Truly, the screen seems almost alive. It carries a commanding presence, yet radiates a sense of disorder—a complete atmosphere in itself. You sit before it, still waiting, always waiting. But that vespertine screen, that great, hulking creature of the gloaming—it betrays its own nature, dragged from rest at dawn for a televised breakfast. A trivial offense, yet a major lapse of circadian proportions. Where once there was a single, steady, autochthonous channel, the content has become a wholly allochthonous assemblage—a headlong rush of fiber optics rather than airwaves. It is a complete shift, a Pirandellian fever dream in which the play knows it is being streamed.
The common ruck, bless their hearts, ain’t watching; they’re curating, tapping with celerity for a gaggle of nugacious trash or some utter galimatias documentary. The future? It’s a blur. It’ll be AI, a Cerberus of algorithms guarding your de gustibus, so you never suffer the anomia of not knowing what to watch. But old Bill Shakes? He knew the deal: “One touch of nature makes the whole world kin, That all with one consent praise new-born gauds.” That high-res flat-panel gimcrack, the interactive storytelling, the relatable stuff? That’s the slay. We genuflect before the novelty, the thing in motion. The old studio head’s turgid pronouncements? Footling dross. It’s giving Laodiceanism—a deep, spiritual lassitude about what’s good versus what’s available. And yet, we sit. Waiting for the Wi-Fi to buffer. The mot juste for this existence remains unsaid. But the screen? It’s already on to the next thing.
That Wednesday walk, though? Big mood. The sun was clocking out. My left leg, a true rebel, went full autopilot, ghosting the usual route. Not my jam, but whatever. Small-stride oldies walk, a mental loop of: Don’t engage. Seriously, just don’t. No spontaneous chit-chat with randos, only civic duty level threats—untied lace, unlit headlights. The list was already giving a headache. Why spiral into this social safety net cobweb when all I wanted was a cool vespertine stroll? Then, boom. A bulging stone, a literal trip, right in the cobblestone alleyway. A blessing in disguise—the sharp pain a hard-stop on the overwhelming task of writing my life story. But that millisecond of being humbled by geology? It zipped my mind back to Kes Timhirt Bet.
The squad was Dereje, the OG, very mature for his age. Kinfe, a walking emoji of continuous smiling. Awoke, born the day I was, whose oddly unchildish demeanor reinforced my mother’s tea about my “terrible essence.” Awoke’s older brother, Fasil, whose face screamed trickery—chef of all drama. Can’t even remember Awoke’s voice; he was not a speaking type. And Nebiyou, immediate cue: wrestling. Back then, a TV was an alien concept, dead serious. Had to trek to Dereje’s house just to view the “magic box” from a safe distance. Every morning, the whole crew (plus Shimeles, the regular plus-one) would gather, giving our hot takes on what went down on the tube. Consensus was zero. The debates led to fights, and if a visual aid was needed, it was full-on physical demonstration. The culture core: “Mainex” (probably Mannix), Lassie (furry superhero), and Zorro (masked dude). Dereje? Respected. Always neat. Khakis, tilting from grey to almost white, so pressed it raised the serious question of did they even need to be washed? But the action movie demonstrations? Dereje and Kinfe? Never involved. The spark for the whole mess, the required visual aid that guaranteed a fight? Me, most certainly. Morning exercise, basically. All that cinematic masterpiece because of one rogue rock. Wild ride.
I owe Dereje, seriously. Indebted. First days at Kes Timhirt Bet, I was wrapped on my mother’s back, delivered screaming, left there wailing, lamenting—a whole mood. Then, a boy from my back bencher pack came right up, totally unbothered by my epic meltdown, dropping the weekend’s tea: “It was my big sister’s wedding day.” But only one thing mattered, the detail that performed emergency surgery on my heart: “The Imperial Guard Orchestra was also here!” What?! Astounding. Felt fake, like, cap. He kept going, but I was stuck on the Orchestra. My audio experience from the radio was buzzing, struggling to process his video experience. Dereje had a slow walk vibe, unusually courteous and patient, mirroring his father, Basha, the army Sergeant Major and Iddir chief. That orchestra moment was the good-humored backstopping I needed; the crying days started to die away.
