to unlock the door of his house, he gleefully enters, expecting to be received his beloved wife. Instead, he sees an old love interest sitting in his living room, smiling with his wife. The circumstances surrounding his eventual break up with said love interest causes him to freeze at sighting her and is rooted at the door just thinking at what havoc she might have wreaked in his absence already. His wife smiles at him reassuringly and asks him to,
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“Bolt the door as security is of paramount importance.”
He knows better than feel comfortable when his wife begins to sound all formal and poetic and in endorsement, his beat rate gains pace. He hesitantly inches toward the dining table where they are both seated, before being prevented by the fear that has overcome him. Wife is unusually well dressed and adorned in a manner suggesting an occasion in the offing. He asks her if
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“...there is any gun pointed at his head...?”
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Which causes her to chuckle as she walks over, dragging him by his long arms into one of the empty seats gathered around the table. She abruptly excuses herself over sensing her food burning, leaving Husband and his old lover to their devices.
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As she departs, Husband is unable to bring himself to lay eyes upon a woman he once could not take his eyes off. She asks him a few rhetorics concerning his demeanour and he mutters monosyllabic responses praying fervently for Wife’s return. Wife returns eventually, insisting he narrates before them both, what indeed transpired between himself and the strange lady. Husband crouches in deep sobriety, bowing as though he was before a guillotine, awaiting decapitation. His wife comfortingly rubs his right arm softly, urging him to,
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“Go on; the stage is all yours.”
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That is when he squirms in his seat in an awkward way that cause his wife to worry and ask him if everything is alright. He nods and stands to his feet, then launches into an incoherent philosophical ramble about the whole encounter with the woman. Indeed he had narrated in the past, bits of his experience with this woman to his wife—never mind their indistinctness to the current version.
When the lecture is over, he keeps silent and his wife asks him if he is through and he bucks at her disbelief; walks over to the fridge without uttering a word and pours himself some wine. After that is gulped, he pours some more in the glass and calmly walks over to his wife, all the time, meticulously restraining his eyes from straying to where the other lady is seated. He tells her he has been thinking a bit and wondering the worst implications her disbelief could entail.

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“Don’t even think divorcing me is the worst thing you could do as punishment.”

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As he stretches his left arm into the table to pick his car keys, he straddles on his left leg and swivels his waist, heavily swiping the back of his right palm across the room and toward the lady’s face; sending her to the floor in its wake. His wife’s face remains expressionless. She does not even as much as flinch. Husband tilts his head left and stares blankly at the fallen woman.

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“Look at you.” He says. “...lying on the floor on all fours like a hog.”

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He then turns to his wife and asks her to have a great night.

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The next morning, a haggard Husband fumbles onto his porch but cannot get into his apartment since the door is locked from inside. He calls and texts his wife repeatedly begging to be let in.

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“Why don’t you go take your bath wherever it is you went to pass the night?” She finally texts back.

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“Bars do not have baths & I cannot fit in the wash-hand basin. Now please let me in cuz im runnin l8.”

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She did come let him in and like the previous night, she was unusually elegantly dressed—for 9am at least; She should still be yawning in her nighties were it a regular day; but this morning she even had stilettos on.

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“Look what you did to yourself Ralph! My goodness!” She exclaimed as he walked in.

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“You’re all fixed up like a soured tomato. Go stay in the living room while I prepare your bathing water.”

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He obeys and heads for a random upholstery, only to behold a sight intensely disgusting: a tied condom filled to its brim with viscous semen. He retches amidst his wife’s soft advocacies:

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She says the he whose semen is entrapped in that sac will be back once Husband leaves for work and that that is not even the worst she would do. Incensed, he attacks her, buckling both her skinny arms together and clipping her legs with his feet while she grunts, squeals and wriggles—twitching her knees convulsively and threatening to scream. He then uses his free hand to pluck a nearby curtain rod, fidgeting to forcefully impale her behind with it despite her struggles—announcing that she better

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“get ready”, because she is “going to be doing a lot of ‘worsts’” and “should ditch kinky sized condoms for a mall-size plastic bag which would contain all the resultant semen the ‘worsts’ would leave behind” before letting her go. She becomes truly silent and is alarmed at the manhandling she has just received from a least expected proponent.
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Husband goes to take his bath. Remorseful Wife follows him into the room, making supplications and telling him she is,
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“sorry about everything and does not want to fight.”
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And when he does not respond, she opens the bathroom door and offers to
“share the warmth of the hot water with you.”

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Husband, still enraged, proceeds to yell

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“How many times do you want to bath in one morning?!”

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And as he hurriedly dashes to close the door, he glides on the lathery floor and takes a bad fall, wrenching an arm. He wails loudly so Wife rushes in, sympathetically shushing. She tries to pacify him by massaging the arm but he shrugs her hand off and groans some more.

