goodbuddies inc.

Setting Fire to Life

2012-01-22T12:45:00.000+02:00

Hello myfurry friends,

First thingsfirst (never second): I love you guys! Each and every one of you. I love howbeautiful, intelligent, patient and just generally awesome you are. I wouldlike to marry each and every one of you guys and because I'm Xhosa-ish I can.I'll get cows and everything. It'll be nice.

Secondthings second (never first): I'm falling in love with this rag called life andI'm setting it on fire, arsonist that I am. My life pretty much sucks right nowbut God gave me amazing friends and some useful family members to help me on myjourney to becoming the absolute best that I can be. If I'm going to set mylife on fire I might as well do so with the best team available to me.

Phoenix Rising

Here's thebulletproof plan:

1. Land theepic librarian gig I've been gunning for all this time. I would be SouthAfrica's best librarian. No question about it. Books, talking with and helpingpeople are where it's (I'm not too sure what 'it' is) at for me. I am alsointerested in the Big Five literacy programmes that the City ofJohannesburg's libraries host annually - that's my wheelhouse and all.

Jo'burg Libraries

2. Be moneywise. The thing that always kicks me in the head all the time is that I amstupid with my money. I'm sad to admit that I'm too compulsive a creature andthat I go too far in spending money on too many things that aren't importantfor progress in my life. That's not cool and I should stop it. Just stop it,Charlie. *the moving, wagging finger*

3. My newfavourite real life hero is Pierre Spies. He's, like, so totally awesome hey.The man's just a tank whose life is on Wizard's Fire. He is the inspiration behind mynew workout routine and health plan. This guy. He's rad-ical. I also want tobuy a mountain bike and hit the off-road for thatadventurous healthy sort of lifestyle.

Pierre Spies

4. I misstaking some time out, connecting with the 'verse and talkingto the Big G. I should do more of that, more of the time. I miss You Big G, Imiss our dialogue. Please forgive me for being silent for so long. I also missC.S. Lewis and Peter Kreeft a lot. Those guys know God's heart very intimately.

5. Workharder. Work smarter. I'm the laziest person I know and it's my lethargy that'sbeen the source of many a failure of mine. I'm also pretty dumb about how Iwork. I've no plan of attack; I just wing it, which ain't too efficient orsensible. This is one of the important tasks to get done.

6. Readmore. A book a week keeps the ignorance away. I want to expand my reading materialto more than comic books, graphic novels, horror, fantasy and sci-fi novels. I'mgoing to annihilate the 101 Books to Read Before You Die list this year.Bam! Just like that. Better and smarter Charlie, always a hit at upper crustparties.

7. Gamemore. I miss gaming and tech so much that my soul actually hurts. Gaming is tome what boobs (lol) are to awesomeness - essential dammit! I have so many titlesto catch up with: replay Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2 in preparation for Mass Effect 3, Skyrim, Batman: Arkham City, Deus Ex: Human Evolution and many othertitles beside.

8. Get my driver'slicence. This one has been a thorn in my side for some time and it'stime to be a road warrior and just do it once and for all. Get it out of theway as they say. Also, there's the fact that bitcheslove being driven around in cars and stuff.

9. Beadventurous and tick off exciting things on the impromptu (we'll pretend I knowwhat that means) bucket list: surfing, sky diving, banging dirty hippies withginger dreadlocks, climbing a mountain - any one will do - and winning fightsagainst annoying assholes.

10. Finally,do some good for change. I'm a fan of literacy programmes so I'll do somethingselfless along those lines.

Okay. That'sthe list, give or give a few more items. Other than Pierre Spies, and a host ofothers, I'm being my own hero. No cape, no tights or cool Bat toys - just me.

Thank youfor sticking around and indulging me my little speech. I ask only that you joinme in forging (I like that word - and know what it means) an alliance ofeveryday heroes that set the 'verse alight by being super awesome at living ourlives.

Fire Dragon

Also, happy Chinese New Year for tomorrow.

Cupboard Person of the er... Year

2012-01-18T17:11:00.000+02:00

“The most wonderful of all things in life is the discovery of another human being with whom one's relationship has a growing depth, beauty and joy as the years increase. This inner progressiveness of love between two human beings is a most marvelous thing; it cannot be found by looking for it or by passionately wishing for it. It is a sort of divine accident, and the most wonderful of all things in
life.”- Sir Hugh Walpole

I didn’t think of her as an actual human person with hopes, wishes, dreams, feelings, boobs, cute lazy eyes and chutzpah.

It’s too early to make this person my Cupboard Person of the Year, I know, since the year has just kicked off but she will be a highlight no matter what else happens to me this year. So here we go: the beautiful and charming Nthabiseng Monyane.

Life is wonderfully wobbly and all sorts of wibbly and I love it for that very reason. You can never be too sure of what to expect from it. It gives you Joy and sunshine at times and grief and thunderstorms at others. That’s just the way it goes.

Once in a while, though, someone amazing happens and her beautiful soul enters into your life and throws your whole rhythm out of balance by exploding her galaxy into your soulstuff. It’s a beautiful moment that I wish I could capture and bottle. That’s not the way God’s multiverse works though and all I can do is hold my breath and enjoy the beauty of the moment. I can also write about it a little.

Life in its wonderfully wobbly proportions is sneaky like a ninja kitten and introduced me to Nthabi-chan as Asia – someone who left a comment on a post on this here blog a few years back. Of course I didn’t think anything of it back then, since I didn’t expect that we would be meeting at any point. I lack all sorts of foresight I guess. She was, to my mind, just another wonderful mind trawling the interwebscape. I didn’t think of her as an actual human person with hopes, wishes, dreams, feelings, boobs, cute lazy eyes and chutzpah.

And then she moved to Jozi and got in touch and we started chatting on BBM, plotting clandestine meetings in dark corners where groping might occur. We just hit it off like two red headed stepchildren (to quote my friend, Grant). Plans were plot and schemes were scam for the meeting day and they almost unravelled because of fresh fog fuckery on my side of things but we circumvented all of that and met for a drink last Friday. Needless to say that the meeting went well... Okay, I lie, the meeting was freakin’ amazing! This woman just made it into my headspace without any effort and it was one of the highlights of my life.

Plans were plot and schemes were scam for the meeting day...

I am grateful to the hooded and cloaked powers that be that I met Nthabi-chan and I look forward to at least a lifetime of shared experiences.

Welcome to the Beanbag my Lady Love, I hope you enjoy it here :)

Fuck It!!!/Back in the Swing of Things

2012-01-14T14:10:00.000+02:00

This is what happened last week Saturday:

My first post of 2012 and I'm just fucking angry! I'm angry at myself, I'm angry at the world in general and I'm angry at the Big Fella in the sky. I wish I had a fist the size of Cthulhu to punch the living shit out of everything I gaze my eyes upon... or at least a chainsaw to just fuck shit up. That would make me feel all kinds of better.

The funny thing is that I woke up in a pretty good mood today and it looked like my day was going to be all sunshine and tulips. I was going to type up a charming post about nothing in particular, a post characterised by my Charlie brand of humour and all. But everything went downhill with one incompetent computer store owner named Steve fucking up my day by being a douche bag of note. I bought a PC from this dude for a friend of mine who was supposed to pick it up at my place but decided he's going to Mozambique instead. This wasn't a problem since he gave me the cash moneys for it and I still stayed in my own place. Shit hit the fan when my cash moneys stopped going the distance they usually go and I decided to move back home with my momsicals with my tail tucked between my legs because I'm an idiot and unlike Charlie Sheen I lose at life. I digress though. The point is I didn't have space for my useless friend's PC anymore so I took it back to the computer store selling it for half the price I had bought it for. Steve tells me to pick up the money today, to which I agreed without any worries but when I fucking get there today he ignores me for what felt like an hour and then tells me to come back later. At this point I just lost my fucking marbles. Why didn't he just say this when I walked into the store?! Fucking retard.

This, of course, led me to being angry about everything I've ever bottled up in 2011. Now I'm sitting here trying to get my rage under control but it's not really working. I have the urge to take this computer and its slow internet connection and shove at down someone's throat.Way to fucking ruin my day universe! Thank you.

P.S. I still want a bunny-chow after craving one for a long ass time now. But guess what!? I don't have the money for one. Fresh Fog Fuckery! Argh.

Today:

So I had a so-so week till I met someone I'll tell you guys about as soon as I get time to sit down and do this woman some justice on my keyboard.

Today is just announcements. I have big plans for this year, plans the size of Cthulhu and I'm going to be working my sexy ass off to get things done and packaged nicely for yours and my enjoyment.

The Apocalypse cometh and we gotta do epic shit before it knocks on the world's door (with the exception of South Africa, Australia and New Zealand - we're gonna survive that shit) and stops the party.So see you guys next week with the new line-up.

Have fun.

Running Away From Home

2011-12-06T14:09:00.001+02:00

"They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do.They fill you with the faults they had And add some extra, just for you." - Philip Larkin, This Be The Verse

Okay, so I've tried this whole running away thing before... around 12 years ago. I had it all planned out too. BMX? Check. Sandwhich wrapped in a polka dot handkerchief? Check. Grand departure speech to make my mother miss me and feel guilty about shouting at me? Check.Too bad my mother reacted in a rather laclustre manner to the whole business. All she said was, "Okay, see you around." WTF?!My grand plan of making her miss me and regret letting me go for the rest of her life failed when, a few hours into my adventure, I got hungry and pedalled home to get more food. Only to be greeted by my mom and her sarcastic remark: "So, you're back?"Now, at age 24, and with my life in the toilet I've got this running away business figured out. Don't even mess with me. My plan is rock solid. I'm running away to become homeless in Jeffreys Bay, like I had planned almost 3 years ago. I'm going to become a surfer/bum.

The Plan

2011-09-21T18:26:00.000+02:00

In this life one needs a Plan, a towel, a tie and a hammer to make it big. If you’re lacking any of these tools be assured that your name will never go down in the annals of history as a person who was legend. The last three items on the list are easily acquired by anyone 21st Century-savvy enough to walk into a store or two and fork out some cash (which can be acquired through begging, stealing or by being employed). The Plan, though, is the nut-kicker. Without a solid Plan things will not fall into place for you.

Have you ever see Ocean’s Eleven? Yes? Good. George Clooney and his gang are people with a rock solid Plan in that movie. So much so that they went and carried out their Plan in two more movies. That’s the sort of thing you should be aiming for with your Plan.

Everyone wants to win at life and keep on winning till the day they die. Some people are so good at winning that they do so even after they’re dead. These are the people who have their names spoken in hushed tones of reverence. They are legend and had a solid Plan.

What constitutes a solid Plan though?

First things first: a list.

Ask yourself what you want in life and jot it down, every little thing you want. A lightsaber, super powers, Wonder Woman as your girlfriend, to become a surgeon, 2.5 kids, a bat mobile, jot everything down. If you’re going to make a list, you might as well make a proper list. It’s no use messing around.

With that out of the way you have to ask yourself how much effort you will need to invest into getting the ridiculous stuff on your list. This, alas, is the part where you have to be realistic. The best way to go about attaining your desires is to get hold of money, loads of it. The more money you can get the easier it will be to get people who are much more intelligent than you are to spend all their time finding a way to get you super powers.

The coolest way of making loads of money is to rob a bank and use that money to start a lucrative crime syndicate that allows you to have your grubby paws in every cookie jar on the shelf. It is recommended that you spend a few years on this part of the Plan. Also, try avoiding going to jail if you can. If you do get caught spend your time behind bars getting a business degree of some sort and doing push-ups. Use every step in the Plan as a learning experience. The only thing that can stop you is death – avoid it at all costs.

You will know you’ve made it to the top when you find yourself at the head of a boardroom table at the top floor of a skyscraper, surrounded by shady crime bosses clad in Armani suits and whose faces are wreathed in Cuban cigar smoke. Also, you’ll be donning a very snazzy tie and own several comfortable towels. It’s at this point in your life that you can get everything on your list by means of bribery and/or intimidation by way of hammer-wielding thugs (dressed as Thor if you like). Patience, that most admirable of virtues, would be a great addition to your repertoire at this stage (if the years of working on the Plan failed to bestow it upon you – you slow learner, you) but if you do get a little impatient once in a while torture a henchman or two – it’s such a great way to release all your pent-up emotions.

That, furry friends, is how you win at life.

Disclaimer: George Clooney gives this Plan his approval as being rock solid. Also, he is Batman with nipples. That is all. As you were.

There Be Dragons!

2011-09-15T00:53:00.000+02:00

There be dragons. That is all. As you were.

The Nerds Have Taken Over

2011-08-15T17:37:00.000+02:00

‘Be nice to nerds. Chances are you’ll end up working for one.’
- Bill Gates

Not that long ago, in a galaxy known as the Milky Way, on a planet called Earth by its inhabitants, I read the words ‘Save A Non-Geek Today’ in a computer magazine’s Editor’s note and was amused by the seemingly farfetched concept. Little did I know that those words foretold of the tech revolution that has silently swept over the world and converted the masses into geeks without them even realising it.

A short decade ago people who spent hours playing video games, reading fantasy, sci-fi and comic books were thought to be weird and had chairs thrown at them wherever they went by their intellectually inferior peers. These people went under ‘derogatory’ labels such as nerd and geek and were generally frowned upon for their silliness and were told that they should grow up.

What people don’t know, though, is that you can’t keep a nerd down for long because he will go back to his secret lair (because we all have one of those) and hatch a plan, so cunning you could pin a tail on it and call it a weasel, to take over the world! Which is exactly what happened, the nerds took over the Hollywood machine and with it the world. The message being sent out to the masses was (and I guess still is), ‘Don’t fuck with us! We know how to build guns that shoot lasers.’

There was a time when you had only a handful of television shows and movies to pick from if you had a craving for super heroes, space or medieval settings, especially if you were an adult and wanted something fantastic yet mature. Movie studios were reluctant to touch such material because they feared that they couldn’t sell it to a wide enough audience. Steven Erikson, Canadian writer of the Malazan Book of the Fallen series of fantasy novels, spent nearly a decade trying to sell his script for Gardens of the Moon and nobody wanted it because it was too ambitious! He’d walk out of studio meetings with his friend, and co-writer, Ian C. Esslemont with words such as: ‘Try something . . . simpler. Something like everything else out there. Something less . . . ambitious.’ Studios didn’t want to invest in material that audiences might find to be too complicated, which makes sense to a large extent but in the process they were grossly underestimating the intellectual capacity of audiences. People wanted something that would challenge them, hence the success of ventures such as The Matrix. People wanted to go to the cinema and be sold a fantastic story that is intelligent enough to actually buy into. People wanted, as Erikson puts it, ‘sophisticated shit’.

This, my furry friends, is where we are at, the space-age of television, cinema and literature in general. Admittedly it’s not the high-tech world envisioned by great minds like Isaac Asimov, in which the human race has conquered the stars, but strides have been made. The nerds are in charge of a large slice of the Hollywood pie and, like the gay community, we (me not so much actually, which is an outright travesty!) have the buying power to sustain that hold. Since the release of movies like The Lord of the Rings, Watchmen, V for Vendetta, 300, Sin City and others beside sci-fi and fantasy have had a ubiquitous presence in the box-office. This year has been great! Seeing releases like Thor, Priest and the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean and there are still upcoming titles like The Green Lantern and Captain America.

The masses love these movies and don’t even notice that they’re buying into the worlds of the kids they made fun of in school. Nerds have taken over almost every aspect of people’s lives. Just take a look around you at the wide-eyed uninitiated masses toting laptops, Blackberries, PSPs, DSs and hanging out on Facebook and Twitter – slavish devotees of the wonder that is technology with the nerds at the head of the revolution.

Cupboard Person of the Week

2011-08-12T14:29:00.000+02:00

“What could I possibly be suggesting? I mean, a young woman gets rescued by a dashing commander who lets her join his crew and then goes off to save the galaxy? How could she possibly develop any kind of interest in him?”
- Tali

There's something about a girl who is shy, has beautifully curved hips that sway in a mesmerising manner when she walks, wields a shotgun with deadly accuracy and has an affinity for spaceships that makes my heart flutter. The fact that she's an alien and you never get to see her face just makes her so much more mysterious.

I'm referring, of course, to the oh-so lovely Tali'Zorah nar Rayya from the Mass Effect series of video games. She is the sweetest mechanical genius that you could ever hope to meet... with the exception of Firefly's Kaylee perhaps.

I just couldn't help falling in love with her during my countless playthroughs of the two Mass Effect games. I want to marry her and have strange babies with her.

Cupboard Person of the Week

2011-08-10T16:48:00.000+02:00

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.”

- Nelson Mandela (quoting from Marianne Williamson’s Return to Love)

So I've been watching The Pick Up Artist of late and I'm quite impressed with Mystery and his wings.

I read The Game some years back and liked the concept of the seduction community because meeting women is an important area of any heterosexual male's life. It's one of those areas that you can never be too good at, it takes constant work in every other area of one's life to stay afloat in this one.

I love the fact that pick up artists like Mystery have been able to build an industry for this area of people's live. The world already caters for almost every other social and sexual need that people have (in a tacky and crass manner for the most part)so why not this area? Many people I've spoken to concerning the topic of 'pick up' think it's beneath them somehow but the sad truth is that they are still unable to approach beautiful women in many social settings. It's something worth learning is all I'm saying.

Anyhoo, back to the issue at hand, Mystery and his awesomeness!!! The guy is a freakin' tall mofo and has a scarecrow presence that's quite lovable. He's like a bony teddybear. This guy leads the sort of life that most dudes just dream about as they drive to some office in the morning and that is what I think is the coolest thing about him, he just does what he wants and is, as he calls it, the 'tribal leader' in his circle of friends. Everyone in the world should be as out there as this dude :)

My First Proper Article!!!

2011-08-09T13:31:00.000+02:00

Pulling a Rabbit Out of My Hat

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.”

- Nelson Mandela (quoting from Marianne Williamson’s Return to Love)

With Nelson Mandela Day having just passed I’ve decided to take advice from Boston Legal’s Denny Crane and pull a rabbit out of my hat in order to wow the jury, by which I mean you, dear Reader of a writer fascinated by the dust bunnies under his bed. My aims for this piece are rather ambitious, given that I don’t want it to be overlong. They are as follows: introducing myself (only in my second post, forgive the rudeness) and my column (Lost in the Cosmos), doing something good for change instead of whining, promoting the awesomeness of fantasy and science fiction while I’m at it and, lastly, having a great time doing it. That ladies and gentlemen is my rabbit, which I will now proceed to pull out of my woolly hat.

My name is Nyameko Charles Siboto and I am a bookworm.

When I tell people this they assume that I just read any book that comes my way and in this they are mistaken. I consider myself well-read but I’m actually not when you take into account how much reading material exists in the multiverse! Then again, no one is well-read under those conditions. I am a fan of mythology, horror, superhero graphic novels, fantasy and science fiction. It is in these genres that I am well-read and that I revel. I’m especially a fan of fantasy as I believe that the genre is steeped in great beauty, especially the works of Professor J.R.R. Tolkien. I study Literature at the University of Johannesburg and I work there as a tutor, a job that I love immensely (don’t tell my colleagues). People say that I’m an agreeable fellow for the most part but I have days during which I am full of nonsense and annoy people by repeatedly poking them. My dream is to own a beautiful house with a magical garden outside and inside it is filled with books, comfortable armchairs, roaring fireplaces and the pantries (many of these) are filled to bursting with scrumptious food. That is to say, I want to live like a hobbit.

Peter Kreeft, one of the beautiful minds of our time in my opinion, said something along the lines of living life like poetry in one of his talks. I’m sure I don’t know what he means but it’s one of those statements that haunt my thoughts and it refuses to be exorcised. I suspect that it has something to do with my fascination with great beauty, whether it is aesthetic (the beauty of a Helen of Troy) or spiritual (the beauty of a Mother Teresa) and I endeavour to make my life beautiful in all that I do.

That is Charles, to some extent, and it is my hope that we may get to know one another better as we explore the stars and a medieval past that never was together in this column. I would like to be the Virgil and Beatrice to your Dante as I lead you on this epic journey.

Take my hand and hold on tight, we are about to find ourselves Lost in the Cosmos.

“If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years,
how would men believe and adore, and persevere for
many generations the remembrance of the city of God!”

