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Don't be a Twit!

My new column premiers on Tech Leader today for the launch of this new Mail & Guardian site. If you have a moment, take a look. I would love your feedback. If you do pop over, please leave comments for me there.

Tech Leader aims to provide a platform for thought-provoking opinion from Mail & Guardian journalists and columnists as well as other writers, commentators and opinion makers across various industries and political spectrums. Tech Leader is all about debate, offering readers the opportunity to comment and discuss issues raised by contributors.

Eidolon

As I slip from your world

watch me fall from grace

your eyes caress my face

like a lonesome finger

across my length of skin

i drop beyond your dream

past the memory of your mouth

to land with yesterday’s kiss

on the ghost of your soft tongue.

Art by the sublime Martina Strobel.

 

To sleep perchance to dream.

Shakespeare wrote that in a tragedy. A story of murder. Suicide. Madness. Despair. A book rated in January 2007 by Time Magazine as one of the top ten of all time. It’s called Hamlet.

Driven by the madness of revenge  Hamlet contemplates suicide, but is tortured by the fear that there may be no peace after his death.

"For in that sleep of death what dreams may come, /When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, /Must give us pause."

What dreams may come?

This is a seminal question for all who think about life.

What dreams may come?

It is the stuff that religions are founded on. That philosopher’s lives were carved of. That books were written about and crusades fought over.

What dreams may come?

What is next?

In our imaginings we dream and wonder. In our most benevolent imaginings we dream our next existence into being. We become whatever we want.

Imagine... that in both this and your next life you get to choose. Whatever you want. Just for the experience of it.

What do you choose?

I choose to be a writer who lives a simple life with the man she loves in a cottage by the sea.

That way before being a scientist who creates a cure for AIDS.

Or perhaps I will choose the self same life I have lived now. With all the joy and pain. With everything that has come before. Perhaps I will just choose that life again.

What dreams may come for you?

"Kids, you tried your best and you failed miserably

The lesson is, never try."
- Homer Simpson.

GTA IV kicks ass!

My new column on ITWeb goes live today.

Come again?

Artwork by the incredible Mark Elliot @ http://www.markelliott.artroof.com/

And God spoke:

“One life is not enough.

I want to fly into an infinite field of possibility and live a million experiences.

I want to be the crack whore crawling towards the door, heaving, lying bleeding, taking her last breath as she reaches heavenward for relief. 

I want the innocence of renewal, of being birthed into a virgin body. I want to live in the sighs of love, between the sheets and moans and groans of lovers tangled in the sweat of longing.

I want to be the soldier that climbs a hill and through his rifle scope seeks out his enemy and sends on bullet that will hurtle into and shatter a skull. I want to be that skull of a seventeen year old fighting for an ideology he doesn’t understand, lying over soft grass in a valley, adrenalin coursing through his body, anticipating his first kill but thinking of his last kiss. The full length of a beautiful woman’s body lining up against his, the fall of her soft breath against his neck and the touch of her lips reaching his just as he dies and his blood trickles into soft, musty earth.

All these faces and places and possibilities dance within me.

They circle around and through my heart as I walk down crowded streets I see God’s face in every face. And as I see the face of God in ever face, I see a field of infinite possibilities.

God is having every experience. This one, and that one, and this one and… and I realize that God is me. And that God is you. There is some essence that is me, but not me, that is having all of these experiences.

And at once I am me, and I am you.

And I am everything.

And I am nothing."

Embarrass me!

So there he was looking into my eyes asking that question again. The one he always does. I succumb because I love him and the answer always makes him laugh.

“What’s your most embarrassing moment?”

My mind takes that walk, or rather stumble, of shame through those humiliating moments that should rather be kept firmly in the manila envelopes of my mind. But I think it’s important for him to know that I too have failed, spectacularly.

The most horribly, shameful moment? I scan through the list.

Could it be the time, at the tender age of seven that I farted loudly during a pirouette in ballet class, cruelly ending a promising dancing career? The pianist stopped playing, all the mothers’ eyes turned aghast to me and the room became so silent… In all my years of meditating I have never quite captured that Zen like stillness.

No! Not that. Could it be the time I was pissed off because my older and more developed sister was taken bra shopping? She came back with the most amazing lacy numbers that had orange doves sewed between the breasts and showed off the whole day. How I stole one of her beloved bras the next day, filled it with lumpy socks and went to school. A minor miracle considering that at age eight I had gone from a quadruple A to a C cup, much to the amusement of the boys.

