african daydream

2010-04-10T14:25:00.003+02:00

the past few weeks have been strange...
a soulful reunion brought about by the confessions of love by two of my dearest friends have had me floored. this event which felt like such a long time away is over. it is the day after everything that i've been looking forward to for months has come to pass, and i find myself reeling from the finality of it.

maybe its a sense of entitlement, but i thought i would get to spend more quality time with those that had jumped on a plane from somewhere distant. thought that i could discuss with them the things that only they know. thought that i would be more brave and open when i had the chance.

i've made these mistakes before. worrying too much about the outcome in the long run without realising that this is it. this is the moment where you should be happy. this is the second that is real and none of your fears for the future can be valid here, because right now you are here and you are fine.

in so many ways i had looked forward to these past two weeks. two of my best friends who both live on other shores came to visit south africa to attend the spectacular wedding of two of my other best friends. these two people know my soul. they inspire me to be daring and different. i love them and i miss them already even if its only been a day.

the truth is i envy them a bit. they are away on an adventure, am sometimes i forget that my life is one too. i think i'm addicted to adventure. it doesn't really matter in which form, as long as there is always something exciting on the horizon.

i don't really know what this post is about, but in a strange way i feel empty. drained of some of my energy by these two amazing souls, yet replenished by the thought of them. my love for them and everything they stand for. to me it seems i pale in comparison, yet they see something in me that makes them love me. i wish i could keep them forever.

does horse shit matter?

2010-03-25T08:04:00.003+02:00

i sometimes think that i am worth nothing and that everything i have ever done or experienced has conspired to put me in a place where i don't matter. this is very obviously utter horse shit, because for all intensive purposes there is no such place on earth. we all matter whether we like it or not.

you could be famous or just infamous. you could be the bubblegum on the underside of somebody's patent leather shoe, yet you matter in ways you can never even imagine. everybody has or had a mother and father and even if they both hotly hate you - you still matter seeing as there would just be no response at all if you didn't. you are still somebody that changed your parents forever either for the good or the bad.....

the point is that you might be walking down the street, pissed off at the guy who is hounding you back at your office for a report of something that is essential to his corporate survival and wrapped up in your own little world, you don't think twice about the guy asking you for your help or trying to make and honest buck for his family. before he gets a chance to even approach you, he's rebuffed by your force field back into the mass of peopledom everywhere, while you go on with your not so merry life not even noticing that you could have changed his life forever.

we tend to think - screw it - i don't owe anybody anything - and essentially we are right, but maybe by being the 100th asshole to say "fuck off" you might just be the one to send a person over the edge. you might just be the one to make a person walk in front of a bus without ever knowing that had you just smiled and said "no thanks" you could have saved a life. this is obviously an extreme example, but it can be diluted into every aspect and facet of life.

don't get me wrong - i'm not saying we are responsible for the actions of others, but we do definitely contribute our way of thinking by the actions that we take against others and if enough sand is blown over an object at a hard enough rate it will eventually mold that object into something different, even destroy it in the long run....

so i say horse shit to thinking we don't matter, because we do. all of us matter regardless of the scale or place or time. whether we matter more positively or negatively is entirely up to us - but be assured you matter, as do i as does the guy begging on the street. life's just too grand for us not to :)

my truth as i know it

2010-03-18T13:32:00.002+02:00

i had this conversation with a girlfriend of mine last night
and she told me the most truthful thing i've heard in a long time
she told me that my truth is my truth
and that hiding that truth with the excuse that it will disappoint or hurt others is totally selfish and self destructive, because not only am i making other people's minds up for them on how i perceive they will react, but i am using them as an excuse to not face myself and the ugly truth that resides there......

i'm not ready to tell my truth to the world, much less to the people i love
not ready to tell, because i don't always believe my truth
not ready because my truth could get me into a lot of trouble
not ready because what if my truth is a lie?

i hope some day that i'll have the balls to be able to say
"i am me and this is my truth as i know it"
until then - i suppose that omitting the truth is what i'll have to work with

the void

2010-03-15T16:48:00.002+02:00

sometimes i pray for nothing
a place where everything stops
a place where nothing starts
a space that is no place
where there is no life or death
no life after death
where there are no sirens
no rape, no smiling
no aids, no babies
no men or women
dogs or cats
a place devoid of everything familiar
a place of non-contemplative silence
i lay down my head and pray for sleep eternal
pray for nothing

and then i wake up and its all still there
the pinprick earth in space and time
the wailing and whining
the loving the hating
the simple complexity

and i feel selfish
because without realising my own divinity
come the night i pray for the void

Rape

2009-12-10T09:13:00.002+02:00

Extract from Johnathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals

Bycatch
Perhaps the quintessential example of bullshit, bycatch refers to sea creatures caught by accident—except not really “by accident,” since bycatch has been consciously built into contemporary fishing methods. Modern fishing tends to involve much technology and few fishers. This combination leads to massive catches with massive amounts of bycatch. Take shrimp, for example. The average shrimptrawling operation throws 80 to 90 percent of the sea animals it captures overboard, dead or dying, as bycatch. (Endangered species amount to much of this bycatch.) Shrimp account for only 2 percent of global seafood by weight, but shrimp trawling accounts for 33 percent of global bycatch. We tend not to think about this because we tend not to know about it. What if there were labeling on our food letting us know how many animals were killed to bring our desired animal to our plate? So, with trawled shrimp from Indonesia, for example, the label might read: 26 pounds of other sea animals were killed and tossed back into the ocean for every 1 pound of this shrimp.

Or take tuna. Among the other 145 species regularly killed—gratuitously—while killing tuna are: manta ray, devil ray, spotted skate, bignose shark, copper shark, Galapagos shark, sandbar shark, night shark, sand tiger shark, (great) white shark, hammerhead shark, spurdog fish, Cuban dogfish, bigeye thresher, mako, blue shark, wahoo, sailfish, bonito, king mackerel, Spanish mackerel, longbill spearfish, white marlin, swordfish, lancet fish, grey triggerfish, needlefish, pomfret, blue runner, black ruff, dolphin fish, bigeye cigarfish, porcupine fish, rainbow runner, anchovy, grouper, flying fish, cod, common sea horse, Bermuda chub, opah, escolar, leerfish, tripletail, goosefish, monkfish, sunfish, Murray eel, pilotfish, black gemfish, stone bass, bluefish, cassava fish, red drum, greater amberjack, yellowtail, common sea bream, barracuda, puffer fish, loggerhead turtle, green turtle, leatherback turtle, hawksbill turtle, Kemp’s ridley turtle, Atlantic yellow-nosed albatross, Audouin’s gull, Balearic shearwater, black-browed albatross, great black-backed gull, great shearwater, great-winged petrel, grey petrel, herring gull, laughing gull, northern royal albatross, shy albatross, sooty shearwater, southern fulmar, Yelkouan shearwater, yellow-legged gull, minke whale, sei whale, fin whale, common dolphin, northern right whale, pilot whale, humpback whale, beaked whale, killer whale, harbor porpoise, sperm whale, striped dolphin, Atlantic spotted dolphin, spinner dolphin, bottlenose dolphin, and goose-beaked whale. Imagine being served a plate of sushi. But this plate also holds all of the animals that were killed for your serving of sushi. The plate might have to be five feet across.

Die Weduwee se Kruik - Lucas Maree

2008-10-07T18:46:00.001+02:00

Ons almal is maar bang dat die liefde dalk sal opraak

Dus probeer ons dit tot sterwens to bewaak

En dan bêre jy dit veilig in die hart se diepste kluis

En hou jou naaste op 'n afstand met jou vuis

Maar dit is die goeters wat mens weggee wat jou ryk maak

En dit is daarmee wat jy mense om jou raak

Want wat beteken liefde as niemand dit gebruik nie

Of 'n blom se geur as niemand daaraan ruik nie

Ek vermoed die hart werk soos die weduwee se kruik

Wat vol bly, selfs al sou sy dit gebruik

Ek vermoed die hart werk soos die weduwee se kruik

En die liefde, soos die olie in sy buik

Dit is eintlik so eenvoudig en tog almal murmereer

Want die liefde het 'n les wat baie min van ons ooit leer

Jy kan nie liefde optel, soos in boekhou balanseer nie

Want die liefdeswins se som bly omgekeer.

En dit is die goeters wat mens weggee wat jou ryk maak

En dit is daarmee wat jy mense om jou raak

Want wat beteken liefde as niemand dit gebruik nie

Of 'n blom se geur as niemand daaraan ruik nie

Ek vermoed die hart werk soos die weduwee se kruik

Wat vol bly, selfs al sou sy dit gebruik

Ek vermoed die hart werk soos die weduwee se kruik

En die liefde, soos die olie in sy buik

A hard lesson to learn

Get Clued up on Fish

2008-09-26T09:26:00.003+02:00

Thought it was safe to stick to hake and dolphin friendly tuna to eat ethical and protect our fish supplies? Think again............

With the popularity of fish as a healthy substitute for chicken, pork or beef more and more, people start choosing it as a dinner and dining option.

While South Africa has a great variety of fish species the diversity of habitat and lifestyles means that some fish are more plentiful than others, some grow faster and others slower, and that some breed more frequently and abundantly.

It is estimated that 75% of global fish stocks are either exploited at maximum levels, or overexploited. In South Africa, many commercially important linefish species are overexploited. Some fisheries are very selective and catch almost exclusively the species they target, while others are non-selective and may catch fish and other animals that are not intended.

These non-target animals such as other fish and sharks that are caught are called bycatch.

When a fish species is overfished it becomes less and less available until it disappears from your fish market and restaurant menu. Continued overfishing is damaging to everyone involved, from the fish and ecosystem, to the communities whose livelihoods depend on fishing, through to seafood retailers, and you, the consumer.

Make an informed decision
Next time you go to supermarket, fish market or restaurant use SASSI's(Southern African Sustainable Seafood Initiative) guide to make an informed decision.

Green
These are species that are from relatively healthy and well-managed populations that can sustain current fishing pressure. Some green species are not targeted by any particular fishery, but are managed as a sustainable bycatch. These species are recommended as the most sustainable choices available.

 Angelfish 
 Butterfish 
Hake 
Mussles 
Snoek 
 Yellow tail  Orange
These species may be sold by retailers but the increased demand for these could compromise the sustainability. The are considered orange because of potential overfishing, methods used to catch it may damage the environment and biology of the species may not be able to cope with heavy fishing. 
 
Bluefin tuna 
Cape salmon 
King mackerel 
Kingklip 
Kob 
Prawns (locally trawled) 
Snappers 
Sole  Red
These species are illegal to sell or buy in SA. These species cannot handle commercial fishing pressures and can only be caught with a recreational fishing permit. 
Cape stumpnose 
Galjoen 
East coast rock lobster 
Natal stumpnose West coast steenbras 
White steenbras  To see the complete list for each category go to SASSI.com.

Source - http://www.food24.com/Food24/Components/F24_Cuisine_Scene_Article/0,,1-12-14-66_19945,00.html

To Braai or not to Braai - What a stupid question....

2008-09-23T18:52:00.003+02:00

A note I wrote in response to a discussion on Animal Rights Africa's Facebook profile regarding National Heritage Braai Day.

Hiya

I know I will probably be persecuted for the following statements, but so be it.

I come from an Afrikaans family in which the consumption of meat and meat products has always been a way of life and probably always will be. This however does not mean that my family or the members of my household are not animal lovers. On the contrary, I don't know anybody who knows more about or has more respect for Southern Africa's Fauna and Flora than my father who is an avid hunter and as such actually spends a large amount of time within the natural habitats that harbor these sentient beings.

The fact is that in South Africa today, there is more game in private ownership than game that resides in our National parks, not to mention the prolific rise in game numbers over the last 30 years, because of people like my father. People who love nature, and yes, hunting. People who have actually conserved more animals by using them as a sustainable resource than any of us vegetarians could ever hope to.

We say, it is cruel to kill another sentient being and yes I do feel the same, but the laws of our universe dictates that there can be no beauty without cruelty to remind us of the beauty, no good without bad for how would you define either and on this earth no life without death. They are opposites of a coin and if you take the one away, the other would not exist.

It is sad, because we tend to think that just because we made a personal choice to not eat any being with a face (plants also being living beings which have survival instincts like animals), or anything that comes from a being with a face that other people should automatically alter their way of living to suit our needs. Unfortunately, in most cases this will only prompt exactly the opposite response.

People are programmed to resist anything that attacks their way of doing things, so an outcry of “Oh my God – How could you promote having a Braai as a way of celebrating people’s heritage” will only be laughed off as a ludicrous statement by the “Vegan Hippies”, because for millions of people a Braai is a part of their heritage and not many things on this earth, least of all our squealing, will ever change that.
The only way it will ever change is when the individual meat eaters have the personal epiphany that each and every vegetarian or vegan on earth had, before they became such. Therefore the only way that we could ever influence people to not eat meat is by being the examples that we would like to see in the world as Gandhi once said.

I don’t mean to offend anybody but if I do, it shouldn’t really matter, seeing as the perception in the meat eating world is that vegans and vegetarians don’t care if we offend others, seeing as we perceive ourselves to be superior to people who do consume flesh, which is exactly why we are dismissed. We can’t bully people into respecting our ways; we have to earn their respect by being unflinching in our beliefs, yet allowing others to have theirs....

Life on Mars (or is it Venus?) I'm not sure.....

2008-08-20T15:35:00.004+02:00

they say that men are from Mars and women are from Venus.
technically i'm a man, so i should be from Mars, but seeing as i do like other boys in bed i'm sure a bit of Venus was added in there somewhere.

its strange, living on two planets at the same time. even more so if you don't actually live on either of them..... yet lately that's exactly how i've felt. like i am torn between two realities that aren't even mine. like the real me, the person whom i know, love and trust is stuck in the middle with these two opposing posers trying to pull me in opposite directions.

frankly, its getting a bit crowded in my head and heart and i have to make a change. i know i have to make the biggest change i have ever made. a change so drastic and dramatic that there is a very real danger of hearts being broken, limbs being shattered and brains being splattered all across the dashboard of space and time as i slam on the brakes of my life trying to avoid a head-on collision with myself as well as those that i love with all my heart.

the truth is i am afraid. scared shit-less of the consequences of realizing my dreams and potential. it is like a wise woman once said in words similar to these "it is not our weaknesses that we are afraid of. what truly scares us is that we are powerful beyond comprehension. that we can basically be and do anything that we set our minds to"
that my friends, is what truly scares me. the though that i am good. that i am worth being loved. that i am strong beyond measure.
i am terrified of these things, because if they are true, then i have to believe them too. then i have to believe in myself as much as the people around me do. as much as God does. (my concept of God anyway)
if these things are true, then i have to take the responsibility to be those things - to be worthy of those things.

i want to run away, but i know from experience that it just doesn't help. i want to die, but i have so much to live for. i want to be loved, but once i open myself up i have to pay for that love even if i didn't choose it. nothing is for free, least of all the love you receive from others or the love you give to others. it should be, but is it really? sometimes i wonder....

Sleeping on a bed of ice

2008-07-08T15:11:00.003+02:00

as the wind tries to blow the winter scorched earth away and into the sea,
i find solace in the comfort of clear, see-through glass.

there is nothing like winter sun, to restore calm and peace of mind not to mention blood circulation.
people find it strange to hear that we freeze our asses off in africa in winter. granted we don't have the long extended periods of temperatures below zero, but what we do have is major temperature changes from day to night and back again. this makes them pretty harsh seeing as our bodies don't ever really know what to expect.

a typical winter day in secunda, would start at about 06:30 with the sun peeking over the horizon, always inquisitive, wanting to know what went on during the night in its absence. tentatively it's rays seek out every corner of earth to give their loving warmth to anything that appreciates it, which is everything around here, seeing as night temperatures could have gone down below zero, which excludes wind chill, the night before.

as the sun climbs higher in the sky, the earth warms up and on most days it can reach a very comfortable twenty to an amazing 25 degrees, which is heavenly especially inside, on your bed as the afternoon sun floods the room. i'm getting sleepy just typing it :)

on the flip side however, the moment the sun starts shrinking from the sky towards a further part of interest along the earth's meridians, the temperature drops over the horizon with that ball of fire that so defines life on our planet. 20 degrees become 5 in the matter of an hour and depending on the wind, 5 degrees become -5 during the night. subsequently most things outside including car windows, water pipes and people who have nowhere else to go turn a shade to the left of popsickle in the frozen air.

one thing that really makes me very sad about africa, but especially south africa, is the great number (estimated to be a few million) of homeless people who live here. you see them when driving in the cities as they line the sidewalks night after night. sleeping in tight groups to conserve heat, many of them succumb each year to the earth's tilt. that said, the political situation in Zimbabwe and the poverty in Mozambique and other areas, don't make things any better. people who flee their own, warmer countries because of tyrants and lack of opportunity, run straight for a country that is already over saturated with great numbers of its own people, who live on less than $5 per day. people who are in themselves, fed up with the poverty that manifest in their own lives, and who subsequently lash out at others who seemingly rob them of the little opportunity that they perceive themselves to have.

then again, what is the good without the unkind. people like me have the opportunity to make a direct difference in other people's lives every day and seeing the homeless reminds me of the things that i have to be thankful for and the places in life that i don't want to go. it might sound insensitive, but you can't give anything away, if you don't have anything to give.

all my love and prayers to Africa, my home and favorite place on earth :)

the blur at the edge, highlights the focus in the middle

2007-11-12T18:12:00.000+02:00

there are things in our lives that we can't change
we are either male or female or both or neither
white, black, brown or yellow with blue, grey or black eyes and straight or curly hair that reflects or absorbs light in its own fabulous or dreary way.
some people live longer than us, others die around us and the only thing that connects it all, connects these thing that seem totally random, yet are too complex to be is that we can't change them. basic facts of each of our lives that determine in a way who and what we are and become.

the most concrete of these is of course the only other constant than change on this planet - death.
some will die quickly others in slow agony. some will give up, others will fight their way into oblivion and beyond, yet each person upon this plane of existence is fated to have at least one experience that is the same as each other person here.

what's the point of the story - there is none really.... or is there?

i've realized in my wanderings that there are things about myself and my life that i cannot change. i am gay, i am a man, i love marmite and cheese sandwiches.

the flip side of the coin is that i can change the way i view my world and that in doing so, i can manifest the things i truly want and need. not through personal effort alone, but through the connectivity with the universe's energy. communicating with something that is at once everything and nothing.... amazingly easy once you open you mind to it

there is a peace in knowing that everything will be ok, even if it is not at the moment. its really strange, but the moment i started believing that my life will be fine and will work out exactly as it should, things became better. not necessarily because they changed, but because i looked at them through new eyes.