- Emerson

This quote says almost everything that I would like to achieve with this column. Lost in the Cosmos wants to show that fantasy and sci-fi are very much like religion and science, their goal is to speculate on the mysteries of the universe and to ask the great questions that have ever haunted human beings from the first time they emerged from their caves and looked upon the tall trees of the great forests, the vast oceans, the majestic sun, the moon and the fiery stars and stood there in fear and trembling, faced with the sense of the numinous. Fantasy and sci-fi show us that the universe, the little portion that we know of it, is howling with holy wildness and that we are part of something substantially bigger than we ordinarily think.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, we come to it; a rabbit being pulled from a woolly hat!

We as South Africans have the bad tendency to whine about everything that goes wrong in this great country of ours instead of going out and doing something good to change the situation. I beg you to go out and to make the remainder of this year a Nelson Mandela one, in honour of the great man and also simply to do something for someone else. To paraphrase Emerson, to leave the world having made one life breathe easier is to have succeeded as a human being. So no matter how small your contribution, it does make a difference. I am going out to Cotlands to play with the children and read to them on my off days to do my little bit for change… and to prostitute fantasy and sci-fi to the younger generation, nerdy whore that I am. :)

Brain Explosion

2011-08-04T17:27:00.000+02:00

Greetings Reader of a slightly OCD writer,

Say, is it just me or is there just too much happening on our beloved interwebs?

There was a time when I loved the internet more than I love my mother, I lived and breathed for it. But something has changed... it scares me now. Maybe it's because I've grown older and thus am not as charmed by it as I was in the past. It just seems so chaotic that all I can do at times is stare at my homepage on my computer screen for a few minutes before closing the browser, the thought of surfing being too daunting. Everything I do online seems rather pointless most of the time and it's messing with everything else in my life. I have a bunch of Facebook friends I don't know, I can't watch TV anymore, I don't read as much as I used to, my blogs don't get the attention they deserve and I just feel uncomfortable online.

Being on the internet is like being in a house and knowing there's a dirty sock in the vicinity and that you can't put it in the laundry basket because, like cutting off a hydra's head, every time you do two more pop up to take its place. This is the thing that makes me think I'm just being anal. Chaos, after all, is a part of the internet's charm. Not knowing what you could find as you surf is exciting, it makes one feel as though one had fallen headfirst down the rabbit hole.

OCD aside, the content available online is quite overwhelming and that can be a bad thing as it results in people spending valuable time trying to keep up with the latest thingymabob.

Maybe, then, being out of the loop's not such a bad thing when it's all said and done.

Take care when you're online, Reader, there be dragons of the vilest sort here.

A Bitter Truth or Two

2011-07-05T23:06:00.000+02:00

'Like people, animals
will become frightened and likely
do whatever you say if you
whip them enough'

- Lemony Snicket

I like Lemony Snicket, he's not the sort of writer who attempts to make you feel that the world's a better place than it is. Instead he goes out of his way to paint you a picture of the world so bleak it makes your soul wither. I've been feeling down of late - emotional woes and whatnot - and I thought a trip down to Exclusive Books's winter sale with good friends would cheer me up. Spending money I don't have on books has a strangely pleasant effect on me, it makes the world seem like a happier place.

Little did I know that Mr Snicket would be waiting for me with a bitter truth or two concerning this wondrous thing some call life. It cheers me to know that I shouldn't expect more than horseradish from life and that crossing mountains in search of wisdom's a waste of time. His book, Horseradish's a non-self-help book that's charming in its approach to not improving your life in any way whatsoever. I love it :)

Sometimes bleak literature's good for the soul, paradoxically so. Thank you for ruining my life in order to make a little better Mr Snicket.

'Sometimes even in the most
unfortunate of lives there
will occur a moment or
two of good fortune'

- Lemony Snicket

The Big Purge

2011-06-02T17:11:00.000+02:00

Take all my vicious words
And turn them into something good
Take all my preconceptions
And let the truth be understood

Take all my prized possessions
Leave only what I need
Take all my pieces of doubt
And let me be what's underneath

- Courage, Orianthi ft. Lacey

Dear reader of a blogger who has lost his way,

I woke up the other day, as I’m prone to do at times, to find that it was May and that I’ve no money! I’m supposed to be responsible and awesome this year but I spent almost a whole month drinking, smoking (yes, me!) and eating junk food. I’ve not been home in a while, I smell funny, my face is swollen and my hand hurts from repeatedly punching a dude (yes, me, punching a dude!). Do I regret all the crap that’s been going down most of April? Not so much, most of it was loads of fun but it was out of control and I need to reign myself in, especially when it comes to spending my money on random crap when there are bills to be paid.

It is near the end of May now and I’m still stuck in that abyss of financial ruin that I managed to walk into in a manner that Erikson’s sappers would refer to as ‘wide-eyed stupid’. I’ve received many text messages with threats that a number financial institutions (which kindly paid for my varsity fees, books, rent and my... er... beer) have enlisted the services of Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger in a chopper to blow up my house – which is not actually mine. The plan, thus, is to lay low for the next two months, stay out of everyone’s way. It also helps that it’s the winter season and that the chill affords me an excuse to stay home, catch up on my reading and dream of the wonders of gaming once I acquire finances to build an uber-PC in the summer.

Later Days :)

Cupboard Person of the Week

2011-05-24T14:52:00.000+02:00

"I am not brushing a cow's teeth Walter, you know I have real work to do... right?"

- Astrid

Astrid, Asterisk, Astro, Asteroid, Astringent, Aspirin or whatever you want to call her, I love this woman! She's exactly my type of girl: beautiful, intelligent and plays some minor, but crucial (at times), role in an awesome television series. What more do you want from a woman? All the scrubby guys will be chasing after the female lead, who you really don't want to date when you take some time to think about it. She always has too much emotional baggage and can probably kick your ass! That's just not cool. Astrid on the other hand is just plain awesome and lovable.

Here are some more Astrid fun facts: She graduated from Haverford College with a B.A. in Music and Linguistics and a minor in Computer Science, having taken computers apart since six years old.

I'm in love. Sigh.

P.S. I should find out what the actress' name is but I really don't care. To me she's Astrid.

Final Crisis

2011-05-20T13:56:00.000+02:00

I want it. Now! That is all.

The Church's Badassery

2011-05-19T07:41:00.000+02:00

'To go against the Church is to go against God.'

I went to go see Priest with Ms J. on Friday and it was so much better than I expected. Then again my expectations were based purely on the theatrical poster; I’d not seen a trailer or heard anything about it beforehand. I actually thought it was based on the Thief video game series. It’s actually, rather loosely, based on a graphic novel series though. Ms J. said let’s go see it and the Beanbag was game.

Now, I rarely like movies (or any other entertainment media) that are set in a dystopian or post-apocalyptic future because, to quote my friend, Dave (referring to Fallout 3), “[they] depress me”. Such movies have to be really good for me to put up with and Priest, though it’s not an excellent movie as such, was fun to watch. It has a villain simply referred to as Black Hat in the credits dammit! That’s total badassery. Also, there’s an army of crazy, animalistic vampires (who have no eyes) on a train, hell-bent on the destruction of a totalitarian city run by the Church. The manner in which the Church runs the city is brutal and I’d not like to live there. They do have awesome warrior priests that kick some vampire ass though. You can never go wrong with Holy men and women opening a can righteous ass whupping.

There’s a lot to be said about the big, bad Church... the Big BC as I fondly know it. I’ve always been intrigued by the Church’s rather violent history back in the day (as my tutlings refer to anything that happened more than a decade ago). Rome was badass I tell you! All the ways with which they came up with to kill people would sicken many a serial killer today. On warm summer days I sit on the grass under my favourite tree and wonder what the meeting was like when a handful of respectable Elders of the Church got together and agreed that boiling a guy was the way forward. I can just see them all nodding solemnly in agreement at the suggestion. I’d put my house... wait I don’t have one... I’d put my awesome four-year-old cousin, Lennie, down on a bet that the guy to put that option on the table was one of those Rasputin types that no one seems to know is crazy even though he looks freakin’ crazy!

Maybe I’m just not good at being a Christian but what was up with all that violence!? Am I misreading my Bible? Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that Jesus is naught but a sweet, gentle lamb. Lord no! He is also a fierce lion that fights for love’s cause, but why did they have to get all creative about torturing and killing people? I’d go with just hanging them or something simple. Even stoning is a quite excessive for my tastes.

Let me end off by playing devil's advocate and directing you to some of the Church's atrocities throughout history.

P.S. The moral of this story is don't mess with warrior priests or the Church, they will kick your ass... and the boil you alive.

Heaven's Magic Machine

2011-05-18T16:23:00.000+02:00

This is the magical scene that will play out in Heaven as I awake from death, as though it were a dream:

‘“Well, Master Samwise, how do you feel?’ [Gandalf] said.
But Sam lay back, and stared with open mouth, and for a moment, between bewilderment and great joy, he could not answer. At last he gasped: “Gandalf! I thought you were dead! But then I thought I was dead myself. Is everything sad going to come untrue? What’s happened to the world?”

“A great Shadow has departed,” said Gandalf, and then he laughed, and the sound was like music, or like water in a parched land; and as he listened the thought came to Sam that he had not heard laughter, the pure sound of merriment, for days upon days without count. It fell upon his ears like the echo of all the joys he had ever known. But he himself burst into tears. Then, as a sweet rain will pass down a wind of spring and the sun will shine out the clearer, his tears ceased, and his laughter welled up, and laughing he sprang from his bed.’
- J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

I’m sitting here pretending to be marking first year English assignments but because I suffer from ADD (or whatever they call it these days) I can’t pay attention to another string of words that make no sense to anyone in the universe or any of the infinite ones parallel to ours – not even the person who wrote them. Unlike J.R.R. Tolkien my mind does not conjure up hobbits when faced with the deadly dull task of marking, mine wanders to random things instead, like whether or not there will be magic in Heaven. The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings have me convinced that there will be tonnes of it.

What sort of magic will it be though?

To use Terry Goodkind’s terms, will it be additive or subtractive? Will it be the sort of magic worked not by our souls but worked on our souls as Peter Kreeft puts it? Will it be the charming magic of animated Disney movies that sees dishes washing themselves and beautiful Princesses aroused from eternal slumber by true love’s kiss? I’m secretly hoping for dragons and centaurs. I’d love to have tea with a majestic dragon, assuming dragons care for tea that is. Imagine how big a dragon’s tea cup must be!

I went to see Thor some time back and if Heaven’s anything like Branagh’s vision of Asgard I’d be quite chuffed; all the best parts of a fantasy medieval setting merged with futuristic technology that has no side effects like pollution. It would have to be bigger than Asgard though, so as to accommodate my dragons. I’m a big fan of flashy and destructive sorcery I must say: Wizard’s fire, the fiery tempests in Dragon Age, crazy chain lightning and such. I doubt there’s place for destructive magic in Heaven though, especially since I’m referring to post-apocalyptic Heaven, when Satan and all his crazy minions have been smote down by Heaven’s awesome Secret Fire-wielding host and the Flame Imperishable has been sent to burn at the centre of the universe(s) forever and ever. Amen.

I should expect a behind-the-scenes sort of magic then I guess, only a little more overt than can be glimpsed in Nature. God is a big fan of espionage after all, what with Him always working His magic from the least likely of places and in a most covert manner. Take for an example in The Lord of the Rings He doesn’t make so much as a peeping sound but in which His presence makes all the difference.

Heaven’s magic is, no doubt, rooted in beauty – the lofty beauty of an Elvish Princess like Lúthien that captures the hearts of admirers the world over but can only be won by the most noble of beings, and yet it is a beauty as humble and accessible as a Samwise Gamgee of the Shire. Beauty alone is not enough though, for it to be truly magical it must be accompanied by truth, wisdom and all that good stuff.

Arcane arts like necromancy are out of the picture then; zombies, as cool as they may seem, are only a mockery of real life after all. Such arts are of a lower type of magic, not that of creation (or sub-creation).

I would venture to say that the purpose of magic is not to be seen but to be experienced. Real magic feeds a deep human need for wonder. It speaks to us as though we are children exploring the world and looking at everything in it with awe. Scientists experience the universe’s magic as they set out to unravel its mysteries and theists (the real ones) encounter this magic in their unshakable faith.

In the Middle-Ages it was said that God wrote two books, the Bible and Nature. The world in which we live is a magic making machine and many of us don’t even notice it. Nature is God speaking to us of love, beauty, perfection, imperfection, death and many other such lessons beside. The universe, as such, is a picture of what the magic of Heaven will be like, the sort of magic whose presence is never noted but whose absence is immediately apparent.

Cupboard Person of the Week

2011-05-18T15:43:00.000+02:00

‘Mane of Chaos. Anomander Rake. Lord of the black-skinned Tiste Andii, who has looked down on a hundred thousand winters, who has tasted the blood of dragons, who leads the last of his kind, seated in the Throne of Sorrow and a kingdom tragic and fey – a kingdom with no land to call its own.’

This one has been a long time in coming.

The man is too cool for words to contain. He jumps out at you from Steven Erikson’s pages and grabs you by the throat as he considers whether or not to slay you with his sword, Dragnipur. This guy is one of the sons of Mother Dark (from whom he broke away), he can veer into a giant black dragon because in the distant past he drank the blood of dragons and just hung out in their realm for a while you know, because that’s how cool people roll. That’s not even his most impressive qualities, a few other people in Erikson’s world of the Malazan can do some of that stuff (one of his brothers for instance); the guy made an awesome sword, named it Vengeance and when he found that the Elder god, Draconus, had a cooler sword, Dragnipur, he romanced the guy’s daughter, teamed up with her to slay her dad, took his sword and the broke up with her. This is a super simplified version of the events that took place but it captures the badassery of Rake. Why is Dragnipur so cool you ask? All who are slain by it are drawn into a realm inside it where they have to join a line of chained souls dragging a giant wagon for eternity!

If you’re this awesome where would you live? In a fortress on a floating mass of rock named Moon’s Spawn of course.

The only thing worth saying about Rake is that every man, woman and child should just shut up and bask in his awesomeness. I want to be like him when I grow up.

Recovery

2011-03-28T18:04:00.000+02:00

I feel like Eminem probably felt when he sat down to pen the songs for his Recovery album; I feel all sorts of bleh but I'm on the road to bigger and better things methinks.

The last two months have been all about me going through an involuntary purge of all the crap in my life, getting closer to my friends, eating junk food, meditating, drinking too much, exercising, falling in and out of love, being very broke and all sorts of other cool stuff that are probably not all that great for my health. All-in-all it's been one of those experiences that feel like you drank too much the previous night and puked all over your shoes but you're like, 'Fuck that shit, I had a great time'. You know that feeling right? Life throws all sorts of crap in your path but you take the blows like a soldier and keep living your life as best you can.

What would be cool is if I had a chainsaw and I was allowed to run around with it cutting through all the stupid stuff in my life and coming out on the other side covered in their 'blood'. I'd like that and would probably not take a shower for a while.

With that wonderful and not-at-all wibbly image I leave you to go and do something more useful with your life :) See you next week.

The Days of My Zombie Life

2011-02-15T17:44:00.000+02:00

“It was a crazed night of forbidden science that brought Twin Sunflower into existence. Thunder crashed overhead, strange lights flickered, even the very roaring wind seemed to hiss its angry denial. But to no avail. Twin Sunflower was alive, ALIVE!” – Plants vs. Zombies Almanac

Okay, okay... I’m addicted dammit! I admit it and that’s the first step, admitting that I have a problem. I’m addicted to Pop Cap’s simple, yet ingenious, little gem of a game, Plants vs. Zombies. My life is spinning out of control and I’m neither eating, sleeping nor procreating because all my time’s spent in front of my computer screen thinking up clever strategies for my plant troopers to carry out against those dastardly zombies trying to cross the lawn and get into the house whose master’s brain I’m sworn to protect. I don’t even know who this dude is! But I’ll protect him from those zombies till my body gives out and they eat my brain. Why do you ask? Well, because I’m a soldier and soldiers never give up even if we’re facing a zombie apocalypse.

What was I saying again...? Oh, yes, I’m addicted to Plants vs. Zombies and I need help. ...*ten minutes later* Well, clearly help’s not coming so I’m going to pen down some semi-important thoughts about my life that occurred to me in the heat of vegetable warfare before I get fired, dumped, kicked, punched and generally outright ostracised from society for not moving from my computer in weeks. If I’m lucky I’ll just die from starvation, thirst and fatigue before anyone notices that I’ve not been performing my duties as a human person.

So there I was! My defences were crumbling all around me and I was on the verge of being overwhelmed by Dr Zomboss’ forces and when it occurred to me that my so-called real life is a lot like Plants vs. Zombies! Can you believe that!? From such a simple game flow the issues of life. Both the game and my life started out easy enough, plant a few peashooters here and there and things were hunky-dory. It was bliss at first; parents, teachers, bullies and zombies could be kept at bay by simple things such as hiding out in libraries and erecting wall-nuts – which sounds very dirty. But I’m older now and have these pesky things called responsibilities, which are the bane of my life. I hate ‘em, I hate ‘em, I really do! Now the zombies and life’s mundane problems just keep coming at me without any relent and the bigger the wall-nuts I erect the bigger the zombies and problems become. The whole business is throwing my Zen-like balance out of whack!!!

Shakespeare compared life to a stage but that’s because they didn’t have video games or movies then and also because he liked the theatre. Musicians probably went around telling people that life’s like a song. Modern life, I’d say (with as much authority as Shakespeare), is like a video game... a certain video game that involves plants and zombies to be exact. In life, just as in video games (RPGs especially), everyone has ridiculous expectations of you. All they do is run around expecting you to save the world from one ridiculous threat or another, just like certain members of my family and some teachers. Oh, Charles, you really could’ve done better you know. What the hell man?! It’s always the really lame people who are on my case about how I could’ve done better than I did. All the successful people are too busy being awesome to pay attention to me and when they do notice me they’re actually pretty nice and make me feel like I actually can be a bookworm who sits in a large library for a living if I put some blood, guts, sweat and tears into it. I’m not good with pressure at all, it makes me nervous, which in turn makes me feel like puking. People and zombies should give me a break once in a while! You guys can’t just keep bombarding me with weird responsibilities all the time. What’s that nameless dude in the house doing anyway? He should come out here and help me ward off Dr Zomboss’ goons. We’re in this together after all.

Look, I’m not saying that people shouldn’t look out for me and not let me know if I’m veering of the path now and then. All I ask for is a little space, you know, a little room to breathe. I’m a lazy guy who doesn’t like doing things if they seem too difficult – I’ve played video games on easy mode for years and only upgraded to normal last year – and this is not a good thing at all. Constantly wagging your finger in my face is not the best way to get me to do unpleasant things though. That’s the sort of thing that only makes me angry and will result in me throwing chairs at you. Take Plants vs. Zombies as an example; it’s nice and gradual in the manner that it ups its difficulty level. I find myself performing heroic deeds without even noticing that I did. This actually only goes on till the game decides to throw an endless horde of zombies my way and my plant defences crumble to dust and all I've worked to defend goes to hell in a rosy basket.

My point, though, is simply this: I like life, it's a thing of great beauty for the most part but it tends to get overwhelming at times and people and zombies should know when to give a dude a break. That is all. You may return to being a productive citizen. I'm off to deal with those dastardly zombies till I get kicked out of the human race or die from starvation, thirst or fatigue. Whichever comes first.

Later days.

Glory, Splendour, Hierarchy, Height, Formality

2011-01-11T20:10:00.000+02:00

“Here is a sentence that no man who hath uttered it really believed it: I’m just as good as you are” – C.S. Lewis

I’ve been told that I’m arrogant by people who think I think I’m better than they are in some manner and this has baffled me for the longest time because I don’t have much to be arrogant about! I’m not outlandishly handsome (though I’m not ugly), I’m not wealthy as far as money goes, I don’t have the best fashion sense, I’m rarely the centre of any social gathering and though I’m intelligent I’m by no means the most intelligent person I know. I’m merely a chocolate Columbo, a winsome character in his bumbling manner. The answer to this question came to me as I was listening to Peter Kreeft’s talk on the beauty of language. In this talk he points out that people actively hate words! The very idea causes anyone who can claim any sort of humanity’s soul to cringe because, as Kreeft points out, words are not merely labels for things but rather it’s in words that things live, move and have their being, in words they come to us; language, according to Heidegger, is the house of being. It is in words and language that things first come into being and are, thus the misuse of language destroys our authentic relation to beings, because what you do to words you do to things. I’m a lover of language and when I speak I tend to do so as juggler, I love to play with words, not very ‘big’ words mind you, just your normal, everyday sort of fare and this irks people. I don’t know why but it immediately puts me on their radar as someone who is trying to belittle them, which is never my goal. I’m blessed in that the majority of my friends are more intelligent than I am so I’m always the one learning new things from them and listening in wonder at how they spin their stories. I can sit for hours on end and listen to people tell me about themselves because they are so ‘other’ from me and the words they use are like a song I cannot emulate. This obviously applies only to interesting people. Thus, it’s not people’s cold intelligence that impresses me but the way in which they present their being, if that makes sense at all.

