THE TEDDY BEAR DEATH SQUAD

At first I wasn’t sure if it was a rescue or kidnapping. Later it would all make sense.

Well, as much sense as it could possibly make.

I’m out back having a smoke by the bins on my own. By myself I don’t have to stop people grabbing my balls.

Because everyone wants to grab Elvis by the balls.

I know Rod Stewart has this problem too.

Okay, maybe not the real Rod Stewart, but certainly the one getting on stage now. Oddly enough, his name is Josh Stuart.

After his set is done he’ll come outside and be mauled by women. They’ll be all over him asking for autographs and wanting to buy him drinks. One or two might even slip their panties into his pocket with a wink and a phone number.

Sounds great, right?

The problem is they’re not the young, nubile women we all got into music for in the first place.

Rod Stewart was popular, what, thirty years ago? So the women who come to Josh’s show and pinch his ass or cup his nuts were eighteen and nineteen about thirty years ago.

He thinks he’s got it bad. He needs to take a look at me. The women trying to get in my pants could be my grandma.

But I didn’t choose Elvis, I remember, Elvis chose me.

It’s not just the old women with sagging tits and crow’s feet that get me down. It’s the hair and that ridiculous voice.

Uh huh huh huh!

 He wasn’t even like that. It’s like so many people created this caricature of the King that now they think the caricature is the real thing.

The bins stink of stale beer and rotting meat. From inside I can hear Josh belting out Maggie May. Next it’ll be Hot Legs and then I Don’t Want To Talk About It and then I’ll be back on.

I flick my cigarette into the darkness. Maybe I’ll mix it up a bit. Start with Jailhouse Rock and try out that new version of Suspicious Minds I’ve been working on.

The voice sounds like honey and broken glass in a blender, “Hello, Mister Robertson.”

It’s coming from across the street, “They say you’re the best Elvis Presley in a hundred mile radius.”

The man who steps into the streetlight is tall and so pale. He’s dressed in a black coat and top hat. His long, skinny legs don’t bend as he walks towards me.

I got to find myself a new gig. Too many weirdoes around here.

“Always nice to meet a fan,” I smile, “I’m back on in fifteen. See you after the show.”

“You’re seeing me now, Mister Robertson.”

It’s his turn to smile, but it’s not a Kodak moment. The corners of his mouth rise up and up until it looks like someone took a knife to his cheeks.

When they reach behind his ears his lips part. They’re not human teeth, more like a cartoon shark’s. Long and thick and scalpel sharp.

“Damn,” is all I can think to say.

My hand is on the doorknob. I know I should run through the kitchen and into the safety of my fans.

But I don’t.

Smiley walks like he’s moving through mud. His eyes are crazy. The pupils vibrating, epileptic. Slowly his arm reaches out to the side.

He takes a violin out of thin air.

With his other hand he pulls the bow from nowhere.

He holds the violin between his head and shoulder, stops in the middle of the road. The smile gets even wider, “Here’s something I wrote especially for you.”

And that’s when the van hits him.

Thud!

Screeching tyres!

The grinding noise of gears being hastily shifted.

Then a whirring sound of the driver reversing.

The van jolts up and down as Smiley takes another hit.

“Uh… hey…” I stutter. My brain frantically tries to process it all, but pops a gasket when the van door slides open and three guys jump out.

Three guys dressed like me.

Three guys dressed like Elvis.

Two of them grab me. I’m too confused to struggle. The third, the one with the machine gun, steps round the back and shouts, “Hey, Pork Chop. All I’ve got is some feet here. Move it forward.”

Gears grate again.

The van moves forward.

Smiley is revealed.

He’s looking rosy. He’s still smiling.

The machine-gun-Elvis spits on him and opens fire. Smiley’s body bounces rapidly with the rounds. The other two pull me inside the van.

The driver is a black dude with serious sideburns. He’s also Elvis. I wonder how safe his driving is with those sunglasses on.

He looks in his rear view at me and says, “You better be worth it,” then looks past me, behind the van, “Oh shit! Shitshitshit!”

He sticks his head out the window and shouts, “Trigger! Move your ass!”