Happy 25th to ME!!!!

2007-09-14T09:16:00.000+02:00

you know its your birthday when your phone rings at 6 am and somebody starts singing.
it dawns on you in a millisecond and depending on your situation and your age your mouth either turns into a smile or you start the day frowning.

today i smiled :)

butterfly suicide

2007-09-05T13:31:00.000+02:00

a man died today.
he got up this morning at 07:05 am and smoked a cigarette
he made his way to the shower, rubbing sleep from his brow
he let the warmth of water and steam fill his bones,
savoring the feel of aqua on his skin
the touch of a fluffed up towel on his face made a lasting impression, before
he dressed in his customary don't give a fuck Levi and t-shirt
he made himself a hearty breakfast
bacon and eggs on toast with strawberry jam and cheddar cheese
washed down with sweet black coffee and another cigarette
after his meal he took a note pad and pen and wrote to those he loved
he stuck the dribble on the wall in his kitchen, walked to the living room and
splattered his brains on the roof with a 9mm pistol he had gotten from his father
he was 9 days short of 25

Demand for whale meat still strong: Japanese institute

2007-08-30T16:20:00.000+02:00

SYDNEY — Japan's whaling body denied Wednesday that Iceland's recent decision not to issue catch quotas for the coming season shows that people no longer want to eat whale meat. Institute of Cetacean Research spokesman Glen Inwood said that demand for whale meat in Japan remains strong and that comparisons with Iceland should not be made because they are "completely different markets."

Iceland's relatively small population of about 300,000 means domestic demand will always be a factor unless export arrangements can be made, he said, adding that Iceland is still in discussions with Japan on setting up a whale export program.

Earlier this week, Iceland's Fisheries Ministry decided not to issue quotas for the season beginning in September, citing low demand for the meat in the domestic market and poor short-term prospects for export to Japan.

The move prompted New Zealand Conservation Minister Chris Carter to claim it shows demand for whale meat is not as strong as pro-whaling nations like Japan continue to assert.

"It appears obvious there is almost no market for whale meat, so if the Japanese government will not listen to the conservation argument to stop whaling, perhaps Iceland's official recognition that there's no market for the meat could finally encourage Japan to stop its expanded 'scientific' whaling program," Carter said Monday.

Last year, Iceland drew international criticism by ending a 20-year ban on commercial whaling and introducing quotas for 30 minke whales and nine fin whales. Only seven minke whales and seven fin whales were harpooned during the season because of a lack of demand.

New Zealand and other anti-whaling nations argue there is insufficient evidence that fin whales are sufficiently abundant to hunt and complain the methods used to kill them are cruel.

Inwood rejected a suggestion by Carter that Japan is sitting on a stockpile of 40,000 tons of whale meat that it is unable to get rid of "in spite of a move to serve it in lunches in Japanese schools and using it in pet food."

"If Chris Carter thinks that there's 40,000 tons of whale meat in Japan, then the man is on another planet," Inwood said.

Japan does keep a surplus of whale meat, around 4,000 tons, but only to ensure demand does not outstrip supply, he said.

The Japanese government has awarded the Tokyo-based Institute of Cetacean Research special permits to collect whales. Meat derived from so-called scientific whaling is sold to the public.

Japan says data taken from the whales are used to determine age, reproductive status, diet and effects of environmental changes — information it says is needed for future management of whale stocks.

But New Zealand, Australia and other staunchly anti-whaling nations denounce Japan's "scientific whaling" as a sham and call it commercial whaling in disguise.

In the latest whaling season, Japan's whaling fleet caught 505 minke whales and three fin whales before its processing ship was incapacitated by a fire and forced to turn back. It had planned to catch 850 minke and 10 fin whales.

From Japan Today

http://www.japantoday.com/jp/news/416477

20 Ways Sharks Help Humans

2007-07-30T16:28:00.000+02:00

1. As the oldest-living vertebrates, sharks may provide information on the origin and evolution of all vertebrate species, including humans.

2. Sharks affect shellfish-population counts, since many consume skates, rays, and other predators of scallops, crabs, lobsters, and more. When sharks decline, shellfish that many humans like to eat start to disappear, too.

3. Sharks rigged with cameras have provided important data on dangerous underwater sites, such as a Pacific Ocean nuclear-test site where sharks were deployed in 2003.
4. Sharks possess a highly developed immune system, with few species suffering from cancer and other disorders. If researchers can unlock its key processes, sharks may one day lead to preventative treatments, or even cures, for some of our most deadly diseases.

5. Shark fins and hammerhead shark noses have inspired high-tech adaptations to airline wings and jet bodies. The Langley Research Center has extensively studied sharks, along with whales and seagulls, for their potential design applications.

6. Certain sharks, such as the basking shark, are filter feeders that consume large quantities of zooplankton, such as copepods and krill. Some experts believe this helps to “clean” the water and may prevent red tide and other harmful algal blooms.
7. Shark blood contains special anticlotting compounds that scientists are studying for possible human heart-disease applications.

8. Sharks have the greatest electrical sensitivity of any creature on Earth. Since detection of magnetic fields can help with orientation and navigation, future research on shark electro receptor organs may one day lead to better navigation systems in cars, planes, and ships.

9. Analysis of sharks, particularly the dogfish, has taught many researchers and students about fish biology.
10. Ecotourism, with sharks serving as a primary attraction, has improved local economies in many places throughout the world, such as in parts of the Philippines and Belize.

11. Sharks and humans once shared a common ancestor, so our tissues are not all that dissimilar. Optometric researchers are investigating the shark cornea, which may one day be used for human transplants.

12. In 2005, Mercedes-Benz modeled a “bionic car” after a tropical fish called the boxfish and other fish, including sharks. Its streamlined shape made the car one of the most aerodynamically efficient vehicles for its size.
13. Sharks always draw a crowd when they are safely contained in aquarium exhibits. While such displays remain controversial, they have earned millions of dollars, with some of the monies going to shark-conservation projects.

14. Many sharks are scavengers that consume dead and dying animals and plants. They help to rid the oceans of rotting carcasses and related waste materials.

15. Squalamine, a chemical extracted from dogfish, appears to kill bacterial microbes and removes potential tumor cells. This natural compound may one day be incorporated into treatments for human infections and disease.
16. Shark teeth, with their variety of different shapes, sizes, and cutting surfaces, are a marvel of nature. They may have inspired early human tools, some of which incorporated actual shark teeth, skin or both into the objects.

17. Sharks possess remarkable senses that enable many species to see in near darkness, smell from long distances, feel distant vibrations and more. Analysis of these abilities may one day give humans similar abilities through devices modeled after shark senses.

18. Recent studies indicate that sharks are highly intelligent, with advanced problem-solving skills, social complexity, and a natural sense of curiosity. Using neuronal activity-detecting devices, scientists have developed rudimentary ways of reading animal thoughts and feelings. In the future, we may better understand ourselves by learning how other intelligent creatures view us.
19. Some sharks, such as the spiny dogfish, never seem to go into a full sleep, since they can continue to swim while “sleeping.” Researchers continue to study sharks in hopes of learning more about what occurs in the brain during sleep modes, which may lead to treatments for human sleep disorders.

20. Researchers are experimenting with a new boat-surface coating based on shark scales. Due to their base shape, size, and bristles, scales help to prevent algae and other things from sticking to sharks, a quality designers hope to impart to ships.

http://encarta.msn.com/encnet/Features/Lists/?article=20SharksHelp&GT1=10187

Boredom is the root of all evil - the despairing refusal to be oneself - Søren Kierkegaard

2007-06-20T16:14:00.000+02:00

arrgggh
i really piss myself off sometimes. yesterday was a perfect example.
i'm so much stronger than the bickering that goes on inside my head, yet at times the smallest little thing can send my mind reeling in the wrong direction.

no i'm not really still hung up with ss. i might have some issues with being alone, but doesn't everybody? venus is messing with my mind. its like i'm a love sick puppy, with all the wrong things on my mind.

i think this year has officially marked my quarter life crisis and seeing as i am turning 25 in september, its right on time. questions like, "where am i going?", "what am i doing?", "where should i have been by now?", "do i really need this shit" plague my already stressed psyche at times when such questions are in actual fact - fucking annoying.

i've realised something crap about myself lately. i'm way too restless. i get bored so quickly with whatever i'm doing and for the last few years, that factor has taken a back seat in the ride of my life, because i've had constant change. now i'm just irritable with being in the same spot for too long in a place that does little to relieve the utter nothingness that my social life comprises off during week days.

i need somebody to shag...... (read make love to)

dream a little dream

2007-06-19T14:55:00.000+02:00

its strange how you reach a point where you think you are fine
then you see a name - in indication that this person is still alive and you realise that in actual fact - you are not.....

i found this in my diary a few nights ago....

i dream a little dream every day
dream that i could take you away
dream of showing you where it all began
far south - in my land
dream of kissing you under the stars
making love with only the moon as a witness
i wish i could show you a world where time is a tad slower
a world that would remind you of home,
yet challenge you with the new

when i met you, i knew you were special
that's why its so hard to get over you
i don't ever want to, because you deserve to be loved by me
ha - how self centered.
you are loved where ever you go
what makes me so special?

i turn all the bad things in your mind to good right?
for a while i did, at least
then i turned sour
became this ugly thing that not even i knew i could be
i scared you away with my apathy
made you think i was pathetic
i think that sometimes

this life brings us people to do things that help us learn
you were meant to break my heart
nobody could do it quite like you did,
which is exactly why you did.

i do love you and hate you at the same time
actually that's not true
i love you, couldn't hate you if i tried
hate myself for trying

there's no point in saying that you will be great someday,
because you already are
why do you take so much crap from some people and none from others?
you mystify me and that's what attracts me to you.

do all dreams have happy endings?
mine seldom do
hopefully this one will
i would love to show you AFRICA
but if i don't get to do it,
i sincerely hope that you will see it someday
even if its with somebody else

love forever
fireboy

how do we go from being in friends to being complete strangers?

Cat Stevens for Lola potters

2007-06-06T21:42:00.000+02:00

i love my dog as much as i love you
you may fade, my dog will always come through

all she asks from me is the food to give her strengh
all she ever needs is love and that she knows she'll get

so i love my dog as much as i love you
you may fade, my dog will always come through

all the pay i need comes a shining through her eyes
i don't need no cold water to make realise that

i love my dog as much as i love you
you may fade, my dog will always come through

i love my dog, baby i love my dog

a legend to forget

2007-05-08T14:14:00.000+02:00

its tempting to say sorry
sorry for not being here, but i'm not, so i won't

i've had a few experiences since i last posted, but above all the one i will relate now, stands out.

i could feel bile slowly leave my stomach and work its way up my throat as i stared at this man. his tall muscular body barely covered by an ugly dress. his dilated pupils and tar stained teeth, attesting of a fear of himself and the world that shuns him. fake hair on his head falls in all the wrong places and the smudge of lipstick at the corner of his mouth is distracting to say the least. his voice once more starts to sing a song of decay and in that instant as i swallow hard not to puke, i know i will never be the same person.

backtrack - its a saturday evening and all the peeps are out on the town in pretoria. the gallery of distorted art had produced a surprising show, from which i left feeling a little queasy (a compliment, by the way)

on our way to the after party, planned at "aandklas" in hatfield, i look at my evil twin geritu, smiling at his painted fingernails. it is a universal truth that going to any theater is the perfect excuse (if one is really needed) to dress up, and neither gert or i had disappointed that evening. put it this way, we were hotter than pofadder in december and on our way to the straightest place in gauteng. luckily our mommas didn't raise no fearful children, so we walk into jockville hatfield with only a little trepidation in our hearts.

as we enter "aandklas" a large rugby screen knocks us off our feet and into the realisation that we are probably the only two gay guys in the whole of this establishment, if not the whole of hatfield, yet we walk in, buy a drink and find a spot to wait for the others. a few meaningful glances are shot our way and as we walk out to summon our friends for rescue i feel a bit relieved for not having to stay, yet not one person had made any derogatory comments and when our friends finally pitch i'm prepared to walk back in, which we do. luckily the girls we are with are clued up on what is "hip and cool" and obviously "aandklas" is not it, so we giggle all the way to tings and times around the corner.

ok, so i don't live in the city. in reality the place where i live is very far from being a city. as such, the only "club" where dancing is a remote possibility in secunda, is one of those dodge open plan bars where the floors are naturally sticky. this in turn makes it hard for patrons to leave and seeing as very cheap tequila is served at the bar, the floors have a tendency to become even more so what with all the blood and vomiting. (exaggeration) but face it, you know what i mean - you've all been to one of those.

given the above and the fact that i really love dancing, i came up with the "wonderful" idea of treating my straight girlfriends to a gay night out, which in pretoria would mean legends (apparently the hottest place to be), seeing as they have good enough music and there are usually no vibes, so the girls enjoy themselves. shame on me for being the naive gay boy...

piling into a few cars, we make the treck to inner city pretoria. always pleasurable at night, cause almost nobody is around. we pile out of our cars and are greeted at the door by the lovely bouncer, whom me and daniela have been terrorising since just after i unceremoniously fell out of the walk in closet that was my life before the city. i'm going to miss her.

we are ushered in and start queuing to pay the R30 entrance and me being the shy show off, writes my name and telephone number on their contact sheet (regret, regret)

fast forward: "what are you on about, man?" i'm gay, so is gert and these are our girlfriends. why aren't they allowed in, if their boyfriends are?
his reply punches me in my already unstable stomach. "the patrons of the club, find that there are too many straight people i.e. girls i.e morality who frequent it, so we've instituted a policy that limits the amount of straight people who can go inside" ok - he didn't say it in those exact words, but that was his point.

i should have said - "so let me get this straight" - no pun intended.

you as a gay person who is part of a community that has fought for over 30 years to be included in the country that we live in, decides to exclude yourself by choice from that society and the freedom you've got in it.
by not allowing straight girls into this club, you are advocating promiscuity and as such advocating HIV/Aids, Hepatitis, Herpes, Syphilis, Chlamydia, Gonorrhoea and a whole host of other sexually transmitted diseases, because lets face it, the absence of "the straight girlfriend i.e. moral fibre " in any gay man's life, makes him a whore. a man with a brain and a dick and not enough blood to work both at the same time. is that your target market? a fucking orgy?
you inadvertently and in many cases actively advocate sexism, hetero phobia and in return homophobia simply because you are afraid, which will only lead to anger, hate and suffering.
you take away my right of freedom of expression. i want to be able to dance without feeling like a cheap piece of meat and the only way i can do that in your club is if i have a straight girl who has my back.
you wouldn't dare walk around looking like you do outside, because deep down in your heart you know that you are not truly free. true freedom would be living as a lady each and every second of your existence if you were so inclined, regardless of what might happen to you because of it.
in a strange way i've lost something tonight. something that has never been good for me and i thank you for that.

instead i told everybody i saw, to please not go to legends, and yet despite all my efforts, they still went.

this is a model that does not work. nowhere on earth is there proof such as here. if you exclude yourself from the majority, the majority will rise and squash you, because we live in a society that is intolerant of everything that is different to itself. there's no getting around the fact though, that everything is different on some level and i truly believe that the only way to overcome the perception that different things are to be feared, is to break down the barriers between them. to let them mingle and as such phase each other out.

this happened three weeks ago, and i'm still feeling crap about it. on the one side there is a genuine freedom to being gay on the other a looming darkness that whispers on the wind. glimmers of infidelity, pomp, vanity, gluttony, lust, anger and hate are all over, hidden under a blond wig and bad make up.