Nah! What about the time (same year) I decided to cut my own fringe when mom was off on a cake icing course? My hair dressing techniques were a bit off, so each cut was skew. Late into the night, and sleepy eyed, I wafted off to bed. The next morning, to my horror, I saw bristles sticking out at the top of my forehead. Yeegads! After the bra incident I just had to do something to hide this debacle. So I wore my brother’s balaclava to school in the middle of summer, sweaty little eyes and perspiring little nose sticking out through the woolly hole. I explained to everyone that I had this weird, exotic head cold that called for knitted hats in summer.

Nader, it actually gets worse than this, if you’d believe it. Besides I lay the blame for all of the above on my parent’s nasty divorce.

Ah yes. My first job and the time I rushed to catch the bus to work. That wintry morning when I hurried out the bathroom, onto the bus, past all the pensioners and the bus driver. The old biddies said things to me, which I arrogantly mistook to mean: “You’re simply looking splendid dear!” I waved them off with my hand saying, “Thank you, thank you,” then sat to read a book on the ride in. The bus driver kept eyeing me. “How could he resist my ravishing form?” I thought. As I slipped off the bus the driver’s eyes engorged. Only then did I slide my hand over my butt to realise that the back of my skirt had bunched into my underwear. I had been flashing my bum to the world. Lovely!

No, no, no. The all time face-flashing, earth-swallowing, cringe inducing moment must be the JJ night. As a virginal university waif I shyly avoided boys, but had the hots for JJ. Most of the guys I liked were funny literary types, but JJ was sheer eye candy. The male version of Pamela Anderson, if you will. All blonde, blue-eyed, ripped and tanned. Imagine my delight when after months of lusting he asked me out to a beer festival.  My gay friend Craig and I were beside ourselves. I primped and preened, applied mascara, put on sexy underwear and did all the things I needed to do so I would be uber-desirable. What I thought the male equivalent of a 'Pammy A' would go for. Involved some, yeeow! tweezing and other delicate things, but I digress.

JJ wasn’t all that chatty, and I was still virginal and shy, so yes you can imagine the ‘conversation’. I did want to make a memorable impression though, so I clapped loudly when he decided to enter the men’s beer drinking competition. What a boytjie! He downed that yard-arm in just one gulp. Then came the women’s beer drinking competition and JJ said I should give it a twirl. Too eager to please I jumped up and tried to emulate his macho behaviour. What do you know? That yard arm went all the way down. JJ leapt up to congratulate me and the world started to turn.

The thing about being in an all-girls’ school is that apart from no sex, there’s also no booze. As I was scoring the first contact with JJ of the evening, what went down came up all over him in front of all his friends. Gay friend Craig grabbed me and rushed me into the girl’s loo where he lovingly padded warm beer off me with toilet paper. I cried and he clucked and said that he was sure JJ would forget all about it in the morning.

Damn liar, Craig was - JJ, never asked me out again.

So back up the shame walkway into the present moment where I end my story, look at my son and say: “There are worse things than farting in front of all the girls in class. Believe me.” He’s just cracking up with laughter and then turns to me with a huge grin. He looks at me adoringly and says: “Know what mom. I just love you. I really, really love you.”

Notes from another time

“The holy lives in the collision of beauty and grief. The only way we can be free is to be accountable to the holy. ” -Martín Prechtel

Artwork by Carly Allen-Fletcher : www.carlydraws.com

Let me steal your fire.

Through this act of creation
(I’m a thief)
I will make less of your world.

Like Prometheus let me take
what will warm humanity
leave you cold
feeling old.

Men and women are dying here.
Not of starvation, or disease, or violence.
They are dying from a lack of meaning,
purpose, and story.

Walking dead with hearts beating
in empty chests.

It’s presumptuous to think
these small words can save them.

But I must try.

We cannot let
sleep to
watch them die.

Speak with the softness of whispers:

“You have set sail on another ocean without star or compass going where the argument leads, shattering the certainties of centuries.”
- JANET KALVEN <i>Respectable Outlaw</i>

Your head lies soft on a pillow of sleep and already I’m wondering how long it’s been since I said: “I love you?”

I who birthed vulnerability to catch the eye of your bliss. Your flesh may be fashioned by mine but your spirit flew through independent to teach me that love is more about letting go.

Bring the knife. Let us sever the umbilical once more before you walk into that land for which I have no passport. As you leave to lose yourself. To stand squarely in the shadow of your manhood so in darkness the first seeds of self realization may blindly find you.

What language can I fashion to reach you then?