I’m in love with beautiful words and ugly words grate my soul, which is why I cannot listen to most popular music, I can find no beauty there. I guess that this goes a long way in setting me up as an elitist. People are not happy when you tell them that the things they like are ugly. I happen to like a great many things that friends I respect tell me are ridiculous and thus my opinion on a thing should not be taken as an attack but rather as a misunderstanding thereof. I like being schooled and once you point out the beautiful side of a thing to me that is the only light in which I will see it from then on. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion is the most beautiful book I’ve ever read but most people hate it! They tell me it’s dull and unnecessarily difficult in its language usage. I understand exactly what they mean because the first time I read it grasping the language was a herculean task. This was a failing on my part though, not Tolkien’s. When I tried again a few years later I could understand the language and thus Tolkien’s poetry. The beauty I found there was like Lewis’ comment on The Lord of the Rings, lightning from a clear sky. People, especially students, have the same problem with Shakespeare; they hate him only because they don’t understand him. Once they learn how to read him they realise that no one sets up the drama to a story like that man! Mathematics is another example, I just don’t get it but when mathematicians speak of it I can see its beauty for a brief but clear instant. There’s a quote whose source I’ve forgotten that says, “Euclid alone has looked on beauty there”. That is to say that Euclid saw geometry as one would poetry and thus found beauty but we look at it from a utilitarian vantage and it’s drab and ugly from where we sit.

Going back to what I was saying before I started down this side road. I like language that portrays Glory, Splendour, Hierarchy, Height and Formality because it hearkens to a better time in humanity’s history, a history that didn’t really exist in the ordinary sense of the word but a history that’s as real as you and me nonetheless. I speak of a time that every civilization in our past strove for but failed to hit the mark. Here in South Africa many of us still remember the atrocities of Apartheid but now that I, as a black person, can look back at that sordid past with a sort of fascination it’s apparent that people like Verwoerd were racist but in their own crazy way they were trying to preserve the purity of the ‘race’ and their biggest fear was the pollution of their blood so they did what people who are afraid do, they attacked the monster before it could get a chance to attack them. Every mess that has ever been made of governments in our history was made in trying to create a Utopia. Though we fear words such as Splendour and Height it’s what our souls yearn for, our souls believe in a monarchy. Our souls want to inhabit a kingdom ruled by a just King where we all observe manners and customs. Our souls love obeying the righteous law and modern people make the mistake of seeing people who live in accordance to the universal law of humanity and thinking they’re arrogant when in fact they’re the epitome of humility.

That’s the end of my winding argument to prove that I’m not arrogant but simply aligned to the natural law of things and that I like words and thus speak a lot. Also, I’m a bit more of a saint than you are :P

The Month That Was

2010-11-10T17:17:00.000+02:00

My Dearest Goodbuddy,

We’ve not spoken for some time, you and I, and I hope you’re well.
November’s already upon us I see... how time does fly. Anyhow, I must say that, as per usual, October was a good month for me. There were many rough patches but hey! Who am I to go around complaining? I’m here and I’m alive, which is a good point to start building happiness from. Let me give you the lowdown of the month that was.

I kicked the month off by attending rAge with t3h Munsh and Sleuth. We had a good time messing with the new tech, talking to the assortment of strange people there and ogling the booth babes. I enjoyed the expo more than I did last year but I did miss the larger anime and tabletop gaming stands they had then. It’s all good though. My PC is also happy because I picked up blue LED fans to pimp it out and now it looks like it would be at home at a drag race in Chatsworth. I’ve come to a point where I love my PC more than most members of my family; it’s prettier, it’s more intelligent and it gives me greater joy. Now, now, you don’t have to say it. I’m materialistic I know, but matter matters.

Meadow Leigh’s sister, Pie, came to visit from the Eastern Cape and I went on a picnic to the beautiful botanical gardens in Emmerentia with the two of them. They also visited me with banana bread over the course of her stay in Jozi. Now, you must know that I have a deep love for banana bread, to the point that I have dreams about it. Yes, I know it’s strange but I really can’t help it. Then my birthday came around and I was a ball of excitement. I’m the sort of person who just loves his birthday even if nothing terribly exciting happens because at least there’s cake. Now, I spent my 23rd birthday marking English assignments, which is not the most exciting thing to be doing on any given day, but there was chocolate cake to cheer me up and books from friends to look forward to reading. People who know me always buy me books for my birthday and I’m happy with that arrangement because I really don’t want much else. My grandmother buys my handkerchiefs though... and I'm still rather unsure what one does with them so I just give her a hug and take them. I did get one gift that deviated from the norm though, a new motherboard from Ed, Leigh and Pie. I mentioned to Ed how much I hate my motherboard at some point and he remembered. After getting the new motherboard the plan was to take the old one and piss on it but I sold it to some guy who thinks he’s a friend of mine instead. I hope it explodes when’s he’s sleeping and scares him. That’s all, just scare him. Not result in his house burning down with him in it or anything as gruesome and painful as that.

I did manage to celebrate turning 23 in style though. My friend Catharine has her birthday two weeks after mine and we decided to do a joint little shindig of a thing, that is to say we went bungee jumping! You heard right. To celebrate turning 23 we went and threw ourselves off of a 100 meter high platform suspended between two cooling towers. It was the craziest experience of my life. Your brain totally shuts down as you throw yourself off that platform and the ground comes rushing up to you. It’s just not normal. Then the rope goes taut and snaps you back up and your brain switches back on and you start screaming f*ck!!! At least that was what I was screaming. It really is just the best thing ever.

To celebrate surviving the jump we went to dinner and then to a strip club – which just happens to be one of the coolest places in the world, den of iniquity though it may be. Lots of naked women in one enclosed space are more fun than they rationally should be.

The next morning I went shopping for books with Meadow Leigh, hangover and all and I picked up Steven Erikson’s Deadhouse Gates for forty bucks! That just made my day.

After all that going down I had to sleep for a week and catch up on my reading, which is what I’ve been doing.

That’s my tale for today bud.

We’ll talk later. Keep well.

2 A.M.

2010-10-25T02:00:00.000+02:00

It's 2 A.M. and I'm sitting here just surfing the interwebs because I can't go to sleep and I'm too tired to read my Erikson book... and I feel like an Amstel because they made it look so damn sexy on that ad on TV when I was watching Snakes on a Plane with my mom and sister. Sigh.

Anyhow, I'm 23!!! This is only setting in now. I should go out and do something 23-ish to celebrate, like get a job that pays me four times the amount of money my current job is or become a Saint and make a difference in the world... or I can go out and get smashed on Amstel and pink girly drinks (which I've come to love).

Okay, I'm really tired... but I'm 23 and I have a feeling that 23 is the turning point in mine, my family, friends and random homeless dudes' lives. Let's rock this.

Later.

A Human State of Affairs

2010-09-23T23:03:00.000+02:00

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.” Said that the Cat.
- Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Being a human person is such a silly, amusing and tragic state of affairs – all these things all at once. When I am not being a tremendously busy person, that is, a person tremendously busy chasing his own tail like a dog, it occurs to me that I suffer from schizophrenia in all areas of my life. My being a human person is a sort of schizophrenia all in itself. I am an amphibian of a creature, half animal and half spirit and these two sides are always in opposition to each other it seems. Usually I try and ignore my spiritual half and walk around like I am merely a highly evolved animal. This is okay for a while but I have been cursed (or so it would seem) with a love for the works of two very great men who always manage to tug at my spiritual strings; Professor J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. It doesn’t help that my good friend Dean introduced me to Dr Peter Kreeft, a contemporary philosopher who loves these two writers even more than I do and gives so much more insight to their works than I could ever have managed to discover on my own. I have mentioned what a slow learner I am many times in this blog, it takes me thrice as long to learn something that other people grasp immediately. By this I don’t mean that I’m stupid but simply that I grasp an idea quickly and then that knowledge evaporates and then I have to start again and repeat the whole process until the knowledge sticks to my brain. My brain glue, in other words, is of the cheap sort. As a result of my slow learning I find myself living in circular ruins – I always come back to where I started. I feel like Roland Deschain, doomed to always find myself back in that same old desert where it all began, following after the man in black as he flees across what seems to be the apotheosis of all deserts. I’m not so sure whether this is a good thing or not anymore. I usually think of myself as making progress as I try again, fail again and (I always hope) fail better. Anyway, I digress. Going back to what I was saying before; after being in contact with the works of the aforementioned geniuses I always find my way back to my spiritual self and realise that there is so much more to life than meets the eye. I find myself thinking of how scared I am of spending an eternity in hell and what a reality it is at the rate my life is going – I find myself face to face with my mortality.

The Road So Far

2010-09-02T18:07:00.000+02:00

Past,
Future;
They all merge into this present moment
I’m a dude on the road –
I dare to disturb the universe
Within these pages
There are snippets and snatches
Of a life lived

- Charles Siboto

Hi there goodbuddy,

Navigating these circular ruins is proving to be more difficult than I imagined it would be and I’m having a hard time getting over my quarter-life crisis. I feel that I should be doing more with my life but I’m not sure what I actually mean by 'more'. I don’t feel like I’m really living at all to be honest. I’m not enjoying my work and studies as much as I did about two years ago and I feel slightly distanced from my friends and family. They all seem to be so much more alive than I am; they have problems that they care about solving and they’re all in ‘touch’ with their lives. When they’re happy they actually really look happy and when they’re in the doldrums they look pathetic... but pathetic in that way depressed people should look, you know. I, on the other hand, just feel murky. There are people out there whose lives are in total ruin and, in my darker moments, I think that even they have it better, they at least have ruins to work with. I just don’t have a clue what I’m doing! I’m neither coming nor going, nothing happens, it’s like I’m stuck in Beckett’s non-story, Waiting for Godot.

Usually I’m the first person to tell you how amazing life is and how much magic there is to be found if one takes some time to look around but that magic can turn out to be black magic at times – one million megatons of destruction. So all I’m saying is to be careful and always prepared for them (that mysterious bunch that I’m pretty sure are The Laughing Men Co.) dropping the bomb rather than not. I’m grateful for the fact that my life has been fairly pleasant up to this point but as a human being I get to whine about everything and nothing once in a while because ultimately I’m an ungrateful little bastard.

Don’t worry, though, it’s not all doom and gloom, I have that nastiest of diseases known as indefatigable optimism and even in my darkest hours I wear a little smile on my face and have the not-at-all-naive belief that the best is yet to come. I have no clue what I am to do about my quarter-life crisis other than to work harder at my studies (which I’m not actually in the mood to do to tell you the truth) and to kick off my Goodbuddies book drive. It’s Springing and I want to enjoy some sun without some stupid voice in the back of my head whispering that I’m an epic failure. They (these people again!) say that one foot up and one foot down is the way to London town... or some such... and right now London town seems as good a destination as any. Some of my favourite Poets lived there and they have the Thames in which to kill oneself if the business of living becomes too much to bear.

With great consideration I’ll choose the path to follow
I’ll pick up my sadness, madness and new-found gladness
And together we’ll walk down that winding path
Singing our tuneless song into the sunset
- Charles Siboto

Attack of the Bloodthirsty Couch: Zombies of Doom

2010-08-15T13:43:00.000+02:00

Dear Constant reader of a writer in peril,

Here I am again, still trying to escape the circular ruins with only minimal success. It’s been a few months since the bloodthirsty couch sent its arachnid minions after me and I’ve only just survived wave after wave of their attacks by the enamel of my teeth, until now that is... . Instead of just outright killing me the damned creatures enjoy torturing me and seeing me writhe in pain.

A few nights ago I woke up with a start at the sound something scratching at my window. Now, you should know that I’m a fan of cheesy B-grade horror movies and one thing I’ve learned from them is that you do not head towards danger because you will end up either dead or serving as a host for some alien parasite. Also, I’m the token black guy who gets killed first if he’s stupid enough to go anywhere near the danger. Being the survivor that I am I decided to just stay put and see what happens next. I sat up in my bed for five nerve-wrecking minutes and nothing happened... maybe it was a stray cat or something. Eventually I fell asleep again and pretty much forgot about the incident until the following evening when I woke up to the sound of voices at my window. With my heart beating a tattoo onto my chest I got out of bed as quietly as I could and grabbed the empty bottle of wine next to my bookcase and crawled towards the window. The voices outside turned out to be a couple of lunatics just having a merry ol’ chat on my porch in the middle of the night! I switched on my light and they left. Then I started thinking of the previous night’s incident and wondered whether they are connected. My brain is groggy at the best of times so expecting it to make complex connections at the dead of night was really just me expecting too much from the poor bastard and so eventually I gave up and went back to bed.

The previous paragraph has very little to do with what the rest of this post is going to be about now that I think about it... but it does serve the purpose of letting you know what the state of my mind has been for the last few months.

Some time ago our geyser burst and the guy who came to fix it didn’t put the ceiling cover back on in the bathroom and every time I go to the loo I have to stare into the inky blackness of the space above the ceiling and wonder what my bloodthirsty couch’s arachnid minions are cooking up. I can hear them crawling around in the space above the ceiling in the dead of night and I’m scared for my life. I’ve not been sleeping for almost two weeks now! I sit up at night, drinking copious amounts of coffee, with a screwdriver within reach just in case they try something. I’ve even taken to pushing furniture against my door in an attempt to barricade my room.

The sounds are getting louder every night and this has led me to believe that the spiders in the ceiling are more like the head crabs from the Half-Life games and that they’re dragging people into the ceiling through the opening in the bathroom and turning them into zombies to ensure my doom. I have to invest in a shotgun and a chainsaw before their zombie army is ready for attack.

Pray for me my dearest reader, for I very much doubt that I’ll live thought the coming week.

Cupboard Person of the Week

2010-07-30T08:41:00.000+02:00

I have a strange desire to snatch up interesting people I come across and keep them in my cupboard. I don’t know why... It might be one of my sociopathic tendencies that I must find a way to deal with or that I’m simply as mad as a hatter. Don’t worry though; my cupboard is rather comfortable as far as cupboards go and I promise not to harm the individuals who catch my eye. I figure that I might as well dedicate some space to the wonderful and wobbly people that I come across and tell their stories, by which I actually mean what I think of them. So first up is the lovely:

Emanuela de Paula

Other than the fact that she is a very beautiful woman, Brazilian (very fitting for a beautiful woman) she just seems so bubbly and fun to be around. She looks good in a swimsuit, and I assume out of one, but what really catches my eye is her laughing. When she laughs her whole face lights up with Joy and it makes me laugh, her laughter is contagious like a dangerous disease. This is the main source of her beauty I think. Joy is beautiful no matter who it affects. Mother Teresa looks beautiful in pictures even though she is a wrinkly old woman because she is in the presence of Joy. People who are labelled as ugly instantly transform into a vision of beauty when they experience Joy. Ms (I don’t think she’s married) de Paula can stay in my cupboard to remind me that Joy is beautiful. She should hang out with Mother Teresa to show that beauty is more a matter of what’s in your heart than what you look like.

My June/July Reading List

2010-06-25T18:10:00.000+02:00

Thus he [Fingolfin] came alone to Angband’s gates, and he sounded his horn, and smote once more upon the brazen doors, and challenged Morgoth to come forth to single combat. And Morgoth came.
– J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion

Great masters of old,
You'd be amazed by twenty-first century machinery
'though you invented time travel
That modern science has yet to match
I find myself spirited away by words
That are ages old
- Charles Siboto, A Life Lived

The critics say that epics have died out
With Agamemnon and the goat-nursed gods,
I’ll not believe it.
- Elizabeth Barret Browning, Aurora Leigh

Dear reader of a writer who spends more time reading than he does writing (and even more time haunting bookshops than he does reading),

I must warn you from the outset that there be dragons here and an assortment of other beasties hell-bent on devouring you and, alas, there are not many heroes to slay these monsters. The world has forgotten the old tales and brave kings of men are no more. All those royal houses have fallen into ruin. But fear not because I have in my possession a machine that will allow us to transcend time and space, so that, my comrade in ancient lore, we may go where we will and forget about my evil couch and its arachnid minions that are pursuing me without relent for the time being.

Winter’s icy tentacles have reached our southern shores and the masses visiting us from all over the world are taking shelter in our country’s soccer stadia to view the world’s largest soccer spectacle. This is all good and well but we will not have too much time to poke fun at them because the remainder of June and the whole of July will be a very busy period for us, what with so many worlds to visit.

Let’s start off by revisiting Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian - an old friend in a new hardcover jacket. This is a tale that brings Dracula, that old villain, into the one place that bookworms feel safest. Yes, you guessed it, our beloved and dusty libraries. It turns out that, like us, Vlad enjoys collecting books and building an extensive library of human (and not-so-human) thought when he is not busy impaling or ‘necking’ people. So the next time you’re reading on the fourth floor of the library and think you’re alone bear this information in mind. I would recommend a garlic clove or two in your pocket, as unfashionable as it may be.

Make sure you are holding on tight, my dear companion, because our next stop is Middle-earth and Eärendil, most renowned of mariners, has agreed to let us sail with him on his great ship, Vingilot. You must remember that the world has changed after the Fourth Age and only by sailing in one of Cirdan’s ships can one reach the distant past. It’s impossible to grow weary of Professor Tolkien’s Middle-earth and its people throughout the ages. The stories that enthral me the most though are those of the elder days; stories of the Elves and their hopeless war against Morgoth and the stories of the tall Men of Númenor and their downfall. I have managed to get my grubby hands on Professor Tolkien’s The Book of Lost Tales 1 and 2 and The Lays of Beleriand to supplement my copy of The Silmarillion so there is quite a bit more of the elder days to be explored. Also, John Howe’s cover illustration of Fingolfin’s challenge to Morgoth for The Lays of Beleriand is just breathtaking. If ever a movie of The Silmarillion was made this would be the scene I would most look forward to. No other Elven-king of old was more valiant than Fingolfin and reading this scene always brings tears to my eyes.

To keep us entertained as we hop from one world to the next I’ve picked up two books of short stories: Stephen King’s Just After Sunset (which I find is safest read just after sunrise) and Legends II (edited by Robert Silverberg), an anthology of fantasy stories by some of the biggest names in the genre. I’ve already read a few of the stories and some of them are very good. Let it not be said that I take you on long adventures without some form of entertainment when we’re on the ‘road’, as it were. I can see by the look on your face that you’re thinking that I’ve not taken your stomach into account but there’s no need to fret because the Elves from Middle-earth were kind enough to give us some lembas for the journey that lies ahead.

Goodness! How time does fly when one is on a flying ship. We have reached our final destination it seems: Robert Jordan’s world of The Wheel of Time, and this, I am ashamed to admit, is my first visit. As is usual with me, I am very excited to start exploring a new world, so I will linger here and see the sights.

When we get back home another new writer will be awaiting me, a certain Mr Greg Isles who was recommended to me by my dear friend, Lady Leigh of the Meadows. My first expedition into this man’s mind is titled Blood Memory, which I think just sounds wonderfully delicious. Hey, come now, don’t you dare judge me on what I find delicious or don’t! Now go away, I have things to do.

Until next time,
Have a wonderful winter season :)

On Being Blue

2010-03-31T17:25:00.000+02:00

Dear reader of a mad writer,

I'm told that there is a man who appeared on Oprah quite a while back because he is blue and not very happy about it. I've not seen this man and I'm not going to bother Googling him because although my little post was inspired by what I heard about him it has nothing to do with him directly. He must have very good reasons for not enjoying being blue and that is his business.

If I were to turn blue, on the other hand, by painless means I hope, I would totally rock it! The very first thing I would do is buy myself an Armani suit (I'll sell my sister or something) and dress like Dr Manhattan (in the scenes in which he is dressed that is). I'd even go as far as tattooing the hydrogen symbol he has onto my forehead. The most important thing my being blue will do for me is make me a circus star. Some people might find it degrading to be paraded like some kind of freak but I would approach my role in as dignified a manner as possible. Everyone who has a sense of wonder loves the circus and I would be proud of touring with a circus because I'm blue - which will be the only talent I have because I can't juggle or anything awesome like that.