"do unto others as you want them to do unto you" - Jesus

I am worthy

2007-04-14T14:39:00.000+02:00

YOU ARE THE FIRST EXAMPLE OF HOW THE WORLD SHOULD LOVE YOU......................................................

tom hark - mango groove - 10 years ago

2007-03-07T17:11:00.000+02:00

you never know what hits you 'til you're black and blue
you never get the picture 'til the movie's through
and even if you do it doesn't mean a thing
you're only gonna play it like a fool again

the whole thing's daft, i don't know why
you have to laugh or else you cry
you have to live or else you die
you have to laugh or else you cry

you tell yourself you're sick and tired of getting burned
and then you realise you're never gonna learn
you think you're gonna get it but you just don't know
you want it but forget it 'cause you move too slow

the whole thing's daft, i don't know why
you have to laugh or else you cry
you have to live or else you die
you have to laugh or else you cry

we all need time
to unwind and get away
far from ourselves
everyone, everyday

the whole thing's daft, i don't know why
you have to laugh or else you cry
you have to live or else you die
you have to laugh or else you cry

- kyk hoe sluit die son die hemel oop -

2007-03-05T15:20:00.000+02:00

-in the dark of night a journey begins - a journey into the unknown - a journey through the familiar - cigarettes and chewing gum, spike the senses as miles of tar flash beneath - "and i'm not here so you can play around,fight your battles on someone else's ground" she sings above the din of air rushing in - lights betray their origin as they flicker away, out of sight - a friend lies sleeping in her spot as thoughts on life, love and most things inbetween occupy a concentrating mind - tasks are numbered, prioritised and filed in the "to do" list of categories - as the minutes tick by, the waning moon casts a halo of hope & soft loving brilliance on a land waking up to yet another scorching day under the african sun - black gives way to grey in the east, warning of the impending rays - as blue takes the batton a distant memory of a life unknown sparks with fire - "what goes around comes around, right here" - time is no friend, nor is it an enemy - time is an illusion created in the stars - for an instant there is no future - there is no life beyond these four walls - these four wall created to guard, created to protect, no doubt created to fascilitate absolute destruction of self -

"our lives are worth living only when we make the conscious decision to actually start living them... everything else is synonymous with the mundane"

who am i ?

2007-02-27T09:18:00.000+02:00

Sailing through the tunnels
In the morning by yourself
There’s a very special feeling
True sensation all is well
If you stand and reach your arms out wide
Close your eyes and try to fly
It’s an underground illusion
Tricking you from side to side

We knew all the answers
And we shouted them like anthems
Anxious and suspicious
That God knew how much we cheated

It can’t come quickly enough
And now you’ve spent your life
Waiting for this moment
And when you finally saw it come
It passed you by and
Left you so defeated

Skyscrapers rise between us
Keeping me from finding you
If the concrete architecture
Disappeared there’d be so few
Of us left to navigate and
Defend ourselves from the tide
It’s an underground illusion
Tricking you from side to side

There’s no indication of
What we were meant to be
Sucking up to strangers
Throwing wishes to the sea

It can’t come quickly enough
And now you’ve spent your life
Waiting for this moment
And when you finally saw it come
It passed you by and
Left you so defeated

korreltjie klein is my woord, korreltjie niks is my dood, korreltjie sand

2007-02-18T22:22:00.001+02:00

so its been a while since i've had anything to say really. i've been terribly busy at work and have neglected all my blogging duties, which incidentaly stretches farther than this particular post, but hey that would be telling.

its strange how work can so easily take over a person's life, especially if that person is a perfectionistic do-it-freaking-all-myself-because-in-no-way-is-anybody-else-qualified-enough type of guy. well that is me and to tell you the truth, its a scary prospect.

anyway, its still 8 hours before i have to start work again, and my bed is whispering my name on the wind, so i'll get to the point.

i'm almost 25 years years old and i still live with my parents
i work for my them too in our family busines
i have a challenging job that is rewarding in many ways,
yet i feel dead most of the time
i'm probably moving to a farm in about two months' time
so i'll be even more removed from everything that keeps me sane
or is that insane?
o yeah, and don't forget the rising trend of finding murdered families in their remote houses (gotta love this country :)
i haven't had sex in almost two months
and strangely enough i don't really want to
which is weird, because for as long as i can remember
there's always been the sex issue
i live in a town that doesn't fit my personality
where i have one friend
i go away for weekends to a home away from home
where a life that is no longer mine winks at me as i pass by
i have the freedom to pack up and leave
but i choose not to, because in loving stupidity i can't let people down
i know that if i need a soulmate to be complete, i'll never find one
so i need it, because i'm not good enough for hapiness.
it is not my destiny (or maybe it is)
and that's ok
who we were, is who we are and who we are is who we will be
i think i was a mean ass chick in a previous life so my karma in this one might be a bit jinxed
on the other hand, we can always rise from the depths to become something better
and at least i have been a lover of a soul. love not reciprocated, but love none the less

peace, love, insanity
w:)

living to rant another day

2007-01-31T19:50:00.000+02:00

i thought about starting another blog, which i did actually. peacetodafish.blogspot.com is a pet project where i mainly post news about the attrocities of overfishing and the like. what i missed though was being able to rant. to rant into cyberspace, having words spill from my fingers onto a canvass. i read them, evaluate them and then ultimately discard them, because i'm secure in the knowledge that they are there whenever i want to go back for a quick glance.

so here's to new beginnings and an end of something special. i'm breaking a habit tonight, i hope.

ciao ciao
w

all is fair in love and war

2007-01-04T15:24:00.001+02:00

SEEK AND YE SHALL FIND!

endless possibilities

2006-12-24T23:21:00.000+02:00

they say that every drop of rain has the potential to house an entire universe within itself. sitting here listening to all those worlds crashing down on a tin roof, reflection on a year that dragged its tired feet over the hot sands of time is a given.

i started 2006 under the african sun. out of love, belief in myself and the world around me, i was a being lost in a sea of thoughts on my death. alone and naked my sould had no purpose, no need to be. thats what i thought anyway. but the mysteries of life have a way of taking something drab and mundane and turning it into a thing of beauty and colour with the changing of light.

i visited a temple that changed my life. the Buddha crept into my heart and even though i’m not religious i found a way of thinking to identify with . a life’s lesson from which to learn. a light in the distance pulsing its message of love and tolerance for those things we do not understand or know. a knowing that love does no need itself to be true. secure in my peace, i went to and island far from my home, my family & friends. i looked to the lights of that busy city where dreams can be made, where hearts can be broken and for a while it was good. i was in love. high on a man i thought who was a friend. a man who turned out to be an angel and a thief. no worries. no regrets.

actually, only one regret. i wish upon a star that we could have stayed friends, but what will be will be and maybe we learnt all we could from each other. i know i should stop obsessing about it and in my daily life i have, but at times it hurts like the wounds we carry with us from when we are small. he was the one that showed me a life i never thought possible and even though he won’t talk to me now, i know that on some level i made him think twice :)

so for a moment i lost my way again. found that winding road back to self-hate and pity and sensing that another chapter’s page had turned, a migration home was the only thing i had left.
africa is in my veins. there is no other place i would rather be. no place i would call my home because my heart beats with a rhythm of drums in the dark and my skin, off white testifies of a sun that nowhere shines with such loving intensity.

philosophies changed, tears cried to last me a lifetime, dimension jumped, summer ridden into oblivion and beyond. yes tis true. nobody likes you when you are 23, least of all yourself, yet all we have is time. the great teacher, healer, dealer, defyer. it comes and goes and when the sand runs out on this life all we can hope for is that we’ve learnt something about ourselves and the world we live in.

to those who read this, wherever you are. may this end, signify a beginning of something better. all my love to myself, my family, my dogs, my friends, my lovers, my haters, this world and you.

ciao, ciao
w :)

a dragon roars

2006-12-10T22:10:00.000+02:00

clouds of mist rolling towards our thatched shelter feather the world with their watery contents as my sister and i prepare to brave the cold outside. impossibly green mountains form the valley we are nestled in and despite the rain i am furiously alive. by the time we reach the outskirts of the camp the cold has evaporated as our bodies’ warmth emanate from within. the sleeping giant that forms the horizon snuggles under his moist blanket and as we round a corner into a forest of dreams, we are transported to a place where gnomes lurk and fairies play tricks on the eyes of passing strangers. this place, high in the drakensberg of kwazulu natal is arguably the most beautiful place i have ever experienced. a true paradise that leaves me completely content. well, almost.

numerous stories have been heard on how these mountains came to be known as those of the dragon. drakensberg translating literally into dragon mountain. from afar they appear as would the teeth in a dragon’s mouth. a place where creatures of immense power would choose to make their home. inside their bowels, vibrating thunder rolling of the sheer cliffs lead one to believe that monsters truly lurk around every corner. the world shakes with this mesmerising sound.

as the mist clears, new horizons form and i feel smaller than i’ve ever felt in my life. this is by no means a bad thing, for when confronted by beauty on such a grand scale one cannot help but succumb to a higher sense of something out there somewhere over the rainbow. i am in love with this space and i wish i could share it with one person. strange how my life these past few months is leading right back to that moment our eyes met. the harder i try to forget, the harder it is to accomplish and now that i should be happy, which i am and content, which i’ll probably never be, i miss him more than i’ve ever had in my miserable existance. not the one these pages are so full of even though i would have loved for him to be mr right, but that illusive person that every singleton on earth rolls around in their head. that person that makes you smile as you wait for the trafic light to turn. that person you yearn for when faced with a spectacle of nature, so insanely real that you pinch yourself to make sure you are not sleeping. strange that such a place would inspire me to long for a love i’ve only partially known.

admittedly i’m lonely and thats ok, because i’m used to being that and as a very good friend reminded me a long time ago, loneliness is at the heart of every human being. loneliness makes no difference whatsoever to the majesty of this place. a place that has been the host to many a defining stage in my country’s evolution. the voortrekkers, my ancestors walked over these mountains barefoot, facing danger from every side. if the zulus the english or the cold didn’t kill them, leopards, lions or the unforgiving land did. still they walked. trekked in search of a place to call their own. in search of a future full of hope and love. did they find it, or are they, in a way, still walking?

swem jannie swem

2006-11-30T20:45:00.000+02:00

monday morning 5am. i meet my sister in the hallway outside our rooms. she looks like i feel. tired, asleep yet awake with anticipation. today is the day we start swimming.

i have to admit that i don’t like going to the gym because it never provides any of the activities that i’m interested in. i’ve always been a bit wack, or so they say, so gymnastics and yoga, scuba diving and jumping off stuff, rollerblading and tae – bo, pilates and now swimming are the things i choose. suffice to say that the local gym only provides one of these activities and if i am to stay sane then 5am it will be :( small towns suck. he he

there is no happiness without action, but action will not always lead to happiness

2006-11-21T15:39:00.000+02:00

about the pic - the last time i saw marilu :( miss you malu and a big shout out for your bday on 13 nov. mwahahahahahahahaha

i have it on good authority that life is not always a bowl of cherries. that things can go horribly wrong, while in a strange way they are actually going right. that life isn’t ever what it seems and that i’m in a funk. hooray

i’ve been awaiting a package that i posted to myself just before i left the uk. its been due for two weeks and as is apparent, no rollerblades :( upon reflection, i shouldn’t really be surprised, because i did choose the cheapest option of transfer, with no tracking or insurance, because i didn’t have the required amount. desperate times... on the other hand, there are some links to the past that i’ve been longing for, especially a book with a pressed flower inside. hopefully it arrives at some point, because the thought of losing that memory really hurts like so many things these last days, months, years.

life’s not all bad. solace can be found in a sunrise, a random smile, a dog pressed against my body at night, in family, in friends. those chosen few who enlighten with their words, their thoughts, their actions. who’s example teaches me about my life and how it has an impact on the world around me. who loves the person i am even though i’m not without faults and who i love in return for their being.

headline news yesterday was that a very dangerous man had managed to escape from c-max prison, which is the highest security prison in south africa. this from the wing where people who are likely to try and escape are placed. a debate has risen from those ashes coated in petroleum jelly, which poses the question. “was it an inside job?” and if not, “how the hell did a grown man manage to un cuff himself and then break through a number of windows without being badly cut or caught to finally set foot in the world again? a more urgent question i would like to pose is, “what is being done to recapture this rapist, murderer, fiend?” this in the city where my little sister and most of my friends stay. yikes

something i made up:

disillusioned enchantment
brings to a fore
a life i’ve dreamt of
a life i ignore
you carry your heart on that shoulder
you say exactly what you mean
i stray from the path
a path chosen for me?
we talk in circles
we talk all the time
but what i wish for
is for my heart to be as thine
but lo and behold
if the truth has to be told
i dream of another
so beautiful, so bold
a man with an ego
a man full of scold
for me and my illusion
for me and my cold
hard emotion
so openly displayed
so wait for a while
my heart is not mine
its somebody else’s
who doesn’t want
who doesn’t need
who lost it in a cloud
i pray it comes back
i pray it will be fine
i pray that one day
some day,
it might again be mine
to give to you, or someone alike
to keep for myself
to stab with a knife
i do love you
i need you as that friend
a person to belong to
a person to defend
so give me some time
so give me the space
to forget my mind
to put my heart in its place
i'm not saying yes
i'm not saying no
i'm not saying anything
because i can't let go

een, twee, drie. blok myself

2006-11-12T22:16:00.000+02:00

a strange phenomenon that has come to light since my return is that my parent's friends are all very happy that i'm back in the land. strange because i never thought that i realy made any impact on these people's lives. i still wonder if i do, but i think the answer lies in the fact that my parents seem so much happier and healthier and this is what the friends see.

we went to visit a couple on their farm today. it was lovely to get out of town for a bit and even though i was so much younger than everybody there, i was treated with a respect that i'd never had in such company. the only explanation i can think of is that my eyes look older, more experienced, that the hurt of life has taken its toll and that even to myself i've grown up in so many ways.

an old "oom" of 82 greeted me and made the comment that my parents look well. the conversation led to me, which these conversations often do and my mother commented that she had missed me alot and that she was glad that i'm back. the guy looked at me and said. "yes, he is worth being missed, even if he doesn't always think so" nervously i smiled and looked away. was it that apparent? am i that transparent?

my whole life i never thought that i would be good. never dreamt that i would be missed, that i meant so much to somebody. how could i not see that regardless of who i am and what i've done, there would always be people who love?

my back has been knotted in the worst spasm i've had all year for the last two days. it happens periodically for whatever reason that i tense up of which the aftermath is difficulty walking, breathing or even lifting my arms and the only way to get rid of it is a voltaren injection. ouch. never one for modern medicine, i've tried yoga, lotions and massages, but it just won't let up, so it looks like a trip to the doctor will be my only way out of this one.

tonight was the first time in over a year that lightning gave me a fright :) the place in which i live, the highveld, is known for earthshattering thunderstorms. as a kid i used to spend my time at a second storey window judging the distance of and counting the bolts of fire that rained from the heavens. "god is moving house" we used to say as the sky lit up in a spectacular display of natures power. like a bomb going off, night becomes day and the earth actually trembles under your feet. windows vibrated and anything connected to a telephone line is bound to explode. ah the joys of an african summer.

tomorrow is busy, so i'm saying goodnight sweet world. to the ones i love, you know who you are, may your dreams be filled with visions of beauty. to the ones that i miss, its apparent on my face. my eyes glaze over as i dream of days when you were around and hope for a future of which you will be a part once more.

mag julle geseënd wees

fishy, fishy swimming in the sea, you don't need to worry about me wanting to eat thee

2006-11-08T17:47:00.000+02:00

last night as i prayed for sleep to come, i decided that the time had arrived to turn into the fully fledged vegetarian that i’ve always secretly been. i’ve never really liked meat and although i will admit that giving up seafood is going to be a bit hard for a while, my mind is made up. there’s just no point, because i feel that if you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem. i will concede to eating free range eggs to supply myself with a bit of protein not derived from plant materials

its strange but i blame this holiday that i’m on my way home from. info on shark nets and long liners, plus lest we forget the freaking whalers made me realise that i have the power to help in my own small way. stop consuming and thus lessen the demand. ah, i know what you’re thinking. what can one person do? well, i’ll tell you a story that daniela told me once upon a time.

“lee woke up one morning at 6:00 and as was his custom he went down to the beach where he stays for a morning walk. as he rounded the corner and the sand came into view, he was greeted by a spectacle of nature. the beach was filled with starfish that had been washed up on shore during the night. thousands of helpless animals lay dying on the dry earth without much hope of rescue. as lee neared he saw something that blew his mind. a girl, lets call her dandelion was wading around in the water. lee watched as she made a trip to the sand, collected a few starfish into the makeshift fold in her blouse and waded back into the water to throw the fishies that she had collected back into the ocean.

