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Final justification…for the miserable

~ monkeywithgun ~ Leave a comment

I can hear them, the excited little pops of cork exploding out of heavy glass necks. I can hear them from 13,000 kms away across several oceans and from different points on the globe, and the poppers of these corks are the ‘we knew its’ and the ‘I told you sos’ who fled South Africa in mini-migrations from the early 90’s onwards.

I can picture the scenes.

The stooped couple in their twilight years. The first wave to leave ahead of the elections in ’94. They’re in their little outer London flat, or if they’re lucky a small, doily bedecked  bungalow somewhere suburban. This is cheap champagne and their sad smiles are pulled across their weathered faces. Their decision to run from black rule has finally been justified. Their years of morose unhappiness and perpetual unease at the relative stability and blossoming reconciliation in the rainbow nation; their double decade of jealous rage at the lifestyles of their friends whom remained. All of these things now justified.

The botoxed, inflated & tight waisted Jewish women in St Ives and Double Bay. The dentists’ and cosmetic surgeons’ wives, now divorced and living loud in the coffee shops, hairdressers and nail bars around Sydney. These woman cackle and tap tap their titanium gelled talons against their glasses, to choruses of ‘the fucking ANC…we knew it…we told those fucking liberal moffies that it wouldn’t work…see. Top me up. Yes!’

The young professional couple in their tidy Perth flat grinning from ear to ear. Their friends should have listened to them. They knew it. They told them that ‘they’ would drive the economy into the ground. That ‘they’ would get more violent and that ‘they’ would [insert any negative]…and that they should have come with them to this wonderful(ly fucking dull nirvana for terrified white folk). The ‘they’ can’t get them here…oh no, not here.

So what is it that has got these corks popping, the botox cackling, the young, uptight self-righteousness slyly bursting forth…it’s Zuma’s latest ‘fuck you’ to his country. His sacking of Finance Minister Nene. The man who said ‘no’ to his odious demand for a personal jet. The man who questioned why South Africa needed a mortally wounded national carrier. The one human being fighting to keep South Africa’s status out of the analysts’ junk pile…and here’s the rub. I’m not South African…so I have no axe to grind, but I have, in the past had to endure the relentless negativity and gutless whinging and whining of these modern day migrants. These settlers, ‘settling’ in far flung countries, congealing in suburbs in their numbers, bringing their biltong and  their Old Ma something or others fucking blatjang. I’ve stood squashed against them in tube trains across London and had to endure their boisterous conversations on the ferries criss-crossing Sydney’s incredible harbour. And 3 years ago I finally got the opportunity to move to South Africa and to ‘settle’ in Cape Town. To live in this wonderful land. The land I’d been told I was ‘focking mad’ to go to. ‘Was I not scared ‘they’ would kill me?’

I wasn’t scared and I was excited and I am also hopeful. Today especially I’m hopeful that this lastest nail that Zuma has hammered home is into his own coffin and not the coffin of the 60 million wonderful people who make up South Africa. I’m hopeful that people are going to see beyond politics, to humanity. That blacks, whites, Indians and coloureds are going to dig deep and find a way to rid this country of the foul, bloated creature that is hell bent on destruction and insatiable greed…I wonder if any of the South Africans abroad might choose to come home and make a difference, rather than sit in their bedsits, flats and their dull contractors’ desks toasting thier apparent ability to see into the future…I somehow doubt it.. but hey.

Magnesium dreaming

~ monkeywithgun ~ Leave a comment

I’m curled up on a wet, potholed road, somewhere, crying; crying harder than I knew was possible. I can’t stop and it feels like my soul is being torn from me. To my right, my dad lies against a gate post, his final breath having just left his body. There are thick, bulky blackish birds circling and swooping and my sorrow is so intense that I wish I had died with him.

I don’t know how long this lasted, but it was the latest in a series of diabolical dreams where unresolved things have been thrust at me. My dad died 11 years ago. We had a troubled relationship, but I loved him. I didn’t cry much then. I was in my early 30’s and angry.

I’m now 42. and taking high doses of Magnesium to drill out my insomnia. I’ve done the prescription pills for years but am not comfortable with being laid out cold these days – probably due to living in SA where crime is a ‘thing’.

I got turned onto Magnesium by an old doctor up the east coast. I found the strongest capsules I could get and doubled the dose on his instruction. It was heaven. Sleep came fast and hard, but then so did the dreams. Each night I know at some point I’m going to have my past thrown at me. I’m going to laugh, cry, feel uncontrollable rage, fear and sadness.

I’m addicted. Normal dreams don’t cut it anymore. Without my fix of nightly emotional purging I’m left disappointed and dejected. It’s a sweet hell I go through. It’s cleansing. It’s doing the work that therapy failed to do…I think.

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’.

~ monkeywithgun ~ Leave a comment

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.

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

~ monkeywithgun ~ Leave a comment

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.

Re-calibrating success / copping out?