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A few hours later, Husband—accompanied by his wife, swaddled in a rumpled 'assoke'—could be seen at the hospital; his arm suspended in a cast and it was obvious he would take the day off but they first had to report his condition at the office.

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“No o! I can’t follow you to the office nah! Ah ah! Why will my colleagues see me inside bandage? Please drop me off at home and just take the medical report to them. Abi you want me to submit it myself like my final year project?”

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“You ma, relax now.” Said his wife.

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“Iz no big deal. OK, why don’t you stay in the booth so nobody sees you? Once we leave the premises, you can re-emerge.”

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A diffident husband pretends to contemplate but is too dishevelled to resist or disapprove.

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“OK. OK. Lez just start going so I can go home and rest.”

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On arrival at the yellow four storey Bolvin building, Wife briskly runs into the reception and ties her scarf around her waist, pleading for urgent help and assistance from the Managing Director.

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“Madam calm down...what is the matter?”
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She is soon surrounded by a group of concerned staff who listen to her narrate how her husband has lost his mind the previous night, destroying appliances in the house and running into his car trunk because he is afraid the cops will come to arrest him. She claims Husband is still scared stiff in the car trunk and keeps screaming
“I am not crazy!!!”

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A call is made and before long, a small white and orange van carrying a team of psychiatrists can be seen cautiously cruising into the firm’s premises.

What love is

When you find that one person in the world that understands you the most, you don't love them--no. We weren't wired that way. The way it works, when you're not talking with them, there's a burning desire to leave everything else and go pick up from where you both left off the last time; because they've become the focal point of your joy, blissfully radiating it to the dark corners of your life--corners you didn't even know were dark till this person strutted along and became your saving grace. At that point, your biggest fear is the knowledge that this mortal body will someday, prevent you from continuously sharing your life with this person and admiring the creases that gather by their eyes as they laugh at how funny your experiences are. Maybe that is what love is--that voice weakened by your joke-induced laughter, calling you names and telling you how crazy you are.

My older siblings were all raised in one of the lowliest slums of Enugu and I was no exception. By "slum", I'm referring to a part of the town where getting water for domestic usage involved girding the loins with related paraphernalia which would often include numerous Jerry cans and embarking on elaborate trips by an untarred road to the underworld—quite literally, for the destination of every water-seeker was as far as it was deep; below sea level. The pursuit of water was merely a constituent in the myriad of disasters in a place where access to every conceivable amenity is constant proof to nature of resilience, strength and adaptability to life and I hear it remains that way because the government extols the deity that is Impoverishment and dares not interrupt his sovereignty with development lest the Government itself be accused of attempted coup d’état. This place is responsible for my heightened conversance with the "street" and a few other acquisitions shared between myself and my siblings but while they seem to be moulting most of these acquisitions, I admit to have been ingrained the most with this uncultured existence.
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I don’t remember at what point exactly I first listened to Pammy Udu Bunch music but it must have been one of those evenings with me hopped on the window and watching the slum herd back and forth. The sound ignited my fascination into this mirage I’m currently dwelling in—one where I am inclined to believe that everything dissipates the instant I play their music; lesser pleasure and sorrow alike. Such was the faith I had in them back in the day that, as an extremely shy youngster, I had to extensively listen to them before I could approach the very first damsel I scored. We still keep in touch to this day even though she does not know the elements that spurred me onto the mighty victories won against the contemporaries contending for her.
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Many years down the line, having long absconded that slum, my obsession with them has refused to desert me. I practically dance to their music at a volume that would convince an onlooker I am set on paralyzing my eardrums. Regardless of what chart topping single I am momentarily hooked on, or what classic 80’s hit I softly nod to, I always retrace my steps back into the loving arms of their tunes. Even though it does not exactly sound loving—the lyrics—people often wonder how a seemingly polished young man frequently draped in fancy suits and speaking in unfamiliar accents manages to endure such “noise”. I myself have forsaken such perplexities and instead, concentrated on the unabridged satiation often ushered into my ears. Yes, unabridged. As a saner person supposedly in an enlightened position, ideally, I should filter off their bad grammar, incoherent ramblings, unnecessary repetitions, violent lyrics and similar elements that are too raw for civilized individuals. However I have since come to learn that their music is best absorbed whole; seed, stem and root fused together. It courses through the body and touches specific nerves too remote for aphrodisiacs or any medicine for that matter.
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This particular post was inspired by an evening of awe at my latest procurement—just when I thought I could brag about listening to all the materials in their catalog—entitled “Enugu kwewe lu m iyoo”, the literal meaning is an immediate deterrent to anyone that understands the Igbo language; but I can assure you of the uncountable bounties rewarded to Olympians brave enough to spare a minute or two. Unfortunately, it cannot be found online; because these paragons of entertainment, entrenched in all that grit, barely know the usefulness of immortalization and the proliferation such a medium could offer. It is one thing that pains me greatly that I cannot put them out there singlehandedly.