‘what are you doing’ shouted lee over the wind. ‘you can never save all of these starfish even if you stood here trying all day’ he laughed. with a smile on her face and a glint in her eye she said the following ‘i may not be able to help all of these starfish, or for even half of them for that matter, but (throwing one back into the water), i can help this one and this one and that one.’”

like dandelion i believe that if every person makes just a small change in their lives to consider the planet on which we live, we can grow in ways that nobody ever though possible.

as they saying goes “many small people, who in many small places do many small things, can alter the face of the world” :)

here today, gone tomorrow

2006-11-07T22:19:00.000+02:00

as the african queen made her way out of durban harbour, i was thrilled at the thought of getting up close and personal with a whale or two. my father and i had decided on a whim that a cruise in a sail boat would be a good way to spend our last day on the coast before returning to the hustle and bustle of everyday life. its sad for me to report that no whales were sighted and the pod of dolphins that we saw from a distance was so spooked by the idiot chasing them down that they didn’t hang around for long either.

our skipper and captain for the day was a dr j. gerard murphy. as the blurb on his best selling autobiography says: “Dr Gerard Murphy, a flamboyant Irishman, is married to Charlotte, and has two daughters, Sharon and Alexandra, and three grandchildren. He has eleven degrees and qualifications, including a Doctorate of Philosophy. A teacher by profession, he taught in the United Kingdom, and later became the headmaster of Marist Brothers College in Johannesburg. Thereafter he was involved in the upgrading of black teachers’ qualifications during the apartheid era. Now retired, he is the proud owner of a 60-foot yacht called “The African Queen” and takes charters out into the Indian Ocean every day to look for dolphins and whales.”

being a scuba-diver, i’ve been out on the big indian many a time. there is really nothing like the thrill of breaking through the surf with a rubber duck. the whine of the engines as the boat is lifted out of the water is one that is not easily forgotten. a few times on these outings we have spotted whales as they breached and dived and did the general things that whales get up to and i can attest to the mammalian connection there, when i say that it is always a sight worth any effort and one that prompts most people to cry out for joy :)

a dark side to life and my story there is on this day of 7/11, which curiously enough is also the name of a wide-spread supermarket chain in these parts and i’m sure elsewhere. anyway, as the wind billowed in the sails of a queen and we bobbed up and down with the huge swell brought on by a week of nasty weather, it became apparent that the whales are not around anymore.

as the minutes became hours without so much as fin or exhaling spray, dr murphy interrupts the silence with the following words. “two years ago, i said to all crew that came on-board ‘if you don’t see whales, i’ll give you your money back.’ today, i can’t say that, because its not true anymore. its the japanese. they wait for the whales to come here to calve and then take them. they say they shoot 20 000 per year. i think personally its more like 100 000.” to that he added that he had been to japan 10 times and that he’d seen people sell whale meat as dog food.

i’ve never been prone to becoming sea sick, which is very lucky, because both my mother and sister would have shown everybody their breakfast before we left the harbor, were they with us. at that moment though, my heart filled with such contempt, not for the japanese, but for all the freaking people on this planet who take it for granted, myself included, i almost chundered. yuk.

i have no way of knowing if what the good doctor said about the dog food scenario is true, and seeing as i’ve never been to japan, i won’t be biased by saying that the system of consumption there is wrong. personally i think that countries such as the united kingdom and mostly every country in europe where i have been, have a very wasteful culture that is so consumption driven as to be sickening as is my own country in a way.

but why kill whales? they are not elephants. i can see why culling elephants is necessary. i totally get that elephants can’t migrate because of man-made borders and thus trample the whole of africa to dust and desert, killing trees and wiping out a whole eco-system, including eventually themselves. thus shoot a few to save the race, but why kill whales who has ¾ of the world’s surface to roam. what reason could there possibly be other than greed and a refusal to adapt to a world in which whaling is not cool or even fucking legal.

readers in japan, i know i have you, so give me some insight into this matter. as for me, i will start the study. a sad day it would be indeed, if we no longer heard the song of those giants or if they no longer visited our shores. i say stop whaling, lift the shark nets which catches not only sharks, but dolphins and turtles and any other sea creature that just happens to swim by, cut the long lines, ban shark fin soup and humiliate in public and then lock up for life anybody who does not treasure the mother of us all : (

idealist. probably. hopefully the maya were right and our epoch ends in 2012, because sometimes i really hate the human race.

hypnosis

2006-11-03T17:13:00.000+02:00

i've been in ballito on the east coast of south africa since wednesday and have yet again come to the realisation that the country i live in still is one of the most breathtakingly beautiful places on earth. the blue of the indian ocean as it laps at our golden coast is my favorite colour, bringing back memories of places on some of these beaches where profound realisations in my life has taken place.

today i had another of those realisations. places don't mean a thing if you don't have anybody to share them with. its the same with money. i'm staying in a two storey penthouse with a private deck and jacuzzi, yet i'm miserable because i've got nobody to talk to. i came down to the sea with my parents, which is a lovely experience in itself. went to the aquarium in durban today. defs worth the visit. brilliant shark tank with brindel bass inside. the one is massive and weighs in at an astounding 200kgs. even better is that its only half grown. reminds me of a scuba dive i once did. i was doing my advanced course and we did what is called a 'big blue'. dropped off the continental shelf, we did a multilevel nitrox dive. down to 30m for 10 minutes, then 20 for ten and 5m to do a safety stop. thing is at 30m you still have about 40m of the big blue under you. profound and very scary at the same time. that day, i saw a bass on the ocean floor. at that distance it looked 1,5m long, which would make it twice the size in actuality. i've always had trouble grasping that site until today. truly amazing.

i know i should stop looking for somebody to share these things with. i used to dream of meeting a boy from a different place to take with on my adventures. to show this contrasting country that i love so much. someone who wouldn't take it for granted and in the process would make me realise the beauty of what i have. i thought i had found him and i think losing that idea above all else is what hurt me the most when my life took a different path yet again.

its ok though. somewhere there is a lid for this worn pot that is my life and as a good friend reminded me a while ago, i have to go through all the wrong ones, to find the one that'll fit.

i dream of a garden where the sun feathers my face as did your once eager kiss...........

tonight, tonight that crazy night, when the dead walk the earth looking for the light

2006-10-31T17:11:00.000+02:00

it was a night to remember. it was a night to forget. as one of the peeps said. what happens in zeplins, stays in zeplins. i think we freaked the canadian and american friends out again. sa's tuff ne'. then again, a place like zeplins is a bit twisted on the best of nights and that's why i felt right at home. i went as my own decomposing body and the costume was quite effective. whereever i went, i had alot of space around me, because i looked like a rotting corpse. i think at the end of the night, i smelt like one too. soo hot inside the club and it constantly felt like i was sweating big white droplets of base off my face. good party though as these dress-ups tend to be. big up to our make-up artist christine. brilliant job. the pumpkin didn't come out too shabby for a first try either :)

to a teacher in my dream

2006-10-23T22:32:00.000+02:00

it would be easy to say that i don't miss you. it would be easy to say that i'm better off. it would be easy to say that life goes on. saying things are always easy, but meaning them is a tad harder.

when i left for london in april, my head was full of dreams of things to come. my heart had a chocolaty pulse and i had a spring in my step. i arrived and for a while, it was good. as so often happens in these situations, the good didn't last and my hurt was apparent for all to see. a hurt that i'd never felt before. an emptyness so big that all the water in my body, thrice filtered through my eyes, could not fill it. nothing could

it would be easy to say that my life would have been better without. it would be easy to say that i didn't meet someone i had known in some way on a previous plain. it would be easy to say that i regret the things that happened. it would be easy to say, because i know those things to be lies and as i've mentioned, i'm good at lying.

no point in saying those things.

much harder to say is that i think about you every day. much harder to say that i wish you'd write. much harder to say that i know i'm wrong in wanting you. much harder to say, that in my screwed up way i l u. those three words i said too much, but not enough......

it must have been so funny, to see me unravel. to see me bawling in the street. in a way i'm glad to be here, far away from those faces. was i running again? who the fuck knows? when i left, i asked a silly thing, which hurt you. i'm sorry, because i'm doing it again. i'll ask one more time. don't forget. or rather, just remember that day at segesta.

hope you are happy. hope you are well. hope that one day, you will walk these shores and think of a love that could never be. i mean you no harm and am going to get on with my life, because i can't dream anymore. not about you.

i sometimes wonder if it was you, or the idea of you that had me entralled. i think it was a bit of both :)

ciao bello

boere beauty

2006-10-19T16:33:00.000+02:00

what a great idea to have a fashion shoot party as a house warming

alot of cake, he he, and clothing made for the most fun i've had all year

only in africa baby

its weird though. i recieved an email from one of the peeps that was missing at this party, due to her move to japan. her sentiment on south africa is exactly the same as mine. we both love it to bits, but there is something about first world living that is definitely appealing. for now though, i'm enjoying the people and having fun in the sun. lets leave the bitch for later.

Z-U-L-U: That's the way you say zulu

2006-10-11T21:29:00.000+02:00

as the full moon illuminates the sahara below, i find my soul floating above london and the things i left there. people's faces already fade into just another memory of places visited and as i'm pulled back to my body by a tear falling without grace from my right eye, i wonder if this decision will haunt me forever. the infamous "what if" resides there in my centre despite all efforts of joy and hope to banish it. I can feel africa as it glides 33000 feet under my bum. can feel its rythm and stealth as the realisation hits me that this chapter has closed.

one thing i hate about flying, besides the fact that people make me feel claustrophobic, is that i can't sleep in a sitting position. so i just stare out of the window, hoping for a glimpse of a monster on the wing, hoping that life will offer me a way out. nothing comes. nothing but the awe of an african sunrise as the moon sets into oblivion. i'm home. i'm petrified. i'm happy.

i laugh at our first impression of sa as our captain informs us that another airy has taken our parking spot. i love that i glide through customs (the only place on earth). i hate that the baggage takes forever, and as i make my way past hundreds of people the only thing i can think of is having a chance to smoke a ciggy before meeting my parents. no such luck, which is actually better. my mind reels. happy, sad, lonely, fullfilled.

i spot my mom as her face lights up. my dad takes a photo and i feel crap for not wanting him to. we say our hellos and get into the car and even though i've seen it all before, its like i'm actually seeing it again for the first time. its dryer than i thought it would be, but the rain will come and summer will make me sweat once again.

mamma afrika. it doesn't matter how far away we go, you are in our blood and you never leave us.

on arrival in pretoria i'm hopelessly surprised by all my friends. they shout and drum. the sound of the vuvuzele welcomes me home, and now i feel crap for my earlier aversion. these people, like so many others, have touched my life and as is apparent, in some way, i have touched theirs.

we eat, we drink, we are merry and as the sun sets and dandelion delivers me home, i litterally pass out from 50 hours without sleep and way too much substances in my system. yum.

i love my dad, my mom and my sis with all my heart and i hope that they know it. i know i can be such a bitch to them sometimes, but its a fact of life that we hurt the ones we love. we can't help it, because they are the only people we ever really trust and thats a scary notion. nevermind the bollocks, i love you all.

the world is our oyster only if we take the chance to crack the shell

good bye and good luck

2006-10-05T17:53:00.000+02:00

hurtling through the midland countryside on a gner train bound for london king’s cross, my mind is a complete blank, so to speak. today is thursday 5 october 2006 and two days hence i will be on my way to that country down south that gave me my name.
so far to travel in so little time. of course the days leading up to this event will be filled with many laboring tasks, with saying goodbye to my first love probably being the hardest.
sitting in this seat, traveling at high speed in relative comfort, with the option of charging my telephone & chatting online via the train’s wireless internet network, i can’t help but wonder how i’m going to adapt to sunny sa, where everything is two paces slower & therefore 3 steps behind. a place where people are more hung up on who did what to whom in days past than on how to survive & thrive in days to come.
it’s plainly obvious that if there is a place on this earth that i could match myself into our worldly jigsaw puzzle, i’ve not found it yet. i’d love to say that a space has been reserved for me in the country of my birth & deep down i do believe this to be true, yet i’ve never seen any hard proof of this other than what is in my heart.
a paradox, i know because in this grey, there seems to be so many small people who all yearn to be part of the bigger picture & who in their own way eventually do exactly that. i’m free here, in a sense. buy a ticket and you can go anywhere, without much effort. live the life you want for the price of a pound & the loneliness in your heart. down south on the other hand, i can certainly expect love from the people who have touched me, but there is no certainty if this love is for the person i am in their minds, or a love for the real me. i suppose that people can’t know me, if they don’t have my permission, which is something that is rarely granted.
what am i saying?
am i saying that back home i have love & support, with a way of life that people expect as the price to pay for that?
am i saying that here and in most western countries, i can live the life i want, with a lack of much needed love and support as the price?
how do you weigh these extremes up against each other? is there a middle ground in existence somewhere?
every fiber of my being want to be excited about the RSA. wants to believe that a life there could be just as ‘easy’, albeit extremely hard on those shores, yet my resolve crumbles as soon as i read of millions of rand wasted on name changes. of corruption, rape, murder, decay, squalor. i don’t want to become desensitized against those things, because they are wrong and shouldn’t be such a big part of every day life that people get used to them. i don’t want to see a child begging on the street and not feel anything. this is the life in south africa. the great rainbow melting pot, where unparalleled beauty is balanced out by people’s hate for one another.

i’m taking this much harder than the last time around. no question that its because this time, this move is for good. or is it? sure, i can’t come back to work in the uk, and i don’t see myself doing that in the near future either, yet there are many ways to skin an artichoke and many places to run and hide. i know, i’ve been told a million times that if you run, you’ll be doing it for the rest of your life, but for the first time in my life, i can’t stand the thought of going home. i’m ashamed of that. ashamed of being ashamed of my country. ask anyone that knows me, and they will tell you, i’ve always been fiercly patriotic. proud to be african. now with my return imminent, i wonder if i’ve not always been in love with the potential country south africa could be and not really with the africa that it truly is today. kind of like those people back home with me.

are our pretenses in this life, the only real way to survive?

you, me and the sea

2006-10-01T21:31:00.000+02:00

as i sat on the train yesterday on my way to amie in rotherham, i had the profound realisation that i have serious unfinished business in this country. that the one thing i wanted here, my reason for coming here is the one thing i didn't fully get and the one thing i still want more than anything else. you know there is something wrong when you refer to a person as a thing. especially if that person is somebody you love.

my sister's visit also made me realise that there are so many things in london and the rest of the uk that i'd not experienced. that i'm going to miss. that i don't really want to go back to south africa, just yet. on the other hand it also made me realise that i probably need to go and face the things that i've been running away from, before i can truly be happy and get on with my life.

the truth is that i'm seriously afraid of what lies in store for me when i get off that airplane on sunday. that at the moment i'm considering just not going. that the one thing that will probably set me free, is going to be the hardest thing i will ever do in my life. nothing worth while is ever easy i always say, but when push comes to shove, i jump at the easy way out. jump at not having to face the truth.

for now though, i'm sat in a heated house with an old friend watching x-factor for the first time. not a fan : ) for now, i'm safe in a world that accepts me as the gay man i am. a place where i might have been alone, might have been hungry, depressed, whatever, but where i never felt that my sexuality would get in the way of anything. for now, i'm ok and even though i don't have those big arms to wrap around me, i'm fine. all i can hope is that one day i can feel as safe with somebody else in the place that i was born. until then, i'm keeping my options open....

babby daddy's

2006-09-17T02:36:00.000+02:00

i could hear jake shears sing 'come on, come on - where is your love, won't you give me your love' a few hours ago. it was truly beautiful, so i had to walk away. i didn't have a ticket for the concert and i was supposed to be working, so being outside was painful.

come to think of it, that was probably the supidist thing i've ever done. i should have stayed and listened. suppose that the fantacy for me needs to be more real. if the person is there, i wan't to see them. i hear them enough on tv. not that i'm saying i could ever get enough of the scissor sisters.

i'd like to be the one to throw that whole band off of bloukrans bridge. can you say 'bungee' in a thighfitting leather outfit. that would be my ulitmate goal if i didn't get in my own way so much. to see people's reaction to taking such a leap of faith, and many like it.

i did my last night of flyering tonight. gladly sad that's over. meeting people and then losing them again. its like there's a whole world of 'i wonder how they're doing's out there. then again, some of them stick. ever wonder why some glue and others just slip back into infinity?

friday afternoon, i saw a guy i haven't seen since my graduation from uni. polish lukazs, as he's affectionately known studied the same thing i did. i was on my lunch break walking with a friend when i hear the words 'i don't believe it' to my left. i turn and think 'i don't either....' how random that the place i'd see this person again, would be king's cross, london on my way to boots, the day after my birthday??

life is good even if its not always easy

: )

14 September 1982

2006-09-14T19:19:00.000+02:00

if you had asked me ten years ago where i'd be today, i would probably not have said london. then again i can't remember what i did ten years ago today.

it seems like time goes by so much quicker with every passing year. strange too that i wasn't blessed with the memory of an elephant, which is something i would have liked to have. i suppose that i've fried my brain in some ways, so things that happened, even a year ago leave my mind, until by some chance i'm reminded of them.

such was the case last night as cj downloaded the photos on his camera onto my computer for processing and these pics cropped up.
this was me precisely one year ago, give or take a few hours and a couple of shot of absinth, i think.

funny that i should spend this day, in almost the same spot, two years and a world of travels apart. in the time that has passed between these two dates, i've visited 8 new countries, had two summers in one year, fallen madly in love, cried my heart out because of the former, had a nervous breakdown on a foresty mountain in austria, drank in total about a bottle of real absinth (not all at once, thank the stars), opened up to the buddhist way of living which is totally contrasting to the former, quit smoking and then started again a month later (i know, i know, the 5 precepts), been happy, been sad, been suicidal, been at peace.

a year has gone by since my last birthday and when i look back on it, i've done lots of shit in that time. it doesn't feel like all those things were done in 365 days, but, hey i'm jaded.

if there is one thing i would hope to achieve in the next 365 days, it would be to find peace with the people i love the most. to find my place in the country i call home, even if that means leaving it again, next year.

to all those who celebrate their happy day on this day, i wish you many returns, be they happy or sad, for without one we cannot define the other.
i was born 24 years ago at 01:05 south africa time in a subburb of joburg, called germiston and this year i'm glad for it : )

little miss sunshine

2006-09-11T23:57:00.000+02:00

imagine not talking for 9 months. only communicating via the written word. this is central to one of the characters in the movie little miss sunshine. watched it tonight with some friends. beautiful.....

