DEATH

Life is such a cliché.

Staring out the window at the rain, the bus trundles along and I’m wondering what a praying mantis is praying for (more bugs to eat, probably), when the driver hammers the breaks and stops an ant’s ballhair away from someone’s grandma.

She only realises this when the glass wall of the windscreen is towering over her. She hobbles across the road and when we pull away I see her leaning against a telephone pole, panting from the shock of it all.

Of course, my first thought was: Holy shit! But then I remembered the old chestnut: You never know, you could cross the road and get hit by a bus tomorrow.

Then I started thinking about the stats for such a death. For all the talk of getting hit by a bus, how many people actually do? Maybe a more clichéd end would be ‘heart attack from overwork’ or ‘died in his sleep from old age’.

Maybe they should say: Appreciate your life, because tomorrow you could cultivate a heroin addiction and end up lying in a shopping mall toilet with a needle sticking out your arm.

This is probably more likely than getting hit by a bus.

It seems like there are only two ways people want to die. One is quietly in their sleep, the other is in a rip-roaring blaze of glory – blown up rescuing a kitten or something.

It seems that death is a cliché too.

I can see the appeal of the ‘quietly in my sleep’ death. It’s painless, I suppose, but I think this way would cause much more aggravation than, say, being held hostage in a Speed-style elevator situation.

Imagine the conversations downstairs on the day of your demise: “Bloody hell, Nathan’s having a bit of a lie-in… we were supposed to take the grandkids to the Frisbee-a-thon!”

And then after you’ve been discovered as a soulless, empty husk: “Oh no, his coffee’s gone cold… and he’s shit the bed!”

I think the ‘blaze of glory’ thing implies death at a young age; you don’t really imagine senior citizens machine-gunning aliens and staying behind to self-destruct the mothership while everyone else legs it.

It’s not the kind of conversation anyone really wants when they’re hosting a dinner party, but it should be. Then you’d realise that no one chooses the middle ground and says, “I’d like to cross the road one day and get hit by a bus.”

…

In ‘The Tibetan Art of Living and Dying’ it says that “you cannot live [properly] until you have learnt how to die”. It encourages people to not steer away from thoughts of death, but to realise that one day you will die and live your life accordingly.

For every big decision I have to make, after trying to imagine what my dad would say about it, I try to think about how I’d feel about this choice when I’m smelly and crusty and about to croak.

Another book that I haven’t read but I’ve read about, written by a nurse who interviewed a lot of seniors on their deathbeds, apparently says that most people say they wished they’d worked less and spent more time at home with the family.

It seems so simple it’s almost an anti-climax – not: “I wish I’d spent more time at the pub” or “in front of my X-Box”, but “at home with the brats and missus”.

So instead of thinking about if your death will be painless and silent or noisy and action-packed, just think about one day not being around and leaving the world with the ripples of your existence.

Then your life spent trying to conform or striving to be a non-conformist (the same thing, really) wouldn’t be such a cliché.

Don't Kill the Tshukudu Game Lodge Cub

If you picked a cat up and it scratched you, some people might think it extreme if you hauled it off to the vet and euthanised its fluffy behind.

But that’s exactly what might happen to a lion cub that bit a Singaporean woman who was holding it up for some happy holiday snaps at the Tshukudu Game Lodge in Hoedespruit.

According to the Mail & Guardian article, she “was apparently posing with a one-year-old cub when it bit her, leaving her with four deep cuts of between 4cm and 8cm on the left side of her face, and lacerations on her left arm and leg, where the lion clawed her.” It goes on to tell us her husband thwacked the poor cub with his camera.

“Tshukudu lodge manager Eric Gander said on Monday night that a decision would be taken about the lion cub’s future after an investigation into the incident.”… Cue dramatic music.

This closing sentence to the article betrays the obvious possibility that the cub will be put to sleep.

The lion can’t talk, so we’ll never know if she was squeezing it too hard or wearing some kind of catnip-infused perfume (‘Feline’ by Britney… or ‘Pussy’ by Ron Jeremy). Maybe it was the lion’s revenge for all the domestic animals Asians apparently gobble.

