Month: October 2014

Cocaine for carrot juice

~ monkeywithgun ~ Leave a comment

So the low level struggle continues – wanting to be 100% present and the best parent possible periodically knee capped by a weakness for cocaine. I’m not ready to call it quits and put a life long ban on my vice by calling in the rehab cowboys…I’m determined to keep my party licence but keep it under control.

I’ve got my ‘tool kit’ sorted – it’s a combination of ‘taking a day at a time’, pumping up the exercise and good fuel (carrot juice in my case – although I’m going to have to ditch the beard…nobody looks cool with an orange moustache, or drinking vegetable juice through a straw for that matter)

I don’t want to bleed to death through my orifices – an apologetically panicked response to recent news overload.

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In my head I’m driving deep into the Karoo (you could substitute Australian outback…depending on which plan gets triggered), the SUV’s packed high with ‘stuff’ and family, the sky’s blue and the sound track is either Natural Born Killers or True Detective, and I’m thinking that those mad ass cracker freaks that Doomsday Preppers series featured maybe weren’t that crazy…they’ll be the ones safe in their hermetically sealed bunkers full of baked beans, DVD’s and high powered rifles sitting out the virulent tornado that Ebola became. It’s only March 2015.

Road trips and movie sound track aside Ebola’s caught the world with its pants down. Scientists and those in the know are saying it’s the biggest things since HIV / Aids, and it’s going to be with us forever. Fuck, at least (assuming you weren’t infected through rape or a blood transfusion) you were engaged in pleasure or vice to get nailed. Now all you have to do is sit on the same seat that a carrier sweated on or have one sneeze on you and you’re either hemorrhaging through your eyes and anus (locked up in some isolation unit if you’re lucky, receiving ‘treatment’. And if you’re unlucky you’re being run out of your village into the jungle to certain death).

World leaders are saying ‘calmez vous, calmez vous’ and ‘the chances are remote that you’ll catch it in the west’, whilst two nurses in Texas get infected, in a hospital, wearing fucking contamination suits we’re told (“the patient was producing a high volume of bodily fluids” – read bleeding out of his eyes and his anus) and one of them, on the Ebola watch list, is allowed to fly on a commercial plane with 132 other people. And here in South Africa we can’t even get it together to point and shoot temperature checks of passengers returning from ground zero in West Africa.

A few months back the WHO put out the bowl for $500 million from developed nations to curb the spread and it went unanswered, whilst America and its allies were dropping million dollar bombs and sending in cruise missiles (at $1.9m a pop) to kill some (admittedly angry and militant) goat herders in Iraq and Syria, in their 10s and 20s (on a good day). The cost per head of this current campaign must be in the high hundreds of thousands and more likely a gnat’s chuff below a cool mill…what a dilemma. Spend a couple of hundred million to save millions and millions and prevent a situation where we all live and die in fear of an invisible virus, or spend hundreds of millions to kill a few fanatics. I know there’s probably an argument that the militants could grow into a very visible pandemic of nastiness and death…but at least there’s a semi-cure should it be required.

It’s got the makings of a perfect storm and I’m not looking forward to any of it one bit which is why I’ve got Google Maps open and I’m searching for the quickest route to isolation I can find…somewhere dry and dusty (imparting unpleasantness on the virus in the form of a quick dehydrated death), with few people to sneeze on me and my family…right now it’s looking like the middle of SA or the middle of Australia. Now please excuse me, I’ve got 3 years of baked beans to buy.

Trouble in paradise

~ monkeywithgun ~ Leave a comment

‘They found their bodies on the beach near their bungalow savagely killed with a garden hoe’ My blood chilled when I read the headline. Two tourists slaughtered in paradise. Koh Tao. Thailand.

I remember it well. Twelve or so years ago sitting in my hammock on my balcony typing the last sentence of my first (and only…and still unpublished) novel. Hitting the final full stop into place felt religious in some way. It had been 6 months of love and hate for the beast I created. 400 odd pages of dark and twisted tale.

It hadn’t started that way. I’d spent a year and a half holed up in my room in Highbury at night and at weekends distractedly trying to cobble together what felt like an important, but turned out to be bland story. One night, after a few beers and joints, I admitted it was going nowhere. I needed to give it a concerted shot, get it out of my system, and hopefully have something that was sellable at the end of it. I quit work and moved to Thailand for 6 months to lay it to rest.

I chose the island farthest out into the Gulf. Got myself a place to stay, slotted into the ‘lifestyle’ and got writing again. The island was Koh Tao. A tiny piece of paradise about 21 square kilometers with around 2000 folk living on it, and nearly half a million tourists visiting it a year. Being the furthest island into the Gulf it also served as a magnet for people on the run; hardened criminals, young drug dealers who figured it wise to take off with their supplier’s cash and the odd white collar criminal who’d fucked up and legged it to this little outpost. It made for an interesting social dynamic when you scratched beneath the welcoming island smiles and the stoned tourist banter.

As Monsoon season enveloped the island and the tourist numbers dropped and there would be no boats to and from the island for days on account of the swell. The atmosphere darkened and there was a definite sense of  underlying evil and menace surfacing. The island felt like it was turning on itself. The relentless sheets of rain and the thunderous cracking storms seemed to change the core of people.

It was a month into Monsoon that my novel took the dark turn. Starting from scratch I set the location from London to Koh Tao and the story chronicled the sub-cutaneous, hyper violent lives of a small band of foreigners living there who fed their demons through random, brutal attacks on unsuspecting tourists. Hyper violent, unprovoked attacks…similar to the two British tourists hacked to death on Sunday night.

There’s nothing to read into this other than some fucked up isolated event that mirrored a fictitious tale I’d based on the island…it does feel slightly prophetic though.