By Tony m
I have a confession to make this Saturday. The nice side profile picture you see that accompanies the byline Tony M is actually not mine.
I used to have my real eyes there, just like Miss Dee Gee above (assuming they are, since I, pardon the pun, have never laid eyes on the sister).
That picture is of an Internet feller called The Redacted Guy who, when I was off on a trip, replaced me briefly on the column. By the time I returned and got back my place, the sub-editor had lost my eyes.
So now, not only am I stuck writing blind, but I feel like an impostor, passing myself off as a smooth cheeked chap who looks like Barack — when the truth is I’m a bespectacled wild-eyed mop-head who drinks too much, likes loud rock music and disses damsels for nusu mkate (half bread).
The Redacted Guy looks like the kind of man who long gave up juvenile magazines like FHM for GQ (both supplied by PDS).
On Saturday afternoons, he won’t be getting heart attacks over soccer.
If single, he’ll be taking some cute girl out for a quality experience, say, at the Nairobi National Park.
Instead of still being enamoured by songs like Black Hole Sun with decidedly un-fun lyrics like:
In my eyes, indisposed, in disguises no one knows. Hides the face, lies the snake, and I’ll hear you scream again…, The Re-dacted man loves jazz and classical music, and thinks highly of this white noise.
Blankets & Wines concert — that’s where you’ll find him — and the last time he drank strong liquor that has a simpler name than Henessey was when he was in college, eons ago.
Goes to church
The Redacted Guy goes to church on Sundays while still keeping a sharp eye out for the good girls therein.
He listens to their dull dinner tales and does not one-up them with better anecdotes.
He is the anti-dote to the ‘useless Kenyan man’, goes to the gym and is as smooth as the silken suits he likes to wear to work.
Redacted men operate on the principle of reductionism, which means any chauvinism they have is kept to a rare minimum, and they will try and be darlings to your mum — and if that last paragraph doesn’t make sense, read it again.
Still doesn’t make sense? Sigh — at least it rhymes.
A Redacted man is one who has re-invented himself in readiness for re-launch into the market — in my friend’s case we’ll assume it is to do with women.
Wife inheritor
A redacted guy is the kind of man who is ‘best friends’ with a couple, always advising the one or the other — yet everyone knows it is impossible to be buddies with your best mate, and his woman.
It’s like being best friends with your mother-in-law, and so against the laws of nature or natural laws … almost like bestiality.
Veniality, then, is redacted man’s second nature. They are the ones who let out a man’s secrets to his woman, provide the shoulder to cry on for her, then eventually comfort her in other ways.
In the boondocks, they are the wife inheritors and pursuers of widows.
At work, for bosses, redacted men (and women) are the face of Janus. Instead of working to make their superiors shine, they wish to sabotage them so that the boss can go — and they take up his position with gusto.
It is like that Wikileaks story, that of course bears no semblance to reality, where a certain principal assistant to the president of some unnamed nation kept telling foreigners his boss was a ‘sick old man’ who ‘should not be allowed to run again’, in the hope that he, the assistant, would rise to the pinnacle of power.
However smooth a redacted man is, the raw copy is always truest.