We’ll never know unless we call in a cat whisperer… and do you know how much they charge?

People have wondered what the hell she was doing holding the thing so close to her face! I’ve read comment-thread-rants about the ‘canned’ lion hunting industry – where they drug ‘em and let Yanks bust a cap – and that this is an extension of such atrocity.

But most people simply believe the lion was acting on instinct, be it a reaction to a perceived threat or misguided playfulness, and that it shouldn't be punished for being what it is.

If you think this is outrageous and that the cub shouldn’t get whacked, why not do something about it. At the very least get your voice heard by the people making this decision.

You can send an email to Tshukudu Game Lodge to: bookings@tshukudulodge.co.za – this email was strangely absent from their website, but I found it on their Facebook page.

Or you can write on their FB wall. The link is here.

Please share this if you give a shit.

Diary of a Cheating Bastard

This is just an excuse not to write.

Chuck Wendig says that when you’re working on a novel you’ve got to “finish that shit you started”. He also says when working on a novel you can’t go “behind the shed” sticking your fingers up a short story or other project.

I tried to do it properly this time, too. The saying ‘grab the bull by the horns’ doesn’t apply to novel writing, and instead of starting on page one and winging it – just seeing where it took me – I thought this time I’d do it the right way.

I took a month to plot the thing.

Twenty-eight chapters outlined and one big plot and it all fit together quite nicely, I thought.

Haha, I boasted, with that done it’ll take no time to punch out a first draft.

But then, as it always happens, you put characters on a page and they do as they damn well please. I imagine God got this frustrated when Eve thought fuck it and ate the apple.

There, I admitted it: I’m a writer with a God Complex. Aren’t we all?

It all started going tits up when I got to, as Mr Wendig puts it, “the saggy middle”. My plot looked bullet-riddled and the story like a floppy piece of wet cardboard. The characters seemed boring and predictable. The set pieces contrived and melodramatic.

There is no middle ground; I’m a genius one day and a deluded fraud the next. The future is filled with book signings and movie deals this week, and alcoholic poverty the following Monday. The see-saw of stress and arrogance creaks as my fat arse and pudgy legs bounce it up and down.

And here I am now, as my two-thirds completed first draft sits in a folder, sticking my tongue between the legs of this blog post.

I promise to be better. I promise that this is the last time I’ll cheat on my dreams. The next time you hear from me I’ll have a first draft sitting in my bedside drawer, waiting to be fixed.

Goodbye for now. See you in a month.

Ugly Barbie

I almost fell off my chair when I heard Lady Gaga – in an interview – say, “I’m not worried about what people think of me today. I only care about how I’m seen a hundred years from now.”

You having a grin, love? If anything defines plastic, throwaway, commercial rubbish it’s you.

I feel bad saying that because for the rest of the interview she seemed rather nice, if a tad too attention-seeking.

The thought linked to the BBC’s 100 best books, which was peppered with most of the Harry Potter novels. Don’t get me wrong, I loved reading about the four-eyed pipsqueak and his battle with old baldy-flatnose, but I’d hesitate to say that amongst all the millions of books written they’re in the top hundred.

The BBC’s list only featured one Salman Rushdie epic (‘Midnight’s Children’ – brilliant) and the short ‘Animal Farm’ by George Orwell (what, no ‘1984’?).

And of course these ponderings led me to question the very fabric of our democratic culture. How on earth could we believe that popularity equals substance?

If the biggest selling musician of all time is Lady Gaga and the ‘Top 100 Reads’ have so many glaring omissions, then maybe the way we decide everything is wrong!

But then, I mused, the findings might be skewed if we asked music and literary scholars for their opinions and their opinions alone. You can imagine all the bitterness (they haven’t made it, after all); we’d be flooded with obscure emo bands and unknown e-book authors.

