Jan’s Musings: Dear man with a big mouth

My friend’s mouth is louder than his brain. He says everything he thinks. He has absolutely no filter. He speaks, then thinks. He has what you would call a big mouth and boy has it cost him.
He will say how women are careless and poor drivers and that they should only drive in villages where the car population is almost non-existent and the only other road users are cows and smelly he-goats but not in the city centre where it takes lots of skill and brain to drive.


Only after making this little nasty speech about the incompetence of female drivers will he realise that all three fellow passengers and driver in the Rav 4 he so passionately asked to be given a lift in are actually women. Then he will start to fumble and smile like a crocodile who just realised that he has teeth not white piles of ivory in his mouth.
My mouthed friend is always quick to point out to people how their clothes are ugly, how they don’t smell good, how they have lousy accents, how they walk like they have webbed feet, how there is way too much space between their teeth or that they chew like goats, etc. Sometimes, in fact most times, he is right but does he have to say it out loud?
What man in their right mind would tell his woman that she should dress more like the amazing Napio who he works with at the office or that the man who makes rolex is a better cook than she is after she has laboured in the kitchen for hours or when she makes an ignorant comment about say for instance Zika virus or some God forsaken sports event or world politics, he shuts her up just because she might not be as informed about these things as he and his friends are?


I will tell you what kind of man, the one with an under grown orange sweet potato where there should be a brain.
Words, they make and break, so be gentle. If you don’t like my dress, find a good way of relaying that rather delicate message instead of saying I look like your auntie or a school matron when I wear it, if I make a blonde comment about Uganda’s unpalatable political journey, don’t ask me if I went to school or tell me I don’t know what I am talking about and should therefore shut up or continue to talk over my head as if I suddenly turned into an invisible pillar of salt.
Rather, educate me, not patronisingly but maturely and lovingly after all, you are not the custodian of knowledge. Even you just learnt the things you so brazenly go about preaching like you invented.


My friend has broken up with more women than I can count on all my 21 crooked fingers and toes because his mouth just won’t shut up.


Sometimes he buys his way back with verbal apologies, sometimes with gifts all of which are way too expensive compared to thinking before he speaks and choosing his words wisely.
If we were to all say out loud, the things that are in our minds, exactly the way we think them, this world would go up in flames and nothing, not even recruiting more crime preventers would help the situation. Plus, the world can only have one Donald Trump at a time. The mind is a private place, you don’t have to share everything that lies therein. So, use your brain and heart more than you do your mouth. That too is a form of love, methinks.

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