I turn to look out the back window. Smiley is on his feet. He looks like he’s laughing.

Trigger swings into the van, “Go, go, go!”

The van screams away but before we round the corner Smiley has a chance to play one note on his violin. 

Maybe it’s a coincidence, but as he slides the bow across the strings the back window shatters and something slices my earlobe clean off.

Blood seeps from my ear, through my fingers, all over the place.

Picking my lobe off the floor I say, “Sorry about the seats. Must have been some glass.”

They all trade glances and Trigger, the guy with the gun, says, “Right… the glass.”

This is an extract from 'The Absolute Evilness of the Anti-Santa and other stories' by Nathan Casey.

Available for download: 

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Angels, ghosts, superheroes and the best place to live after the inevitable Apocalypse. You’ll learn why you shouldn’t buy a 3D TV and why the world really, really needs Elvis impersonators.

Plus a support group with a grim revelation – Santa Claus might not exist, but the Anti-Santa does… and she’s coming for you.

Kitty Curry

Standing by the bins at the back of work having a fag break and a ginger kitten scampers across and into the back door of the Chinese take-away. I wander over and call the kitty to me. Partly because I think it’ll scoff some food and partly coz, well, I’m afraid they’ll throw it in a pot and serve it up as chicken.

This may brand me as ridiculous at best and racist at worst, but there you go… A few years ago in Plymouth a take-away was shut down because Health & Safety found a bunch of pigeon traps in its courtyard; so maybe the shards of this story are embedded in my unconscious.

The funny thing is that when I call the cat over the Asian cook, in very broken English, tells me it’s okay, he can come in. I ask if it’s their cat and he says yes. The cat strolls into their office and the cook makes like his hands are holding invisible cutlery and he’s feeding himself, “Dinner! Dinner!” he says.

Okay, I reply, and while I’m finishing my smoke I wonder whose dinner he was referring to.

Why You Should Watch The Paralympics

I have to admit I’m more excited about the Paralympics than I’ve ever been for the regular/normal/ordinary Olympics.

Maybe it’s because of the cool ad campaign for the Para’s –the Public Enemy track banging while the Paralympians look all surly on-screen, Murderball wheelchairs slamming into each other, and the blades that Oscar Pistorius runs on look a bit like alien legs, awesome.

Or maybe it’s because regular, normal and ordinary is a bit boring.

A while back I had a beer with a marathon runner. He had lost his leg in a motorbike accident and what would make most people shrivel up under the bedsheets and bemoan their potential invalidity didn’t stop him from sucking it up and just getting on with his life.

He told me that after running for tons of hours it was his ‘good’ leg that ached and gave him gyp. His lost limb, as you’d expect, didn’t give him any problems at all. He even mentioned that it would be a lot easier if he had two prosthetics instead of only the one.

Kind of casts doubt over the expression: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

According to all the sci-fi flicks we’ll soon be replacing our ears with mobile phones and iPods, exchanging our eyeballs for digital thingies that can upload holiday snaps to Facebook and zoom in like Superman’s, and chopping off our arms so they can be replaced with bionic ones. And when all this ramps up we’ll be jostling for mega-legs that run faster, jump higher and turn footballs into cannonballs.

A couple of years back the Olympic committee didn’t want SA’s Ozzie Pistorius to compete with the norms, saying his blades gave him an unfair advantage. So it only seems logical that in a few decades’ time it’ll be the Paralympians that break all the records.

But the Paralympics is about more than sporting achievement, and in my mind is more important than the regular/normal/ordinary/boring Olympics. The Paralympics has the power to inspire not just the disabled, but every one of us. In fact, it should make the rest of us feel shame for every time we gripe about the weather or our boss or anything for that matter.

The boring Olympics might highlight the physical triumphs of exceptional men and women, but the Paralympics does more – it showcases the triumphs of the spirit, and the strength of the soul.

A Reboot with Soul

So I got up nice and early and made bacon and eggs and coffee to take up to the missus in bed and still didn’t get to see the new Spiderman movie.

It’s not like she doesn’t go in for comic book movies – she loved Iron Man and enjoyed Avengers – but she just doesn’t get all giggly about the impending ‘Dark Knight Rises’ like I do.