For the reader who has not figured this out yet, I'm a bit of a nerd so I'd be a big hit at comic, sci-fi or game conventions. I could go to these events 'dressed' as Dr Manhattan, a very tall smurf or a Na'vi. The possibilities, although not endless, are exotic to say the least.

I'm the sort of person who likes to be different from others so being blue would allow me to escape all the stereotypes I encounter as a black person and people would be forced to come up with new stereotypes especially for me. I can imagine it, a few stupid dudes just hanging about and one says: "You know, I really hate that blue guy! He is just such a cold bastard." Stupid things like that would make my day I tell you.

What would be the most exciting though is being blue and racist! I'll run around telling people that they are inferior to me and that I am special because there is only one (two if you count the Oprah dude I guess) of my kind. That would probably result in my butt being kicked though, which is no fun I've heard from people who've had it happen to them.

When all is said and done, being blue is awesome if you have the right outlook :D

Peace.

At it Again

2010-02-28T16:15:00.000+02:00

Dear Constant Reader of a writer in peril,

My bloodthirsty couch is at it again, it wants to kill me. I cannot say too much at this moment because I am busy fleeing for my life. I know of a hideout in the slums of Rosettenville that might provide some cover. I will tell you more of what has been happening in the past month when I get there.

In the meantime pray for me.

New Year’s Resolutions: The Circular Ruins

2010-01-18T15:37:00.000+02:00

He wanted to dream a man; he wanted to dream him in minute entirety and impose him on reality.

After nine or ten nights he understood with a certain bitterness that he could expect nothing from those pupils who accepted his doctrine passively, but that he could expect something from those who occasionally dared to oppose him. The former group, although worthy of love and affection, could not ascend to the level of individuals; the latter pre-existed to a slightly greater degree.

Not to be a man, to be a projection of another man's dreams–what an incomparable humiliation, what madness!

For what had happened many centuries before was repeating itself. The ruins of the sanctuary of the god of Fire were destroyed by fire.
With relief, with humiliation, with terror, he understood that he also was an illusion, that someone else was dreaming him.

- Jorge-Luis Borges, The Circular Ruins

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results

- Albert Einstein

Dear Constant reader of a sporadic writer,

Here we are, a few days into 2010 and many of us are still sticking to our resolutions to lose weight, save money and to spend more time with our families. With schools having just opened many parents are having sleepless nights over finances and semi-independent university students, such as myself, have had one or two nervous breakdowns worrying about registration fees. All-in-all it’s the usual January buzz where people are recovering from crazy holiday spending and realising that we are in deep financial doo-doo. Life goes on though and the ol’ blue ball we live on keeps on spinning, not as a result of money, sex or Hollywood’s version of love but by the grace of God. (How exactly He goes about it a few physicists might be able to tell you because I have no clue.)

I’m very happy to be alive and, as far as I can make out, healthy. I’m not a good person or anything cool like that but I’m sure God is still keeping His eye on me and watching out for me. The plan is to finally escape the circular ruins this year, you know, those pitfalls that too many of us fall into. We all make really cool resolutions to be better people and to save the Earth from that terrible scourge known as global warming for which we are responsible. But, alas, by March many of us have sunk back into misery, sloth, spitefulness and we refuse, kicking and screaming, to just shut up and be happy. We find ourselves in those dreadful circular ruins again.

My approach to life this year is that of a child, to take each day as it comes and to be an everyday hero :) I don’t plan to save the world, I’m not getting a six-pack like Ryk Neethling’s and I don’t have a devious scheme to become a billionaire like Warren Buffet. The plan is simply to be happy.

I plan to read more books and not only fiction, horror, fantasy and sci-fi but other genres in order to expand my horizons. I might even go as far as giving Danielle Steele a try... or not.

Ice-cream! I definitely have to eat more of that, because it makes me absolutely happy. I’m thinking that once a week will do.

God loves trees and He really went all out in making many of them and so I’ll lie under as many as I can. I will be a hobbit. What I should do is lie under trees, reading good books whilst eating ice-cream!

I have to put effort into my book drive this year and actually make it work. I might even get a few sponsors to back me up. Keep an eye out for this one.

I really must stop watching stupid things like South Park on my PC! My brain will rot and start leaking out of my nostrils if I don’t watch out, seriously. Anyone know any good Jewish comedians I can go see?

I’m falling into the bad habit of collecting video games but never getting around to playing them, which is bad, bad, bad! Play more video games Charlie and enjoy the nonsense out of them.

Last year I was a total douche bag of a friend and so this year I plan to be better.

Another thing I’ve been rubbish at is relationships so this year I’m working on being a good boyfriend and to move away from being too self-centred. It’s good to have someone other than myself to think about and whose feelings to take into consideration. Thank you for being in my life Lil’ Girl, I’m absolutely mad about you :)

My little sister has finally made it to High School and it’s about time I’m nicer to her because it’s a heroic thing to do. I can’t be too nice though because as an older brother it’s my job to be a little mean.

I definitely have to call my grandparents more often than I do now. I love those two people desperately and must speak with them more.

Having a crazy family is hard but I must spend more time with them. A little madness has never done anyone I know any harm.

This is a weird one but I have to buy myself a colouring book because being a kid is cool and it’s fun to sit with my cousin Lennie and be rock stars with crayons.

I was planning this one last year and never got around to doing it but I must buy myself a yo-yo and re-master it because it will make all the girls swoon over me.

Last and by no means least is to just sit at Jesus’ feet and be happy.

P.S. I’ll also spend more time blogging than I do on Facebook :)

P.P.S. I pray everyone I know and don’t know has a wonderful life and that joy finds those who refuse to accept happiness and punches them in the face.

The Little Boy Lost

2009-11-25T15:46:00.000+02:00

"Father, father, where are you going?
Oh do not walk so fast!
Speak, father, speak to you little boy,
Or else I shall be lost." - William Blake, The Little Boy Lost

Nor seeks nor finds he mortal blisses,
But feeds on the aerial kisses...
But from these create he can
Forms more real than living man,
Nurslings of immortality! - Percy Bysshe Shelley

You know, having friends is wonderful because they never solve any of your problems. Friends are like physical realisations of the opposite poles of one's mind, they play out the conflict that's taking place in your head and allow you to be an observer of what's going on in your head. Unlike C.S. Lewis I am fortunate not to have been born with a mind that's split perfectly in two, a mind that's an oxymoron (mine's just a plain moron), a mind that is made of two opposing hemispheres: the one shallow and rational and the other filled with magic and stories. My mind is entirely filled with magic and stories. I am not built to be an engineer or a lawyer, but rather a reader and a writer.

I am interested in dusty libraries and old churches. I would love to live in a museum as opposed to a city because there is life... real life in dusty books and old Greek vases. Being the strange being that I am it is logical (what a filthy word) for me to pursue a career in the Classics.

The more reasonable half of my friends, ironically led by a very unreasonable Reuben points out to me that I am a black boy (which is apparently synonymous with a unique sort of poverty that can only be overcome by becoming a lawyer or a doctor) living in a country that does not take kindly to the Classics. The other half of my friends, who believe that I should pursue a career in the Classics, ironically led by a very reasonable Simone, make this simple and undeniably true point: What else can he do with his life? He'd suck at everything else.

This is all very straightforward once you've had your friends enact it. I am not capable of any other career but one that is made up of mythology and literature in some form or the other and so I must become a scholar, forever haunting the halls of academia. I'll take up refuge in some university as an excuse to use their library and use the money they pay me to take cute librarians on dates. This is my idea of an idyllic life. Done. It's over, let's not talk about it anymore, the irrational and mad side (led by the voice of reason herself) wins.

Attack of the Bloodthirsty Couch

2009-11-10T15:07:00.000+02:00

Monsters are real, ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win. – Stephen King

Dear Reader,

If you are reading this then I am dead.

This is my chilling account of the strange events that have recently befallen me in my room, the one place I always felt safest... my sanctuary from the harsh world. I feel like Frodo at coming home and seeing that evil had managed to make its way to his very doorstep. Going off into some distant land to fight the forces of evil takes courage, but it is not as terrifying as having the darkness invading your home... not as terrifying as that sickening feeling you get knowing that orcs have been rummaging through your underwear drawer.

Of late the dark forces have been trying to kill me! It all started with the unused couch I salvaged from the storeroom – the falling and then later the spiders. As I type this, ironically sitting on the bloodthirsty couch that is the source of all my misery, I keep glancing at a corner in the ceiling where I am sure the spiders have taken up residence. They are led by a huge, old spider, with venom dripping from his fangs, who I have decided is probably named Aragog. He is a monster bred in the depths of the Amazon jungle that have never been touched by sunlight.

Until that fateful day a few weeks back I never paid much attention to the storeroom in the kitchen, all I knew is that it was dusty and seemed to contain tools that no one in my household had much use for. I am the only male in the house and I have no interest in manual labour, which is why I have spent my whole life pretending to be bookish in front of my parents when all I really do is lock myself in my room reading fairy tales or playing video games. I walked by the storeroom on my way to refill my coffee mug on that fateful day, finding the door slightly ajar and because the sun shone through the one grimy window in the room I could make out the couch in a corner. My room, which I refer to as my Potter Closet, is actually the coatroom of the old house in which my family and some other strange people live and everyone saw it fit to put me in the smallest space available and then to make me pay rent for it. As you can imagine my life is a rather harsh one, but that is neither here nor there, what matters is that I will be killed by the evil couch and its arachnid minions soon. Seduced by the idea of more comfortable seating for the people who feel the need to visit me more often that I would prefer I went into the storeroom to investigate. The couch turned out to be an ugly purplish colour and small enough to fit in my Potter Closet. It was perfect! To hell with my guests, I am the only one who will sit in this couch I thought, they can sit on the floor while I pretend to be Morpheus and offer them red jelly beans or blue jelly beans.

With great effort I dragged the couch to my room and immediately used it as my throne and that is where the trouble began. I would be getting out of bed and I would fall and land in an awkward position that the human body is simply not designed to assume. On one occasion I crashed headfirst into my bookcase and almost broke my neck. What really scared me was the fact that every time I fell (which was quite often) I would almost break my neck and it would always be the couch that prevented me from doing so. It was then that I began to see it for what it was... an agent of the Prim – that chaotic soup that conjures all sorts of monsters to create disorder in this world. Oh, Discordia! I was not surprised when the spiders started appearing all over the room. I would wake up in the morning with the evil beasties crawling all over my face or I would be watching movies, sitting on the bloodthirsty couch, and they would shamelessly crawl over me and I bet you they derived sick pleasure from the way I would run around the room screaming like a little girl for a few minutes trying to get them off me. They are just torturing me for the time being, I just know it, and soon a time will come when they decide to strike... I can feel them staring at me from their hole in the ceiling and I hear the menacing creak on the couch every time I shift my weight on it.

The time is coming that one morning (or evening, the time of day really has nothing to do with it) that my parents will find my dead and cold body sprawled on this couch, I just know it. This is why I am telling you my sad tale, dear reader, so that you may remember me when you walk by a dusty storeroom with the door slightly ajar and stay away.

P.S. My mother has told me to stop whining, buy some Doom and to move the couch a bit further back so that I would stop tripping over it.

P.P.S. Stay tuned for my return from the dead and my fight against the zombie spiders armed only with a can of Doom and a lighter.

2009-10-18T22:12:00.000+02:00

After awhile she turned to look at him. 'Oh Bobby,' she said.
'We've made such a mess of things, you and me. What are we going to do?'
'The best we can,' he said, still stroking her hand. He raised it to his lips and kissed the palm where her lifeline and heartline tangled briefly before wandering away from each other again. 'The best we can.' – Stephen King, Low Men in Yellow Coats (in Hearts in Atlantis)

Warning: Listening to William Hurt read this in his rich and textured voice is enough to break your heart.

For the last few weeks my life has been like A Series of Unfortunate Events – minus the weird, but undeniably cool, siblings. I’ve been working harder than I ever have in my whole (and quite short) life – what sucks though is the fact that I get no satisfaction from it because most of my work consists of marking first year students’ assignments and tests and I’ve never met people who are as apathetic as the first year students at UJ. Tolkien must have been made of ridiculously tough mental stuff to mark exams for so many years and still be sane at the end of it all... then again students were much brighter back in his day. Perhaps if I continue on this course I’ll get so bored that my mind will be forced to come up with a story so brilliant that it parallels The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings to try and stop itself from withering away.

One of my life goals is not to live a mediocre life, so being surrounded by so many students who just don’t give a damn is rather shocking! I struggle (and fail most of the time) to be the best Charlie® I can be every day but these people don’t even seem all that bothered about trying. The whole business makes me think of Jagang’s Imperial Order in Terry Goodkind’s The Sword of Truth novels in which Jagang and his men try to make it seem that people who try to aspire to be better than their fellow men are being full of themselves and selfish. The sad reality is that we live in world where mediocrity is not enough to get you to the top – bearing in mind that my definition of the top is probably drastically different from yours... mine involves a huge library.

Anyhoo, I’m tired and need to be heading to Slumber Land to rest my weary body. In a few hours it’s my birthday and I’m looking forward to being twenty-two – it’s exciting I think, what being a full blown adult person and all.

Good night furry friends :)

rAge

2009-10-02T21:57:00.000+02:00

A Life? Cool! Where can I download one of those?

- Dunno

Have I ever told you guys how much I love October? No? Well, it's the coolest month ever because it's the month I was born and it's also the month that my momsicals and jerk of a dad were born. More importantly than my existence being strangely linked to October, it's the month that the really Awesome gaming expo takes place. Imagine this scenario: The Dome in Northgate filled to the brim with the strangest people in the country, people with reflexes faster than any gunslinger ever bred in Gilead. Now imagine these strange creatures walking around gawking at shiny computer bits, scantily clad booth babes (who aren't too sure what you're on about when you ask them about quad core CPUs) and comic books. Some of them might point at random things with wires and fans and start drooling and others will jump up and down at the sight of squiggles on a plasma screen. Now tell me, why on Earth you would be anywhere else (like at a club hitting on hot girls) when you could be hanging with these weird people and having the awesomest time in the history of ever?

Tomorrow it's on! I'm going to rAge to lick a Playstion 3. Happy days.

4 AM in the Morning

2009-09-24T05:03:00.000+02:00

Half my life
is in books' written pages
Lived and learned from fools and
from sages - Aerosmith, Dream On

It’s four in the morning and I can’t sleep, I’ve been tossing and turning for the last hour... I might as well wake up and do something useful with my life. I’ve considered getting dressed and walking to the nearby pub for a beer or two but people having been getting mugged in the morning on my street of late – and I’m too lazy to actually get dressed. I wonder if that huge bouncer guy at the pub would let me in wearing only boxers and a wrinkled T-shirt...? Probably not. There’s also the fact that I have to be up in a few hours to mark a pile of portfolios and a beer or two (which really means six) wouldn’t go a long way in setting the mood for that sort of thing.

Don’t worry too much about it though, I’ll just sit here for a bit and kick the ol’ bull with you guys. You hear about the clown who assaulted the chicken crossing the road? Well, neither did I, it must have been quite a scene I imagine. What was cool, though, was chatting to one of the crazier (which should be interpreted as meaning über cool in this here instance) tutors at the English Department. We were talking about some of the crazy things she’s done in her life and why she did them. She tells me that at some point she got tired of reading about things and wanted to experience them firsthand. If you want to know what falling in love is like, allow yourself to be swept off of your feet on that euphoric wave of gushy feelings instead of believing what some author (even if they’re really clever) tells you. People like me tend to read about things and then think we’ve done them and thus have the wrong idea about them, which is not good depending on how you’re looking at it. The moral of the story you ask? Books are really awesome but at some point you’ve got to add to the Great Tapestry by actually getting out there and living (whatever that means).

That's my mini-ramble for the morning :) Later.

Bats on the Brian

2009-09-05T11:49:00.000+02:00

"'But I don't want to go among mad people' Alice remarked.
'Oh, you can't help that,' said the Cat: 'We're all mad here. I'm mad, you're mad.'
'How do you know I'm mad?' said Alice.
'You must be,' said the Cat, 'Or you wouldn't have come here.'"
- Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventure in Wonderland

"You're in the real world now and the lunatics have taken over the Asylum."
- The Joker, Arkham Asylum, A Serious House on Serious Earth

Okay, I officially have Bats on the brain; the guy is taking over my life and I'm losing the little that remains of my sanity - assuming I was sane to begin with. I've probably played the Arkham Asylum video game demo hundreds of times and I'm rather sad that I won't be able to afford the full version when it comes out on PC later this month. I'll make a plan though, something like stealing my neighbour's cat, Mr Ginger, and selling him. The game is getting rave reviews on consoles and people are even comparing it to BioShock. I just love the Detective Mode and the silent take downs, there's nothing more satisfying than swinging from gargoyle to gargoyle and swooping down and taking out an enemy and then disappearing before his friends see you. You then sit and watch as the villains in the room get nervous wondering who's next and jumping at their own shadows.

I've also just finished reading the graphic novel, Arkham Asylum by Grant Morrison and Dave McKean, which is surprisingly good - I'd go as far as to say that it's even better than The Killing Joke by Alan Moore and Brian Bolland. I just love how dark it is and how it messes with your mind. If you're into psychology you'll notice some of Carl Jung's archetypes in it and another cool aspect is how The Joker raises the question in the reader's mind: which is the real loony bin, the asylum or the real world? Amadeus Arkham converted his ancestral home into an asylum for the criminally insane because he thought that he could help insane people and thus achieve a triumph of reason over the irrational and other cool stuff like that.

Speaking of The Joker, he's always an interesting character to read about. In Arkham Asylum one of the psychiatrists notes that he cannot be properly defined as insane, she suspects that he is an example of someone with some kind of super-sanity: "A brilliant new modification of human perception. More suited to urban life at the end of the twentieth century." The novel has a very postmodern edge to it and asks whether identity is stable or not. In one scene of the novel one of the asylum's inmates suggests that they take off Bats' mask so they can see who he really is underneath. The Joker intervenes and says that the mask is Bats' real identity. So, you see there's a lot of fun to be had with this novel.

All-in-all, Arkham Asylum is an awesome graphic novel that caters for people interested in exploring the darker corners of the human mind.

Spring Has Sprung

2009-09-01T11:27:00.000+02:00

A Light exists in Spring
Not present on the Year
At any other period —
When [September] is scarcely here

- Emily Dickinson

A little madness in the Spring
Is wholesome even for the King,
But God be with the Clown —
Who ponders this tremendous scene —
This whole Experiment of Green —
As if it were his own!

- Emily Dickinson

Ah, 'tis the Spring, it has finally arrived and I feel so gosh-darn good because of it. Winter totally kills my skinny frame and I'm never all that sad to see the bugger go. Spring makes everyone think of the colour green (which is my favourite colour if you're interested in knowing that sort of thing about me) but it makes me think of yellow. For some reason everything that's yellow catches my eye in Spring: take the lemon tree outside my house for instance, it looks so much more beautiful in Spring.

District 9

2009-08-29T11:48:00.000+02:00

I was watching some show on TV a few nights ago and they were all hyped up about this movie when I remembered NAG saying something about it... and the fact that Peter Jackson was the Producer didn't hurt in persuading me to go and see it either.

All I can say is Wowzers! This movie is the "fokken" shiz hey! Seriously, who would have thought that aliens landing in Johannesburg could make such a cool story? Blomkamp and his team chucked everything into this movie: that Cloverfield-esque shaky cam/security surveillance cam thing that usually irritates the crap out of me in other movies, documentary style commentary and speculation, lots of violence and gore (always a good thing in movies), playing with the whole apartheid/xenophobia thing in South Africa, shady Nigerians (rather stereotypical but good fun all the same and an Afrikaans guy who says "fokken" a lot. I spent this first half of the movie laughing at how South African the movie was, which is really cool. The second half I spent ogling the cool special effects an just enjoying how the MNU soldiers and Nigerian gangsters explode when they're hit by the alien weapons.

I was asking Lady Leigh of the Meadows how it feels to live in a city that you see getting destroyed in movies when I saw the Millennium Bridge being taken out by Death Eaters in the new Potter movie and now I have some idea: it's kind of worrying. I'm being a chop but the Nigerian gangsters scared the crap out of me - they're so freakin' ruthless hey. People who live in New York must be brave because that place always gets trashed in movies.

All-in-all District 9 is hands-down the best South African movie in the history of the universe! Go see it, whether you like sci-fi or not you will love it. I pinky promise.

P.S. Check out Christopher's blog while you're here.

