Yes, I have 100 tabs open in my head. There is a high pitched scream in the background every few minutes. Water somewhere on the floor is about to be slipped on, again, and the lingering smell of burnt potatoes stains my thinking. The one adult I see a day shows me his phone where artificial intelligence has just made a podcast featuring two people discussing a topic on Engineering out of the words he has just written. I keep hearing that a handful of people are programming robots to do things that more than half the human race were doing. Is this the economic apocalypse we were waiting for? I have been oscillating between sharing my gallery as it’s done these days and protecting myself from existing in perceptions outside of my control, between writing and never being, never offending, just slowly evaporating as if to have never existed.

It is interesting to think that soon we shall be in our mid-thirties, 34, 35. It came to mind when endlessly reading and listening to recounts of the life and end of a young man, an emblem of wealth and prosperity whose tragic end had caused the hearts of the nation to recoil.

More lightly though, it is interesting to think that 90s babies can now say “twenty years ago” and that twenty years ago includes a time when we had already grown into normal cognitive abilities.

I was thinking about how the passage of time has allowed me to see the almost complete evolution of a certain radio presenter, who after years of blazing hot disregard for the female sex, has become an almost reasonable two-eared person whom his alter ego would completely disagree with. At the age of fifty, the father of a one year old daughter, he expressed disdain for the remarks of a man who is him, 25 years earlier. This other man, who also loves to stir the public, mainly through the lens of his marriage, his wife as a human shield, jumped onto the social circus of the day to say that women should not require help from their husbands when raising children. In a complete U-turn, the former anti-woman vigilante who once, on his radio show asked listeners that, of what use was a wife to a man when he already had a housemaid, commented on the idea as ‘wild’ and implied that this other man’s opinion was irrelevant. In hindsight, I wonder if his show may all have just been an unfiltered stream of consciousness from a mind, whose wounds, oblivious to own self, bleed onto others.

Another distinct mark of my 90s, was malaria and quinine injections. Quinine for some reason got stuck in the muscle tissue and had to be kneaded forcefully in order not to completely disfigure the patient. It was also painful as it was administered and so, apart from the mother, there were always at least two back-up nurses to grab the children who got loose and run away. While walking to the clinic, the escape plan was always water tight, but in reality you only got so far. The mosquitoes then were so deliberate that you can tell whose childhood happened in Kampala and whose did not just by their immunity from the bites of a female anopheles mosquito.

… The 1990s were also a time when nail cutters were either scarce or non-existent on the market and so nails were cut with sharp razor blades. We took the razor blades to school to sharpen pencils and one time someone went further and brought a surgical blade. Later, when we graduated to using fountain pens and mathematical sets as upper class children, we handled injections for our pots of ink, and a compass for drawing perfect circles, which if not of the Oxford brand, had a metallic tip long enough to remove a tooth.

After all these years, I still haven’t got a puff, [an Afro ponytail on top of my head] and I’m now waiting on another little person’s hair to grow. To the few dreams of my own, I have added more, the vibrant confident abundant dreams of the little ones around me.

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Some other person who, like his counterparts mentioned above, regularly misuses their social platform recently announced that he would be plucking his countrymen as grasshoppers and crushing them. Within this were tribal sentiments that are best left in primary school, evils that one dare not rush into. I see now, that we will live long enough to see that, not all grasshoppers remain so, in the eyes of their enemies, and sometimes, they trip giants and they fall.

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