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Maturing or selling out? I’m not sure. It feels like a bit of both. But here I am at 41 and it’s finally dawning on me that I’m probably not going to be the groupie-shagging, multi-platinum selling rock star (especially as I don’t play an instrument or sing…minor details.), and I’m unlikely to be a famous actor (can’t act) or a captain of industry (stuck in a middle management’ish role in a small’ish company)…these have been the lofty “ambitions” that I’ve pegged my measure of personal success to. You’ll see ‘ambitions’ in parentheses as if they’d been ambitions (without parentheses) I would have at least taken the relevant lessons at a minimum, but regardless fortune and fame are what I’ve wanted…and failed to find…and it’s been like a fat retarded monkey on my back poking me with a blunt knife for years, until recently. You see recently, and I mean in the last 12 months, the weight of that fat retarded monkey and the vigour with which he’s been poking me has gradually reduced and it’s an awesome feeling, but an ‘awesome feeling’ that comes with it’s own nagging demon – the ‘you’re selling out’ demon.

What’s deflating the monkey? I think it’s the pleasure that I’m learning to get out of the little things in life (largely because I’ve now got two amazing kids that force me to wonder at things like worms, flowers, clouds and muddy puddles). But I think it’s also because I finally have this growing realisation that I’m not immortal and that each day spent brings me a day closer to the end of the line, so it may as well be spent feeling grateful for what I’ve got and not feeding an already obese baboon with a desire to inflict maximum pain on my soul (that’s where he poke me with his knife).

That’s nice and fluffy I hear you say, but what does success look like to you now – now that you’ve finally pulled your head out of your rectum and taken a sniff of the reality finger? What does it look like now then? Well since you ask so nicely I’ll tell you. Success is now about being the best parent I can be to my girls. It’s about refusing to give in to what is threatening to become an ‘ever so slightly more than recreational use of cocaine’. It’s about choosing kindness over being right all the time, and it’s about trying hard to fix my relationship with my wife…oh, and making a comfortable living in the background.

The pressure of this re-calibrated view on success is quite daunting, but it’s all within my control. I’m not reliant of ‘right time, right place’, elusive ideas and even more elusive capital, record contracts and break out films…I’ve got everything I need to make this new success a reality and that’s a cool feeling….but it still feels like a cop out some days.

I guess there’s nothing to say that I can’t be a great father who happens to be a rock star, oscar winning captain of industry, but I can, for now, be totally happy just being the first bit.

 

Watching death rain down…from your sofa.

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I’ve been toying with this post, trying not to take sides and wondering if I should even publish. It feels raw and unpolished but it’s a dirty topic…so have hit the button regardless

—-

This is not about politics. This is not about history. This is not about religion. This is about is ‘how do humans get to the point where they will drag and set up furniture outside at vantage points to watch death rain down on their neighbours?’ Forget ‘neighbours’, substitute this with ‘other humans’, or even ‘enemies’…at what point do you get to thinking that this is OK?

The Romans used to do it in the name of sport. Get a few slaves and throw them to the gladiators and / or lions, and that ladies and gentlemen was entertainment and it was nearly 2,000 years ago. Surely nearly 20 centuries worth of civilisation should have bred that blood lust out of us? I can’t say for sure, but I don’t think in either of the World Wars that people at any point took it upon themselves to seek out front row seats to watch massacres unfold. It wasn’t done. And keep in mind we are discussing civilians here and not active soldiers. No matter how much you might have been told that the Germans / Brits / Americans / Japanese were the devil coming for you, there was still the understanding that there were German / British / American / Japanese soldiers and that yes they were sent to kill your soldiers, and that as civilians you might very well end up dying. But was it only inconvenient geography that prevented groups of English pulling their sofas out, getting tea and scones served whilst they watched bombs drop on German civilians, in the hope that some soldiers would die too? I might be wrong, but it seems improbable. 

The recent pictures beamed round the world of Israelis chatting, laughing, cheering and kicking back watching missiles pummel Gaza shocked and disgusted the world. They shocked and disgusted me…but then it got me thinking, the only real difference between what the Israelis have been doing and what the world at large did when the Americans went in and bombed the shit out of Bagdad, is that they don’t have a screen between them and the action. With Gaza being a stone’s throw away maybe they figured a TV wasn’t required.

You could argue that watching it on the news at least kept you informed…but it only gave you a single view and hand on heart would you have listened to it if there weren’t any pictures?

When the campaign kicked off and Bagdad lit up like some ‘goddamn 4th of July show’ we were all glued to our screens. We all watched 1,000s of innocent Iraqis get blown apart (collateral damage) in the shock and awe blitz. We weren’t outside on a hill, we were in the warmth of our lounges and we watched and watched and watched until it got a little boring. Some morons probably cheered, got a little rowdy and felt a swell of pride…who knows, but what’s the difference? Is there one? I don’t know. Does dragging yourself out into the action vs having the action beamed into your environment change anything?

There’s no judgement here on race or religion, all I’m pointing out is that as human beings we’re in a pretty sorry place right now. Tit-for-tat wars all over the planet, generally to do with defending one improbable god over another, or this bit of dirt from those people over there on that bit of dirt. We seem to be regressing on all fronts. If we spent a 1/10th of the time and effort and money on trying to feed the world, rather than trying to wipe each other out the world would be a very different place, but I don’t think that it is in our nature to do so. Or it could be in our personal nature but that counts for little when it’s governments and corporations calling the shots.