At least superhero films these days manage to get decent actors and an actual live scriptwriter. I shudder at the thought of the pre-Nolan ‘Batman & Robin’ with Arnie Schwarzablahblah and she-of-the-weird-feet Uma Thurman.

It was fucking embarrassing when I insisted a group of us went to the cinema to see it. When we all left I was mortified and my girlfriend at the time patted me on the shoulder and said, “It wasn’t that bad” as though she was consoling me for the loss of my dog.

If they’d taken the piss out of me it’d have been okay, but they consoled me, for Christ’s sake. It was THAT bad.

But the good thing about these films is if you fuck up you always get another shot. Hell, the ‘reboot’ was invented by the comics. There are so many versions of Batman it’s hard to keep track so when I heard grumbles about it being “too soon” to reboot Spiderman I waved the notion away.

The Tobey Maguire Spiderman got a bit naff, so instead of wringing their hands about it they just had another go. I hear the acting's better in this one, anyway.

Comic companies are always reinventing these myths. They do them in creative ways like ‘Crisis on Infinite Earths” in the Eighties or “Zero Hour” in the Nineties, or they have cool asides like the fascist Superman in “Elseworlds” and the brilliant “Dark Knight Returns” by Frank Miller. If you think about it, the Batman turds that came after Tim Burton’s two were so different they were practically reboots; it’s just that there wasn’t the concept of ‘reboot’ in Hollywood yet so they called them sequels.

I hear so many new Batman fans sad because Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy is coming to an end. They think there’s not gonna be another Batman movie for ten years.

Personally, I think that if the Bane character in “Dark Knight Rises” does what he does in the “Knightfall” storyline in the comics (i.e: breaking Batman’s back and putting him in a wheelchair), there’s going to be another trilogy with the new Batman/Azrael character and how he goes psycho and Bruce Wayne has to come back and fight him and reclaim the mantle.

How cool would that be?

My wife knows better than to want a lie-in when Batman hits the big screen. Coz then she’d be waking up to an empty house while I’m munching popcorn and staining my trousers with excitement.

Backs to the Wall, the Gay Green Lantern is on the Way!

It has the faint aroma of a gimmick, but only time will tell if DC Comics’ gay superhero coming out story will have any kind of impact on mainstream society.

Yes, that’s right, Alan Scott, the original Green Lantern, the guy in the green trousers and puffy red shirt with the purple cape, is coming out of the phone booth. When you take a look at his outfit it kind of makes sense. I mean, superheroes have always been a bit camp, but the OGL… the penny finally dropped.

Big news: The “Mums of America” or whatever the Christian fundamentalist jobsworth group is called were up in arms about it, bingo wings flapping, saying, “…they want to indoctrinate impressionable young minds…”

Dude, I watched the Rocky Horror Picture Show a million times as a teenager, but you don’t see me running around in suspenders and facepaint… well, maybe on special occasions. You either like a bit of cock or you don’t – reading about a superhero who does isn’t going to change anyone’s sexuality.

The question really is: Will he be interesting?

It’s a bit like politically correct rebelliousness. They want the little bit of scandal to garner some press coverage, but when it all dies down what then?

In the Nineties the Hal Jordan Green Lantern killed a bunch of people and tried to destroy the universe and recreate it as a better place. He became the ultimate villain. Will they give the gay GL some kind of dark side?

Here's the rub: Just like the Christian mums scream about a gay superhero, you’re gonna get people calling you a homophobe if you let your Pink Avenger do anything bad. Even though they’ve stirred up a faux-controversy with a superguy who bats for the other team, will they risk the political incorrectness of having him do something unheroic?

I doubt it. They’ll most likely have him come up against a homophobic villain and come pretty close to killing him, but in the end he’ll ‘do the right thing’ and just send him to prison. He’ll be the most goodest, clean-cut superhero ever. He’ll make Superman look like a kiddy-fiddler.

It would be wonderful if they really showed everyone that "hey, gays are people too", and had him, like everyone else, be a good bloke but also be a bit of a dickhead sometimes too. Once we get to that stage then the world really will be a place where no one gives a shit about your sexual preference.

