In 2006, I went on a poetry tour ‘The Hammer & Tongue Four Continents Poetry Slam’ of the UK. We visited 13 cities and towns in 14 days with one night off halfway through in Glasgow. In every city we visited, I would find an internet cafe and scribble some thoughts about the day before on MySpace which, according to a blog post on Infinite Pursuit (which I started in 2005), I ‘discovered’ in 2006. I eventually had two MySpace pages (/kojobaffoe and /kojothepoet) and, while they are both still up, sadly I can’t access either and the stuff I posted doesn’t show.
The Infinite Pursuit blog was born out of my ‘ramblings’, emails I used to send out to a small group of people, from my Blackberry. Also in 2006, I started the Imperfect Poetry blog where I posted the results of my poetry scribbling, without edit, just what I wrote in the moment.
Before discovering, experimenting and exploring the digital world, I had a weekly column in my family’s Lesotho-based weekly newspaper Southern Star. The column was called From The Mind’s Eye and I basically wrote about whatever came to mind. In those days, there was no internet so I have copies of the newspapers sitting in a box in storage.
I have been scribbling my thoughts for a while. A long while. When I ended up editing magazines, it kind of made sense. I was active on social media, building profile, sharing my thoughts. I was writing articles, blog posts, etc giving my perspectives on any and everything.
Now I find myself wondering what’s it all for? This constant sharing.
I have all these spaces to share my thoughts and lack the energy or enthusiasm to do so. I’m not really active on Musk’s Twitter (although I have yet to delete my account), have accounts on Bluesky and Threads, but don’t really know what to say on there.
I have my website, Substack, and don’t feel as guilty for not maintaining consistency on them as I used to.
A friend recently asked me what I am writing, and I realised that I am not really writing anything, and that’s alright. I really don’t feel driven/compelled to write like others do. The bulk of my client work involves dealing with writing, but other people’s … commissioning and managing the admin.
A part of me feels like I should be writing … something … anything … but still can’t figure out why. In the meantime, I wrote this. I have no links to share. Been very much ‘head down’ so far this year … haven’t really been trawling the interwebs for interesting things or creating playlists or listening to podcasts. Even my reading has slowed down a bit.
Initially posted on zebraculture.substack.com