Upon making a left turn onto the asphalt, my serene disposition was immediately disrupted. Attention completely swallowed by a naked bust, a dummy girl, aggressively flaunting its exaggerated breasts. No way, I thought, and told the couturier to fix it. He did. A win is a win. Then, the confusion. It completely trashed the story build-up. A cousin, knowing my hip hop obsession, sent some NY Yankees gear. That cap, colors, and style coincidentally worn by our federal police, no joke, saved my butt one day in Arada, just months before Hausmanization hit it. Back then, I was unusually dressed to look distinguished as I frequented the British Council, one of the few places to get intellectual depth, as we used to say, trying to match Farid Zekaria’s knowledge, taking distant looks at the common sight of HIV scourge Iddir tents amidst the urine-scorched asphalt alleyways of 80s Addis. My raison d’être—the pursuit of knowledge—led me to write for the Ethiopian Reporter, a goal that changed course, yet I’m still waiting to tell some of the “just so” stories. That specific morning, though, I was wearing a snow-white T-shirt and tracksuit pants. Looked like a full-on Diaspora. Long story short: Heading down Jon Melly street, close to 11 AM, a boy rushed up, intent on snatching my sunglasses. It did not happen. The police connection was clocked. Threat canceled. The Yankees saved the day. Dereje’s casual wedding recap conquering childhood despair, a Bronx baseball cap stopping a robbery attempt—life is just built different.
Unusually, I decided to chase some coffee. Dipped into a confectionery, all sugary chaos, and ordered my usual: sugarless coffee. Bitter brew amidst the maximalist sweets. I took a table one space away. A young, motherly figure was there, sorting a to-go pack, indulging in a slice of yummy cake and a macchiato while she waited. She was straight-up struggling. The sweetness of her drink was having a clash of titans with the cake—a no-win situation. I commented on how rich these cakes are, you could finish them in a “single swallow.” Broke the ice. We talked, and in the flow, she almost left her macchiato—the whole sugary disaster—sitting there when she gathered her pack. Quick, unexpected connection over a shared struggle with aggressively sweet dessert. Whole vibe.
Her struggle with sugar reminded me of the journey to the television, that black glass altar. They said it started the year I was born. Artists had to trudge to the studio to make it live—truly aboriginal broadcasting. My first proper look, after repeated, almost pathological analyses of the thing when it was off, was spying near a bar, drawn by the red light of the coffee machine—an incidental beacon. After the Revolution, new television sets were deployed like political monuments in the main squares. I went with the neighborhood ruck; the viewing was unforgettable, giving major public viewing energy. Years later, I’d have lunch with ETV’s Tadele Melese, who found my BBC Radio obsession quite the gaud. Then the news: BBC TV would partner with ETV. Negotiations were in the air. I was so intoxicated—not by drink, but by sheer anticipation—that I struggled with an overwhelming lassitude, unable to leave my chair. This was no adiaphoron; this was serious. My patience, enjoying color TV of my own—a 14-inch Philips bought on credit, simp for resolution—was tested. Then, an unannounced Champions League game, an allochthonous marvel (Van Gaal’s Ajax vs. PSG), arrived. Then the bad news from Tadele: Ethiopia was asked to cover satellite broadcast expenses because its signal covered its neighbors. Speechless and breathless, an Hotspur deflated. The sheer ampollosity of the request, the orotund pronouncements of international broadcasting—too much.
My quest for sense led me to chase Time and Newsweek around the National Theatre, supplemented by an old flight-attendant friend from EAL. The Monitor Addis—this underground samizdat digest treats international news like a wall of receipts—numbers over headlines, no cap. It stitches a global ledger of signals, my only balm against the era’s pedagogy from a government institution that championed illiteracy. Facts over fluff, trendlines over talking points, dashboards over soundbites—the data do the talking while the noise stays on mute, trapped in a cycle of “we have been like this and we will continue like this moron-ness,” where drinks constituted PPE to enjoy the fact that nothing meaningful was coming. This urge to flee, this avoidance of the nugatory fuss of bureaucratic folly, first led to a job opportunity, leveraging my Italophone skills. Failed—jiggery-pokery, frankly.
Next was Bookworld. Requirement: a love for books. Interview by the guy from Britain went almost well. My favorite authors? Dostoevsky. Concern about my “tender age” clinging to his work was palpable. Took every sesquipedalian word I knew to explain Raskolnikov’s exquisite torture in Crime and Punishment. Cervantes and Don Quixote were my constant companions, the only antidote to the soul’s exhaustion. I did well, and the dream of matching Farid Zekaria felt within reach. The parent company dealt with cable television, massive satellite dishes, bringing in the latest magazines. Nearly the mot juste for a career. Crushed. Top management cited my age. Wept all night. Childish display, but the loss of that ideal gemeinschaft hurt. My subsequent career move, however, landed me at a multi-cultural company that, among other things, installed DSTV in my house. The irony is the tastelessness of it all; the very thing I sought, television, now resides right here, a source of distraction that will likely damage my reading. The experience helped me work with some of the weirdest folk, committed to destroying anything straight orchestrated by the man at the helm, a paradigm shift guru who contraband out company management while preaching its unnecessity, leaving the workforce directionless, deeming nothing other than checkers of check boxes, prohibiting every written communication, as standardized concoctions by highly qualified illiterates from the vulgaire self-proclaimed human fabricating altar that more looked a show of daytime strippers, ecdysiast; stripteaser.