But then there wouldn’t be any controversy then, would there?

Why You Should Buy A Kindle

I had to pause for thought the other day when a columnist wrote that they didn’t want a Kindle because then guests wouldn’t be impressed by their well-stocked bookshelves any longer.

I thought: Surely someone who is well-read can’t be so shallow!

Or maybe, like me, they’re just what is called a ‘late adopter’ of technology. When the e-reader first came out I, like so many, scoffed and blah-blah’ed about the smell of a new book and how proud I was of my bookshelf.

Then, alas, I moved to another continent.

Anyone who has moved house knows that worse than the sweat and swearing of hauling the refrigerator and washing machine up stairs is the ball-ache of carting boxes and boxes of books up the very same stairs. At least the telly gets up in one go, but a library of novels can take a week.

It’s a pain because books are heavy. I’m not talking about the intellectual weight of Tolstoy; I mean that you can’t shove all your books in one big-ass packing case. You’ve got to mix them in with clothes or stick ‘em in in smaller shoeboxes.

So when I moved from South Africa to England I had to part with all my imaginary friends and their exciting adventures. These fictional characters had changed my life, and as I handed them over to charity shops or second-hand stores I performed many tiny eulogies.

Two months later I unwrapped a shiny new Kindle courtesy of my amazing wife!

It is rare that as an adult one opens a gift that slaps a genuine look of wonder on their steadily-wrinkling mug, but that Christmas morning a childlike grin and sunfire eyes blossomed on my grizzled visage.

Since then I’ve become a wannabe poster boy for the Amazon Kindle.

There are so many reasons for this:

Bizarrely, it’s easier to read than a book. It must be the magic of e-ink, but my eyes don’t tire as fast with the Kindle and I can read for longer.

I love browsing in bookshops, and there is no bigger store than the online Amazon store. If you’re looking for your favourite author she’s right there – everything she’s ever written! If you like something Amazon will recommend stuff that’s similar. I’ve also found so many new, brilliant writers that just talking about it makes a big sparkling heart grow where my small black coal-shaped one used to live.

Also, you can only lend something to someone for a fortnight; and even though you can’t access it on your own Kindle when it’s lent, it comes straight back after those two weeks. This means that you never give someone something to read and never see it again.

I won’t bang on about how comfortable it is to hold or how cool you feel reading it on a bus when everyone thinks you’re much smarter than you really are – ooh, he’s reading; must be a doctor or something.

But the best part of a Kindle is this: I’ve often wondered how many books I’ve read in my lifetime. Heavy readers will say they’ve read over a thousand, but when you think about that it’s a book a week for just over nineteen years. Now imagine giving one to your kid when they start to read and in twenty years’ time that kid having a record of every book they’ve ever read.

Not only that, but they’ve still got all those novels stored forever.

Sad, but things like this make my heart dance like the Lilliputian toes of cherubs getting shot at by dirty Wild West gunslingers.

So you can keep your showy-offy bookshelf, fat and groaning with its unread copies of War & Peace and Noam Chomsky. We all know you hide Maeve Binchy in your sock drawer, and secretly read Twilight alone in the bog.

WIN WIN WIN

My wife loves yoghurt – but only in the small single serving pots. The larger buy-in-bulk-and-save tubs make her sick. Even a mention of them forces her to emit that gag sound like she’s about to throw up.

She has a few hang-ups like this. The vomit noise can also be brought about by a picture of Tom Jones; sometimes merely his voice on the radio.

I have my own quirks. For instance, if I buy a book, magazine or newspaper I don’t like anyone else to read it before me. Also: When dining I try to get a bit of everything from my plate onto my fork with each bite, thereby ending with a neat sample of the entire meal for my last taste – if I finish the meat before the veg, and am left with a bit of chicken sans the accompanying slice of carrot, a small wave of sorrow flows through me.

Granted, if someone reads my copy of Empire or I have a few chips left over after my burger I don’t want to hurl, but sometimes psychological pain is worse than physical.

