Nuts & Screws: with Charly Boy
E-mail: yarnwithcharlyboy@yahoo.com 07026028479
Recently, my story hit the internet over some naughty 15 years old pictures. Many people had thought I sent those pictures out as publicity stunt; that is where they got it wrong. The perception is because they have refused to see beyond where they stand. They can only go with the crowd. Yes, it’s typical of we Nigerians. We like to talk when others talk, but most times, we don’t know why we talk.
Someone makes a comment on twitter or on facebook and majority of us take on him because we lack the depth to understand where he is coming from; we only read in the surface, and we tend to easily believe those who create some more positive attitude on a face value- too good, yet very bad for us. At a point when my picture, which many have termed my ‘nudity’, was copied from my displayed picture by my trusted friends who are on my private Blackberry contact, I had asked to know what they wanted to use the picture for if they had no particular interest in the picture.
They copied the picture to syndicate even when they never liked it. Some even had to place those pictures on their profile and I kept wondering why they had to do that. How can you patronize what you don’t like? Very funny…the human mind is obviously dirty. I put the picture up because I wanted to look at myself again. I wanted to appreciate some natural artwork by God and to know why God has decided to bless me and endowed me with such body. Wow! At that age, I still looked like that? God has been so artistic. He created me well. Even as I continue to give credit to God for my life, I can’t stop thanking discipline; yes, discipline from drugs, smoking, drinking, and womanizing. I thank discipline for keeping me on the road every morning like a mad man; I thank him for all the meditations towards healthy living.
I had thought that those friends of mine on my contact will read in-between the lines to understand where I was coming from, but they failed, and got carried away by the façade. Since then, when people complain about my supposed nudity, I laugh; I laugh because I have realized that our people can only see the front, they hardly see what’s behind. They do not appreciate and evaluate what some of the things they see represent. They are quick at drawing conclusions; however, nobody has asked me why such picture was taken in the first place. It is true that I put the picture up in order to appreciate how I looked then, and how I look today, as I could not notice any obvious difference, however, there was a reason for having taken that picture 15 years ago.
I posed that way to freely express my freedom in a country that can equally inhibit one’s creative mind. But it all depends on where one stands. If you have a fetish mind, the mind of a native doctor, or diabolical, what you will see is totally different. Your conclusion will be “this man is simply one of us- evil”. If your libido is very high, what comes to your mind is either Charlyboy is gay, or being seductive.
If you are the “churchy-churchy” type, you will not waste time to conclude that I have acted so immoral and should be banned from this dungeon- Nigeria. Who told you that I will regret leaving the shore of this country if I’m band for freely expressing myself? However, what you see depends on where you stand. No creative artiste will think the way many Nigerians think. An artiste will see the picture as an expression of arts. He will have a perfect interpretation to the different parts of my body. What if the picture was not in a photo form? What if it was a sketch? Would you have grumbled? It takes courage to get myself to the studio, and to pose nude. It takes the heart of lion to be able to let people talk about your body in that manner, but the message is all about being yourself and being dogged and courageous to do what you like to do, to being able to communicate your message to the world in the most amazing and significant way. We like to pretend, and by so doing abandon the real thing for the fake stuffs. We like to tell ourselves those fake things, those lies and we don’t check the truth.
Yes, we want Change; we need change and we expect to reap the blessings of change but we are afraid to express how we feel, we are even ashamed of telling our leaders how retched we are as citizens We all know the solution to our problems as a nation; turn on your television, all you hear is “I think Nigeria is at a crossroad, I think Nigeria is bleeding, I think Nigeria is dying” hey! If you do not get off that road to express your freedom, then you’ll get hit by a truck, and you bleed, and then die. Yesterday is history; tomorrow is spotless and a mystery. Today is a gift; that is why it is called the present; so that we become the gift of the tomorrow we need. The success or failure of our country is in our hands. If we don’t freely express how we feel today, we will all die struggling to be free.
We write the stories we want to read; we sing the song we want to hear, and act the scenes we hope to see. Let’s, therefore, begin here and now to rewrite the story book of Nigeria by holding on to the freedom we search. Because this country is our own, we must always fight to redeem it. We need freedom, and we hope Jonathan will give us the freedom we have been searching for IN NO DISTANT TIME. I guess you will now know those gimmicks you didn’t know
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