Maraai

2006-09-06T23:54:00.000+02:00

my sis and i. there's nobody on earth who can make me laugh as hard as she does. love her for it. she's coming for a visit to london on the 22nd. can't wait. haven't seen her since april and really miss her.

solitude

2006-09-05T01:19:00.000+02:00

its 00:15 and i can't sleep. might have been the coffee i drank about two hours ago or greenday singing in my head. i can't decide.

a pretty song by will young. well, part of it.

who am i to tell you
that i would never let you down
that no-one will ever love you
half as much as i do now
who am i to tell you
i'll always be there when you fall

i wouldn't be myself at all....

i've been thinking about sergio alot lately. we've kinda lost touch over the past few weeks, which in a sense is probably better for the both of us, but still makes me sad. i've started planning my return to south africa and have decided on a target date, which may or may not be realistic, but i had to do it eventually.

10 october 2006, will hopefully be the end of this chapter and the beginning of a better one. trouble is, i have to pack up and say goodbye again. this time for good to some people and things, i don't necessarily want to lose. lets face it, the chances of me seeing some of these people again are remote, if not zero. never say never, i know, but the world is a big place, with alot going on and people lose each other. i suppose i'll have to give out my email address to the left and the right.

i've been moving around for more than three years now. it started in my last year of university. i'd lived in one place for three years. the last year i moved to another, which was relatively stable. then i moved back to secunda for a few months, of which i travelled around mpumalanga most of the time, working. after that came london for 6 months, then mpumalanga and its remote places again. back to london and now hopefully, finally back to pretoria for a few more years. at the rate i'm going i'll be ready to leave again by next year april.

i'm scared of winter. i haven't had a proper winter in two years. dread the thought of it, so maybe when the leaves start falling again, i'll be off to another warm place. on the other hand, maybe i need the seasonal death, to bring me back to life. rising from the ashes of winter to become the true phoenix i am. he he.

all i know, is that i'm tired of running. tired of alone. tired of not having someone to love.

"Solitude, the feeling and knowledge that one is alone, alienated from the world and oneself-is not an exclusively Mexican characteristic. All men, at some moment in their lives feel themselves to be alone. And they are. To live is to be seperated from what we were in order to approach what we are going to be in the future. Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition." ~ Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude

there's a glow. a light

2006-09-04T18:23:00.000+02:00

the world is a funny place. our lives revolve around people who we don’t know. they determine who we are and who we become even though we can never really know anybody like we do ourselves. i don’t really know myself either, so who is there to know in this lifetime.

people are like mirrors. if not for others, how could we ever really know who we are because in order to judge our own existence and its importance we need to see ourselves through people? i’ve lived with the illusion that i don’t need other people to be for a very long time. i am, because i am, but how do i know that I am if not through others. how do I know who i am, if not through the eyes of other people? and when others don’t like what they see, how should that reflect on me?

i’ve met some truly astounding individuals throughout my travels on this plain of existence. people who have challenged every fibre of my existence and have inspired me to become something more. to not just accept the things that life throw my way with resignation, but to stand up for what i believe to be true.

i’m going back to South Africa, where my future is even less certain than the one that faces me over here. in a sense that really scares me, but i also know that over there i have a support system. people who love me and a country i know. a place where i am rooted and where i can breathe. even if i’m lonely, at least it’ll be in a beautiful place.

the only difference between me and a madman, is that i'm not mad

2006-08-26T03:58:00.000+02:00

SALVADOR DALI

raindrops

2006-08-23T20:19:00.000+02:00

naughty errands after work kept me away from the house this afternoon. i finally emerge from the wormhole underground and walk home with my face turned up to the pounding of kamikaze teardrops falling from the darkening sky.

the walk drenches my dry clean only jacket as the world around me has a smiling drink. i open the gate with the revelation that my house key resides with my laundry. no-ones home :)

a few phonecalls later i discover an open window in the concervatory which looks suspiciously small. luckily i've lost weight.

the things we do to make ourselves comfy can astound. squeeze. hehehehehehehehehe.
its been a long time since i've been caught in the rain. was a lovely experience.

shut your eyes

2006-08-22T23:57:00.000+02:00

shut your eyes and think of somewhere
somewhere cold and caked in snow
by the fire we break the quiet
and learn to wear each other well
and when the worrying starts to hurt
and the world feels like graves of dirt
just close your eyes until
you can imagine the place
yeah our secret space at will
shut your eyes i'll spin the big chair
and you'll feel dizzy light and free
and falling gently on the cushion
you can come and sing to me
shut your eyes and sing to me

dreams of a life less ordinary

2006-08-22T23:37:00.000+02:00

thoughts of south africa keep me away from the land of dreams tonight. the clock does not wait for me or any on this earth & in 6 hours i have to rise again to the occasion of my work.

i find that if i have something on my mind as big as the next stage of my human evolution, the lady there won’t don her nightgown and i am left with my thoughts of what might come.

my dad is an insomniac. he has no trouble with being awake most of the time. then again, he’s a good napper. a habit, they say of highly effective people. i on the other hand did not have trouble sleeping until i ventured to these far shores. muddled patterns of food and dreams conspire to keep me awake when i don’t need it & make my lids heavy when they need to be light. after a while the total exhaustion just stops getting to you.

i have to have another hepatitis injection today. they hurt like hell, but i’m sure that not being vaccinated might hurt more down the line. needles don’t really scare me anymore. i’ve been poked and prodded in more ways and places than i care to admit, so its just routine really. don’t think that anything can hurt as much as a nipple piercing anyway. actually there is one that hurts more, but don’t ask me silly questions and i won’t tell you silly lies :)

ahh, the comfort of camomile tea, so early in the morning. lets see if neverland will open its gates.....

that was 01:00 this morning, and quiet camomile did her job, for as soon as i put down my pen and head, she persuaded the guards to unlock the gates. getting up this morning was a different story though. eish is the only word i can come up with for how i felt.

i was nodding off at work, so when lunch time came i greeted being outside with a smile and spring in my step. met lee lee for a bit of r&r on the stomach. we made our way to soho, and lo and behold an unclaimed £10 note, which proceded to pay for our lunch. maoz vegetarian for me and itsu sushi for lee. made both our days, but did nothing for my state of fatigue, seeing as my stomach was so heavy that my eyes were drawn down with it into the abyss. i’m still full. thank you, to whoever paid. he he.

worker ant

2006-08-17T19:57:00.000+02:00

after an absence of almost a month, i have once again joined the world of the working.

donning one of my never worn suite, i set out this morning for the start of a three week stint at the royal society of medicine. data entry is the name of the game, and given my extensive experience on the subject, i felt right at home.

its strange. when you don't work, and sit around all day, you start to think "man, i'm useless." after some more sitting around, you start to believe "omg, i'm actually useless and there is nothing in this world that i'm good at, so i might as well just end it all."

agreed, that not all people would go to such lenghts, or sit still for that long, but i had the luxury or shall we rather say the curse, of a four week "holiday" in which i did minimal work. lets just say, i'm glad to be useful again :) only shit is that i only really get paid in two week's time. so it goes.

leo child

2006-08-13T14:33:00.000+02:00

happy birthday amie. hope you have a brilliant year in which your dreams come true.

i still remember the first time i saw you. you were the bad girl. i was the aspiring bad boy. smoking a cig on the steps outside the theatre where i was working, your hair preceded your presence, like the hair of so many leo children.

the ride since then has been full of love, hurt, screaming, dancing and ultimately lots of booze :) you're a good friend whom i've always been able to talk to. love ya lots.

mwah

Love on the Dancefloor

2006-08-11T15:52:00.000+02:00

Many small people who in many small places do many small things, can alter the face of the world

One would be hard pressed to find a place on earth where this statement, painted on the remains of the Berlin wall, rings more true. This country has defied the world, its own people and many like them. It wears the scars of murder, decay and separation with humble indifference, much like a veteran of war would. Not one to forget the mistakes of the past, Germany in its wisdom knows that dwelling on them, is no way to secure a brighter future and thus invites one and all to feel the love.

I first heard about the Berlin Love Parade at the confused age of 16. Growing up in a small town in what used to be called the South Eastern Transvaal, I could only wish that one day things would change. Now, 8 years later I am making my way past Zoologischer Garten towards Strabe des 17. Juni with a sense of anticipation and just a touch of anxiety, for today the love will feel me.

If you have ever had the pleasure of walking around TierGarten in Berlin you will know that calling it big, would be a gross understatement. Covering a massive 412 acres, it gives a new meaning to the phrase “A stroll in the park”. Suffice to say that Strabe des 17 Juni, which cuts in length straight through the garden centre, is the opposite of short and in that regard arguably the best place in the world to host the mamma of all street parties that is Liebe Parade.

The parade dates back to the fall of the Wall in 1989. Communism in Germany was dead and to celebrate, 350 punters made their way to the Victory Column to share the love with anybody that was interested. Turns out that Commercialism was one of the takers and over the years it has brought more than a million revelers annually to this festival of togetherness. Love Parade 2006 would be no different and given a two year resting period, probably better in some ways.

Imagine 1.2 million people gathered together. Imagine the sights, the sound and smell. Imagine the feeling of humans literally rubbing off on you as you struggle to keep your balance. Imagine whistles, horns, screams and shouts mixed with vibrations pulsing from every corner of Earth. Dressed up or down, every person there has two things in common. They are all in awe and if only for a while, they all feel a bit lost. Their lives are highjacked by the Techno, Trance and House Music fed to them by DJ’s such as Tiesto and Paul van Dyk and they walk away, forever changed because this is a party that won’t be ignored.

A shock of color hits me like a falling wall as the world opens on a tree lined avenue. People are flocking towards the Victory Column in the distance, a golden angel precariously perched at its top. Over 30 mobile sound systems from all corners of our planet start their engines. The bass is overpowering, yet strangely inviting. I don a Vodka Redbull and Marlboro Filter as the music lures my group of friends into a slithering mass of people. I’m in another world, on another planet and I’m not alone.

My mind has a hard time keeping up with my senses. Every corner of my eyes is filled with new things to stare at. My movements are driven by the constant bass pulsing from hundreds of speakers. Nothing else exists. We dance well into the night and as the sound of the ocean finally turns the page on this day of days, its like waking from the best dream you have ever had. You can’t help but smile, because for a second anything was possible.

What is it about Germany that makes it cool? Is it the delicious Beer, the gorgeous men, the harsh language, fast cars, faster trains or maybe the fact that all public dustbins are marked for recycling? It could be the beauty of the landscape or the sun filled summer days spent dancing under the sky.
Upon reflection, I think it has to be the people. Forceful, liberal, stern yet friendly, they remind me in some ways of my parents. In other ways of the person I would like to be. Awake, yet never afraid to dream.

Einstein said that “Once we accept our limits, we go beyond them”. It looks like some people listened.

run weasel run

2006-08-11T14:19:00.000+02:00

i've always been surrounded by strong people. i was born to some, others just walked into my life. feelings of inferiority subsequently followed.

i know that through these people's eyes, i represent something that they like or maybe even love, but i don't think they know, that even though i love all of them, they sometimes make me feel crap about myself.

always the dreamers, the go-getters, the people who survive, i've stood in awe of their many accomplishments over life and adversity and seen myself fade away in comparison. fate knew that these people would challenge every fibre of my being and arranged a meeting.

i'm jobless, homeless, soulless and i don't know what to do. i don't know where to turn. i'm lost and confused and i feel foolish and dumb, because i don't have the answers to my own life. i'm a complete mess.

i saw a friend yesterday from way back when. that was good, to be attached to my roots in some way. with it, memories of where i've been and what i've done came flooding back, making things better and worse at the same time.

when i look back on it now, the people that i've adored the most, the people that i've been addicted to, the people that i will love until the end of my life and beyond, has always made me feel crap about me. how random is that? how fucked up is that? these are the beings i so want to be. i'm weak without them. i'm nothing without these people and seeing as none of them are ever there, i'm just weak. naked and alone with nowhere to go. fuckkkkk

ok, now that she had her chance, let me have a go. you have to forgive the bitch in my head. she's a bit of a doomsday devil. even though the things she says might be true in some twisted way, i could never take those people out of my world or reality. people are sent to us, to learn. we learn from them, they learn from us and even though i feel weak, i know i'm not. i know i'll turn around one day and say enough. when that will be, i don't know and that really scares me, because it feels like it gets harder with every day that goes by.

i'm in a really bad state at the moment and even though alot of people here have noticed, none of them can really do anything about it. run, run, run, run. my thoughts on running are that you only do it, when something is chasing you. what is chasing me? monsters in that closet i so sluttily jumped out of. if only i'd turn around, faced them and locked the door forever. instead i jumped and ran, letting them out to follow me to the ends of the earth and back. shit.

where do we go from here?

holy heartburn

2006-08-08T17:02:00.000+02:00

suffering like no other. i'm having the worst bout of heartburn i've ever had in my life. damn you soya milk.

a waking life

2006-08-07T02:49:00.000+02:00

i should be sleeping. i should be dreaming, and in a while i will be, but for now i sit in a dark sleeping house, smoking a ciggarette.

i've become a daysleeper. sitting up until 4am, i numb myself with music, the great communicator. there are so many things i would love to do, yet...

einstein said that once we accept our limits, we go beyond them. where do i start? yet sometimes i feel limitless. its there, scratching at the back of my skull, just waiting to be set free. the notion that anything is possible in this life. it drives me crazy, for i am indecisive and so the notion stays there, scrathing its nails away.

dreams are sometimes just that, a dream. nothing more, nothing less. just a momentary escape from this reality. and when you realise its nature, you find yourself feeling foolish, because you know that the only thing stopping you from living a dream, is you.

Cruise the world or....................