The screen keeps evolving, thinner, brighter, turning everything into an allochthonous pixel feed. It’s a vertiginous spiral of content, a permanently Pirandellian state. The future? Faster. We’ll be watching ourselves watch, trapped in a loop of personalized galimatias delivered with digital celerity. And yet, we sit. Waiting for the next hippopotomonstrosesquipedalian word to capture the absurdity.
“Is it not a shame?” I asked.
She hit me with the question, that young, motherly figure, a total vibe-check: “Had I written about any of it? Addressed the issues?” The surprise on her face was baffling, a pure malapropism of emotion. Before she left, I started to natter—a sudden, vertiginous spiral of self-doubt. My career’s swerve away from writing, from being shoulder to shoulder with Farid Zekaria, now on my laptop screen—what a service lost to the so-called writing business! A kind of Tarike Bachiru in absentia. I was in my feelings, hard. If it indeed deserves the waiting. I brought up the old AAU Cultural Center invites, the vespertine whispers of public figures I eagerly awaited reading in the daily Addis Zemen. An evening with Bealu Girma was electrifying, the town gripped by the congeries of his characters. As Bealu used to mutter, he was waiting for his writing to express his trueself, the search or waiting for the matches all of a sudden ran out of its patience and cost him his life. Another night, a famous Masinko player (his name, an anomia I suffer even now) reminisced about an encounter with the young, uncharismatic clerk-turned-feared Minister, Mekonen Habtewold, associated with Hager Fikir. His grim answer about his academic standing—that he’d be Ministerial-rank, right alongside his peers, if education hadn’t impeded him—was pure slay.
Uncalled for, Il Canzoniere popped in. I lamented the contributions I could have offered, a series of nugatory sonnets to a Laura I never quite met. The whole adiaphoron of Petrarch’s love, the hippopotomonstrosesquipedalian devotion, now only a retronym for something entirely different. The connection? The unwritten summa of my life, the loss of the “writing business,” is as much an ethereal, unfulfilled devotion as Petrarch’s to his unattainable Laura. Byron clocked the vibe: “Think you, if Laura has been Petrarch’s wife, / He would have written sonnets all his life?”
Then came the BBC, the core of my existence. It was one of the best things ever, second only to the first dial-up internet connection in my office three decades ago. The uninterrupted supply of Time and Newsweek—a samizdat thanks to a dear friend—was my lifeline in late 1980s Addis Ababa. The celerity with which I’d rush home for “Jazz for the Asking” or “Jazz Now and Then” (the anomia returns) and Alistair Cook’s distilled wisdom in “Letter from America”—the magic of the double bass a quiet, almost hapax legomenon moment of gloaming joy. My only window to the other world, my exclusive source of jazz. “People and Politics”—a daily rush for Focus on Africa, Robin White, the editor, who later regretted picking up Charles Taylor’s sat phone, though the very first sat phone call came from what was North Ethiopia then, with his regrets about the turbulent times in Africa. BBC taught us English, with the shock of a strongly African accented English, from Africans, that was not what people were used to. It was staying breathless for News Hour with a headphone in the office, and Sunday and “Play of the Week,” my weekly theatre trip. That was my radio, my very public square—a source not of galimatias, but of a real, autochthonous connection to the outside world.
Now, television is less a theatre, and more a portmanteau word of distraction and immediate gratification. It is streaming, utterly allochthonous, a congeries of hyper-specific niches. The genuflection is toward the algorithm, which feeds us content of such picayune triviality it makes Dostoevsky’s struggles feel like a piffling inconvenience. The future is personalized, individual, and terrifyingly efficient. We’ll be watching our own verbicide of attention, edited into perfect, short-form clips. Trapped in a Pirandellian cycle where the only thing guaranteed is the thrill of the “new-born gaud,” the screen’s latest, fleeting attempt to be vibes. The struggle is less about access and more about selection; the tragedy is that we have so much, and yet, we are still waiting for something truly meaningful to arrive. The box itself is slaying; the content? Is it not a shame? We wait. We always wait. The screen just keeps moving. The connection is profound: the new-born gauds—the latest tech, the viral clip—always catch the eye faster than what is steady or meaningful, reflecting the transient nature of modern media consumption.
Contributed by Tadesse Tsegaye