Author: monkeywithgun

A barista is murdered. Will it change anything?

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We live in a relatively integrated area of South Africa, Hout Bay. It’s a melting pot of rich Europeans, who summer, hippies who make stuff and add a vibrancy to the place, families like mine who enjoy the community feel and the fact that you get a lot of house for your money, and as is the way in South Africa today, there is a coloured and a black township. However as is different to the norm, in Hout Bay there is mixing of the various populations and a healthy amount of support for the less fortunate. It’s almost ‘integrated’.

So having lived in ‘The Republic’ for 2 years we’ve got to know the Congolese guys that guard the cars, the Zimbabweans that wait tables in the restaurants and a whole host of other excellent folk, mainly from the black township, IY.

It’s no secret that life in the townships is tough and sometimes violent. You read about it in the local newspaper and we get the download from our domestic helper and the gardener, who happens to be her boyfriend. It’s tough they tell us, but they’re smiling, because is vibrant too. Do they want to leave? Could we rent a place for them to stay in town? No thanks. IY is their community and it’s where they’re established. It took us awhile to get this, coming from very middle class backgrounds where you throw money at problems to smooth your life. But I digress…

A couple of Friday’s ago my wife was chatting to the young black South African barista at the local coffee shop. He was scared he said. He came to work late because he didn’t want to walk through IY in the pre-dawn darkness. His manager didn’t understand; was angry. They spoke about his plans and his dreams. What did he want to do? and my wife gave him her best advice on how to get there; on how to make the things he wanted for himself to happen. They spent a pleasant half hour together and that night he was stabbed to death by a teenager in his one room shack…just because.

The shoving of the IY reality into the broader community jarred. It caused fear and sorrow in equal measure. ‘We’ knew about the violence but now it had jumped the rails. It touched and removed someone that we’d all known, liked and had the slightest of a relationship with. We had to do something before it spread…

Everyone pulled together. Money was raised. Community meetings were held, and the police badgered into agreeing that there was a problem and hopefully action will be taken. It feels wrong that  to get the reaction and the action that it took a person known outside of IY to be killed…what about all the others that we ‘knew’ about and read about? Did they not matter, or did it still feel like it was happening in another land and we would be OK? Who knows.

You can’t win / Fucked if you do, fucked if you don’t / bring on the ‘dad bod’.

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So I’m sitting in the cafe after a work out, browsing the paper and slurping on a protein shake, feeling pretty chuffed with myself and this heading jumps out ‘Being overweight reduces the risk of dementia.’ I read it again. It says the same thing…and my niggling ferret of despair digs another claw in. It’s all about choices it seems – you can be overweight, probably get diabetes or some heart condition (not to mention having to wear Walmart style jeans and have those crusty, bulged out heels all your life)…but remain sane, or you can exercise your nuts off, eat well, feel good about yourself and live longer, but you just won’t know it because you’ll be bat shit crazy, laughing at flies whilst someone else chews your food and wipes your bum for you. Neither option seems that great to be honest. Why can’t I just be fit, slim and sane…I don’t want to be chubby.

[update]

New headline just in – the ‘dad bod’ is apparently in. You look like you go to the gym every now and again but like you eat pizza, drink beer and have tits. So, if this is true and it must be true and it must be true for any male because it works for Leonardo Di Caprio…this is awesome. So what’s the link? Well now I can be over weight with puffy man boobs…which means I’ll remain sane…and will be ‘on trend’ at the same time…and chicks will flock to me for it. There is a GOD!!! Fuck yeah.

Farewell old friend / rogue

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It’s not what I expected. I knew you had to go and go for good, but I hadn’t grasped how I would feel. It’s bitter sweet, like losing an arm, but realizing you’ve still got two perfectly good legs.

Old rogues. They’re the most fun and engaging. All my good friends are ‘rogues’ in one sense or another and that’s why we got on. So when it comes time to cut one from your life it sucks but you know it’s for the best.