2006-08-02T17:44:00.000+02:00

the time has come. its august and i'm planning my escape. again.

the last few weeks since berlin, has been spent in a daze, brought on by the lack of daytime work. ah, i know, i could have tried harder, but sitting on your arse is so much easier, yet ultimately non-rewarding.

i have since aquired a contact number for a prestigeous cruise line operater and am twisting and turning as to which path to take. had a conversation yesterday with a friend, who said that worrying about such things don't achieve anything. true that may be, but i feel like i'm wasting my time in this country.

its a fact that i've been running away from my life back home. the uk has been a place to run to, because i had the visa and up until recently there was another reason for being here. a big motivator in my coming back here, was sergio sardo. a brilliant boy, who stole my heart.

ah, but in all cases of running away, the past and your demons are never far behind, so when i realised what the thief had done, i made a deal with fate. sergio could have a piece of my heart for all eternity and in exchange i would bow out and regain my sanity. it came to pass and as the river of tears dried up and the aching went away, so did my friendship. we no longer talked for hours as we once did. instead, we acted like nothing had happened, like our lives were never intertwined. i guess that is the price we all pay for love. we would risk losing something of beauty in the persuit of having it for ourselves.

so, now i'm sitting before a fork in the road. to the right we have a cruise ship adventure, with entry fees and lots of red tape. to the left we have the straight and narrow way home, to my dog, my family, my friends, the country i love and cherish, the prospect of work.

i don't know. i know what the sensible thing to do would be, but my senses lie more often than not. i have the opportunity now, to do something i've always wanted to do, yet i'm afraid. afraid of being uncomfortable, which is stupid, because since i left those arms, that is all i have felt. these decision need to be made. soon. fack

pina colade

2006-07-23T03:52:00.000+02:00

i'm drunk :)

british barbeque

2006-07-22T02:06:00.000+02:00

ok, so i know i've been a bad blogger lately. a fact i subscribe to the heatwave that has been terrorising this part of the world since july joined the party. you know the type. it envelopes every living thing, beckoning all available moisture from one's body, like a flame does a moth. melting in a pool of my own bodily fluids, the last thing on my mind is blogging, especially since internet access for me at the moment is smack in the middle of hell ie. a conservatory. don't see the point of that one. scorching in summer and freezing in winter, the only thing its good for is drying laundery and listening to rain rap on the roof.
in addition tom robbins and daniel reid both have a hand in my tardiness, seeing as their writing has kept me in a state of oblivion to the rest of the universe. ah the joys of a good book.

tis true that the heat is making me glow, but so is the memory of my recent flight of fancy to that city of cities, berlin. truly inspiring and a subject i do not wish to dwell on in this post, seeing as i am busy writing my memoirs of the whole experience. i am including some pictures for all to drool over in the mean time. finding it very hard to put the experience in words i.e. the delay, but fear not, for ice pack on head and amarula in hand, the guts will spill on that parade of love that took my breath away :)

jitterbug perfume

2006-07-14T20:49:00.000+02:00

berlin is fucking awesome. my favourite city in the world, barring cape town from the competition and obviously only including the ones i've visited. more on that and other tidbits in due time. i'm the queen of the world!!!!

cannons and corpses

2006-07-09T23:26:00.000+02:00

my fingers glide over this keyboard. guess i have my highschool teacher to thank for that. drumming into your brain. asdf jkl; wonder who came up with this sequence. they say i can type at around 50 words per minute whilst copying. if typing on my own accord, it seems considerably slower.

i wonder if i could maybe have been a pirate in a former life. would have made a good pirate. would have loved all the other boy pirates. especially if they looked like captain jack sparrow, or my heart grieves to admit it, the chap who's name i never remember, played by prettier than most, orlando.

seamonsters, gold, the open seas with no body to govern. cannons. canibals. a world to explore with endlessly possible an mostly unknown ways to die. wonder if i could have been a girl pirate. i've definitely been a girl in a former life.

had my first real lucid dream this morning. preceded by a dream of drowning. had had to stay up for something scary. tried to sleep the four hours alotted me, to no avail. the glas house pelted by infrequent raindrops and the flowers of camomile bid me to neverland where i almost drowned. the house flooded. there was someone from work. 4:12 a missed call. the door opens. cj's gost? he tells me he has to go through heathrow. What? where to? to heathrow for a pressie from cold and sunny south africa. wtf? shower and lots of coffee.

said scary event was embarrasing and sad :( prompted verbal vomit. strangely enough i feel so much better. i'm sorry. no harm intended. deleted it once. thought about doing it again. decided to write about something else instead. there's more to me

a bike ride brings me home in the quiet morning. the bedding on my naked body wrappes me in the safest place for me. somwhere far away from this reality. i am transported to the scene. standing under a grey sky i wait for someone to come. a girl falls out of a cyberdog catalogue and invites me for a walk. i feel like i'm climbing one of frisco's hills. my phone rings. the number starts with 88. dad enquires to my well being. as i describe a dozen swimming pools flanked by a sea on the horizon, i realise that i'm not on earth. my spirit returns to its confused shell. the dream is over and i feel fine. for the first time in over a month i feel fine. i love you mr depp

YOU

2006-07-09T15:06:00.000+02:00

i don't know what to do. i don't know what to feel. i don't know if i feel. i don't know if i don't feel.

you. you made me feel alive. i hate you. i love you. i hate that i love you. i hate that i hate loving you. i gave up. you let me. every time i look at you, i hurt. every time i look away i hurt even more.

i'm used to being alone. was used to being alone. was used to not loving. was used to not needing to. you changed that. you showed me what i was missing. i ran away. you let me.

i smoke cause i know it hurts you. want you to feel like i do. but you don't. i hate you for pretending things are right. hate you for pretending nothing happened. hate you for not screaming at me. hate you for not hitting me in the face and telling me i'm shit. hate you for giving up. i fucking hate crying about YOU.

all this hate is eating me up inside. i don't eat. i dream about drowning. i've become a zombie. a car almost hit me the other day. i wish it had. the pain would remind me that i am alive. i don't live, i just exist.

boys like me. i don't see them. the ones i make an effort with, can see that i'm not there. down the rabbit hole alice goes, where she'l end up, only the mad hatter know.

i'm cool with not touching you. i'm cool with not kissing you. but i so miss talking to you. you were my only friend, and you left me alone. alone in this god forsaken place. there is evil here. evil so old and disguised that people don't even notice it.

when i look into your eyes there nothing there to see. nothing but my own mistakes staring back at me...........................................................................................
!
!
O
!
/ \

walking the line of life

2006-06-27T21:33:00.000+02:00

ok i might have been a bit hasty with the previous post. sure i feel trapped, but its not the blog’s fault. the blog has been nothing but a friend to me since time immebloggerral.

strange as it may seem, i do feel trapped in my skin though, and the blog, an obvious reflection of me at any particular moment, is like a mirror. as with everybody on earth, there are times in my life that i don’t like looking in the mirror of myself for fear of what will be glaring back at me.

“insanity, is that you my old friend?” “what? you’ve changed your name?” “reality! well that’s a stupid name if ever i’ve heard one. you could at the very least have consulted a dictionary, before.... oh, but wait. i get what you are getting at. you are saying that most realists are insane and the insane are such because they are too real. interesting conclusion. do you think its true?”

the sentient being that is me has been walking with a very thin line between my feet for a few years. divided, in most if not every sense, i am both insanely real, or really insane. thinking about it, i’ve realised that this state of affair is, for lack of a better word, ok. i’m not completely insane, nor am i completely real, even though from time to time the line becomes a bit blurry and i stray away into one of the realms that lay to either side of it.

such has been the case over the last, oh shall we say, 6 or 7 months. love, what is up with that? holy shit, the big L is a force to be reckoned with. i’ve never been so certifiably insane in my life. and the most insane part of the insanity, was and maybe in a teensy, weensy little bit of a way, still is, that the reality of the situation was a clear as day. i could see it, but for the first time in my life, i paid it no heed. for a while at least. that’s probably the most dangerous thing about it. you couldn’t give a shit about anything other than, i cringe at the word, LOVE.

oh, but in my case, reality never really leaves. it might slam the front door in a disgruntled display of being stabbed in the back, but will hover and peep through the window awaiting the moment to strike back in revenge. such a little bugger, aint he?

and so he bided his time and let me have my little folly of what, at least for me, was and still in a not such a teensy, weensy little bit of a way is, my first ever experience with the insanity that some call LOVE. fuck, its like nails on a black board.

i quote from THE FITH MOUNTAIN by PAULO COELHO:
“Since the Israelite had come into her life; everything had changed. Even poverty was easier to bear, for that foreigner had awakened something she had never felt: love. When her son had fallen ill, she had fought the entire neighborhood so he could remain in her house.

She knew that to him the Lord was more important than anything that took place beneath the sky. She was aware that it was a dream impossible of fulfillment, for the man before her could go away at any moment, shed Jezebel’s blood, and never return to tell of what had happened.

Even so, she would go on loving him, because for the first time in her life, she knew freedom. She could love him, even if he never knew; she did not need his permission to miss him, to think of him every moment of the day, to await him for the evening meal, and to worry about the plots that people could be weaving against the foreigner.

This was freedom: to feel what the heart desired, with no thought to the opinion of the rest”

i’ve tasted that freedom, and the thought of losing it, almost erased that line that i so precariously keep between these two feet of mine, but i’ve realised that i don’t need to lose it, for i will always love my first love, even if he’s being at bit of an ass at the moment. the reason for which i also understand. i think, i hope, i dream that he tasted a bit of that freedom too. it may not have been the first time for him, and therefore not so intense, but.......

ok enough of , i won’t even say it, cause reality is glaring at me. until the next folly. as the afrikaans say “tot siens”. not goodbye. instead “until i see you again”
love, reality, insanity:)

2006-06-26T19:12:00.000+02:00

this used to be escape.

now its entrapment

sjokolade met 'n backdrop

2006-06-19T13:58:00.000+02:00

chocolate martini - the drink of the gods. at least the gay ones.

marilu introduced me to this delectable delicacy. funily enough, i don't think i've ever had one with her????:?

i popped the proverbial cherry or cacao bean, however you wanna swing, in tribecca cafe' pretoria. a headstrong mix of sensual delight, its flavour and texture seems more chocolate than alcoholic beverage.

my first fix on these far away shores however comprised a different look. clear as crystal, the sweet of sweets' presence only becomes apparent upon first sippage. made with vodka, martini and creme de cacao, and if dramatic, powdered chocolate for effect, it enters your mouth and goes straigth to your loins. can you stay orgasmo de liquide?

3 cheers and alot of clean undies:)

vlad the impaler - or not

2006-06-19T13:51:00.000+02:00

brighton. pretty city. its weird, i've been out of london, for not even a day and i already feel better about me, life, the uk. my lungs don't hurt as much and my nose, oh my glorious nose.

decided to stay the night. very impulsive, which according to the signature analysis i did on the pier today, is only an occasional thing with me.

just met a guy from moscow. his name is vladimir and he lives two stops away from me on the jubilee line. he's very drunk and way too friendly. the perks of travelling alone. he he. truthfully his friend is way more appealing yet strangely non-conversational. whatever.

it was good to be in the sun today. almost fell asleep on the beach. wish i'd brought my cossy. the water isn't mozambique, but definitely not cape town either, so swimming would have been good. who knows maybe tomorrow i'll strip down to my undies. probably not though. he eh

is that a pebble in my shoe?

2006-06-19T13:30:00.000+02:00

pebble beaches are strange. they seem almost manmade in a way. i've alwyas been used to white sand, that never ends. by 2pm you don't dare walk on them without shoes, for blisters you will burn.

the sound of humans outweigh the faint rustle of water on rock. back home the ocean heeds no other. usually because there aren't that much people. places where you find yourself, because there is nobody else to find. i miss those beaches, where i watched as the sun unlocks heaven. a billion stars pulsing their light into forever, gradually giving way to the spectrum of colour that culminates in the chosen blue reflection of above. hearing angels sing as the sun says "goeie more suid afrika. 'n nuwe dag begin en ek gaan jou brand to jy braai"

i've never been one for big crowds. a parody i know, because over here that is all there is. masses upon masses of people, searching for a place to call home. why am i here? many reasons could be sighted, none of them truly compelling.

strange, that despite my fear and loathing of the human race, i can't help but be facinated. the sheer volume of it. offering so much diversity within itself inspite of the constant base of underlying truths across its expanse.

we are never satisfied with what we're given, for in our ever changing world a new day has the potential to bring us something better. so instead of liking what is there we strive to improve it, until.....?

a lesson i've learnt in the last few months is that you can never make things happen if they were not meant to happen, which gives power to a divine force. a force i'm not necessarily ready or willing to believe in. lack of control. maybe that's the beginning of all our fears. not being in control.

Wonderwall - Oasis

2006-06-17T12:36:00.000+02:00

"today is gonna be the day
that they're gonna throw it back to you
by now you should've somehow
realised what you gotta do
i don't believe that anybody
feels the way i do about you now

backbeat the word is on the street
that the fire in your heart is out
i'm sure you've heard it all before
but you never really had a doubt
i don't believe that anybody feels
the way i do about you now

and all the roads we have to walk are winding
and all the lights that lead us there are blinding
there are many things that i would
like to say to you
but i don't know how

because maybe
you're gonna be the one that save me?
and after all
you're my wonderwall

today was gonna be the day
but they'll never throw it back to you
by now you should've somehow
realised what you're not to do
i don't believe that anybody
feels the way i do
about you now

all the roads that lead you there are winding
all the lights that light the way are blinding
there are many things that i would like to say to you
but i don't know how

i said maybe
you're gonna be the one who saves me?
and after all
you're my wonderwall

i said maybe
you're gonna be the one who saves me?
and after all
you're my wonderwall

i said maybe
you're gonna be the one that saves me
you're gonna be the one that saves me
you're gonna be the one that saves me"

has always been my fav song by oasis
and now.....
a door has been opened, a key unlocks
life will never be the same
and even though its sad to think that it won't last forever
at least it was had
it really is better to have loved and lost.....

you've got the freedom to choose, you'd better make the right move

2006-06-14T19:19:00.000+02:00

i used to believe in god. used to believe that he came down from heaven to become one of us. to feel our pain and show us how to be humble in the face of adversity. used to believe that if i ask hard enough, anything would be possible. so i spent hours on my knees praying. praying to wake up and be different. praying that he give me a sign that i was ok. praying to just stay asleep.

every morning i would open my eyes and for a second believe that things were right, feeling like i was floating on a cloud, finally dead and gone out of this world. i truly thought that the only way i would ever be happy was to not be. these were the days before i had come to terms with my life, our lives, this life. before i had taken a gun and put it to my head.

i've spent alot of time thinking about why i did not take my life on that day, about why ending it was so much more difficult than i thought it would be. weighed it up on the scales of my being. was i a coward, was i brave or in a sense guided by something bigger? is this sad way of life, a way of hiding? i still don't know, and shouldn't care, but at times like these, when i relapse into those days of limbo, memories of that day haunt like the bad ones are bound to do.

i hate this, but i can't stop. i can't stop feeling my heart's despair no matter how hard i try. "ignore it, it'll go away" reason says, but reason lies. reason my old friend has lied to me all my life. reason it out, analyse, disect, because there has to be an answer to this madness. has to be a reason, so reason says. what if there isn't? what then? all of this with no reason? what's the point?

"how can you expect somebody else to love you, if you don't even love yourself" she said on a hill one day. so true it hurts, so true its not reasonable, so true its not fair, so true its not right. looking for a way out, looking for someone to help, looking for a key that would set me free, to fly and be. just be in this skin.

i thought i'd found it, or if not it, something like it. i know i did.

feeling, for the first time in my existence and now, just not.

que sera sera

2006-06-12T01:10:00.000+02:00

whatever will be, will be. the future's not ours to see. que sera sera. 'n soentjie vir marilu for her comment. ek het knoffel brood, slaai en steak gee"et. kom ons se^ so "my kop was seer die volgende oggend" bietjie te veel van alles, veral steak. it was my first since i left south-africa, and to tell you the truth, i felt bad after eating it.

i've been following a mostly vegitarian diee"et over the last month, and in confidence,my forever unstable belly is purring like a kitten. most days. they say virgo childrend worry to much, that's why they always have upset stomachs. and to anonymous

i went to my first roller-disco tonight. it was different and lovely and afforded me the chance to rollerblade on a smooth surface, in over 3 years. i used to play roller-hockey in highscool, which back then, was one of the coolest things to do. i smoked, it was the perfect place to be. i busted my chin into a brick wall, still have the scar, i had cement burns everywhere. blisters on my feet for months. black and blue and sometimes purple, yellow and green. these colours will keep you entertained, while nursing your ego and the bruise left by a hollow hard plastic rubber ball, that hits you in the butt, balls or brain at almost a hundred miles an hour. if that's not cool, nothing is. i was even on tv :(

come on

2006-06-09T23:35:00.000+02:00

first night with a load of my friends in agesssssssssss. loving every second. feeling so much better. things make sense just because they don't make sense. its loud, its in your face, its a braai!!!!!! south african style.

if you love something, set it free

2006-06-08T02:02:00.000+02:00

somedays i wish i had never been born. had never been put on this earth, in this body, in this time, in this space. why this life? why do i open my eyes every morning? what is the purpose?

i opened my heart tonight and told the truth about how i feel to someone i love. it hurt like a son of a bitch. i had felt so sure that i did not need this man. felt so secure in myself and my ability to be alone that i was smiling as i approaced this breakup of sorts. then i saw those eyes, felt that body press against mine in the hug that has become so familiar over the past two months and my resolved crumbled.

i said that i did not want to be jealous, that the reality is that i will have to leave the uk in just over 4 months, that there was nothing here for me, but him. him who i cannot fully have, because i'm a squeeze, a lover behind another's back. his eyes went away from mine. my heart stopped beating, my soul suffocating. this pain i cannot describe. if we weren't meant together, why did we meet, why do i feel so much better when i'm with him?

my mother once told me that i should be careful what i say, because once it is said, i can never take it back. a case of do as i say and not as i do with her, but she was right. my tongue slipped and i said what i did not really want to say. sure that is how i feel, but i feel other things too. feel that i could spend my life in those arms, under that gaze, with that laugh.

is this payback, for the ones i've hurt? for the souls i've discarded for lack of caring what they felt. for the selfishness i've displayed on previous occasions? is this being selfish? wanting something so much, that i would ruin another's life to get it? the buddhists say that we have to realize that we don't need other people's love to be whole, because love doesn't need itself to be whole. this is assuming that we are created of love, which i sometimes find hard to believe.