2009-08-07T17:24:00.000+02:00

I strove with none, for none was worth my strife;
Nature I loved, and, next to Nature, Art;
I warmed both hands before the fire of life;
It sinks, and I am ready to depart.
- Walter Savage Landor, The End

People want some sort of consistency in their lives; they want to live their lives according to a rhythm. Wait a minute! Don’t people want adventure and the excitement that comes with it? I hear you say. They do, but within the bounds of a certain ‘routine’.

The other day I was listening to a talk by Peter Kreeft (I really should find other people to spend hours listening to) in which he says we must live our lives like poetry. This immediately made me think of great people like Ghandi, Mother Teresa and Mandela. Whenever one reads of their lives it always seems very poetic – the pain they felt is described in such beautiful terms that make it seem like theirs was a higher kind of pain and their joy was a nobler sort of joy. Dr Kreeft’s statement has been bothering me for a few weeks now because I can’t seem to fine tune my life to the point that it is poetic. When I feel sad, though, it’s a boring sort of sadness and when I’m happy it seems to be an everyday kind of happiness... nothing to write poetry about because poetry – in my head at least – is vibrant, toxic, dangerous and all kinds of exciting.

What I want is for my inner being to be consistent with my outer being, I want to feel like there is a storm raging inside of me when I argue with someone and I want to feel like my heart is melting when I see my beloved... you know, that Romantic kind of thing the old poets always seem to be on about. I want adventure within a confined sort of space – a taste of the unexpected wrapped in familiar packaging.

I might be generalising but I suspect that most of the human race is like me and Walter Savage (this name is fitting somehow) Landor, we want to look back and be able to say that we lived our lives according to some ideal that made us feel nice and warm or crazy and heated in a poetic kind of way. Daily life in a city doesn’t seem to cater for people want to feel poetic about their lives though, which is why I plan to be a surfer or a tree hugger (which is not a nice thing to call someone I’m told).

A Life Lived

2009-07-07T18:23:00.000+02:00

“Fool,” said my Muse to me, “look in thy heart, and write.” – Sir Philip Sidney

Past,
Future;
They all merge into this present moment
I’m a dude on the road –
I dare to disturb the universe
Within these pages
There are snippets and snatches
Of a life lived

“There is delight in singing, tho’ none hear
Beside the singer: and there is delight
In praising, tho’ the praiser sit alone”

– Walter Savage Landor, To Robert Browning

Through the Eyes of the Observer

“Faith” is a fine invention
When Gentlemen can see –
But Microscopes are prudent
In an Emergency- Emily Dickinson

Young, silent observer
In social circles he stands reserved
He is part of all, but not
Jotting down notes with his elegant flowing mind script
Always adding to his intelligence supreme
Like a journalist in a war zone he can do nothing
Nothing but record the terrors
Taking note of human errors
Always adding to his heavily guarded vault of infinite intelligence
Observe is all he can do
It is no fault of his
He seems without feeling
Emotionally void
Grey-eyed ghost
Hands stuffed in pockets of faded blue jeans
He scours rodent-inhabited streets
To add to his already extensive library of thought
His presence paradox, phantom but not
His lips dry like the arid Kalahari from the lack of use
In the shroud of city death the grey-eyed phantom stands
Unseen, listening, jotting down and storing in a box
That might one-day spill all the secrets of life under a cranium saw

“Why do you just stand there?” I dare to ask
No reply
Just a penetrating silver glare

Blood begins to fall from a wounded sky
Drops fall like crimson jewels
He stares at the bleeding sky, emotions from the dawn of time finally stirred
Platinum tears hit the blacktop with unheard plops
He falls to the ground on his knees, arms skinny and limp at his sides
“Father, why?”
He asks in a parched tone

"The Lord said, ‘I was ready to answer my people’s prayers, but they did not pray. I was ready for them to find me, but they did not even try. The nation did not pray to me, even though I was always ready to answer ‘Here I am, I will help you’."

Young Man Going West

Within my heart there dwells a perfect kind of sadness
Within my heart, raging, there is also an organised sort of madness
Stealthily (or so they think) they go about their dire business
I can just barely detect their presence
But I’m quite certain they eventually mean to kill me
Together they make up a beast that is without remorse or relent

Whenever I think of my sadness and madness
I’m struck by the notion that a war’s afoot
I suspect that my soul’s the target of titanic opposing forces
The one side means for me to shed my humanity in exchange for flawless godliness
The other side simply means to consume my soul by preying on my ‘weaker’ will

I stand facing two paths
One of them I have to religiously follow
The choice is simply black and white,
Heaven or hell

But wait!

There seems to be something more…
Something more lies within this fragile heart of mine
Simple gladness

With great consideration I’ll choose the path to follow
I’ll pick up my sadness, madness and new-found gladness
And together we’ll walk down that winding path
Singing our tuneless song into the sunset

Young Man Coming Home

With my madness and sadness in tow
I left home
I travelled far and wide
With these two companions by my side
I swam across seas
Seeking a cure for my disease
And I was told:

"there is a cure in the house
And not outside it, no,"

I found myself coming back home,
Madness, sadness and newly acquired gladness in tow

A THOUGHT ABOUT EVE ON SAINT VALANTINE’S DAY

“True love’s the gift which God has given
To man alone beneath the heaven:
It is not fantasy’s hot fire,
Whose wishes, soon as granted, fly;
It liveth not in fierce desire,
With dead desire it doth not die;
It is the secret sympathy,
The silver link, the silken tie,
Which heart to heart, and mind to mind,
In body and in soul can bind.”- Sir Walter Scott, True Love

“… a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh.” – Genesis 2:24

One day I might be walking down the street…
And all of a sudden there you will be,
As if waiting for me
On that day the sun may or may not shine on our account
Dear God knows, the birds may not even sing
Our meeting may take place in the dead of winter or in the blossom of spring
I would guess the month to be October – things always seem to happen at that time of year
Who is to say it won’t be a dark day of terrible loss and violence
A call to persevere: pure, untainted love founded in a pool of grief and sorrow

The world seemingly passing us by, but from the corner of eyes doubting our little ‘fling’, secretly wishing us ill
You and me, kind of like Fisher’s Lock and Key Hypothesis
No words that I may ever mutter or commit to scraps of paper can do your beauty justice
Your open mind inspiring faith, courage and belief

My love for you, child-like; pure and simple
Because I will give you my all – no more and no less – you may prove to be my fall
I don’t care because I love you
We may be ripped apart by tragedy
And the world may say our ‘doom’ was inevitable, “It was too good to be true”
Stuff the pompous lot with turkey stuffing because I don’t care
I simply and utterly love you

“They sin who tell us Love can die.
Love is undestructible.
Its holy flame for ever burneth,
From Heaven it came, to Heaven returneth” – Robert Southey, The Immortality of Love

To the Masters of Old

Great masters of old,
You'd be amazed by twenty-first century machinery
'though you invented time travel
That modern science has yet to match
I find myself spirited away by words
That are ages old

Your thoughts are entwined
With mine
I dwell in an ancient past
That never was
I walked down to the store
With Hamlet on my mind
And I could swear that for a moment
Achilles was by my side,
His animated shield
Telling an enthralling tale

To my God

I thank Thee for the life Thou hast given me
As topsy turvy as it may be

I thank Thee for the ups and downs,
The heavenly moments and even what sometimes seems to be mediocrity

I thank Thee for the charming
View of life in retrospect
And the hope of tomorrow

I thank Thee for it all,
Lessons learned and wisdom that flew right over my head

Stay by my side and show me the way
With Your patience, kindness and Love
Show me the way that leads to the Dark Tower

The Lamb

“That is why I speak to them in parables: ‘Though seeing, they do not see; though hearing, they do not understand.’” – The Lamb

You are both the Lion and the Lamb
Your love encompasses things seemingly opposite
And thus our magicians are baffled
By Your mysterious ways

I come to You as I am,
A beggar at Your doorstep
Even if I offer You my all
It amounts to naught

I stand trembling at Your doorstep
Because I know that You are a killer of men
Though I am scared of letting go
I beg that You cut me deep
And remove all traces of I in me

Little Lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?
Gave thee life & bid thee feed,
By the stream and o’er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing of wooly bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice!
Little Lamb who made thee?
Dost though know who made thee?

Little Lamb I’ll tell thee,
Little Lamb I’ll tell thee!
He is calléd by thy name,
For he calls himself a Lamb:
He is meek & he is mild,
He became a little child:
I a child & though a lamb,
We are calléd by his name.
Little Lamb God bless thee.
Little Lamb God bless thee. - William Blake, The Lamb

Curious Me

Life!
So complex,
So intricate
Everything's entwined like a vast chain link fence
One thing cannot exist perfectly without another
It's such a fine balance
Even the seemingly simple things are mind-bending
Destinies supposedly linked to ancient prophecies written on tattered Greek tapestries
WHO? WHAT? WHERE? WHEN? WHY? HOW?
These are my journalistic questions
Who do I ask?
Scientists?
Mathematicians?
Or philosophers?
No
They ‘re all just like me
Always searching, digging and trying to unravel the universe's secrets
Unfortunately with answers come only more questions
WHO? WHAT? WHERE? WHEN? WHY? HOW?
Curiosity killed the cat
Why didn't the murdering dirt-bag kill the dog curiously sniffing his own butt?
Shall I ask God to reveal to me His grand design?
I wonder what He would say?
"Certainly not! Patience My child is the key."
Probably not
I wonder, I wonder...
If a fish were a cat
And a cat a tin
What would I have been?
A slit-eyed fiend maybe...?
If I was born a minute later...?
Dear Lord! Would I still be me?
Only goodness knows
Then again it may be that wickedness does too
Do you?

The Pursuit of Joy

What wretched, unhappy creatures we allow ourselves to be!
Created for Joy were we
Who now do not heed our Shepherd’s call;
We’re too busy spreading misery

Happiness is like the sea,
He cannot be caught and contained
For He is not a tame lion
Aslan is on the move
And we must follow,
Leaving everything behind
To the ends of the earth and across the great sea
We must follow

To enter that great country
For whose halls every soul yearns
We must forsake this world

Leave behind all your burdens
And forget your cares
Keep your eyes always on that terrible and fierce Lion
Who gave His life for you and me

Take Me Away

My love, whisk me away
To a place where it’s just you and me
You can sing to me of great beauty
And I’ll recite to thee verses of delight

The place where you made your stand never mattered. Only that you were there . . . and still on your feet. – Randall Flagg (in Stephen King’s The Stand)

The Sea, the Sea . . . it calls out to me

2009-06-21T17:54:00.000+02:00

And it is said by the Eldar that in water there lives yet the echo of the music of the Ainur more than in any substance else that is in this Earth; and many of the Children of Ilúvatar hearken still unsated to the voices of the Sea, and yet know not for what they listen. – J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion

It has finally dawned on me that I am not very good at this ‘real life’ business that everyone else seems so intent on. The new plan is to go live somewhere near the Sea and to take up surfing as my new life-style. Being homeless in Jozi is probably not something anyone should strive for but being homeless near the Sea is a different kettle of fish: all I’ll need is a surf board, some wax, board shorts, a fishing rod and a bonfire every night.

Okay, let me backtrack and be a little more realistic. As Romantic as being homeless on the beach sounds I’m not Zen enough to survive under those conditions yet. What I’ll really need to be a successful semi-beach bum is to save up enough money to buy a super kewl VW hippie van and enough to open a little second hand bookstore somewhere near the beach – those deeply philosophical surfers always need something to stimulate their minds after all. Then I’ll be set for a glorious life of having my brain totally fried by the bliss that is surfing.

I think that we should all quit our jobs or studies and all head out to the world’s beaches and surf forever. If you’re not very fond of the Sea, i.e. she scares the living daylights out of you, I’d recommend trees, quit your job and go live in a giant oak tree… you know, like the Elves in Tolkien. Just build a flet in the biggest tree you can find and fill it with good books and you’re good to go.

I think this will solve some of the world’s problems (some minor squabbles like Hey! Your tree’s bigger than mine will still exist though I’m sad to say) and we’ll all be happier people.

There’ll be some technicalities to consider but I think we (by which I mainly mean a bunch of smart people somewhere) can work around these difficulties and create a system that works. Never mind that, scrap the technicalities, they’re what’s making us humans so unhappy in the first place – we’ll just wing it and hope for the best.

Meeting the Master

2009-06-21T17:50:00.000+02:00

Dreams are a serious business – one rarely knows whether they are real or not, or (more precisely) which of their aspects are real and which are not. Sorting through the tangled webs of our dreams tends to be very sticky and I would rather not do it unless the need is dire, by which I mean something like my Mr Spotty Dog being held hostage by an evil organization of green-eyed cats. Our dreams possess many magical properties, prophecy being the most common and strangest of them I’ve found in my approximately 8030 hours on this planet. I’d be walking down the street when I suddenly have a sense of déjà vu, I’ve seen this before and someone in a bright red hat is about to appear from around that corner I’d think. Such occurrences always fry my noodle until it’s nice and crispy. Enough with all this rambling though, what I really want to tell you is about a very strange dream I had some time ago.

Every single time I read Tolkien I am astounded by the scale, beauty and richness of his imagination, so much so that the ‘real’ world seems rather dull in comparison to his Middle-Earth. He was a cantankerous and endlessly niggling man to know from what I’ve read of him, but I would like to meet him nonetheless. The members of my family are all mad in one way or the other so I’ve some experience with lunatics. Back to this dream of mine: I’ve always had this idea in my head that if could write a story half as good as The Lord of the Rings that I would be the happiest man in the world and then I stumbled across Stephen King’s Dark Tower series and it smacked of Tolkien somehow. The first book in the series opens with the best opening line I’ve ever read. The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed. Maybe it’s just me but those words are like the coming of a great storm, and what a whirlwind of an adventure the journey to the Dark Tower has been. The Dark Tower scared me because it seemed to do for contemporary readers what Tolkien did for his readers, what I hoped I could do one day. In an introduction in the new editions of the Dark Tower books King reveals that he was indeed inspired by Tolkien to write a long tale that would captivate readers in the same way that The Lord of the Rings does, but without the Elves. I think that he’s achieved his goal in terms of writing a story that excites readers, a story that even makes them weep at times. His story is so overwhelming that it seeps into all his other stories. All things serve the Beam in the end I guess – it’s ka.

I think there’s still something missing though… King doesn’t quite hit the spot. I’m the only person that I know of who notices this gap, so perhaps it is my job to fill it. Tolkien and Lewis wrote the type of stories that they did because they felt that there were no authors who wrote the type of stories that they wanted to read. I rarely come across books that do to me what Tolkien does. Perhaps if there more stories like Tolkien’s it would be like living in an Angel haunted world, which (as Peter Kreeft points out) might drive us so mad that we would not eat, sleep or procreate. Back to my dream (in earnest this time): I had a dream that as I was walking down Main Street, Tolkien appeared before me in that unsurprising manner in which things happen in dreams – as if meeting dead authors in person was as common as bread. He looked at me and spoke, more to himself than to me it seemed, quoting Sir Philip Sidney (whose work I’ve never seen him quote anywhere before): “Fool,” said my Muse to me, “look in thy heart, and write.”

I said before that I believe in the prophetic power of dreams and I think that the message of this one is fairly straightforward; in order to write something that might do to readers what Tolkien’s work does I have to start writing and to stop dreaming. Whether I’m good or not is yet to be seen. Wish me luck on my journey to the Dark Tower… or is it to Mount Doom? Who knows? I certainly don’t.

Living or Not Living

2009-05-07T16:45:00.000+02:00

In his very strange novel, A Void, which is a lipogram of the letter “E”, Georges Perec writes:
Living, or not living: that is what I ask:
If 'tis a stamp of honour to submit
To slings and arrows waft'd us by ill winds,
Or brandish arms against a flood of afflictions,
Which by our opposition is subdu'd? Dying, drowsing;
Waking not? – William Shakspar

Yesterday morning I was totally peed off! ... Which is better than being peed on I guess. There were no buses again (not that there are buses today mind you), which meant I had to hustle lifts from everyone like a mad person because paying for taxis is burning a serious hole in my pocket – and I can’t afford a pair of those really cool fireproof pants they sell at Cape Union Mart. I spent my money buying a monthly bus ticket, only to have it sit uselessly in my bag because Metrobus is full of crap.

This is one of those times when it’s very irritating to be living in a society where it feels like the letter “E” has been letternabbed by some villainous organisation of hooded figures with girly fingernails and everything is topsy-turvy. I'm an indefatigable optimist though and slings and arrows waft'd at me by ill winds simply bounce of my imaginary Achilles' armour, which just goes to show how dangerous my imagination is.

My answer to Shakspar's question is that I choose to brandish arms against a flood of afflictions and to continue the imaginary revolution. For Frodo! (And my grandmother!)

The Horror

2009-05-04T13:42:00.000+02:00

I've been downloading old-time radio horror shows for the past few months and listening to them on my mp3 player on my way to varsity, and recently someone pointed out to me that this is strange. Apparently I'm the only person who listened to tales of terror on the radio as a kid - I have no clue where everyone else grew up. To all the masses out there, who are clearly out of the loop, I must tell you that listening to a radio horror story is a very frightening experience, especially if the actors lending their voices to the drama are good. I don't recommend it to people with heart conditions! I've had many sleepless nights after listening to stories like Dr Grimshaw's Sanitarium. The horror stories that aired in the '50s are the scariest in my opinion - they have a weird vibe about them that just freaks you out as a listener.

Get a dose of some old school horror here.

Reading the Archetype

2009-04-27T13:52:00.001+02:00

Solomon saith: There is no new thing upon the earth.
So that as Plato had an imagination, that all knowledge was but remembrance; so Solomon giveth
his sentence, that all novelty is but oblivion.
Francis Bacon: Essays, LVIII

I actually own an ancient copy of Bacon’s Essays that looks as if it would be perfectly at home in a literary museum; and thus I feel it necessary to point out that I’m feeling particularly lazy at the moment and instead of quoting from my copy of Bacon I’m quoting from the PDF version of Louis-Jorge Borges’s epigraph to his short story, The Immortal. I am quoting Bacon being quoted by Borges – it’s mind boggling if you think about it, which I don’t suggest you do because I don’t want it on my conscience that you lost the last scrap of sanity that you owned reading this blog.

What I’m really trying to say is that I think those mysterious people who told Liz Browning that the epics are dead might have been right, but not in the cynical way in which they supposed. The moment the first truly great and epic story was told was the moment nothing better could be told. Every story that follows is simply another version of the archetype – its storyness is a shadow of the real story in the world of forms. This is all in Plato according to Professor Kirke; “Dear me, what do they teach them in the schools nowadays?” He asks. It’s certainly not Plato I can assure him.

Why do we continue to tell stories then? I think it’s because we are a forgetful bunch that constantly needs to be reminded of our place in the world in the world. We never seem to learn from our mistakes as a species. Look at our history: The Americans fought for independence from the British, who were being very mean to them, and then they started fighting with the native Americans (this probably happened before their independence). They drafted a beautiful declaration of independence that goes on about the rights of all humankind and then they go and enslave African people and act like they’re not human beings. The same thing happened all over the world: in South Africa the Boers fought for independence against the British (hmm... they seem to be the root of all evil in this tale) and then merrily instituted apartheid. I was telling a friend of mine that we’ve all more-or-less come to the conclusion that colonisation was wrong but if we ever discovered a planet in some far away galaxy that is populated by beings with less strength of arms than us we would colonize them in a heartbeat. We would argue that this is somehow different from what we’ve been doing on our planet in the past.

This is why we still write stories, to remind us that we are silly and that we need to stop it and eat all our veggies.

A Lazy Weekend Taking Over Middle-Earth

2009-04-06T12:13:00.003+02:00

Hang a gold cord down from heaven, and all you gods and goddesses take hold of it: but you could not pull Zeus, the counsellor most high, down from heaven to the ground, however long and hard you laboured. But whenever I had a mind to pull in earnest, I could haul you up, earth and sea and all – then I could hitch the cord round a peak of Olympus, so that everything was then left hanging in midair. That is how superior I am to gods and men.
– Zeus, The Iliad

The earth is shaking
Because of His wrath
The mountains tremble
At the sound of His voice
He pulls down the sky
To crush His enemies
He descends upon them with fire
He is clothed in greatness
His voice resounds throughout the earth
His vengeance no longer is contained
His light destroys the darkness
If He speaks the earth will crumble
If He moves the universe will fall
He is clothed in greatness
- Becoming the Archetype, The End of the Age

At some point in our lives we all dream of taking over the world and ruling it with an iron fist; but unlike Hitler or Mugabe most of us are actually sane and know not get ahead of ourselves. I spent most of my weekend listening to the lead singer of Becoming the Archetype boom out lyrics of God’s greatness in his thundering voice as I sent my vast armies of Nύmenόrean descent across the plains of Mordor in The Battle for Middle-Earth 2 – crushing all who would dare oppose me. I was not trying to be blasphemous and compare myself to God; no, not by any means. I was just feeling very powerful as I ordered virtual soldiers to do my bidding and the music served as a muse of sorts. I felt like Zeus surely must feel in Greek mythology as he sits on his throne atop Mount Olympus, using his power to meddle in the affairs of humankind.