My mum has a friend who is a compulsive competition enterer. The prize is unimportant, and whether one can win a holiday in Spain or a year’s supply of anal bleach she will enter it regardless.

Of course she wins a lot of stuff she will never use – like power tools and the complete works of Fifty Cent – but you can’t argue that if you’re gonna succumb to a bit of OCD then that’s one to go for.

Back in the day competitions were all about sending in a postcard with your name and address on. These days it’s on your mobile or online.

My advice: go for online.

Driving around one day long ago I kept hearing a radio competition centred on the new Whitney Houston album. They were incessantly playing her new ‘hit’ about how she looked or felt like a Million Dollar Bill and I couldn’t help thinking that the only million dollar bill I knew of was the Zimbabwean one, worth about one Rand or eighty pence, and that was how I usually felt after a big night out drinking tequila and pepper-spray. After a while I got so irritated I entered the damn competition by texting the relative number.

I didn’t win a cd, but what I did receive was non-stop messages from the competition sponsor. And being that Whitney’s primary target market was middle-aged female divorcees meant that the people behind it sold things like pills for menopause and books such as Eat Pray Love.

So in future I’d obviously go for the online option with a fake email address. If I’m lucky I’ll win a Tom Jones dvd or a lifetime supply of big tubs of yoghurt.

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.

haha or lol?

If I explained the growth of a gigantic carbuncle on my toe as a process of ‘evolution’ you’d probably head off to the bar for another drink or make some such other excuse to leave my company, right? But then why do people insist on telling me that language is evolving?

More likely, as with the ugly thing sprouting on the edge of my foot, it is becoming hideously deformed.

With every Facebook ‘lol’ I type and ‘innit’ I catch on the tip of my tongue I feel like I’m becoming more slobbering beast than Darwinian king-of-the-food-ladder. And with every badly punctuated ‘Firemans Arms’ pub or cringe-inducing ‘wellness’ I read I imagine our species spiralling back to amoeba status.

I have a special hatred for the word ‘wellness’. When I hear it or see it written in some puffy magazine it never fails to conjure images of rich housewives daintily nibbling scones on the patio and sipping Earl Grey in frilly teacups – “So, Maeve, how’s your health? But more importantly, how’s your wellness?”

It is a pity our language is being destroyed. To hear a Christian say, “God is awesome!”, I’m never sure he means the yippeewowsingasong ‘awesome’ or the real meaning: the inducing of equal parts fear and excitement. One of the most powerful words in the English language is now a guy on the pavement with his trousers around his arse and a baseball cap at a jaunty angle.

Depressing.

And if I read the UK papers correctly, the word ‘immigrant’ now does not mean someone from another country living over here. In the hearts and minds of Brits, ‘immigrant’ means Muslim.

Whenever I see an article bemoaning immigrants I can’t help taking offence. I’m an immigrant and I don’t leech benefits. I’m an immigrant and I’m contributing to the economy and paying taxes. No, no, people tell me, they don’t mean people like you; people with jobs who can speak English; they mean those other people.

What am I then? A pseudo-immigrant? A European returning to the motherland? Sometimes I feel like I’m back in South Africa, only it’s not the Juju Malema’s telling me to bugger off back to where my ancestors possibly came from but the Brits saying I’m not really a Saffer but one of them… shit rugby team and all!

I’m not complaining. I appreciate that I’ve been welcomed with open arms by the country we beat in a World Cup final. In fact, the thought of going back to South Africa fills me with dread; not because I don’t love my country, but because I like it here so much.

I sympathise with the English who see a cleric on a street corner shouting about how evil the British are; especially when said cleric is living in a cosy council house eating food bought with tax money. I also think that if he reckons it’s so shit over here why doesn’t he fuck off back to where he came from.

But don’t shoebox him as an ‘immigrant’. Call him what he is: a stupid prick.

I say this not as a foreigner telling anyone how to run their country, but as a staunch defender of a great language trying to rescue it from obscurity. I love English, and will stand in front of the ‘innit’ wrecking ball as it swings in for destruction.

If only someone would point that wrecking ball at my big toe, maybe I’d get more conversation down the pub.