I who have looked into my own lostness and left behind everything to venture toward the suspension of disbelief. A frail bridge that barely takes me to the next step. The hope that holds the tension between two worlds - one that is dying, one that has yet to be borne.

As I take that step toward intuiting us, let me leave you with what I can give.

Love and this one lesson I’ve learnt:

“If the soul does not find beauty it dies.”

Follow your bliss.

Fly into that which makes your heart sing.

And live one life.

Your own.

The truth about Charlie

- A story about family.

Personal narrative. That story that lives within you and without in the people you love. But it’s never quite the same. When you start having long and detailed conversations about your personal history with those who were there when the action went down, you’ll find that your story is dynamic. As if your memory plays with your imagination to thread through everything you thought was reality. So much so that you begin to wonder about truth and whether there is any real, objectifiable evidence of it out there, or whether everything is only a matter of perception.

How you see things.

How you saw things.

Charlie and I saw a lot of things together. From the first time I sat on his lap, drew the comb out from his inside jacket pocket and ran it through his Brylcreemed hair. I opened his cubby hole one morning, my mind filled with unbounded curiosity, my legs dangling toward the floor of his Datsun. There was a magazine bound in a tight roll and all I could see was half a smile and one nipple staring at me. Charlie looked at me and told me to close the cubby, which I did. Because we shared the same language. It was unspoken but we each knew what the other person meant. I have found this is extremely rare in people. But I only found that out later, when I was older. After Charlie died.

Let me just say that Charlie and I had been intimate. We were born from one headspace although there were some fifty years or so that separated us. I had seen him drunk, paraletic, with piss running down his legs. He had seen me suck condensed milk from a tin without stopping until I stood to puke all over the back yard.

There was no space for advice to live between us. Charlie was wise enough to abandon the arbitrary lectures that went hand in hand with relationships between adults and kids. He loved me exactly for who I was, and I simply returned the favour.

Then came the day he started to forget. Small things. Like where to put the key into the ignition. What day it was. That he was supposed to come and fetch me at twelve to go for chicken pie, chips and gravy. That our staple diet consisted of chicken pie, chips and gravy with a side of coke, and Smarties for desert. He forgot to buy condensed milk. He couldn’t remember the route to work.

At first I covered for him so my family mumbled about his old age. Then came the days that no amount of lying or maneuvering on my part would rescue. I remember screaming and crying and begging them not to take him to that special place. Charlie told me that old men and women went to die there. Without his independence, Charlie said they may as well put a revolver to his head and pull the trigger.

My folks had earnest late night conversations in between days when we were called from Checkers or the chemist or the cinema to fetch the old man. By that time my ma had put his name, our address and phone number like a tag on all his jackets. He looked like a disheveled Auschwitz prisoner with that tag, and because he had started forgetting to eat. So I would sit on his lap and comb his Brylcreemed hair like I always did amidst the consternation and hushed adult conversations.

And then he was gone.

Until Sundays when I was taken in the car with my folks, my brothers and sisters to visit. Then there was no him and me, only us. The forced awkwardness of familial obligation.

Given our relationship had lurched into crisis I had no other choice but to cut my extra-murals short and drive all the way out to see him on my bicycle. And there we would reminisce about the days we spent at the car wash, or reading stories or going to the cinema.

And then I was gone.

Came that day when he looked at me with those big old empty eyes and I saw that he had struggled to keep the fragile bird of my memory alive in him, but that the fight was too fierce. Merciless and too long. After months of scrabbling bloody tooth and nail, he let go and I slipped from his grasp.

Still I came on my bicycle day after week after month. And on Sundays with my ma or pa, who took it in turns to watch the old man waste away to nothing.

In the week I would sit by his bed and hold his hand as he shook and twitched. Other times I would read him Don Quixote by Cervantes. Or retell him the stories about the movies we had seen together. Frankenstein and King Kong versus Godzilla and Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. He would look at the ceiling or he would sleep, it didn’t matter. At times I thought I did it more for myself than for him. But on a couple of rare days he looked at me and those big old empty eyes would focus into a small moment of clarity. He would see me and smile, and I would tell him again that I loved him. Which I did every day until the day he died. His hand slipping gently from mine. His story taking its last breath in his rib cage.

Interesting thing, personal narrative. The way our stories live and dance in ourselves and the people we love, hate or live with. How they walk on two legs and grow like legend. How they grow a lot like love.

Thank you to Sunday Scribblings for inspiring people to write.

My gratitude to Charles and Charlie. This is just a story but without them I would have nothing.