When you read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows you were told that Lord Voldemort died. If you believed this I’m sorry to tell you that you are a gullible fool because Voldemort did not perish in that battle with snot-nosed Potter, I spirited him away to Middle-Earth using my godlike powers. He now commands my armies for me alongside Gandalf and Galadriel. Sauron sits trembling on his black throne as my army marches through Mordor to annihilate him. I have also slain that foul creature who calls himself Gollum before he could get the chance to lose the Ring to Bilbo in a silly game of riddles. I’ve taken the ring and given it to Galadriel as she is the only one powerful enough to wield it against Sauron – she will become corrupted by the Ring in the process but I do not care about such trivialities.

Mwahahaha, mwahahaha... cough, cough.

No Rest for the Wicked

2009-04-02T11:21:00.003+02:00

Dear traveller,

Surely you are lost. The interwebs, wonderfully wibbly and wobbly though they may be, are like the world-renowned labyrinth that Dædalus constructed for king Minos and it is easy to click on the wrong link and end up lost in cyberspace. Since you are here now and I can’t help you find your way home, you might as well stay for some cake and listen to me talk about things that will not change your life in any meaningful way.

It is said, by people I don’t know, that there’s no rest for the wicked. I’m quite certain that this means I can spend the next two weeks resting because I can’t be classified as a wicked person; selfish, petty, mean and proud perhaps, but not wicked. I am officially on holiday and as a result I’m ridiculously happy. Very practical people (whose role on this planet I’ve yet to figure out) have tried to rain on my parade by pointing out the stack of work that I have to get done by the end of my holiday. These puddleglums don’t have to worry, though, because I’ve already come up with a plan to get my work done in time; it’s a plan so brilliant that you can put a pointy wizard’s hat on it and call it Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore.

When I am not doing my work or fending off irritating family members (who cannot bear to see me happy in any shape or form) with my imaginary kung-fu skills I will be reading. My reading list just keeps growing and growing, I spend more time haunting book stores than I spend reading it seems. At the moment I have three books that I’m focused on: The Song of Susannah by Stephen King, Odd Hours by Dean Koontz, my favourite fry cook who sees dead people’s fourth outing, and Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian. I eventually have to get around to reading books I picked up at second hand bookstores some months ago, books like Peter Straub’s Koko (which Lady Leigh assures me is disturbing) and The Book of the Dead, a collection of horror stories that pay tribute to George Romero’s zombie movies. To add to my long reading list I went to this super cool bookstore called Boekehuis, which serves coffee in a beautiful garden when you feel thirsty after browsing their impressive selection of books, and bought a copy of Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy. I read City of Glass (one of the three stories in the book) last year for literary theory, which totally blew my mind. Lady Leigh was kind enough to lend me her copy of book but I never got around to reading the other two stories so I just had to buy my own copy. Speaking of Mr Auster, I went and bought his friend, Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (which I read in English last year). To round up my reading list I bought Eats, Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss because the stickler inside of me decided that it’s time improve my punctuation and grammar – which is atrocious at best. The fact that the Apostrophe Protection Society (APS) wrote me a scathing letter concerning my misuse of the apostrophe didn’t dissuade me from buying the book either.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

2009-03-13T15:23:00.006+02:00

“… the secret of the Great Stories is that they
have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover’s skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don’t… In the Great stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn’t. And yet you want to know again”- Arundhati Roi, The God of Small Things.

I went to go and see Watchmen last weekend. I love the graphic novel and I was waiting for the movie to come out for some months now. I was actually expecting it to come out in July so the March release caught me by surprise.

The accuracy with which most of the graphic novel was captured and translated onto the silver screen is remarkable. I browsed through the graphic novel the day before going to see the movie to refresh the story in my mind and I was pleasantly surprised to see that the movie used the panels in the graphic novel as scenes and they barely changed the dialogue – which just goes to show how good Watchmen is as a graphic novel.

After seeing Watchmen (which I'm going to go and see again on Wednesday) I started thinking about the movies I like. I rarely go to the movies to see a movie whose story I don't know. All the movies I watch are based on books I've read or comic books whose plots I know. I like familiar stories, they have to be comfortable enough for me to jump right into them and know what's happening. I'm the sort of person who reads the same books over and over again because I like the way they are written, I've fallen deeply in love with the characters (and plan to name my children after them) and because the stories make me weep. I'm currently reading Terry Goodkind's Confessor and I had to hold back my tears on the bus this morning because I was so impressed by the strength of Richard Rahl's spirit. When I was reading Stephen King's The Waste Lands I came across one of the most beautiful sentences I have ever read (which I don't recall now) and I stopped and reread it for fifteen minutes.

All the lovers of stories, whether they are about wizards and dragons or superheroes, go to the movies to see them in a new light without wanting the essence of them to change.

Who watches the watchmen? The fans of books, comics and video games. We are the watchers of movies based on our favourite stories. We go see a movie based on the Watchmen graphic novel to see if they can capture that epic feeling we experienced when we were reading it at 3 in the morning. Once in a while something like the Watchmen movie comes along and makes us happy to be those shadowy figures behind the scenes that keep a protective eye over the watchmen as they keep the streets safe.

The World Is Too Much with Charlie

2009-03-04T10:17:00.004+02:00

The world is too much with us; late and soon

- William Wordsworth

I have always suspected that I am a materialistic person but things have finally spun out of control. I want, want, want and I want some more! My latest 'want', I'm proud to say, is actually a desperate need in disguise.

This post is aimed at anyone in this wide world, and even worlds parallel to this one, who feels the need to grant a poor African pseudo-kid the one sensible object of all his desires (drum roll): an Amazon Kindle 2 .

As a certified bookworm I need to have this space-age piece of technology. I'm always lugging books around and this tends to disturb a lot of people on the bus. I'm a skinny dude with the upper arm strength of a Keibler Elf and I'm a bit of a lummox - thus I'm always dropping heavy books on fellow commuters' toes and falling on them. If a very kind person bought me a Kindle 2 this would not happen and many toes would be spared.

Er...: Laughing Men Co.

2009-02-06T14:07:00.004+02:00

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Phew! This has been one of those weeks where a lot of things seem to happen and when you take the time to think about it you realise that you were just going around wasting a lot of energy doing almost nothing. I ran up stairs and down stairs for reasons that make no sense to me and I walked around with lots of useless books in my bag and hands for most of the week feeling very productive and now I can't even remember where those books came from. The first week of varsity is like drinking too much at some party and having a vague memory of how all that vomit got on your shoes the following day. I have scraps of paper lying everywhere and I have no clue where most of them came from. I'll use my super sleuth skills later to solve this case, I'm just too damn lazy right now.

The highlight of this week is the company I'm starting when I acquire a heap of money in the near future. I met an old high school acquaintance yesterday and just to bore the nonsense out of him I decided to tell him about Laughing Men Co., which is going to be the biggest, wealthiest and least profitable company in the world. We're going to convince (at gunpoint of course) the top ten people on the Forbes list to give us all their money. We will then proceed to build an empire that will be the second home of the world's strongest, fastest, tallest and most intelligent men and women. With the skill of these insanely talented people at our disposal we will find devious ways in which to lose money. Laughing Men Co. will be headed by a board of 13 directors (me being at the head of the table) in a room enveloped by Cuban cigar smoke. The directors will all wear expensive Armani suits that cost more than the house I currently live in and no one will know what their faces look like because they'll all be wearing black hoods. From their ivory tower the directors will laugh, giggle like little girls and snicker as the company loses vast sums of money. We (by which I mean my 12-year old sister and I) made some advanced calculations and with the capital at our disposal Laughing Men Co. will be around for almost a century before our money runs out. I'll be dead by then so I won't care that lives have been ruined by 13 crazy, laughing people in a room.

P.S. If you've just wasted two minutes of your life reading this post I'm sad to say that there is 99.999999% chance that you will never get them back... unless the Chuckling Time Machine that Laughing Men Co. plans to build in the future actually works.

2009-02-01T15:31:00.001+02:00

“The critics say that epics have died out
With Agamemnon and the goat-nursed gods;
I’ll not believe it”- Elizabeth Barrett Browning

What our age lacks is the passion older civilizations seem to have had. Kierkegaard said of the modern age (he was speaking in a religious context) that you can hardly call its inhabitants sinners; they (i.e. us) are lukewarm beings whose sins are of the vague and wretched sort. The older civilizations really sinned! They murdered, they stole and they lusted in the proper sense of the words. These terms hardly qualify in describing the modern human being. In a time when love just means being nice to other people passion is almost dead. Look at the stories we tell on TV, they’re getting sillier every year. As a kid I watched lots of TV because they had good cartoons on, shows like Darkwing Duck, Bikermice from Mars and Captain Planet. I see that they’re barely showing cartoons on children’s shows anymore, all they go on about is the presenters and what they get up to. Apparently we’re the most intelligent beings on the planet and yet we waste our lives away talking about the cellulite on some celebrity’s thigh. Did you see how lumpy Jennifer Smith’s thighs are? They have pics of it in Warm Magazine. WTF?! Douglas Adams is right, it’s mice that actually run the show and dolphins are second in command.

It’s not all doom and gloom though. Like the lovely Mrs Browning I believe that the spirit of old is not dead yet. It is locked away in some cupboard and it’s still fairly easy to get hold of the Golden Key with which to open that forgotten cupboard. That Golden Key is, believe it or not, literature. Stories have always been the favourite art form of human beings all over the planet because they are an ingenious way of preserving a society’s wisdom and even more importantly, they are entertaining.

The epics have not died out my friends; they’re on shelves in your local bookstores and libraries. If you’ve never heard of those places just look around for dusty looking people and they’ll gladly show you the way.

Totally Out of the Loop

2009-01-29T10:39:00.006+02:00

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There’s been a disturbing trend amongst many of my friends of late; they all seem to be surprised that I’m out of the loop when it comes to current affairs or social conventions. Let me just say this: I watch very little TV and the little I do watch I rarely remember because after 15 minutes whatever’s on TV just fades into the background and I start thinking about whether or not dwarvish women should enter into some of Faerie’s beauty contests. I live my whole life in a box – it’s a sad, sad existence I know but it suits me just fine.

To all of my friends who get exasperated because I don’t know the name of some celebrity whom even people in Timbuktu know about and because I have no idea what happens in some movie that’s apparently a classic and everyone in the universe watches it twice a year, please bear with me. When you talk to me always assume that I have no clue what you’re on about, go as far as thinking of me as an alien visiting the planet for the first time. I’m surprised that so many people talk to me in the first place! It’s a miracle I thank God for.

This little post is just to remind you guys that Charlie is a freak who has no idea how the world works. All I know is that there seems to be some sort of activity everywhere and that the Dark Tower still stands. I’m not good at real life and that’s why I just don’t participate in it.

Thank you.

Amazingly enough, Lady Leigh and Sleuth know this and they are the only people who seem to be able to roll with it.

The Change We Need

2009-01-21T09:12:00.004+02:00

"What you know you can't explain, but you feel it. You've felt it your entire life, that there's something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is, but it's there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad." - Morpheus, The Matrix

Yesterday was a monumental day in the history of our planet – the inauguration of Barak Obama as the 44th president of the US of A and the formatting of my hard drive. President Obama promises to be a breath of fresh air in the world's polluted political landscape and my hard drive just needed some spring cleaning. Whether you like it or not, the US is the nation that we all look up to as the standard of wealth and prosperity. As the guiding light of the world the US is always under the scrutiny of critics and when they become a fallen people the world is catapulted into doom and gloom.

Yesterday Obama promised the American population the change (for the better) that they need and my PC seemed to think that it too needed a certain change, a fresh installation of Windows XP. I was trying to install the Windows 7 Beta and I forgot to back up some of my data, only to have W7 crash halfway through the installation. I did what any person who is unhealthily attached to their PC would do, I cried. It would have been better if I'd been dumped by a girl. Luckily, though, I'm of the same stock as the lovely (and somewhat imaginary) Mrs Lorrie Tock, I'm an indefatigable optimist. I'm always cheerful, come crashing PCs or gun toting clowns – the latter being quite disturbing and potentially fatal.

As the world watched and listened in awe as President Obama delivered his inauguration speech promising Americans (and the world to a lesser extent) the change that we need I was installing Windows XP onto my PC and giving it the change it so desperately needed.

I wish President Obama a wonderful and successful term in office and may his bright vision inspire each and every one of us to become better human beings.

P.S. Remember kids, change is an important and necessary part of life – especially when it comes to things like underwear.

P.P.S. Is it just me or does Obama sound a little like Morpheus?

"I believe it is our fate to be here. It is our destiny. I believe this night holds, for each and every one of us, the very meaning of our lives. This is a war and we are soldiers. What if tomorrow the war could be over? Isn't that worth fighting for? Isn't that worth dying for?" - Morpheus, The Matrix

From the Elder Days to the Dark Tower

2009-01-10T14:01:00.003+02:00

I had a sense of eucatasptrophe (what Tolkien calls the good catastrophe) this morning as I was reading Wolves of the Calla. It happens when Roland, Eddie, Susannah, Jake and Oy go todash (courtesy of Black Thirteen) and land up (in a manner of speaking) in New York. They go visit the rose that might be a doorway to the Dark Tower or the Tower itself. When they see the rose there is a sound of many voices singing:

“Here is yes. Here is you may. Here is the good turn, the fortunate meeting, the fever that broke just before dawn and left your blood calm. Here is the wish that came true and the understanding eye. Here is the kindness that you were given and thus learned to pass on. Here is the sanity and clarity you thought were lost. Here, everything is all right.”

Every age has its great stories: The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Aeneid, Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Hamlet, The Divine Comedy, Alice in Wonderland, and many other tales besides. In terms of sheer epic scope J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-Earth legendarium stands head and shoulders above any other work of the 20th Century and that mantle has been passed down to Stephen King I think. I’ve read many fantasy books where the blurb compares the story to The Lord of the Rings but they all just don’t live up to that high standard. SK does not try to create an epic story of a world gone but rather he writes about a world that’s moving on, a world that’s dying . . . our world. Tolkien starts his story when the world is yet new and already evil has entered into it and stops in a time where the world has forgotten the beauty of old and the power of Elves and Men has declined. SK’s epic story starts with a lone gunslinger, the last of his kind, following the Dark Man across the desert. The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed. Roland is the last true hero of a world on the edge of oblivion. At the centre of SK’s epic story is the Dark Tower which holds all worlds together and what I love about SK’s corpus is that all of his work is somehow connected to the Dark Tower, all his books are interconnected. In SK’s universe everything means, when things are said it’s best to pay attention because ka is at work.

What I love about good stories is the storyness of them; their text-ure, that warm feeling they give you as a reader. Great stories are an echo of life, not the humdrum everyday sort of thing but the sort of life where anything might happen at any time. In a way stories are more real than ‘real’ life. In books people get killed and it causes the reader real grief, in real life people die every day and we don’t give a damn. We turn on the news and we think, Conflict in the Middle-East, I’m so bored by this. Stories give us our humanity back so that we may care about people dying in senseless conflicts and maybe even do something about it. In The God of Small Things Arundhati Roy says:

“… the secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover’s skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don’t… In the Great stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn’t. And yet you want to know again.”

The stories Tolkien and SK write are like that, you never grow tired of them because they don’t try to trick you into liking them – they simply reveal certain truths about the human condition. The theme of these stories, like Christianity . . . like life, is eucatastrophe – the good turn. No matter how dark things become they remind us that there is light and beauty forever beyond the reach of the dark cloud as Sam realised when he spotted the lone star from the slag heaps of Mordor.

If you want great stories that deal with a magical world of old, read Tolkien. If you’re looking for something more modern but just as epic, read SK.

There's Life After the Party

2009-01-01T14:29:00.002+02:00

My sneaky plan for this festive season was to fly under the radar and not be noticed but, alas, that didn't work. I had my hiding corner all kitted out with everything comfy or edible lying around the house so I can read the days away. My corner was discovered and I was immediately dragged, kicking, biting and screaming, to the nearest pub where I now have my own honorary table and beer mug. After a week of drinking beer and eating pub food I'm super tired. I left the pub this morning and waved goodbye to my pub friends and the waitress I had a minor crush on. I got home and went straight to bed and prayed, thanking God that I'm still here on this blue ball called Earth :)

I had a good time at the pub but I have to go back to being a bibliophile.

A prosperous new year to everyone on Earth, Mars, Oogle Google or wherever you are :) God bless.

Christmas According to Dickens

2008-12-24T16:43:00.002+02:00

A Christmas Carol

"I have always thought of Christmas time as a good time. A kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time. The only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely."

"I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year."

Doing Stupid Things

2008-12-22T18:44:00.004+02:00

Doing stupid things is a funny business, funny (and annoying sometimes) to those around you and funny to you in retrospect. I’m sitting here and thinking of my total failure at successful romantic relationships with the opposite sex over the years. It all started when I was a pip-squeak and I decided to ask the hottest girl in the neighbourhood (no, not the sexy sixteen-year-old in flat number 103 but rather the beautiful twelve-year-old in flat number 4) to be my valentine. You see I thought I was a smart kid and I reasoned that if she said yes to being my valentine it was inevitable that she would be my girlfriend. The good news is that she said yes and the bad news is that I had no idea what to do with her now that she was my valentine. The whole affair was very awkward and I ended up writing her a letter proclaiming the extent of my love and thus started a chain of folly that I’ve been trailing around with me for many years. In the letter I said things like I’d jump down from the jungle gym for her, not thinking that she’d actually take me up on it. Seriously! That R Kelly dude sang about crossing oceans for some girl and I bet she never took him up on it. I jumped down the jungle gym and learned that I wouldn’t die in the process. The relationship was still awkward though.

The lesson I learned: don’t just want things, know why you want them.

Fast forward to my High School years and my letter-accompanied stupidity just became worse because I was an avid reader by then and what better way to get girls than to write them letters with quotes from Hearts in Atlantis I thought. I could never work out what was going wrong for the life of me! Were the girls stupid or something? I spat more game in my letters than the most charming guys in school and all they said was that’s nice.

The whole mess was really silly but I wouldn’t change it for the world because stupid things make super cool memories.

Dating aside I’ve done lots of stupid things over the years such as playing with fire and burning stuff like curtains and carpets; shoplifting (I stole a Game Boy at Reggie’s once and I’m secretly proud of that); stealing a gangster’s chips (don’t ask); drinking punch that consisted of vodka, whiskey, beer, wine, brandy and some other suspect beverages at a house party, breaking into what looked like an abandoned house and breaking all the windows only to find that a friend of my mom’s lives there and the list just goes on and on.

I’m comforted by the fact that stupid people are virtually indestructible; God loves us so much that He gives us a ridiculously long lifespan. It must be a punishment for smart people, putting them on a planet crowded with stupid people to annoy the cheese out of them.

Labor omnia vincit

2008-12-19T18:46:00.004+02:00

My favourite fictional character of the month is Rock Lee (or Rokku Rï as the Japanese say it) from the animated series Naruto. The boy looks like the biggest chode in the history of the universe but he totally kicks donkey, which he achieves by working his donkey off. The boy’s Ninjutsu skills are sucky but through crazy amounts of hard work he manages to develop kick-donkey Taijutsu skills. He doesn’t come from a “genius” blood-line but through sheer willpower he shows that hard work can kick genius’ donkey. His name is inspired by Rocky and Bruce Lee, two dudes who kicked a whole lot of donkey.

Much respect to the man :)

Cool Bargains

2008-12-19T18:21:00.002+02:00

I have eagle eyes when it comes to spotting good books in the most unlikely places. I was walking past a stationary shop yesterday and I spied a mound of forlorn looking books hidden in a corner. At first glance they were simply a bunch of romance novels for women who own too many cats but I found the most unlikely of treasures hidden beneath all the mushy stuff, George MacDonald’s At the Back of the North Wind for only three rand! I felt like a pirate who had just discovered the biggest treasure chest in the universe. There was a book by Peter Straub but I was too lazy to buy it (I know it sounds strange but I just wasn’t in the mood) and for some strange reason I bought The Mystery of the Strange Bundle by Enid Blyton, whose books I’ve always been indifferent toward. Maybe it was the title that intrigued me or the power of the magical number three that made some older and wiser primal force inside of me stir (this would explain why the Straub book put me off, it cost ten rand).

