Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground

I have fucking had it. The August winds have been blowing barn-flattening strong for weeks now. Tumbling dead leaves fill the air like swarming locusts, landing and burying everything. The pool’s leaf soup, and the filter’s gagging on the all-roughage diet. The hammock’s become a giant potpourri of dead leaves and twigs, and the patio’s vanished under crunchy brown snowdrifts. Trying to sweep it away is a Sisyphean futility. This wind’s sentient, malevolent. When I try to fly my kite (when life gives you lemons, make lemonade and so on and so forth), I either get scorching string burns as the kite gets snapped out of my fingers, or watch it stall and plummet as the winds seemingly holds its breath out of spite. It's become a bitter personal enemy. Take this extract from The English Patient:

“There is a whirlwind in Southern Morocco, the Aajej, against which the fellahin defend themselves with knives. Herodotus tells of a wind - the Simoon - so evil that a nation declared war on it and marched out to fight it in full battle dress, their swords raised.”

Fuck it, if they can, I can. The kitchen arsenal has yielded an egg beater and a rolling pin, though I fear they may not be quite up to the task of thrashing an entire low pressure system. Any suggestions?

Plagiarism and Seduction

Watching a rust-coloured sunset from a deck on a stretch of beautiful and wild beach*. Paragon du jour sits next to next me, pink gin in hand. I clutch a fist-sized whiskey, trying not to babble, gazing at her ice-white blond hair, blue eyes, and the freckles on her button nose.

I’d already made several mock charges at her. The previous night’s attempt of flinging off my glasses and saying ‘kiss me, you fool!’ had left me blinded and blundering into the rhododendron bush. At least she laughed.

So now sitting on the deck, my brain was ransacking the unkempt bedsit of my mind for something cool to say, to do - anything. Something along the lines of ‘we could die tomorrow, so just in case, why not snog an average guy like me?’. Or failing that, just tearful pleading.

Then, tearing my eyes away from her and seeing the sunset, a flash of inspiration hit me, like a bitch slap from Cupid. I segued the conversation into mortality and the vivid bits in-between. I began a sensitive, heartfelt monologue heavily paraphrasing from this extract from Paul Bowles' The Sheltering Sky , passing it all off as my own.

'Because we don't know when we will die,
we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well.
Yet everything happens only a certain number of times,
and a very small number really.
How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon
of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of
your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it.
Perhaps four or five times more, perhaps not even that.
How many more times will you watch the full moon rise?
Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.'

There was a sigh. She swung out of her deckchair, climbed onto my lap and snogged me!

We spent a great, funny, affectionate year together after that, til she went back to London, and I swore off tear-stained airport goodbyes for life.

*Storm’s River Mouth, Tsitsikamma, for those of you who know it.

What’s In Your Pockets?

Tonight I emptied out mine and found:

1. Silver cigarette case. I’ve started rolling my own cigarettes and need somewhere to lump them. Like all the things I like, it feels good in the hand. It snaps open like a clam shell, easy as a gesture.
2. Packet of liquorice rizla papers. See above.
3. Asthmatic Bic cigarette lighter, dull as a broken lego brick.
4. Old silver ring someone gave it to me one glorious day on the beach way back, that day she said there were dolphins in my eyes. She’s gone - and I don’t wear it - but I like to keep it near me sometimes, to remind me someone else - and I - can love that much. It’s my talisman against settling for less.
5. Piece of shit clam-shell cell phone that’s about as clever as a nine volt scalectix set. Texting on it is slower than semaphore.
6. 250Mb flash drive. Last night’s work and some other random crap on it. Sadly no Defcon 1 missile launch codes.
7. Passport-sized notebook, for catching exciting stray ideas and mundane grocery lists. Right now it’s scribbled with cock-eyed storyboards for a spoof James Bond trailer Nick and I are making.
8. Jane’s writing manifesto, printed to bookmark size. She wrote it a few months ago, to kick my arse into writing stuff down.
9. Lamy fountain pen with a broad nib (the only sort that makes my spidery writing legible, even to me) and Parker sapphire ink. They don’t make this ink anymore, but if you wrote someone just a grocery list in this deep india blue, they’d jump trains, switch buses and walk blocks to see you.
10. Wallet with drivers licence, a waning debit card, maxed-out credit card, and about R125.40 bucks in change, after all the tequilas I bought tonight.

I think you can tell lots about a person by turning out their pockets. What’s in yours?

All Nighter

3am. I’m still up working, while the rest of the post code has been under the covers 12 cups of coffee and a phone book of computer code ago. My eyes are itchy and the on-screen alphabet segues into dancing kenji subtitles. The keyboard is dandruffed with cigarette ash, and the ashtray is silting up with butts, higher than my laundry pile. I shan’t bore you by explaining what I’m working on: suffice to say it’s tedious as grouting and tiling the Berlin wall, and so mindless a trained monkey zygote could do it.

Stankie the pug is fast asleep under the desk, snoring like a wheezing plastic squeeze toy. I wish we could trade places, but I'm hesitant to entrust the skewed marble run of her dog brain with cranking out an airline website with a 10am deadline.

I thought I left all-nighters behind at varsity. Strong cheap coffee and brutal Stuyvie Red cigarettes that would poleaxe an iron lung. A set work Bronte speed read faster than a money counter clacking through a brick of Zim banknotes, then writing the essay out straight into neat. I always cursed the first birdsong that meant dawn wasn’t far behind, and the nine o’clock sharp deadline, when Gollum the English Dept secretary snapped closed the submissions slot sharp and final as a mousetrap.

Work calls. Wherever you are, sleep tight. Sweet dreams.

UPDATE
8am. 3 hours sleep. My bones feel like plasticine. I’m bumping into things. Things are blurry and my eyes feel like eggs boiled in lemon juice. I can’t email the 80Mb of work across town, as bloody SA bandwidth is slow as lichen. So now, in my knackered state, I have to zip the files onto a flash drive, bike* the fucking thing four postcodes from here and transfer them onto the computer of what I suspect will be a contentedly well rested client. Then it’s straight home for deadline number two, due at 12 o’clock. Bloody hell.

*My car got nicked recently. I have not the words for my venom.

Housework

I’ve returned from three weeks’ holiday in Malaysia, to find the garbage scow that is my house listing badly and taking in water. The swimming pool has gone rotten and looks like a tar pit, I haven’t seen my bedroom floor in days, and Frankie and Stankie (the labrador and pug) have colonised the ziggurat of dirty laundry in the scalectrix room and are turning feral. The digsmates have fled for parts unknown, leaving no forwarding addresses.

Agri, my Zimbabwean butler/houseboy has been home on holiday for three weeks now. He normally does the gardening, housecleaning and laundry. I live in a large, drafty, lopsided four bedroom house that without his constant attention would slowly collapse in on itself like a flan in a cupboard. Now before you self-cleaning First World types roll your eyes; my generation grew up in ‘70s South Africa in similarly preposterously large houses that would be totally unviable without servants to keep them afloat. As a result, we are lazy, spoilt, apartheid brats that are hopeless at surviving in the wild.

I’ve tried to blame my procrastination on jetlag, but as I’ve been home for a week now, this excuse is becoming untenable.