Friends come and go. Our friendship dates back over 20 years. There were good times, bad times and times when we didn’t see each other for a year or two.

In those 20 years I’ve moved countries several times, lost a parent, been married twice and now have two wonderful daughters. My second wife has never really liked you. She’s felt threatened. Has felt that you changed me. Did not want you over when the kids were awake, and I got that. She spent a couple of nights with us, but it was always strained.

So now you’re gone, and let’s be clear I didn’t really have a choice, It was you or them, and I love them and they’re what I live for, so it had to happen. I know that, but what I didn’t know was that I would suddenly feel alone. You see, nobody to pick me up when I’d been kicked down, shouted down, argued with. Nobody to hang with on sunny afternoons when the family were away. Nobody to listen to music and chat harmlessly to women with. I’m going to miss all of that. Each time I argue with the ‘other half’ and storm out of the house, which doesn’t happen all that often, I’ll expect to find you waiting. Whenever there’re are old friends in town they’ll want to know where you are…and ‘what? Fuck off, what d’you mean you don’t know him anymore.’ And each of these times is going to be hard, but I hope, I really sincerely hope that we don’t meet again. I need to get on with my life and to do that we can’t be friends. That said there will always be a dull gap which you used to fill that is going to remain…dull for awhile at least.

Happiness is…

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‘They’ say that ‘happiness is earning more than your brother in law.’

If that’s true then I’ve just come back from 5 days of depression inducing hell…Easter with my 3 brothers in law and their families.

They’re all great guys and I’ve known them for years (including as friends, before I did the unthinkable and dated, then married their little sister…but that’s another story for another time.)

I’ll lay the scene; BIL (bother in law) 1 is on the board of directors of a bank; BIL 2 is a partner at a global law firm and BIL 3, one of my oldest friends (apart from the 2 years he wouldn’t speak to me because of the sister situation (see above)) runs a little business from his house which sees him earning more than BIL 1 and 2 combined. This trifecta, this triple whack with the ‘you’re worthless’ stick, this probe with the ‘what the fuck have you done with your life’ finger (and thumb) hadn’t registered before…it’s rare that we’re all in the same country at the same time…but this Easter it happened and happened in full force in a big rambling farmhouse we’d hired for the weekend.

The 6 kids ran amok and did what kids do. The wives drank wine, flicked through magazines and did what wives do. And the guys do what apparently guys with prestigious jobs and / or high amounts of disposable income do, and talked money…

By day 2 I was spending more time with the kids. By day 3 I was even considering starting work on a novel, simply to give me an excuse not to participate in the conversations I couldn’t really participate in, and by day 4 I was drinking heavily to dumb down the internal voices tearing sheets off me. I’m not a jealous person (although a couple of ex-girlfriends might beg to differ…especially the one whose dress I cut up after she screwed around on me with some floppy German fool in a camper van…) but it was tough. As many times as I tried to divert the conversation to anything other than money, business and finances (and cars I’ve never even heard of), they managed to slickly slide back to the point they’d been interrupted at. It was exhausting.

By day 5 I was feeling like the knock-kneed fat kid at a school sports day and my ego and self-worth were both punch drunk and reeling. I’d wondered out into the never ending garden with glass in hand. I was vaguely aware of the kids voices nearby, when a chubby little 2 year old hand grabbed mine and pulled me to the trampoline.

‘Daddy look. Do like this.’ She said, and I looked down and she had her head between her knees. I didn’t understand. The she dragged me onto the bouncy canvas, tucked her head down and executed a perfect somersault and lay on her back screeching with pride.