The Devil's Day Off

Some mornings it’s hard being a Secret Service samurai, arm-wrestling the legions of Darkness without denting your balls of steel. Leaving the safety of my bed yesterday, it didn’t take me long to realise that the balls in Hell’s Lotto had rolled the numbers of my shitstorm quickpick.

First, when I got to the library to print out the tickets for our flight, a sign told me their pcs were all down. This being Plympton (not exactly the tourist capital of Rainland) the closest internet café was fifty miles away, across a raging river of lava and guarded by an oversexed-yet-horny werewolf.

No worries, I thought, as I took it in my long stride and calculated a back-up plan.

Making a fast stop at home to remove my work clothes from the washing machine and pop them in the dryer I discovered that said washing machine had broken down, locking my clothes inside. As I peered through the tiny, round window my soaking clothes looked ashamed to be in cahoots with Beelzebub and his rotten tactics.

But I looked into the bleary, red eyes of Satan’s minions and spat.

Then, because the bus driver wouldn’t except a tenner (not enough change) and I had to buy something from the Tesco to get a smaller denomination, Satan thought he could beat me by making the queue really long and making the machine swallow my cash when I used one of those do-it-yourself check-outs.

People think the Devil is only to blame for the biggies – War, Pestilence, Famine, Death – but even the Dark Lord has a day off. He does some gardening, collects stamps, maybe is responsible for a new boyband, and then burns your toast or makes a shoelace snap.

I figure, if that red bastard is gonna fuck with me, I’m gonna fuck with him. So every time he makes me step in a dog turd, or moves my cereal bowl so the milk goes all over the table, instead of blabbing a load of expletives I try to laugh about it; try and make him think I love this shit.

In retrospect, even the worst day of your life is just an amusing story to tell down the pub.

So fuck you, Satan. I got my plane tickets, I got my money out the Tesco machine, and today is my day off and you’re back at work inventing AIDS or causing drought or filming another season of Jersey Shore.

You suck. I win.

A Time Machine in a Jar

By far the best birthday present I got this year was a jar of Smurfs.

Yes, Smurfs. Those blue shirtless guys with the funny hats.

On the morning of my birthday after being presented with loads of cards all filled with money, after downloading the $50 Amazon gift voucher from my mum all the way in South Africa (spent on Goo Goo Dolls, The Fray and Madonna (for the wife) CDs), I opened the badly wrapped present complete with (rather random) piece of string.

At first I thought it was a jar of sweets or chocolates, which would have kept me in a movie’s worth of munchies and kept my dentist flush with future filling bills, until I realised that they were the exact same plastic Smurf figures Greg and I used to get at the petrol station. My niece had had them lying around and on the night before thought she’d wrap them up for me just because.

My eyes lit up and my jaw dropped open. Everyone in the room – even the kids – initially thought I was taking the piss.

I wasn’t.

When I was but a wee lad my mum, dad, brother and I used to spend almost every school holiday on my grandparents farm in Beaufort West – one of those small towns described as ‘one horse’ but also only have one policeman, one prostitute and about thirty liquor stores. It is surrounded by many large farms, so in fact it has many horses.

Anyway, the drive from Cape Town to Beaufort West would take around six or seven hours (this was before the Huguenot Tunnel shortened the journey considerably) and on the requisite stops for petrol, padkos and a piss we would receive a Smurf figurine.

I’m not entirely sure if my parents bought them or they came free with every tank filled (it was before I understood the concept of money… as in something other people always seem to have and I always seem to need), but we always got some.

That was around 1985, and now back in 2012 it was as though someone tied my brain to a football and I’d been booted back in time by Beckham.

Of course, the kids were chuffed by my reaction, even though they didn’t entirely understand it. It seemed kind of poetic to be surprised with a burst on nostalgia on my birthday.

I am the Smoking Jesus

You might as well tattoo a swastika on your forehead, because you’d no doubt garner the same contempt from little old ladies and mums-pushing-prams. You’re standing in the rain, while everybody else – all non-smokers – look out at you thinking, “Freeze, you bastard.”

But you put up with it because you’re a slave to nicotine. An addict. And the ten minute wait for the bus would seem like an age if you didn’t have your cancerous friend to suck down.

