Kim and Kourtney Krap on my Kranium

It was the oddest thing. I don’t know what it says about our society or psychology. All I know is it fascinated and disgusted at the same time.

On an uneventful afternoon, lying on the couch, having finished the paper and flipping through television channels, I happened to catch an episode of ‘Kardashians Take New York’ or whatever it’s called.

The not-so-pretty sister was telling her husband he would get sex when her more-famous sister went out for dinner, but on the discovery that her sibling was going to stay in and watch movies they headed off to the gym where they supposedly shagged in the bogs.

The disgusting part wasn’t the thought of them bumping uglies next to a sloshing urinal – for we only got to see them enter and exit (with feigned naughtiness expressed on their heavily made-up mugs) – but the fact that it was all so obviously staged.

Maybe I’m new to the idea of reality tv just being badly scripted and horribly acted fiction, but if so an even more disturbing revelation is that millions of people across the world tune in every week to watch a sitcom where the ‘sit-’ is boring and the ‘-com’ non-existent.

And then I thought that if life imitates art and we are all mediated beings (learning our way through the world via television et al) maybe future generations – thinking this is a kind of real-time art form – would learn their responses to situations from the worst actors.

Would future sincerity appear fake to older, less mediated generations if later generations have learnt to express their emotions from these ‘stars’?

Is it going to be harder for our kids to spot a lie if they believe the ‘reality’ on television to be just that?

If so, then I think I’d advise my kids to careers as conmen, car salesmen, or politicians.

Where can I study Juju-gese?

If South Africa were a sane country, I’d say Juju Malema’s days were numbered.

The leader of the ANC Youth League said a while back that young people had “a responsibility to party” - a sentiment I’m sure he wasn’t too sure of the next morning with his head down the toilet, vomiting up sushi, Johnny Walker, and a nipple cap.

Oh well, we must all suffer for the revolution.

Most recently, at the opening of ex-con Kenny Kunene’s ZAR nightclub in Cape Town, our pudgy leader of the upstarts told the press that DA leader Helen Zille (PBUH) “will not close ZAR at 2am, like she does to other clubs in Cape Town. The ANC owns ZAR and we will party until the morning."

A political party raising capital selling liquor from the bar and condoms from the toilet vending machine seems strange; but this is Africa, after all – we do things a little differently around these parts.

As usual Floyd Shivambu – ANCYL blackboard monitor – lost sleep translating into English a language that could only be called Juju-gese, “The ANCYL president said that the freedom and right for black people to own a club in a predominantly white territory is a freedom and right that came because of the ANC."

Wow! I bet those stuffy old archaeologists had an easier time deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics.

I’m not sure what is more embarrassing to the ruling party – Julius’ ridiculous statements or Shivambu’s laughable translations.

The thought that such a drunken buffoon would have his public office rug pulled out from underneath him is quaint, but looking at the ANC’s internal politics I’m sure this man will one day become our country's president.

Hopefully he would have sobered up by then, but I doubt it.

Giving the Devil Head

When I was a child, that grizzled drill sergeant we call God tried to teach me about hangovers.

Occasionally mum would allow us a chocolate Mighty Milk – they later changed the name to the odd-sounding Steri Stumpy, which for some reason always made me think of a guy with his legs cut off at the knees.

Dad would punch a hole in the top of it with his keys so we could drink it, and I would without fail down the lot in a series of frantic gulps.

I knew it was a bad idea, and that not long after I would suffer a painful belly-wrench. But I didn’t care; I loved that Mighty Milk so much I just couldn’t stop myself.

I got so used to the hurt that by the age of eight I could take a punch in the gut from Mike Tyson and carry on building a model airplane without skipping a beat.

So you see it’s not so much the headache part of a hangover that bothers me. The hangovers that I dread are the ones when I wake up feeling like Linda Blair.

I’m talking about that floating, hazy feeling; that heavy lump of shame; when you can’t remember what you did or who you offended, but you know it was along the lines of a 360 degree head rotation and projectile pukage onto a priest.

Losing mates this way is a bit more dramatic than finding you’ve been unfriended a few months after the fact, and it’s usually just as public and embarrassing as a series of angry wall posts ping-ponged across t’interweb.

Naturally, this hasn’t stopped me from drinking as much, but rather just to identify the types of poison that turn me from a jolly Jekyll to a heinous Hyde.

And much study has brought me to the conclusion that if Satan gave golden showers, you’d smell like you’d been in a Mexican barfight – tequila is the Devil’s discharge.

Seriously, they should just package Jose Cuervo in veiny, red penis-shaped bottles – maybe with two great testes so it won’t fall over as easily… and horns on its bell-end.

It looks like piss. It tastes like piss. No, no, it’s from the blue agave plant in Mexico. It’s just a coincidence that it resembles a liquid by-product excreted through the urethra. Don’t worry about the taste, lick some salt and suck a lemon afterwards.