My friend, Leigh, also found some awesome bargains a few weeks back and she brought me back an ancient copy of Sir Francis Bacon’s The Essays. The book has some battle scars but they only make it look so much more like a source of great wisdom. Books have that sort of magical ability, whereas all earthly matter seems to run down with use they just keep on getting better. Ask any bookworm which book in their library they love most and they’ll most probably point to an old volume that’s just barely holding on to its molecular integrity. To an extent the same applies to the content of books. At no point do people say let’s stop reading Plato because he is simply no longer relevant, instead as time goes on people find themselves more in need of teachers like Plato and stories like Alice in Wonderland. We read some of Jorge-Luis’ short fiction in literary theory this year and he quotes from Bacon’s Essays in the epigraph of his story, The Immortal:

Solomon saith: There is no new thing upon the earth.
So that as Plato had an imagination, that all knowledge was but remembrance; so Solomon giveth his sentence, that all novelty is but oblivion.

C.S. Lewis always writes about how unoriginal most of his work is. He stands on the shoulders of giants. Literature does not need to be original; it needs only to be true. People never tire of reading the truth because they can never stick to it. We’re like children who never learn when their parents scold them. What’s wrong with you Johnny!? Didn’t you learn anything from the previous World Wars? Go sit in the corner!

Burp

2008-12-17T14:32:00.004+02:00

I seriously cannot see what the hype is about when it comes to people attending parties and getting super drunk. I knew what the hype was about when I was in High School but I can't seem to remember it now. I was forced to attend a party yesterday and because there was nothing else to do I ended up drinking too much beer which turned out not be such a good idea because I ended up making a fool of myself (which I don't mind too much) and I have a hangover :(

To hell with being social with crazy people! I resign. I'm going home and I'm going to read Stephen King.

Catching My Breath

2008-12-16T14:11:00.004+02:00

Shh... please don't tell anyone that I'm here. I'm a wanted man you see and this is the safest place I can find to gather my wits and prepare a plan of action. I understand that the festive season is a time for people to get together and make merry but they don't have to be so damn adamant about it. I am invited to a birthday party I'm really not in the mood to attend :( The guy who invited me promised me that there will be booze and girls. His idea of booze and girls is different from my idea of booze and girls. I'm quite certain what he really means to say is that there will be enough booze so that you might find yourself attracted to the giggling semi-ugly girls he will have lined up. This is not my idea of a party at all. I'd rather be on the beach watching the waves and talking to a beautiful girl who has a personality of her own. I know I'm being anti-social and it's not a cool thing to do but these people are so boring! All they do is talk about dull parties they've attended and dull girls they've slept with. All I want to do is sit under a tree and read Stephen King, is this a crime?

Sigh. I've got to go, someone has just spotted me :(

This Momentous Year

2008-12-09T11:51:00.006+02:00

The number one lesson I learned this year is that *life happens. It’s like Fanta, it will find you.

Rush headlong and hard at life
Or just sit at home and wait.
All things good and all the wrong
Will come right to you: it's fate.
- Dean Koontz, The Book of Counted Sorrows

You can’t hide from life; it finds you wherever you are. The one thing you can do is choose the quality of your life and the path you choose to follow or carve out for yourself. You can live a reactive life and have things happen to you according to the whims of other people or you can be and take up arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them.

2008 has been a wonderful year when it comes to books and I’ve read everything that I’ve wanted to read save for George Orwell’s 1984 (which I’m just too lazy to read), Terry Goodkind’s Confessor (the library is being mean to me) and William Golding’s The Lord of the Flies (amazingly enough I never seem to be able to find a copy of this classic! I settled for the movie which was fair enough). When it comes to reading books I’m the sort of person who enjoys the journey and when I get to the destination I wish I could start again and experience the thrills all over. My reading experience is always eucatastrophic, I’m always happy that the characters I got to travel with find their heart’s desire but parting with them is always hard because they are more real to me than strangers I meet in the street. When I was reading Stephen King’s The Stand I fell so in love with the characters that I dreamed about them and had imaginary conversations with them as I walked down the street. I lugged that book around with me everywhere I went and snuck in a few pages whenever I could. I read it on the bus, in the library, in lectures, all over the house at home, under trees and just about anywhere where I was. When I finished The Stand I wept for all the people in it who died and for the survivors who must start rebuilding their lives – I felt like I was part of the struggle. The last time I loved characters so much was in 2003 when I read Dean Koontz’s From the Corner of His Eye.

When I talk about books to anyone there are two names that never fail to pop up, those being C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. At the beginning of the year when I was shopping for varsity text books I stumbled upon Tolkien’s The Children of Húrin and after a moment’s thought I said to hell with some of the books I had to get for English and bought the book. Tolkien writes of high beauty forever beyond the reach of evil and I derive the utmost pleasure from reading his books because he is lover of life. Tolkien loves language, nature and beauty something fierce. The man loves names so much that all his characters have more than one name because one name simply does not suffice to tell of the person’s beauty, wisdom and strength or foul nature. In The Children of Húrin Túrin is also named Neithan, Gorthol, Agarwaen, Mormegil (The Black Sword), Wildman of the Woods and Turambar. Peter Kreeft points out that in Middle-Earth matter matters, things are always more real there than they are in our world. Mountains have personalities and walking trees are the shepherds of the forest. I live in Johannesburg, a very bland part of South Africa so reading about such beauty is like crack for me. When I visit my grandparents in Sterkspruit I’m amazed by the fact that they have rivers and real mountains. But because of traditional laws I don’t understand one can never actually go and do any real exploring without getting the nonsense beaten out of you. This, for me, is much worse than living in Jo’burg, having the beauty and not experiencing it. In an effort to stick it to the man (don’t even ask me why that thought occurred to me like that, it just seemed fitting at the time) I decided that one of my life goals is to go to the Galapagos Islands because they are “howling with holy wildness”. Another thing I want to do is explore some of the beautiful places SA has to offer. Because I love leading a strange life I have decided that when I graduate from varsity I’m going to live in Japan. Imagine it, an African anglophile who majored in English literature living in Japan, pretty weird right? Then there’s also the plan to go to Oxford University for a Master’s Degree or something. I don’t like living an ordinary life because it dulls my mind and makes me forget that the world has much more to offer than going to work every morning and trudging back home every evening. Being a weirdo reminds me that:

There are more things in heaven and earth
Than are dreamt of in our philosophy
- William Shakespeare, Hamlet

Some people believe that there are less and those are the wet blankets I tend to avoid and throw stones at whenever I get a chance. Sometimes I run into the dullest people ever and I feel like punching them. I’m one of those social introverted types so I rarely pick up on the fact that people are dull because I create my own excitement with people. I’ll hang out with someone simply because he looks like an orc and get the biggest kick out of it. Thus if I think you’re dull you must know that you have problems.

Let me get back to what I was talking about before, our beloved Professor Tolkien. After The Children of Húrin I tackled The Hobbit (my third time reading it) and couldn’t get around to re-reading The Lord of the Rings. I have a sneaky suspicion that the Elder Days of Middle-Earth are more exciting to me than the Third Age, the only things exciting about the Third Age is Gandalf, Hobbits, Tom Bombadil and Ents. I reread Leaf by Niggle which is a beautiful story about the sort of man who is better at painting leaves than he is at painting trees. Niggle is as much a leafsmith as Tolkien is a wordsmith. As I was reading the story and Parish, Niggle’s neighbour, kept bothering him I wished he’d just throw rocks at him and get back to his painting. I was wrong it turns out because Christ says that no matter how demented your neighbour is and even if he does not appreciate your painting and it is suggested by the authorities that you use the canvas on which your masterpiece is painted to fix a leak in his roof you must always help him. Niggle should have lived in Japan, the neighbours there are much less demanding I’m sure. Tolkien’s essay, On Fairy-Stories, proved to be very humorous. I can’t get over the cool factor of a distinguished professor writing about fairy-stories in such a serious manner, it’s totally insane. I tried reading some book on Tolkien’s work as philologist and it was simply beyond my present abilities so I left that alone. The best is yet to come I always say because, like Dean Koontz’s Lorrie Tock, I’m an indefatigable optimist. When I finally got my hands on The Silmarillion I knew that the best had finally arrived, clad in a stylish black jacket. The last time I read this book was when I was still a snotnose in High School and most of it flew right over my head. This time around I think I grasped it and it was a joyous read. The characters aren’t as personal as those from The Stand; it’s more like reading about the gods on Mount Olympus but the tales are epic in scope. My favourite, for the lack of a better word, scene in the book is when Fingolfin, High King of the Noldor, mounted upon his great horse, Rochallor, and rode forth to challenge Morgoth to single combat. He even dared to call Morgoth craven! In our world this would be like Barak Obama challenging Lucifer to single combat. Fingolfin dies in the battle but manages to chop off some of Morgoth’s foot in the process and after that battle the Dark Lord never issued from his fortress for battle ever again. If ever a movie was made this would be the scene to see.

I love C.S. Lewis’ work very, very much and before I went to go watch Prince Caspian (which I watched three times in cinema) I reread all the Narnia books (save for The Silver Chair) and I was blown away all over again. I always preach this to anyone willing to listen, read children’s books because they always have the good stuff. Children’s books are dynamite in Technicolor packaging. After you’ve read a crate full of children’s books read Lewis’ Till We Have Faces because it is simply his most beautiful novel. The central question the novel asks haunted me for months. “Why must holy places be dark places?” Why must religion be so mysterious? Peter Kreeft says that part of the answer is that God hides himself so that only those who truly want to find Him do so. Salvation, thus, is not determined by intelligence, money or good looks but by faith. In the novel the Priest says of the gods, “[T]hey dazzle our eyes and flow in and out of one another like eddies on a river, and nothing that is said clearly can be said truly about them. Holy places are dark places”.

I even had a good time with the books I had to read for English and literary theory. I can’t say I care much for the ups and downs of modernist and postmodernist theories but postmodernist authors sure know how to write mind-boggling books. I read some of Jorge-Luis Borges’ short fiction for literary theory and the man is a genius at telling unconventional stories. For Borges the rabbit hole goes very deep. I acquired new names for my list of favourite authors, people like Paul Auster, Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison and Arundhati Roy. The God of Small Things is one of the best books I’ve read this year and there’s a chance that I might name my third son Velutha, I’m still thinking it over.

I went to the library a few weeks back and took out a massive George MacDonald book titled The Princess and the Goblin. It looked really cool and had pretty pictures. The librarian at the counter asked me if I was taking it out for a younger sibling and I was like, “No, dude. It’s for me.” I think I’ve lost any respect that dude had for me, especially after I went around the children’s section hunting for Pullman’s His Dark Materials books and for books by Anne Fine – whom I think is a damn fine novelist.

There’s still so much to read and so little time. At the beginning of the year I bought Milton’s Paradise Lost, Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey and I still have to finish those.

I’ve had a good year of books and that is always a good thing so I’m one happy dude. Life is good even when it’s not so good and everyday is of utmost importance (Read Lewis’ The Great Divorce to make sense of what I’m actually saying in this sentence).

Not one day in anyone’s life is an uneventful day, no day without profound meaning, no matter how dull and boring it might seem, no matter whether you are a seamstress or a queen, a shoeshine boy or a movie star, a renowned philosopher or a Down’s-syndrome child. Because in every day of your life, there are opportunities to perform little kindnesses for others, both by conscious acts of will and unconscious example. Each smallest act of kindness–even just words of hope when they are needed, the remembrance of a birthday, a compliment that engenders a smile–reverberates across great distances and spans of time, affecting lives unknown to the one whose generous spirit was the source of this good echo, because kindness is passed on and grows each time it’s passed, until a simple courtesy becomes an act of selfless courage years later and far away. Likewise, each small meanness, each thoughtless expression of hatred, each envious and bitter act, regardless of how petty, can inspire others, and is therefore the seed that ultimately produces evil fruit, poisoning people whom you have never met and never will. All human lives are so profoundly and intricately entwined–those dead, those living, those generations yet to come–that the fate of all is the fate of each, and the hope of humanity rests in every heart and in every pair of hands. Therefore, after every failure, we are obliged to strive again for success, and when faced with the end of one thing, we must build something new and better in the ashes, just as from pain and grief, we must weave hope, for each of us is a thread critical to the strength–to the very survival–of the human tapestry. Every hour in every life contains such often-unrecognized potential to affect the world that the great days for which we, in our dissatisfaction, so often yearn are already with us; all great days and thrilling possibilities are combined always in this momentous day.
- Dean Koontz, From the Corner of His Eye

*The experience of being alive; the course of human events and activities (the mundane stuff included)

The Blandness of Our lives

2008-12-06T15:19:00.003+02:00

Sometimes we allow ourselves to forget how precious our lives are because modern society allows us to lead repetitive lives. People wake up and they go to work for eight hours doing the very same thing they did the previous day. As a result our minds get stuck in a bog and we become bored – bored people, in my experience, are boring people. The funny thing is that modern society provides many opportunities to lead a wonderful life if you think outside the proverbial box. If you live in a country that is not run by a dictator(s) and where people have the right to go about their lives as they please (as long as they don’t get up to anything criminal of course) then you have it good.

So go ahead and lead a wonderfully strange life :)

Prayer

2008-12-06T15:10:00.003+02:00

Prayer (I)

Prayer, the church’s banquet, angels’ age,
God’s breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, a heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth;

Engine against th’ Almighty, sinner’s tower,
Reversèd thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The six-days’ world transposing in an hour,
A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear;

Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,
Exalted manna, gladness of the best,
Heaven in ordinary, man well dressed,
The Milky Way, the bird of Paradise,
Church bells beyond the stars heard, the soul’s blood,
The land of spices; something understood.- George Herbert

In my last post I spoke very briefly of taking some time out of our “busy” schedules and spending some time in quietude. Peter Kreeft says that everyone who lives in a metropolitan area “has a desperate need for the three S's: silence, solitude, and slowing down—both for psychological sanity and for prayer”. We all like moving around and being “active” because it gives us the illusion that we are alive. When people are still and quiet we believe that they are dull and boring, but in actual fact we need to stop being so restless and start being quiet enough to be aware of what is going on around us.

The most wonderful way to quiet your buzzing mind is to converse with your maker in prayer. In the poem above George Herbert tells of the power of prayer. Just sit and think about what happens when you pray... you actually speak to God as if He were in the room with you and amazingly enough He is in the room with you. People got all excited when Bell invented the telephone but God gave that sort of technology to humankind from the very beginning. Prayer is free, wireless and no matter where in the universe you are there’s always service.

Inner Peace

2008-11-22T11:57:00.002+02:00

The main problem many of us have is finding inner peace I think. For the last few weeks my life has been going very well because I'm chilled about things. If there is any worrying to be done I just don't do it. I'm the laziest person I know so this is the first time I can apply my super sloth skills to something good, I wake up in the morning and start worrying about a host of random things and before it gets out of hand I decide I'm just too lazy to worry about stuff.

All the great teachers recommend silence as a cure to the bustle of modern life and it really works, I've been trying silence for some time now and it gives me the chance to relax and contemplate obscure things like why the love affair between Josh and Lucy on that weird soapie I watch would just not work out. Sundays are my favourite quiet days. I wake up, go to church and then spend the rest of the day reading. It's holidays for most varsity students so there's a lot of chill out time. Party like mad but have a time-out whenever you can, you will absolutely love the inner peace it gives you.

Lady Leigh of the Meadows

2008-11-19T10:57:00.002+02:00

Source

Of all the Great Ones who dwell in this world the elves hold Varda most in reverence and love. Elbereth they name her, and they call upon her name out of the shadows of Middle-earth, and uplift it in song at the rising of the stars.

– J.R.R. Tolkien

A VALEDICTION FORBIDDING MOURNING.
by John Donne

AS virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say,
"Now his breath goes," and some say, "No."

So let us melt, and make no noise, 5
No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move ;
'Twere profanation of our joys
To tell the laity our love.

Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears ;
Men reckon what it did, and meant ; 10
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent.

Dull sublunary lovers' love
—Whose soul is sense—cannot admit
Of absence, 'cause it doth remove 15
The thing which elemented it.

But we by a love so much refined,
That ourselves know not what it is,
Inter-assurèd of the mind,
Care less, eyes, lips and hands to miss. 20

Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to aery thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so 25
As stiff twin compasses are two ;
Thy soul, the fix'd foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if th' other do.

And though it in the centre sit,
Yet, when the other far doth roam, 30
It leans, and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
Like th' other foot, obliquely run ;
Thy firmness makes my circle just, 35
And makes me end where I begun.

There must be a certain magic in the air when you meet people that you love with your whole being. These people come into your life and fill a void that you didn’t even know existed and when they have to leave for Europe you just know that life will be strange without them. I met one such a person, Lady Leigh of the Meadows, my most beloved of friends. I wish you well on all your endeavours and I'll see you again, either when you return or when you come visit me in Japan in 2010. Have fun travelling through Europe (which I know for a fact is a scary place because it's not home), make many friends, eat strange food, swear at people in Xhosa and steal any good books that you come across.

I'll see you again very soon :)

Life's a Game

2008-11-17T13:48:00.005+02:00

I had the shock of my life over the weekend!

I was playing Oblivion because I was tired of reading (and this is saying something) and I had nothing else to play. As I was trying to level my character's destruction magic level so I can use my newly acquired Fingers of the Mountain spell to electrocute those pesky wolves that just seem to pop up everywhere in the wilderness, I had a scary thought. "Real" life is a lot like and RPG - you get born and start to level up. Take for example the things I want to do next year; get my drivers' license, work as an English tutor, work as a linguistics tutor, finally complete my degree, work on a super cool thesis for Honours the following year, go to lots of rock shows and so on. I seriously want to do all these things but when I list them they smack of leveling up in society don't they. I'm crazy scared of having achieved a list of things but never having enjoyed them. That's what counts for me, the life lived in those achievements and failures.

When I first played Oblivion everything was okay and I enjoyed it, especially the Dark Brotherhood quests and then I realised that all you ever do is go on quests in this game. Many of these quests are cool, especially if you have a high level character who can bash the nonsense out of bandits or hurl deadly Wizard's Fire at unsuspecting necromancers, but they get repetitive very quickly. I was so sick of exploring caves and elven ruins by the end of the game that I almost threw up. If real life is like this I will most definitely throw up. I was speaking to a very dear friend on the phone last night and we were discussing how predictable life often is; school, work, retirement. I already lead a half strange life so I'm happy that my path through life is not a graceful arc but a herky jerky line like Jimmy Tock's (minus the clowns and the violence). People who lead these perfect lives where everything happens as planned are probably sad. I sometimes hate my life, I sometimes love it and sometimes I wonder about the weirdness of it all. I prefer my schizo life to 'perfection' though, I think it's fun.

My advice to you: be strange and don't be like a character in Oblivion who does nothing but level up but has no real joy.

Check out this video for some inspiration: Dragonflies & Astronauts

The Power of Words

2008-11-12T10:30:00.004+02:00

studentsofenglish.blogspot.com/2006/01/muses.html

I don’t recommend that you spend fifteen minutes doing introspection because at the end of it all the only thing you will learn is you are not as awesome as you think. I’ve spent the last decade or so thinking that I have an overactive imagination and I prided myself in being able to out-imagine other people. Fifteen minutes of self-contemplation and all my pride is gone. I have a normal (okay, maybe just a notch above normal) imagination it turns out – everything else is borrowed from all the books I’ve read and the movies I’ve seen. The writers of the books I’ve read and the people behind the movies I watch have great imaginations. I simply have all their great visions in my head.

Words, they have a power. A good book or movie can help you see the world from a different angle. Words can clarify things that were always vague but words can also deconstruct. Eminem says that words are a mother[humper], they can be great, they can degrade or even worse, they can teach hate. One of the reasons Hitler was such a powerful character was because he had a way with words – he certainly wasn’t a kung-fu master or anything cool like that. Great people like Ghandi and Mandela also fought many of their epic battles using words. The ancient Greeks thought words to be so important that they sent people to university to learn the art of rhetoric. In Greek society only people who could use word to influence others remained in power for very long. Strength of arms was secondary to rhetoric.

Back to what I was saying in the beginning, words are cool because even though my imagination is limited I can piggyback on the imagination of Tolkien, Shakespeare, Gabe Newell or Steven Spielberg.