‘Daddy look. You do.’ and I did…the first somersault I’ve done in about 25 years,landing on my back next two my youngest daughter, the 2 of us laughing madly (and me feeling more than a little disoriented after spinning my gut full of wine 360 degrees), and I had one of those rare moments where life gets thrust back into perspective with such a force that your mind slaps you upside the head…and you realise that you’ve just spent wasted x number of days feeling worthless when really you’re OK…you’re a good dad, your daughters are healthy and all have the right number of limbs and eyes and don’t think you’re a fool all the time. You’ve got your health. You’re not eating somebody else’s Pot Noodles out of their bin for breakfast and in the rain and cold you’re dry and warm under a roof that’s not made from cardboard boxes or a plastic sheet.

Life is good…I’m just not rich.

It’s all just ‘stuff

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It was 4pm and the flames had just started to lick the top of the mountain behind the house. They’d spent the previous 2 days marching through the hills and valleys unseen from Hout Bay. All we had seen was smoke and a faint red glow in the night sky, but now it became real. By 5pm the mountain had a mane of fire along its crest…a solid wall of menacing red. By 7pm the line of fire had descended a 100 meters or so from the summit and the smoke pumped hard and furious towards the bay. Tension and nervous excitement zinged above the crowds pulled out of their houses and it was hot. The hottest day in recorded history. Summer of Sam played through my mind.

By 11pm we could hear the crack of the flames and breathing was becoming painful. We shut up the house and tried to sleep. I woke up and went to the window at 5am expecting the cliff face that had been below the flames to have starved them of the vegetation they needed and to see only a few whisps of telltale smoke. The flames were in full force, still in formation, none breaking rank…steadily marching down the mountainside, snatching at anything green and living. At 7am the helicopters resumed their water bombing, which seemed both valiant and useless at the same time.

With news that the wind was to pick up and gust it came time to think about what we should pack in case we needed to evacuate…and this is where it hit me. It’s all just ‘stuff’. Standing in front of my cupboards with an empty gym bag, I had no idea where to start. 20 minutes later I’m still standing there and all that’s in the bag  are a couple of t-shirts, a pair of boardies and some boxer shorts. There was simply too much ‘stuff’ make a decision. Separately in her cupboard my wife had the same experience (notice she was in her cupboard and I was in-front of mine)…too much ‘stuff’. It was in this ridiculous situation, forced on us by the largest fires the Cape had experienced in 15 years, that we had our simultaneous moments of clarity. Pure clarity of the fact that all the stuff we’d been buying, hoarding, treasuring and using to make us feel better about ourselves was just ‘stuff’…simple. It was a massive relief and an embarrassing expose at the same time.

So what happened…nothing. The fires raged for another 2 days. It got quite hairy and harrowing at times, but then the flames died. The smoke gradually cleared. It’s been a month now and ash is still falling. Life has continued and all our ‘stuff’ is still in the house but its hold on us is weakened, and it feels great.

Flinging of virtual faeces

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‘They’ say that the only thing you can be sure of is your own mortality. It’s coming. Like it or not, you’re going to die (as is everyone else by the way). That’s what ‘They’ say.

But I have another. I can, with as much certainty as I’m going to shake off this mortal coil, predict which of my Facebook friends will pounce at my posts. This is my new sport. I am the zoo keeper dragging my cane across the bars of their virtual cages.

For example I recently posted some quote by a dead Irish poet about ‘exploring the dark corners of your soul and so on’…I hit the post button, placed by bet and waited. It took a little longer than I expected (probably due to the recent change in time difference), but with pin point accuracy the flinging of digital faeces commenced from the predicted cage…this faeces was flung with such abandon and relentless vigor that contagion occurred…cages up and down the row began to vibrate, howling and barking erupted. More bits and bytes of faecal matter hit my screen and then peace and silence ensued. It was awesome. If I’d quoted that dead Irishman to the same people in a physical space – a bar for example – it would have gone unnoticed…

…and so I posit thus; humans are both more extreme and more predictable in their reactions when reacting from behind the screens of their devices…but I’m not sure what that implies. Do we feel more free to be extreme if we’re not face-to-face? Does the physical world dull our natural selves? Are we too afraid to be us in public, but totally happy to let it all hang out in full force when we’re operating in the virtual?