me, me, me. this blog is always about me and how crap i feel. i bore myself with my depression. sure i'm good at hiding it, but am i ever truly happy. i used to dream of being the one people wanted to hang around with and in a sense i can be sometimes. used to dream of letting someone inside my circle, wowing them with the wonderfulness of me. but i'm not wonderful, i'm just a great actor. i'm pitch black inside, be it from the ciggarettes i constantly puff on or the shit my mind overflows with, i'm like the murky waters of a swamp. on the other hand, the lotus flower, symbol of light to millions, starts its life in those dark depts. could i be beautiful inside? that probably depends on me, because nothing can really hurt you if you don't let it.

as i biked home, i saw a bilboard screaming at me that if i love something, i should set it free. but i don't want to, i want to hold on so thight and never let go. guess i have let him go already and whether he ever comes back is up to him. i'm tired of this bitch in my mind always telling me i'm not good enough, always rationalising things that aren't supposed to be rational. i am my own worst enemy and i'm killing myself slowly, but surely. will i survive without you? do i want to? probably not on both occasions, but as i say, i'm a good actor:(

naked

2006-06-06T19:51:00.002+02:00

i wake up in the morning
put on my face
the one thats gonna get me
through another day
it doesn't really matter
how i feel inside
this life is like a game sometimes

then you came around me
the walls just dissapeared
nothing to surround me
and keep me from my fears
i'm unprotected
see how i've opened up
you've made me trust

cause i never felt like this before
i'm naked around you, does it show?
you see right through me
and i can't hide
i'm naked around you and it feels so right

i'm trying to remember
why i was afraid
to be myself and let the covers fall away
guess i never had someone like you
to help me fit, in my skin

and i never felt like this before
i'm naked around you, does it show?
you see right through me
and i can't hide
i'm naked around you and it feels so right
i'm naked
does it show?

big up to avril "the skater girl"

alive but not kicking

2006-05-31T01:08:00.000+02:00

well hello there. as is apparant, i've not starved yet and its been way too cold over here to contemplate jumping into anything that even resembles water, if not tremendously heated, which obviously the thames is not.

it turned out that the agency hadn't paid me yet. as always i was too impatient and the money was subsequently transferred into my account. this is not to say that i'm out of the red, just that i'm not in so deep as i thought. touch wood.

i miss mr sardo. he's in india being fabulous and i'm stuck in cold, wet london. sucky i know, but absence makes the heart grow fonder, right?

confusion seems to follow me like a dark cloud hovering, ready to release its acidic rain onto my waiting orb. i'm torn between two things. on the one hand i want to stay in london. stay here, make it here, be in love here. the last being the main reason for wanting to stay. on the other, i have to face the fact that my time here is limited and that dreaming up a way of staying is probably only going to hurt me and the person i care for.

my passport is so inconvenient. everybody in south africa always wonders why the kids flock to england in their droves. reason. its probably the only country in the world that has a working holiday agreement with sa. trust me. i've checked. i can't find another country that will have me on the visa that i am now. thus if i want to go live somewhere else, i need a job first. what's that about?

i know the generations before us screwed up, but hey, don't you think we've kinda learnt from their mistakes. ok, i'll admit that not all of us have. there are some true racists in south africa to this day, but its definitely not confined to sa.

i'm sick of having to explain. sick of being confused about what i want, because other people put restrictions on where i can live, and therefore on who i can love. it probably wouldn't even help if i got married. i'd still not be allowed to stay here. so why stay?

my gut tells me i have to. have to not be in africa now. absence makes the heart grow fonder, right?

money talks, but it doesn't listen

2006-05-25T18:33:00.000+02:00

one of my friends told me the other day that i'm bad with money. you know what? i'm starting to suspect that he was right.

i checked my bank balance on the web the other day, and i don't know if i was halucinating, but i could swear that i still had to have some money coming in. today when i checked, the £220 had disappeared from my profile and i'm stuck without enough. shite

i feel so stupid. i need a financial advisor. i need a job that pays me on time. i need, i need, i need. fucking desperate :( i hate asking for help too. is it life that is unfair, or am i just lazy? i work. granted i don't work as hard as i could, but i do work, yet i never seem to be able to have enough money. i didn't get paid last week at my one job, which in a sense is a good thing, because i save a bit of money. now on the other hand, i'm not gonna eat for a week, while i wait for the freaking bank to check if my cheques clear. that is if i get paid this week. touch wood.

why does it take 7 working days for a cheque to go through? or is it 5? i'm not sure. that really fucks me over. you check if they have money. if they have, give me mine. easy as that. probably not, but still. i think they're just lazy.

i've checked again, and it seems that the agency hasn't paid me the money they owe me. that explains alot, but what i don't get is why. i'll find out though. hold thumbs for my return. and if i don't write again, assume i've died from starvation and have been buried in an unmarked grave. either that or i've jumped into the thames. hope to update you soon :)

where is the what, is the what if and why?

2006-05-22T04:12:00.000+02:00

my first real kiss was a few months after i had turned 18. i had moved into my own flat in pretoria and had started what would end up to be a bad first year at uni.

seeing as i was haunted while in school the newfound freedom kinda went to my head. i had heard about this thing called sex. little did i know that things would kinda escalate, as they normally tend to do. never one for chit chat i went out on my first visit to a gay club, kissed someone random,went home with him and had really akward sex, got into my car and drove about 240 ks to where my parents were waiting at loskopdam. the only time i've ever fallen asleep behind the steering wheel of a car. that was before i'd heard of a thing called drugs, u c

i can't count the amount of guys i've had random sex with. a grope in the dark was always enough affection to survive. always afraid of being alone. the things you fear, right?

i recieved an email about a year ago that changed my life. bello. it was a reply to an add i'd posted on gumtree in the view of desperation. i always seem to be desperate. what's that about?
fire in heaven. something i'd love to do by the way. i arrived for an audition and fell in love. i didn't get to spin for the angels. something about a fire hazzard, but gropes in the dark kinda seemed boring after that day.

i've never had to share a bed with anybody and as a result i can't sleep next to most people. exeptions are wonderful. there are 3 people i can share a bed with and sleep like a well fed baby. i won't name them here, because they might not know this either. some secrets are best kept unsaid.

what am i saying? i don't know. i needed to say it anyway. maybe the answer is 42. maybe there is no answer at all. maybe mice rule the world, and then again, maybe not. who shot the go-go dancer? will we ever know?

word verification and comment moderation

2006-05-19T02:32:00.000+02:00

imagine my surprise when i opened my email account this morning and my inbox has 150 messages in it. overnight i became mr popular. well almost.

it seems like my blog has become a target of some or other computer based comment sabotager thingy. hence all the comments praising me for having such a wonderful blog and enquiring about how i perform the feat of bloggerism to perfection. yeah right.

so when i opened my account tonight, after having deleted all the "spam" this morning, i wasn't really surprised to find the same thing. as such i've been driven to the unthinkable. word verification. now i know what you think. word verification is the worst thing that one human can bestow on another after hiv/aids and hickeys of course, but if i have to face a full inbox every day, i might just go bonkers.

so don't be alarmed, see it as a challenge. who-ever gets it right the first time or the second or the third wins the right to comment on "THE BEST BLOG IN THE UNIVERSE" and who-ever doesn't can go spam someone else.

i've also decided to use comment moderation just in case some nutter actually has the time to post 149 almost identical comments, twice on one blog in one day. ha, talk about not having a life. he/she would obviously not be living in london. so if your comments don't appear immediately i'm probably sleeping or jacking off. actually i'll probably not be doing either since i don't really have time, but never fear when the weasel is near. if you deserve it, your comment will appear.

good night and good luck (with the wv that is)

:)

guten abend

2006-05-15T23:49:00.000+02:00

i did something impulsive today. i bought i flight to berlin for £29.36. at the moment i have nowhere to stay and a good friend i helping me to get a flight back. i arrive on the 13th of July 2006, a thursday at 09:26 in the morning giving me two days to explore before i get lost in a crowd of over a million people.

you lose your friends, you make new ones. people are everywhere, make the effort to say "hi". i go crazy from being alone in this town. there are 7 million people in close proximity of where i sit right now and i don't even know a hundred. i'm tired of being alone. have done it for almost 24 years. then again, people freak me out most of the time.

i was punched the other day by a guy who hasn't washed in a while. he gave me a smack on the arm and told me off for supposedly sticking a flyer in his face. i never saw the guy before he klapped me, so i was innocent. he probably staggered into me and poked himself in the eye.

i wanted to jump out of a window today. i get claustrophobic around people. especially people i have to talk to. over the phone. o my ...

is life a story, a movie, a play, because sometimes it bloody seems so. on the other hand all of us have those moments when its more real than real. frozen in time and space.

my back is one big pain. i need to do more yoga, but its no fun alone and its still cold. has been overcast for five days and it actually rained a bit today. i'm excited about berlin and hope to squeeze paris in before. whooooooooohoooo. good night pardners, goodnight
%-)

i've been boring i know

2006-05-13T17:56:00.000+02:00

sitting in a room of glass on a beautiful spring day with some red wine. my ready-to-eat lunch is in the oven and i'm bored. bored of being bored. bored of being boring.

my absence of late can be ascribed to many things. london town keeps a person busy. busy to survive in this nest of people and their things. busy to keep my mind off the fact that i don't fit in. the fact that i don't want to. elitism in reverse? maybe. all i know is that something has to change.

over the past week and a bit alot has happened. i went to the interview at huntress (a workplacement agency) and on the next week i recieved a call with a job offer. 5 days, to start with, working for ncvo, which is short for the national council for voluntary organisations.

so it came about that i arrived at a pretty laid back office, completely overdressed and overstressed on wednesday this week. the day was filled with mundane tasks that nobody else wanted to do, or had the time for. i like the people, which is a plus, but i hate being cooped up in an office for 7 and a half hours. luckily i'm busy the whole day and they have flexi time, so i start a 10, take half an hour lunch and am out of there by 17:30. travel home on the most confusing part of the underground, maybe eat something and then on my way to soho to face the crowds who flock out in their hordes to drink away their sorrows. yuk.

what keeps people here. sure london is pretty at night, but apart from the money, nobody really gives a shit about the place. maybe i should stop overanalysing as i always do and just use the opportunity. i'm making plans to go to the berlin love parade. its present again after two years of absence and i'm so going. just need to book everything. my visa is still valid which is cool and i can only travel outside of britian until september so berlin and paris, here i come. if i have to do it alone, i'll do it, but i'm going to paris as soon as freaking possible. i'd like someone to go with me though. any takers?

i went out dancing with mr sardo last night. good fun for the first time in a while and we had a lovely chat. i truly am in love, which in hindsight might not be the best thing, but i'm going to let that one slide for a while. if it ends up in heartbreak, it'll probably have been worth every tear.

i'm thinking of moving out of the house i'm living in. nothing wrong with it, other than that i was woken up this morning by two of my housemates having a fight again. not nice, plus i need to meet new people. i'm stuck in the same rut as i was last time around. actually that's not entirely true. i've got a bike, and i'm making way more money, so that's a plus. feeling more fit and i'm in love, which as mentioned, changes things.

i suppose the purpose of life is that there is no real purpose. no beginning and no visible end, so all we have is now. love it, hate it? maybe just live it....

the cheese of life

2006-05-04T23:59:00.000+02:00

summer is coming, and i've got a bicycle :)

it never fails to surprise me how my mother has the knack to phone me at the most juicy moment of any dream. suffice to say that after the conversation, i have no recollection of what i was pinching in the dark and that trying to salvage what was lost in translation always fails to satisfy. thus was my awakening today (well the first time). actually good to hear her voice and that of my dad too. second time around a lady called claire asked me "are you awake?" as i tried to recollect my senses. i explained that i was working last night, and that i would be glad to go and see her tomorrow morning to review my future employment opportunities in england. i've got a date with destiny and plan on keeping it. hold thumbs:)

so i woke up, went to a sports shop and bought a wheel for a bicycle that sergio found on the street. he's the luckiest guy i've ever met. seems like the whole universe wants to be around him ;). got the wheel and off i went only to reafirm that both me and the sales advisor at decathelon are complete idiots. off course the wheel doesn't fit, so mr sardo, always willing to give a helping hand, escorts me back to the shop where we find the right one. that done, our plans to go to the park are shot and i go shop for food, whilst he attends to his studies.

on the menu is, sicilian bread topped with butter, mini corn, cherry tomatoes and pecorino cheese, oven roasted to perfection. life is grand and seeing as i forgot to buy batteries for my bikes' tail light, i enjoy the wind through my hair once again (who am i kidding:) at the shops the light finds life and so do my feet for a mere £10. by now i'm feeling a bit of a tummy ache coming on, which i ascribe to my level of unfitness and the heat. back home things escalated:(

i flop onto my bed praying for the arrival of a better state of being, which doesn't come. i phone my friend to cancel work for tonight after which i promptly puke up my cheesy lunch. yuk. i hate vomiting. i still don't know why it happened and i don't want to blame the cheese, but what else. yeah i'm unfit, but today wasn't my first time on a bike and i've had summer for almost two years straight now. the butter? i think not.

luckily i'm feeling much better now, aside from the fact that two of my housemates have been shouting at each other for the last half and hour. ah, the joys of love:)

how now?

2006-05-02T20:44:00.000+02:00

my adventure in sicily, into the lives of the family that hosted me there and the amazing culture has left me enriched, yet in a sort of predicament. i came back to england with the prospect of meeting mr sardo again and having this adventure in with him, in mind. problem is, that has come and gone.

don't get me wrong. the adventure was and still is worth every second, but i'm faced with another dilema at the moment. what are my options here in england? my visa expires next year april. what do i do in the mean time. do i try to secure permanent employment here in the hopes of being offered a sponsorship to stay? what happens if the sponsorship is not an option? should i be worrying about such things yet?

i've been thinking about what i want to do with my life and the answer is a definite "i don't know". i do know that in time i want to return to south africa and set up my own company there, but that time is still on the distant horizon, thus i need to find something profitable to keep me occupied until i again feel the pull of that land in the south.

i'm almost 24 years old and up to this point in time, i've not had any real employment exprience, even on a semi-permanent basis. sure i've worked for my parents' company, and have learnt alot there, but does that count for me or against me in the land of employment? i've obtained a business degree in marketing management, whatever that means, yet i have a passion for tourism, in which i'm only slightly qualitfied on a formal level. i'm falling in love with someone i shouldn't be falling in love with. someone i don't want to lose or hurt. someone who's future (at least for the next two years) lies here in england.

i searched the web today for work on cruise liners and i'm finding the idea of going off to live on a floating city for a while rather enticing. i could see this as a viable option for when my visa here is up, but with it comes a great number of red tape and a major move into an uncomfortably unknown situation. profound moments right?

maybe i've been spoilt. actually that's a fact, but i know i'm smart and could learn to do anything given enough time. hopefully the universe will send me an inspirational sign. if not i'll just have to clench my teeth and face the hurricane. hopefully i stand out in the storm:)

:) sicily :)

2006-04-24T03:22:00.000+02:00

the house is quite as i guard myself against the chill. my phone beeps with the news that a taxi is on its way. i’m early as I like to be. i arrive and drive over tower bridge for the first time since my voyage here began. i step into the bustle of life after dark in this city of the masses.

two hours later i awake on my makeshift bed as it pulls into stanstead airport. what the fuck are all these people doing here at 5:00 in the morning? we find our way and i get stamped with a “happy to see you leave, grin” the flight is cheap, no allocated seats, so i end up in the middle of a suit and a hippy and wish the time away. I awake, look out of the window, my first glimpse of the alps from above in all their snowcapped glory :-)

a moment forever locked in my mind. an aerial view of a city, skirted on one side by azure waters. i’m relaxing already. we make a dash for the country, and i’m met by yet another “g’mpf, how long do you plan on staying, look” i cling to the thought than in africa, you’d be welcomed, but would probably be pissed off that the whole process took so long. at least there is a big area of one continent where i get to go to the fast queue. he he.

another bus ride and we arrive in a city that reminds me of africa. a place where battles have been fought, but none won. a place where the social politics are highly strung, the people brewing over cigarettes and coffee, both being national sports. an old place in humanity. bellisimo.

we arrive at sergio’s home and his mother cries, after which she immediately starts preparing food. i’m welcomed into a world that i’ve never entered.

my first meal’s first course is a plate of pasta that fills me right up. then comes a thin slice of horse meat along with what i’m told is compressed beef. the meal is washed down with a small glass of potent wine and my first of many cafes “sicilain style”. suffice to say that I would spent a lot of time in the kitchen.

air is put into soft bicycle wheels and mr sardo and i navigate the city of trapani’s terrifying traffic. our first stop, a signal tower older than me and the rest of earth’s population, surrounded by beautiful water. the city is older than imagined, yet the new is more than evident everywhere. we soak up the sun. life is good.

we visit a beautiful park and get approached by a very dodgy guy. he comments on the dirty water of a pond while undressing us (actually only sergio) with his eyes. we escape after a painfully long conversation and buy some water. on our bikes again, we explore some more. we go back home where we eat again and sleep the shift in time away. life is damn good.

you can take a picture of something you see

2006-04-23T19:13:00.000+02:00

my taxi to liverpool str station arrives tomorrow morning 03:00, where me and sergio have to get a coach to stanstead airport. our flight leaves at 06:10 and we arrive about 2 hours later. except for the fucking flue, life is good.

i feel like a kid eyeing his christmas presents moments before unwrapping them. i'm so looking forward to the sun. today has been a rainy day. typically england. yesterday it gave us a glimpse of what we might expect in the future and today reminds us of what we want to forget. the gray. almost as bad a omen as the grim.

my whole day has been spent in a daze. hopped up on stuff for flu and the flu itself, i made a trek to tesco. i have to honestly admit that the journey was a trying one from which i've yet to recover.

bed time again. ciao :)

pucker up for heaven's sake. there's never been so much at stake

2006-04-22T04:20:00.000+02:00

i arrive at home just before 01:00. my feet hurt from the walk and work. my nose is frozen. the house is black as i stalk inside, trying to make as little noise as possible. i go into my room and get rid of my ppe, designed to keep the cold and thorns at bay and make some tea. depending on my mood, i brush my teeth and either come here or go to bed.