You’d have to be shitfaced to fall for that!

All the teenage Satanists from the Eighties grew up to be Brandhouse reps pushing what they tell you is cactus juice.

With God telling you one thing and the Devil winking and suggesting another, it’s tough.

If, as Eric Draven in The Crow tells a junkie, Mother is the name for God in the hearts and minds of children, then Satan is the tattooed slag you wouldn’t take home to meet her.

I stopped drinking once, until a good friend told me I was much more fun drunk. And according to Chuck Palahniuk all God does is watch you and then kill you when you get boring, so...

I guess life’s just more exciting when you’re confused.

God Hates a Piss-Head

The dawn cracks like a free-range egg on the hard edge of the city bowl. Its bright, orange yolk spills across the streets and buildings and in through my bedroom window. God is a chef and this is Her fry-up.

On a beautiful morning like this I should be walking in the dog park or circling the block on a swift, brisk morning run. At the very least I should be out in the garden with a cup of Kenyan or apricot jam with some toast stuck underneath.

But I’m not. I’m lying on my back in bed, my shirt almost unbuttoned and one sock halfway off my foot, my tongue’s probably hanging out and I’m definitely snoring… until God flips that yolk through the window and it slaps across my fragile frontal lobe.

I sit up with an audible grunt. At first not sure where I am or how many eyes I’m supposed to have – I could swear only two – and for a sliver of a second I’m sure I feel fine. In that same fraction of a clock tick images from the previous night’s misbehavings hurtle past.

I was drunk. Very drunk. And I have somehow escaped a hangover.

Then that post-bingeing anomaly of something happening slowly but at the same time very quickly swirls between my stomach and head. In this long/rapid moment I realise that the alcohol is toying with me; lulling me into a false sense of security before whisking my brain into a frothy eggnog.

I swing off the bed and hastily zig-zag my way to the bathroom, smacking my shoulder on the wall and my hip on the hall table.

The ingredients placed inside my stomach last night have scrambled and, if I may stretch a metaphor to breaking point, a vomit-omelette is ready to be served.

The toilet laughs at me through his porcelain lips. He gargles the regurgitation down, knowing there’s more where that came from. I glare at his pasty judgement and crawl back into my dungeon of despair.

The scary thought that I’m dying enters my mind.

An hour later the more horrific thought that I won’t die torments me.

It is arguable that the most elusive medical breakthrough is not the cure for the common cold, but the perfect remedy for a bad babalaas.

Some swear by the “little, red ambulance” – Coca-Cola. Others will tell you water and exercise.

I knew a lawyer who would mix tomato juice and Black Label in a big glass and neck it – he called it a “Bloody Label”. From the banal to the bizarre.

I slowly rise from my pillow and place a pair of dark glasses over what used to be my eyes but are now no more than pain receptors. My furry tongue feels like a bloated blowfish, dead and decomposing. Funnily enough, the chorus from Lionel Ritchie’s “Dancing on the Ceiling” is looping in my head.

There must be some wisdom out there, I think, somewhere in the world there must be a decisive cure for the hangover. I conclude that I must ask the all-knowing consciousness that floats in the very air around us; that enigmatic, online oracle known in this dimension as Google.

At first she tells me what to do before I started drinking. However, in order to build a time machine I would need “a wormhole, a large Hadron Collider or a rocket that goes really, really fast”, according to Stephen Hawking.

I have none of these things.

Then she says I should eat toast. But what if anything I send down there demands a return ticket? And not via the scenic route, I might add.

There is a thick rubber band at the bottom of my throat. It shoots everything right back at me.

As I search I discover that in Puerto Rico a hangover is cured by rubbing lemons under your armpits, Africans generally believe peanut butter does the trick and the Native Americans consume six almonds before the drinking begins.

If you have an Irish mate you could get him to bury you up to your neck in mud – and they wonder where the reputation comes from.

A recommendation of breathing in the smoke from a coal fire makes me regret quitting the Chesterfields.

And in Romania I come across something called tripe soup: veggies and the lining from a cow’s stomach, boiled and steaming. Yummy!

You’d think that at my age, with all the binge drinking experience I’ve compiled, I’d be able to navigate the morning-after with ease. But my whiskey-soaked brain can’t turn the library door handle, let alone remember where the reference section is.

So my only option is to ride it out, groaning and sweating like a bad porno actress.

I try to bargain with God, telling Her I’ll never do this again… or at least not for a very long time. But She can see through my bullshit and lies. And I can feel her taloned fingers digging into my brain.

God hates a piss-head, so I implore the scientists of the world to cease the search for pimple pastes and constipation cures and focus on that which inflicts us all at some point.

I could really use your help right now.