It is a universal law, though, that as soon as you light a ciggy the bus will round the corner. If you’re scabby enough you might nip it and put it back in the box – to hell with the stench – but most of us just grumble and stomp it underfoot.

Smokers, in England, are treated like lepers were a few hundred years ago. I’m sure if all the health freaks had their way we’d be chained and shipped off to a remote island where we could pollute the air away from their tender nostrils; killing only those like us with our secondary poison.

They now put pictures on the packs of all the horrible things it does to you - like a child sniffing it in; an open mouth with missing teeth and rotting tongue; and my personal favourite, a dead guy on a morgue table.

The thing is, if they did that when I was in school it wouldn’t have discouraged me. Rather, I would have collected the things like stickers for a Thundercats sticker book.

An ad I noticed put it into perspective for me. A yellow background with black silhouettes of a young lad handing a pack of cancer sticks to a younger lad (or a midget), and the writing: CHEAPER CIGARETTES MEAN IT’S EASIER FOR YOUR KIDS TO SMOKE!

Made sense, I thought. A lot more sense than the South African version telling you that cheap, illegal smokes fund terrorism(?). Yes, but the heavy ‘sin’ tax on legal ciggies funds Jacob Zuma’s third plane.

Like any addict gives a shit, anyway.

But it made sense to me, and I thought that it’s right to make smokers feel like evil outcasts if it means my future children will look at the habit with disgust.

It wasn’t like that in my day. Hell, James Bond was a smoker! But a decade or so ago they got Hollywood to only let Bad Guys tug on a fag. And no teenager wants to be a bad guy… well, unless you want to score with the girls your mother warned you about… and who didn’t?

It makes sense that Bad Guys would have bad habits, but so often the Bad Guy is more appealing than the Good Guy with his neat haircut and gentlemanly demeanour. The genius in making smokers smelly, yellow-teethed and rain-drenched is that it makes them us look like sad losers with no friends, obviously standing in the rain so that no one can see we’ve been crying over our pathetic lives.

I will happily stand out in the rain dancing with pneumonia if it means I will spare my children from future addiction. Stick a fag in my mouth and nail me to a crucifix if it helps.

Hopefully my sacrifice will save them.

The American Version

Growing up I was often forced to break the law.

My parents were criminals not because they robbed banks or blew up shopping malls, but because our house was practically a warehouse of books and films banned by the Apartheid government.

Of course, it didn’t take much for the forever-frowning, downturned-mouth racists at the board of censors to ban something. Most of it was laughable; like the banning of the novel ‘Black Beauty’ for obvious, albeit ridiculous, reasons.

It was hard to get good telly. You see, the British were holding ‘Free Mandela’ rallies and imposing sanctions, and my parents couldn’t bear the thought that their kids would have to make do with American television.

So mum and dad would sneak in bootleg copies of ‘The Benny Hill Show’ and ‘Fawlty Towers’ – the kind of thought-provoking art they knew mattered.

The Americans, who didn’t have a problem with Apartheid because they thought all blacks were Communists, flooded our market and our tv screens with ‘Airwolf’, ‘The A-Team’ and ‘Murder She Wrote’.

I don’t think anyone will seriously argue the superiority of British television. I believe this is mainly because in Hollywood original thought is for amateurs.

And of all the Yank shows stolen from the Brits I can’t think of one Brit show stolen from the Yanks.

The British also manage to restrain themselves; with the average show lasting maybe three or four seasons no matter how popular it is. Americans, on the other hand, will milk the cow until its udder turns to dust. It’s all fair play if it’s a show you love, but more often than not the Yanks run it drier than a cheap table wine and by the time the show is cancelled it’s become so lame your entire memory of it is ruined.

And it’s all such flag-waving masturbation. If you believe films like ‘Saving Private Ryan’ you’d think that it was only the Yanks who fought World War 2. I mean, did anyone even know that Australia was involved in the Vietnam War?

The irony is that in South Africa, even though the American government supported the National Party’s retarded policies, we still love them so much that half the country puts on a fake Wesley Snipes accent.