14:00: and the somebody is hammering at something. its hot in the room and my back misses the futon 10000 kilometers away. the light hurts my eyes as i stumble out of bed, almost overshooting the shower in which i wake up. i make more tea and stuff my face with museli and yogurt. i try thinking of things to do, other than watching tv or washing the dishes. if i'm lucky london calls, if not i sleep some more.

18:30. i've been waiting for half an hour for someone to open the front door. painfully aware of my impending departure into the cold, i'm raving for a conversation with something other than the wall or that nagging voice in my head. if i'm lucky one of the housemates arrive a few minutes before i leave, if not the tubes are waiting.

19:30 i emerge, shaken, but otherwise unharmed from that hated hole in the ground and snigger at myself for wanting to smack the pretty english boy in his "oh so important" powerwear upside the head with my rolled-up newspaper. i constantly want to shout out loud "let's go to africa". wan't to take you to the open spaces, where the smell of the air will stirr in you something old. something that city-life has taken away from you. the place where you came from when time wasn't time and you were but a sparkle in evolution's eye.

20:00. i meet those beautiful eyes and for a moment the universe stops. my heart skips a beat and life is good. then the whiny bitch inside my head tests out her microphone. vomiting her cabaret of decay onto my thoughts and my heart sinks. i'm an addict of my own anguish and that pisses me off. as leo once said "we hope and pray for something good to happen to us and when it actually does, we expect it to be better, to be more viciral, more real"

21:30. i want to throw the girl who looked straight through me with the free-entry flyer i offered her, but smile at my own indoctrinated restraint. i wish i was on my way home, or better, on a beach running on water, on an plane to vegas, on a ship far from land or listening to you snore.

01:30. i arrive home, the place is dark, my noze is frozen blah di blah di blah.

i'm weird. when i meet someone i really trust, i want to have that person to myself the whole time. i guess what i'm trying to say is that i've met two people i feel i can trust since being back and i see both of them less than i would like.

big cities make me feel alone.

when words fail me

2006-04-21T17:57:00.000+02:00

rewind - stereophonics

its your time
its your day
it's never too late
to change lanes
how's your life?
how's your place?
was it where you wanted
your head to lay?

but wait, you can breathe
you can see what i can see
don't waste your time
you can't make back

if you could rewind your time
would you change your life?

do you like you?
do you love your wife?
or did you pick what
you're told was right?

dream and be
what you feel
don't you compromise
what you wanna be

'cause change is okay
what's the point in staying the same
regrets, forget what's dead and gone

if you could rewind your time
would you change your life?

if jesus rode in on a camel today
with your cross on his shoulder
time to take you away
have you done all you wnated?
are you happy and warm?
do you miss someone special
you don't see anymore?
have you blood on your hands?
do you dream of white sands?
can you sleep well at night?
have you done all you can?
the place i was born in
stays crooked and straight
i see innocent blue eyes
go blind everyday

rewind your time
would you change your life
today?

sometimes i wonder

trafalgar square

2006-04-18T17:35:00.000+02:00

i was on my way to soho this afternoon and travelling on the northern line i decided to get off at charing cross station instead of at leicster square. the reason being that i haven't visited trafalgar square since my return. this is quite the shame, because i travel past it every day, and i work not 5 minutes walk from there, so today was the day. i get out of the tube station, find my way and wham, a big scaffolding around the pinnacle i've come to love so much. how dissapointing. at least the fountains were going.

trafalgar square is the biggest, non-park, public space in london. it also houses on its outskirts, the south african embassy and the nightbus number 47 that takes me home. i can remember many a cold wait not 20 meters from where i am now, to go home after a night out. even worse, being dropped off in trafalgar after a week away at work with too much luggage, surrounded by way too many drunk people.

i feel good today. the weather is not too bad and i'm in london. a town older than i could ever imagine. one thing i love about sergio is his attention to detail. the other day he showed me something that i had passed by about a hundred times. during excavations at london bridge station, they found flooring, vases and a number of other artifacts dating back to around the time of christ. a place inhabited by people who have organised themselves around it for millenia. best thing. by this time next week i'll be in sicily. yippy. have to run. going to c ice age 2.

still smiling

2006-04-17T20:27:00.000+02:00

its strange. i still feel all the things that i wrote about in the previous post, yet the comment made a difference. i'm sure i know who wrote it. a person who has given me advice more than one times in my life, and who has turned out to be right most of those times. so i'm not going to analyse what my heart feels. not going to try and break it down with my head. just going with the flow and in african style, not care to much where i end up, seeing as it might be hell or paradise. either option is not really for me to decide :)

hey you

2006-04-16T13:33:00.000+02:00

i find myself staring at blank spaces, wondering where i had just been. find myself pondering those big questions. am i happy? will i ever be?

i lose myself in the rhythm of heartbeats and sleepy breaths running through landscapes in my head and heart, skipping over threats and karma, hopping along with a life that's not mine, falling into forbidden dreams of knights in shiny threads on self-propelled horses and of innocent yet dangerous beauty sweetly smiling on my eyes.

i feel like i'm betraying my individuality. feel lost. i'm not used to wanting something or someone. not used to being a blubbering fool. not used to being the third wheel, the secret you have to hide. am i wrong in wanting something that is not mine? am i overanalyzing this? should i let things run their course? should i publish this post?

i almost had a nervous breakdown last night. i was freezing when i entered sergio's house and wanted to turn up the heating. in typical me style i pressed the wrong button and switched everything off. no heating, no hot water, nothing. i only realise this once i've shaved my head and want to enter a nice "warm" shower. so there's me running around naked trying to fix something i've never even seen. why the fuck don't they use electricity to heat water?

i'm afraid of the dark when i enter the flat. afraid of what it might contain. i'm afraid of the boogyman, coming to jump on me as soon as i turn on the light. i've never been afraid. i'm wigging a bit, but in typical me style, i'll be fine, i'm sure. i just don't know when. i hate being such a whiny bitch. yuk

he sticks his tongue out

2006-04-14T16:37:00.000+02:00

i was always told that by sticking your tongue out at someone you are asking them to kiss you. a bit of an oldwives's tale i'm sure but not so far fetched. seeing as kissing almost always involves some degree of tongue action its an appropriate, if somewhat obscure way of inviting the object of your affection to a game of tonsil hockey.

here's to kissing!! whoo hoo

damn the frog

2006-04-13T23:20:00.000+02:00

i woke up this morning dreaming that there was an ensuite shower in mirror next to the couch i was surfing on. it was occupied by another dream and i was pretty dissapointed realising that it was only my reflection staring back at me when i opened my eyes. weird how you can be in two different dimensions at the same time, but only be conscious of one.

my day started and i headed of to the bank. money exchanged hands and i decided to see if i could go to london dungeon but when i saw the number of people waiting i opted for a chai latte complemented by a piece of chocolate chip shortcake from starbucks and straddled the tube to westminster. big ben amazed yet again.

now is more than a week after i started this post. i've just arrived to my new home in rotherhithe from soho where i did some flyering with mr sardo. the frog is still in my throaht and my nose seems to be running some kind of marathon, but hey i'm not dead yet, so life is good.

it was very sad for me moving out of sergio's, but a neccisary step if we were to keep looking each other in the eyes. i love staring into that chocolate heaven even more than i would love to end up in a heaven made of chocolate. i can't wait for our trip to sicily and running on the water in marsala.

i went to the london dungeon with two new found friends today. it was pretty good, but as far as most attractions go, really overrated. the aura of the place, is worth the £15 admission fee though, as you can feel and smell the presence of death long after it has passed away from that place, and seeing as some of the actors were pretty cute, in a zombieish kind of way, i give the day out a 9 out of a possible 10 shiny stars. not working tomorrow which affords me time to rearrange my new room to make it a bit more habitable seeing as i slept on the floor last night. on the one hand i was too drunk to care, but if i had indeed have to be violently sick as i felt i would be, i fear that making the toilet in time would have been an issue, seeing as i'm sharing my space with a hundred different things strewn accross all corners of a not too big place. luckily i wasn't sick or hungover, just sooo tired. sleepy time :)

stille water

2006-04-10T17:23:00.000+02:00

i woke up this morning with a bad cough. i was working in the rain last night and had the wrong shoes on for the job. my feet along with my ego got drenched in the coldness of london, so i skipped work, went home and had a hot shower. met sergio at a club where he was the host and danced the night away. had a few free drinks and two not so free ones and came home...........

i've been working about four hours every day this past week, which has been great for my bankbalance and morale. i've partied for free for about 6 hours almost every night this week, which is also great for my bankbalance and morale.

its strange but i find it difficult to write even though i have so much to tell. maybe its the weather or maybe my situation is not describable in words. one moment is spent ontop of the highest mountain, the next in the deepest rankest sesspool. i catch myself dreaming of a future that i shouldn't want and then scold myself by dreaming of it some more. i miss stevie.

somebody once said that people are about as happy as they make their minds up to be and i try to remind myself of that every day. try to remind myself that even though i make my own destiny, fate has a way of pushing people in a certain direction. call it temptation, call it whatever you want, i'm in love with a guy who is in a relationship and the more i try to fall out of love, the more i fall into him, into his eyes, his smile, his way of looking right at me instead of through me. if i fall on my face, then i fall on my face, but at the moment i want nothing other than sleeping in those big strong arms.

stille water, diepe grond, onder draai die duiwel rond
ja nee

2006-04-06T14:52:00.000+02:00

i love soho (not likely)

2006-04-06T13:15:00.000+02:00

the last few days have been pretty strange. i've been working with sergio, doing flyering for a club/cabaret/trannyshack called too 2 much. very good money for not being very active and being able to talk with friends and make new ones at the same time.

people's reactions when presented with something they don't really want are always very interesting. some of them in timeless british tradition are very polite in declining, others will tell you to fuck off straight to your face. i prefer both these above people who don't even acknowledge your presence. smiling is the best way to make them feel bad about being bad or to guilt trip somebody into just taking the fucking flyer.

i'm cooking dinner for my two hosts tonight. i'm still undecided about the starter, but i think i have the rest down. well i had untill i found out that charles doesn't eat red meat. that kinda changes things, but i'm sure i'll be able to work around that. i haven't had to cook for other people in a long time, but i think it should be successful. hopefully, i'll be able to move into cj's soon, because i'm falling even further into a situation i shouldn't be.

the weather here is strange. i'm sitting inside being pleasantly baked by the sun, but can only imagine the temperature outside, because the wind is blowing like a bitch. i'm glad i skipped winter here, because i don't even want to start thinking about what it must be like. my feet are freezing even while in the sun, so going outside is not a prospect i'm looking forward to.

i've been to two museums in two day. the day before yesterday visited dali's universe on the south bank and was surprised and dissapointed. the display of much of his later work was something i hadn't experienced before, but the absence of any oils made my heart sink. yesterday the mummys got a turn as a visit to the british museum astounded. the scale, the oppulence, the pure self-centred fucking nerve to steal so many things from all over the world in the name of research.

i've slept in another's arms for the last two night, which has been an experience i've rarely had or enjoyed but these two times have been diffent. safe. deep sleep. relaxation. elation. guilt. what am i getting myself into? rationality has left me and been replaced by something else. something i'm not familiar with at all. something i like. could it be that word?

2006-04-05T01:58:00.000+02:00

am i working malu's shades?

dtpm

2006-04-03T23:25:00.000+02:00

the easyness of transition towards the familair is astounding. things are familiar, like i was never gone, but also very different. homes have changed, experiences are new.

i went out last night. big birthday party for dtpm at fabic. i haven't had so much fun in a long time. imagine and old underground station, turned into a heaving nest of half naked gay boys shaking what their mammas gave them, and me shaking mine right alongside one in particular. good times made even better by drifting in and out of the astral plane on a couch in a corner.

i woke up and walked home in the early morning hours to come and pass out of sergio's couch, oversleeping the bank to which i had intended to go. cj and the other guys moved into a new house which is a much better prospect than what the old one was. the garden is bigger and the room that i'm thinking of letting is perfect. the location, close to the river to jump into if things get too much as well as a leisure centre in which to hone my skills at swimming for when i've in a state of craziness jumped into a very polluted river.

my head is running, my mind is spinning, i'm not sure about what's going to happen, which for the first time in a long while scares me a bit. i'm living with a couple of people who love each other very much, kinda feeling in the way. i know that according to sergio i'm not, but my mind, as always my worst enemy says different. at the moment i'm a bit too tired to care, but i'm sure things will sort themselves out in time.

london town. what a ride.

london times

2006-04-01T15:39:00.001+02:00

after being in transit for over 15 hours i eventually made sergio's couch. what a good feeling, to not have to carry things anymore, to be able to close for my eyes for a while, to watch somebody i don't really know be happy to see me.

its cooler here. the moment i stepped out of the plane, i could see my breath, which was a blessing in disguise because i had a shitload of stuff to carry. i sat next to a cool chick in the plane. got drunk with her and watched her as she slept. yip, forgot to get a sleeping pill and sat awake the whole night. not a wink of sleep, we arrived at gatwick and fell in line to be stamped into this island of opportunity. it was easier than i thought it would be. just handed it over and got stamped in. no questions asked. then came the hard part.

as i mentioned, i arrived at gatwick and so had to make my way to the other side of london with four odly sized items of luggage. catching the train to london bridge was easy enough, but having to go underground was a different story, but hey, i survived and now i'm here, connected thankfully once again to wireless internet. ah bliss.

yawn. still tired.

2006-03-31T10:12:00.000+02:00

you have to love the french

second away

2006-03-30T12:30:00.000+02:00

the time has come. i'm leaving one of my homes. on my way to pretoria for the last time in a while. got a flu shot and i feel crap already. saying goodbye. i hate it. c ya later is a better way of putting it. ciao secunda. may i breathe the poison that passes for air here, once again.

buster busted?

2006-03-29T22:31:00.000+02:00

i had a surprise visit by an old contact on msn an hour or so ago, which turned out to be one of the best conversations i've had all week. so here's to you buster. you made me smile, plus you're damn cute. my bad, but i'm just stating the obvious. oh the joys of being young and single. ja nee

what i need?

2006-03-29T08:12:00.001+02:00

george moore said that "a man travels the world in search of what he needs and then returns home to find it"

i tore my room apart the day before yesterday, filtering through everything there in search of things to make the short-list. 25kgs, plus one or two stowed away in the handluggage section of my life. its kinda like taking the things you need and hold dear to you, and making concentrate from them, sqeezing all the good stuff together and making a package so sweet it'll hold you for a long time. hopefully. trouble comes in when deciding on the things the concentrate should be made from.

my room in secunda is a total mess. everything on the shortlist is strewn across the floor in a disarray of books, clothes and thingamabobs. on the other hand i should view myself as lucky, because the things that didn't make the shortlist and the stuff that will be falling off that list as soon as i get back to pack can be left in that room awaiting my return. sigh.

i'm in pretoria at the moment. i have to be at the italian embassy in half an hour to go and collect my passport that hopefully has a shengen visa plakked on one of its pages. one of the few that is still available for my travels it being from the stoneage of '98. i have this romantic idea, that i would only like to return to sa in 2010, but my passport expires in 2008, so i need to return, if i can't get it renewed somewhere out there.

i know i should be nervous, i am a bit, but i'm still on zyban, so it kinda deintensifies everything. today is day 13 of not smoking, i think. lucky number. it will be a good day. i'm proud of myself for not asking for a ciggy yesterday, from a friend that was smoking in my close proximity, and afterwards thanked the higher power that helped me resist, because i almost choked on his smell when he sat next to me. did i stink like that? how could i have ever even tried to hide the fact that i was smoking if my aura was preceded by such noxious olfactory poison? eeuw.