And in case you think I’m being unfairly judgmental, I’ll let let you in on a little secret. I too used to punch holes in my keyboard and let it all hang out over the dumbest of shit….sarcasm and dismissive ‘humor’ were my weapons of choice…this was until I caught myself in my own game.

All of the above is simply an observation…but 10 bucks says your keyboards have taken a bashing at things you wouldn’t have given a flying monkey’s about in the real world.

PS

For anyone looking to find a virtual predictor of future anti-social / deviant behavior, my theory (untested) is that the number of ‘I haven’t got a clue who they are’s as a percentage of one’s full set of Facebook connections would be a good place to start.

Cocaine for carrot juice

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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

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‘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.

Cocaine, dwarfs and business associates

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Last weekend I find myself standing, swaying ever so slightly, in a throng of party people I didn’t really know. It was a 40th. I get a perverse pleasure welcoming others to this decade, so make a point of going to them. They go one of two ways. You get the ‘I’m 40 now, so I’ll throw a pseudo-sophisticated dinner party to show I’m grown up’…these either end bloody early as they’re boring as, or wind up slightly later with people throwing up in plant pots and arguing with their wives. The other way they go, which is the way this one certainly looked to be going was ‘I’m fucking 40 and I’m going to party like it’s my last day alive…mutha funkstas!’…my favorite of the two options, but that’s an aside.

I’m bouncing from one knot of people to the next and relaxing into the night. The little trip to the powder room has imparted a comfortable buzz. The night moves on and all things ratchet up a few notches. I’ve just extracted myself from the rant of some ex-architect who now makes leather bikes seats and my god had I seen his wife? Isn’t she wonderful and did you know she was black, you couldn’t tell by looking at her and look at those legs. Did I tell you I made a bike saddle for so and so and etc etc, and am taking a private moment when my focus pulls in on a short (ish) woman standing in front of me. She’s just called me by my name. My memory banks come up empty. I mentally scramble through recent occasions and events – still blank. I therefore assume we must’ve met in the desert recently…at that bastion of madness, Afrikaburn. That would make sense. Similar people. Similar vibe. That must’ve been it…but it wasn’t.

‘It’s me, X, we met at your office last week.’

I feel myself draw up straight and move into auto-pilot. The scrambled synapses find their sequence and we chat. When I say chat, we danced. We conversationally tangoed each looking for the opening to broach the ‘are you high?’ question. Neither of us allowing that opening to occur. Neither wanting to be the first to drop the pretense. How ridiculous, and I remember thinking this at the time, that two adults were struggling to be adults on their own time because of a link to their grindstones. This continues for a while until some guy (who turns out to be her husband) sidles up and offers us both some MDMA, and the faking and parrying ends and we have a blast and uncovered a whole lot of shared history.

As fun as it was this little encounter got me thinking: is there an etiquette in these situations? And if so what is it and what drives it? Surely as two functioning adults, what you get up to on your own clock is your business and not something that you need to hide? Is it though? I’ve tried to project our next ‘work’ meeting and wonder how it will pan out with the knowledge we each have about it each other. I’d like to think it will be more open. That we’ll each understand where the other’s coming from and that the level of professionalism will remain intact and be more authentic for no longer being clouded in fake funk. Has my view of her changed knowing that she tucks into the same recreationals as I do? It would be more than hypocritical if it has. I wonder if I’ll take her as seriously? We’ll see…

Anyhow, the night moved on to include a woman jumping out of a cake, a bunch of grumpy little Playboy bunny waitresses getting grumpier and the smallest dwarf I’ve ever tripped over wondering around, dressed in a ring master’s coat, with beer and cocaine on a plate for the party boy…but that’s another story right there, which I may, may not get around to writing. If I do I’ll call ‘Who’s exploiting who: the ethics of dwarf hiring’, or something similar, but right now it’s time for a swim. Over and out.