I think Ernest Hemingway said that “a good writer borrows, but a great writer steals.” So, of course, I could just be full of shit.

Good News is No News

I see myself suspended from a washing line. The rope enters one ear and exits the other; with a look of painful sadness I flap violently in the wind.

Or maybe there is a toothless hillbilly in my head; grinning idiotically as he plays on a tight, thin strip of catgut attached to a banjo constructed out of a rusty oil can and his late uncle’s wooden leg.

Now, I’m not complaining about the weather – which would be all too British – but merely commenting on the frozen state of my ears as I trudge up the hill on my way home. It is enough to make me at least consider buying and invariably wearing earmuffs; but I’m not sure I lack the sense of self-consciousness to take such a plunge.

It’s odd, but I find myself appreciating the horrible weather. Or, to be more specific, I appreciate the appreciation it gives me of those days when the sky is blue and the sun is shining; even if said sun isn’t making things that much warmer, but the mere presence of its happy glow now makes me as retardedly giggly as a drunk Tellytubby.

Possibly I’ve come to some Zen understanding of the nature of existence… but probably not. More likely is that I’ve become an exile from the world of print media.

What makes your neighbour’s botched birthday cake more newsworthy than, say, the slaughter of a thousand Buddhist monks in Burma is the closeness of it all. The closer it is to your doorstep, the more you care.

Even though I occasionally browse South African news, I find myself not puffing out my cheeks in wild indignation, furiously punching out an angry rant in the comment box, but shrugging my shoulders and thinking: not my problem.

And even though I occasionally pick up a copy of the Herald, I can’t find the energy to exhaust myself over the pseudo-shocking headlines. It all seems like good news to me.

For instance the story today about the gormless (and pudgy) thug stuck in jail for five for threatening someone with a broken bottle. Five years! That’s about the average term murdering rapists face is SA; and that’ll probably be suspended.

In South Africa criminals are scary and intimidating, but here in Plymouth they just seem incredibly stupid and ridiculous.

Like the asinine monkeyboy caught spray painting “Dorks” in fancy tags all over the city who barely escaped tchookie. There we see his simple mug, his puerile smile, and we just know he’s looking at the photographer while his small brain is thinking: “Yes… Yes! Fame at last!”

So while some stop reading the papers due to impending depression, I’ve stopped because it simply isn’t interesting enough.

However, on page eight of the Herald I see earmuffs on special at Chaplin’s, but now I’ve kind of befriended the little hillbilly so it would seem rude.

The New Facebook

After yawning at yet another FB status update along the lines of: “Riding my bicycle this afternoon. Yay!” I couldn’t help logging off and spending a wheelbarrow-full of money.

Not on drink to ease the pain of not having my own bicycle. And not on an actual bicycle to ride myself and maybe exclaim my very own “Yay!” on my very own Facebook wall. In fact, forget the bicycle. It’s metaphorical and wildly random at best.

The money was spent on books, movies and music. And I was content to wait a few days to receive these items; unusual in this ‘instant gratification’ world we now live in.

You see, I’ve started to realise that Amazon might just be the new Facebook.

Even though ‘The Book’ might be “free and it always will be” as advertised after abject international online horror at the mere rumour that they were going to start charging, I don’t mind the spending or even the waiting.

As it were, the waiting is the part I love the most. A few days later, when you’ve forgotten all about your purchase of an old Batman comic you liked as a kid or Britney’s Greatest Hits, you hear a plop through the letterbox and instead of the usual bills and Avon catalogue there lies an exciting gift.

And if you’re like me in any way you’d have forgotten completely about it by now; it’s like Christmas all over again! Even though it may be the Madonna cd you bought for the wife or ‘Zulu Dawn’ for your mum-in-law, it’s still addressed to you so you get to rip the box open.

As long as you put some money every month into an inaccessible account, and draw some cash to spend on bus fare and fags, you can spend to your heart’s content.

And it’s not just entertainment one can purchase. They sell pots and pans and shoes and trousers. They even sell sporting equipment; so very soon I may just be exclaiming a “Yay!”

But I promise I’ll try really hard not to mention it on Facebook.