And predictably, all this staring-off-into-space-deliberation whisked me back to junior school history class. I was sitting there in my shorts and tie, reading out loud from the text book, when I came across the word ‘chaos’. The teacher stopped me and said, “It’s not pronounced ‘chaos’, it’s ‘chaos.”

The thing is, he said it the way you’d say ‘cheese’ or ‘chesticles’. I’d pronounced it correctly, like ‘character’ or ‘cholesterol’.

When I disagreed he wrote it on the board and asked the class. They all parroted him, and turned to have a guffaw at poor ten-year-old me.

My vision panned across the room full of rich, over-privileged idiots and I realised that the majority was not always right.

But then, I gasped, who shall decide our fate when it comes time to decide upon our leaders? Do we bend to the will of our intelligentsia? Does one have to have reached a certain level of education before they can squiggle an X next to the smarmy picture of a grinning candidate? Should age and wisdom be a factor?

I couldn’t come to a satisfactory conclusion so I opened another beer and forgot about it.

Later, my head down the pub toilet, epiphany struck – If Elvis is still imitated, and Madonna is still going strong after she’s so long in the tooth, then maybe Lady Gaga will be remembered one hundred years from now.

Maybe she’s not just an ugly Barbie doll with lots of outfits.

Maybe popularity is the answer.

If only I’d realised this at the tender age of ten, I groaned into the porcelain vomit-receptacle, I wouldn’t have given my peers the middle finger and ostracised myself from their games of marbles.

When I was Your Age...

Nostalgia can be a saucy mistress, but every so often she removes the veil to reveal herself a buck-toothed, wart-ridden, grumpy old bitch.

Case in point, I recently purchased a 2003 Meatloaf album (Bat Out of Hell 2: Back into Hell, if you’re wondering) and a flood of ‘Good Times Gone’ exploded in my brain and dripped from my teary eyes (ah, the memories).

I remember braais in the garden at Nansen Road, the time I lost my virginity in a drunken encounter (very unsatisfactory for the other party… my apologies), my first job at a seedy bistro where I got profound satisfaction asking guys older than me for ID, all the while listening to the melodramatic tunes of the aforementioned Meatloaf.

What a wonderful experience!

On the other hand, a few years ago I found a copy of an old movie the bunch of us watched ad nauseum in my youth. I don’t remember the name (repressed, maybe) but it starred the Brando of B-grade – Rutger Hauer.

I’d remembered this as a great work of art – brilliant acting, massive action, thought-provoking dialogue and a plot tighter than the seating in a Cape Town taxi.

Alas, sometimes that mistress Nostalgia – as I mentioned earlier – doesn’t age well.

Take the ground-breaking ‘Terminator 2’ as another example. When the Bad Guy first walks through the bars to get Sarah Conner in the mental asylum, geeks in cinemas around the world drowned in their own four-eyed, fanboy jizz-tsunami.

Those FX haven’t held up and to look at it now you might wonder what all the excitement was about.

Books can be the same. So many novels that at the time changed my life by readjusting the way I saw the world, upon rereading come across as trite and obvious.

So the dilemma: Is it safe to go back?

I think it’s safer with music. No matter how plastic-poppy-poofty that music was, it’ll still bring back bitter or sweet or bittersweet times. Hell, even when I listen to Abba or Julio Iglesius I’m lulled into the arms of the farmward bound roadtrips of my youth.

Tv shows are the most dangerous. I remember catching an episode of Airwolf around fifteen years after its initial airing (no pun intended). I’d remembered a high-tech machine with formidable gadgets, and then realised it was just a cut-out of a helicopter and a second-hand motorbike helmet with a red dot on the visor.

I haven’t bothered with the A-Team of the Eighties. Even as a kid I thought it odd that no one ever died in the fiery car crashes; not even their hair was messed up.

But I suppose it’s worth the risk. I don’t mind the disappointment as much as I enjoy being catapulted dreamily back in time, whether those times were good or bad.

So no matter if Nostalgia has tight, milky thighs and a firm bosom today and a hairy chin and orange-peel arse tomorrow, I’ll let her in.