P.S. Don’t bother with introspection because you’ll just burst you own bubble.

GravityGunSlingers & Exams

2008-11-06T14:10:00.002+02:00

I've been writing exams for the past few days and it's been rough. All I do is write essays for three hours every sitting. I'm not complaining though, because I'm rather good at writing essays and thus far all my papers have been good. Exams aside there has been something exciting happening. Sleuth and I play Half-Life 2 Deathmatch after each of our exams. We only play with the gravity gun, no other weapons are allowed. It's such a blast hitting Sleuth with boat or a fence. It just makes me feel so ghetto. The coolest thing is chucking around toilets though, that just totally kills me :)

A Dude Named Dean

2008-10-29T11:50:00.002+02:00

When I was in High School I wrote a poem about a dude named Dean because he incites in me such powerful emotions. I never just feel mellow about Dean as I do about Sleuth. For Sleuth I feel a constant stream of love and wonder. The dude baffles me in a quiet way and in his presence I’m like a dog who cocks his head in a quizzical manner at the strangeness of his master. Dean, on the other hand, makes me rage with emotion. I love him something fierce and I hate his guts. He is the most intelligent person I know and the most stupid person I know (second only to myself). He is the kindest person I know and the biggest jerk I know. The dude is crazy and belongs either in a mental facility or a prison cell in Gotham City. Hanging out with Dean is an experience that can be compared to being on a roller coaster, it freaks you out but it's exhilarating.

Natura Morta “Howling with holy wildness”

2008-10-29T11:36:00.003+02:00

We are noisy, dull and bored most of the time. We rarely take some time out to listen to the small voice that constantly haunts our souls. We are always too busy, too busy doing I know not what. We are bored with our lives because 50 Cent and Paris Hilton tell us that we don’t have enough bling or pairs of shoes. The only beauty we know is plastic and metal. We ignore real beauty because we are afraid of it, I suspect. Look at the gusto with which we chop down God’s trees and pollute His rivers. Nature scares us witless because she whispers to us of high beauty forever beyond the reach of our destructive habits. Peter Kreeft, in his profound talk about the sea, says: “Maybe God puts cotton in our ears because such great beauty would drive us mad . . . we would be unable to eat or sleep or reproduce or survive . . . in this angel haunted universe.” Some time ago I was telling Sleuth what a good thing it is for the human race that most people on the planet think of sex as the pinnacle of joy. If there were more chody people like me around the human race would not be around for too long – we’d all be too busy lying under giant oak trees to procreate.

I don’t think that you can find the raw stuff of life in any metropolis in the world, but when you walk into your neighbor with green fingers’ backyard it is simply overflowing with the stuff of life. Nature is fertile, wild, soothing, dangerous, exciting and truly alive.

My message to you: be still for a few minutes and let God speak to you and when you’re outside allow Nature (God’s other book) to tell you about life and the love thereof.

The Jaguar

The apes yawn and adore their fleas in the sun.
The parrots shriek as if they were on fire, or strut
Like cheap tarts to attract the stroller with the nut.
Fatigued with indolence, tiger and lion

Lie still as the sun. The boa-constrictor’s coil
Is a fossil. Cage after cage seems empty, or
Stinks of sleepers from the breathing straw.
It might be painted on a nursery wall.

But who runs like the rest past these arrives
At a cage where the crowd stands, stares, mesmerized,
As a child at a dream, at a jaguar hurrying enraged
Through prison darkness after the drills of his eyes

On a short fierce fuse. Not in boredom—
The eye satisfied to be blind in fire,
By the bang of blood in the brain deaf the ear—
He spins from the bars, but there’s no cage to him

More than to the visionary his cell:
His stride is wildernesses of freedom:
The world rolls under the long thrust of his heel.
Over the cage floor the horizons come.

Ted Hughes

To The Light House (And Back Again) [2nd Revision]

2008-10-24T10:49:00.004+02:00

Image: Salvador Dali, Hermes, 1981

I wrote this story in an English lecture on Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse. I wrote the story simply because I got a kick out of it, so don't expect anything epic :)

To the Light House (And Back Again)

Once upon a time, in a light house there lived a beautiful maiden. The house in which this maiden lived weighed only two kilograms and the curious fact that there were thousands of colourful balloons tied to the roof resulted in the house floating away on a gentle breeze. So for all intents and purposes our maiden was a damsel in distress (even if she would never admit to it if asked). The kingdom in which this story takes place was filled to the brim with brave knights in gleaming armour (there were so many of them in fact that the king hired them out to neighbouring kingdoms), but none of them could fly and they all feared shooting at the balloons with arrows in case any harm should come to the maiden. In a stable (a very heavy one I might add) a peasant boy had an epiphany. He would borrow the god, Hermes’ winged sandals and use them to rescue the maiden. He jumped on a donkey and set out (at a rather slow pace) to the Sometimes Holy Mountain, north of the kingdom of Ramsey. Hermes often visited the mountain to drink the wine he stored there in a cave. Most of the wine came from sacrifices, for in those days people were very fond of sacrificing things to the gods – things like useless pieces of string, flowers, virgins, cows, goats, wine and so on. The special thing about this mountain was that it was surrounded by ‘certain airs’ that were detached from the wind and these mysterious airs resulted in a curious property being added to the mountain; that property being that none of the gods, save for Hermes, could see the mountain – it was simply invisible to them. Hermes being quite an alcoholic (as history fails to mention) often retired to this mountain to enjoy a few drinks without being hassled by the rest of the gods on Mount Olympus. Since Hermes wasn’t there all the time the mountain was only holy at the times that he was there. Our peasant boy rode to the mountain in the hope that it was holy on that day. I’m told that he was smart as far as peasant boys go, but it was quite sad that his name was Rubbish. His father was a very busy man and had simply named the boy after the first thing that popped into his mind at the time, which happened to be a pile of rubbish which he remembered he must take out for the king if he wished not to be beheaded. Rubbish, being a vital young man, did not let this get him down for he believed that if people could be made from dust and some of them transcend their dusty state to become something like gods, so bright and radiant that looking at them is blinding, there was nothing stopping him from transcending his unfortunate name. Rubbish arrived at the foot of Mount Sometimes Holy as the sun was setting; he said a quick prayer (not knowing that the gods on Mount Olympus could not hear him) and started his search for Hermes’ cave. He found the cave just as the sun disappeared behind the mountains in the west and on that evening Lady Luck (because she is technically not a goddess and she had no other plans for the evening) was on his side, the god of the mountain was lying on a bed of straw (one would think a god would bother with his sleeping arrangements more) in a drunken stupor, his winged sandals floated around the room chasing each other in a playful manner. Rubbish thought he’d be polite and not wake Hermes up (no one knows what a drunk god would do after all); he quietly snatched the winged sandals out of the air and tiptoed out of the cave. At the mouth of the cave he slipped on the sandals and they rearranged themselves to fit snugly on his feet. He took off with a little jump and zoomed through the air. After a few hours of flying around he spotted the house floating gently on a light breeze. Candle light came from the windows. Rubbish flew right up to the door and like the good mannered boy he was he politely knocked on the door. It is a strange thing being in a house that is floating high up in the sky and hearing a knock at the door. The maiden peeped through the keyhole and was thoroughly surprised to find Rubbish at her doorstep. She opened the door and invited him inside. “O! Dear Rubbish,” the maiden cried when they were inside the house. “It’s so good to see you.”
“It’s good seeing you too, Irene.”
Rubbish and Irene were very good friends so it was really a pleasant surprise for her to find him at her doorstep. “How ever did you manage to get here?” Irene asked.
“I had some help from one of the gods.” Rubbish pointed to the winged sandals.
“Do you think they will be able to carry the both of us?”
“How will we know if we don’t try?”
Rubbish held Irene by the waist and she put her arm around his neck. “Ready?”
Irene nodded and they jumped out through the front door of the floating house. The sandals rapidly flapped their wings in order to adjust to Irene’s added weight and off to the Sometimes Holy Mountain they zoomed.
Rubbish’s plan was to return Hermes’ sandals before he woke up and then he and Irene would ride the donkey he left grazing at the side of the mountain back to Ramsey. But, as anyone with sense knows, something strange always arises to mess up good plans.
Hermes rose from his drunken stupor just as Rubbish and Irene landed at the mouth of the cave. He immediately noticed that his winged sandals were not floating around the cave playfully chasing each other. “Blasted sandals...” Hermes muttered, “Where’d they get off to?”
Then he spotted the couple at the opening of his cave.

Both Rubbish and Irene froze with fear when Hermes’ eyes fell upon them. The god was immediately on his feet and before they could even blink he held each of them by the scruff of the neck and dragged them inside the cave. I don’t know if you have ever been manhandled (or maidenhandled in Irene’s case) by an angry immortal who has just woken up from an alcohol-induced slumber, but I can tell you that it is a very frightening experience. “A pair of thieves, eh?” Hermes roared.
“Please don’t blame Rubbish, sir. The only reason he took your sandals was to rescue me from floating away with my house.”
I mentioned before that Rubbish was an intelligent boy as far as peasant boys are concerned and so before Hermes could reply he said, “Hermes of many shifts, blandly cunning, robber, cattle driver, bringer of dreams, watcher by night, thief at the gates, please do not let loose your wrath upon us for the theft of your sandals because you are a god who condones the practice of thievery after all.”
Hermes burst out in laughter that shook the cave. “Well spoken… very well spoken, dear boy. I do condone theft if the thief does not allow himself to be caught. Since you are caught you will have to perform a certain task for me if you wish for me to spare your lives.”
“Very well then, tell us what to do,” Irene said.
“By the manner of your speech, I take it that you are from the kingdom of Ramsey. I need you to deliver a little gift to a friend of mine, who currently resides in the dungeon of that wet blanket you call a king.”
King Ramsey was the most unpleasant ruler I can care to think of. He was as thin as a reed, possessed a hooked nose and he had the look of someone sucking on lemons on his face. Rubbish and Irene agreed to undertake the very dangerous mission of sneaking into King Ramsey’s dungeon.

The rest of the evening was spent drawing up plans and feasting on honey, cakes and roasted lamb, which Hermes produced from a hidden larder in the cave. Once the two children got past his alcoholism and their fear of him, Hermes proved to be a charming host. He told them of some of the adventurous errands he has undertaken for his father, the mighty Zeus and how on the day of his birth he stole oxen from his brother, Apollo. By midnight Rubbish and Irene were fast asleep with smiles of contentment on plastered onto their faces.

Hermes flew the two children to the kingdom of Ramsey at the crack of dawn the following day. He dropped them off at the city gates and before departing he presented them with a sealed package and the helmet of Aïdes as a gift to help them on their mission.

Sneaking into King Ramsey’s dungeons was no easy business, even with a helmet that renders the wearer invisible – especially since the helmet could only cover one head at a time. Rubbish and Irene managed to sneak into the castle undetected because everyone was too busy to bother with two children. Ramsey did not hesitate to behead those who did not attend to their duties and thus everyone in the castle minded their tasks and naught else. At the passage that leads to the dark and dingy dungeons Rubbish donned Aïdes’ helmet and immediately he became invisible. “Stay here, Irene,” he whispered, “I’ll be back in a flash.”
Irene hid in a dark corner whilst Rubbish trotted down the passage to find the prisoner Hermes had sent them to. It did not take Rubbish long to find the prisoner, she was hard to miss in the midst of all the ruthless looking men who inhabited the cells. The prisoner wore a long, white gown that was in total contrast with the squalor all around her and her light brown skin glowed as if some inner light was struggling to escape through it. Although there was not a trace of hair on her head, no one could mistake her for a man, so striking was her beauty. “Ah, there you are.” She said in a voice that was like the sweet music of Apollo’s lyre. Rubbish looked around to see who she was talking to. The prisoner laughed and said, “I’m talking to you, dear boy. The helm of Aïdes cannot hide you from me. Come closer.”
Rubbish stepped closer to the prisoner and fumbled with his cloak, trying to take out the package Hermes had given him. He finally managed to free the package from his cloak and he handed it over to the prisoner through the cell’s bars.
“Thank you.”
“It’s my pleasure, ma’am.” Rubbish said shyly.
“I suggest that you do not linger too much, but before you go I have a gift for you.” She touched the boy’s head and he felt a tingling sensation all over his body. When she was done she said, “Now no one who sees you shall ever call you Rubbish again. From this day you shall be known as Michael, a name that befits a brave, young man of your stature.”

Michael and Irene made their way home safely through the king’s dingy dungeons and to their merry surprise they found Irene’s house returned to its original spot. It also seemed that the house had acquired some weight along the way. Inside they found a note from Hermes demanding a month’s supply of good wine to be delivered to Mount Sometimes Holy for the favour and the swift return of the helm of Aïdes. In the days that followed Michael thought much about that strange lady in Ramsey’s dungeon and he hoped that all was well with her.

Alas, the story of Michael’s quest to the light house and back again must I end here for now. There were many adventures that followed and many of them included that strange lady Michael encountered in Ramsey’s dungeon. I am told by my sources that her name was Palesa, which means flower in one on the tongues of the South.

Galápagos

2008-10-15T16:28:00.004+02:00

I was randomly watching late night TV when I came across a BBC series called Galápagos. What caught my attention was the enchanting narration by a voice of a woman who was born to tell epic stories. It turns out the narrator is Tilda Swinton, who plays the White Witch in The Lion, the Witch and Wardrobe. The islands and their inhabitants are beautiful and deadly at the same time. The islands have been called hell on earth and so on but the life that flourishes on them is just amazing. The Galápagos are a place that every man, woman and dog must visit at some point in their lives.
Here are cool pics from Wikipedia:

*All images from:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galapagos_Islands

March On

2008-10-15T16:23:00.005+02:00

This post is dedicated to all of my goodbuddies :), even though most of you don’t read my blog – you bast1ds ;) Maybe one day when I am dead and some of you guys are still kickin’ it strong you’ll be digging through the archives and stumble upon this post. To all my friends, from people I’ve been with me for years to that one person I just said hello to on the bus this morning, I love you guys like mad (but I still reserve the right to hate your guts if you behave like a chode – a word which here means jerk).

Never again will a single story be told as though it’s the only one. – JOHN BERGER (Epigraph to Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things)

It makes me feel fuzzy inside when I see my friends doing awesome things that make them happy.

Sleuth, with help from Dean, put together a respectable PC (from my point of view anyway) and he has been gaming the days away. His supply of games is drawing to an end though because he plays 24/7.

Dean got himself a new graphics card and he’s got some major plans for upgrades throughout next year. The dude’s playing Crysis and having a good time of it. He’s also getting into the local rock scene and he’s planning to attend a few gigs and, naturally, I’ll be tagging along.

Last time I spoke to Anouk she was having boy trouble and not listening to my sage advice because she felt like being stubborn. Get yourself sorted dear girl! Just hook up with H. and see where it leads you. Here’s the mantra: how will we know if we just don’t try?

Sleuth and I hung out with Katie yesterday and dragged her around campus showing her what the student life is all about. It’s not as glamorous as all the poems say ;) Katie is doing well at work and she got a promotion a month or so back. Respect to the woman.

I hung out with M’Jackknife last week and the man’s having a tough time with accounting. It’s your own fault buddy; you should have studied medicine like you were planning in High School. You’re my most disappointing friend of the day ntanga (I’m getting you Fight Club for Christmas; maybe Tyler Durden can talk some sense into you.

To the rest of my goodbuddies: keep the faith strong :) *Live it up to the best of your ability and make sure your strand gets woven into the great human tapestry.

*Just to clarify, my definition of ‘live it up’ is reading as many books as you can and lying under as many trees as you can – that’s why God invented trees and people make paper from trees after all.

International Translation Day

2008-10-06T08:46:00.006+02:00

Listen up guys and gals, you’re about to get an education ;)

I bet none of you knew that the 30th of September was International Translation Day. The theme for this year was “Terminology: Words Matter”. After spending some time with postmodernist texts that whispered language fails to convey meaning in my ears it was quite refreshing to step back into a world where words mean. When it comes to the beauty and power of words I’m an inhabitant of Middle-Earth where speaking words can sometimes unleash great power. There is even a patron saint of translation! His name was Eusebius Sophronius Hieronymus, but you can simply call him St. Jerome. He translated the Old Testament from Hebrew into Latin and the New Testament from Greek into Latin. I imagine he was a charming gentleman and legend has it that he removed a thorn from a lion’s paw. The Department of Linguistics and Literary Theory hosted a workshop presented by Wilna Liebeberg on the 29th of September to commemorate the day and all us 3rd year student got to attend. Even though the talk on how to start your own freelance translation or editing practice was irrelevant to us at this moment in time I enjoyed it. During the break I got to speak to a very friendly gentleman named Jerry Ngubane who runs his own translation freelance practice and makes a comfortable living from it :) It was a cool experience being a room full of professional language practitioners and laughing at how childish they are at times.

Check out the South African Translators’ Institute and the International Federation of Translators to see what the hype’s about :)

Underoath Concert

2008-09-27T13:26:00.004+02:00

Charlie went to his first rock show and he was totally blown away! We (Sleuth, Dean and I) watched some local bands perform when we got there and I was instantly hooked. I always thought that live music was the suck but when you’re there and your heart is pumping along to the music and there is sweat flying all over the stage you just have to shut up, appreciate and let the music move you. The venue, Bell’s Sundowner, was very intimate so the music was in-your-face live! We almost sacrificed Sleuth to the ancient powers of rock by nearly throwing him into the bonfire they had going there but, as per his usual self, the man was too slippery.

When Underøath came on stage the crowd just went animalistic and you could just feel the awesome vibes oozing from everyone. When they played To Whom It May Concern I knew that this is what I came for. They played quite a number of my favourite tunes like Writing on the Walls, which I sang so loud the girl next to me gave me a perplexed look; they played Desperate Times, Desperate Measures and when they played You’re Ever So Inviting everyone just lost the last of the marbles they had to spare. After we all screamed loud enough to get the band back for two more songs some madman decided to get on the stage and jump into the crowd but he fell on an unsuspecting girl :( The band was nice enough to stop playing and Spencer (the lead singer) asked if people were okay before they carried on again. Spencer (who has a very Captain Jack Sparrow madness to him) kept spitting water into the crowd, which I thought was awesome and I got some on my face :) Only at a rock concert can one get excited about being spat on. We were quite close to the stage and Tim (lead guitar) touched my hand for a nanosecond and that stoked me out like crazy. James (rhythm guitar) is the only chilled dude in Underøath, he was playing pretty close to me and where all the other members were going mad onstage he was just super mellow. Aaron (drums/clean vocals) was quite far back on the stage and I couldn’t hear him all that well but it’s all good. I never had a drop of alcohol but when I left I was drunk on rock.

I really enjoyed the concert and my only regret was that Underøath didn’t play Too Bright To See Too Loud Hear, I can just imagine the crowd clapping and chanting, “Good God! Can You still get us home...?” I would have died and went home, straight to Heaven.

Shout out @ Dean: Goodbuddy, thank you for orchestrating the event. Much respect to you :)

Defing My Great Line

2008-09-26T10:33:00.002+02:00

I’ve heard it said that the years you spend at university are the ones that mold your character and define how you will live your life in the ‘real’ world. For me, personally, it seems to be true. The last three years have been the most turbulent in my relatively short stay on this planet. I’ve been lonely, sad and heartbroken. I’ve fallen in love only to think that it might not have been love after all, I’ve tried to find out where I fit into society and I’ve lived outside of society when I felt I didn’t belong. I’ve known joy that made my heart soar, I’ve had laughs with good friends and I’ve accumulated, what seems to me, vast amounts of knowledge. The most concise way in which I can summarize the last three years is: life happens.

In an interview, Christopher Dudley from the band, Underøath said about their album, Define the Great Line, “[Y]ou just have to find that line and that way to live your life". I can’t agree more. I think I’ve come to a point where I’ve found that line, I know how I want to live my life and now I have to step up to the plate. My life is a tad bit strange but that’s what makes me love it something fierce. Like Odd Thomas I’m something of an oddity and that is the quality that keeps me on my toes – my life is exciting enough to keep me alert and quiet enough to make me feel serene.

Tonight I’m going to see Underøath with Dean and Sleuth and as you can imagine it’s all rather exciting. Hopefully “[a]t the end of the road [I]'ll find what [I]'ve been longing for ”. The camera on my cellphone is pretty sucky but I’ll take pics anyway and post them on Monday or something :)

Remember: life happens ;)

Answering This Calling

2008-09-23T12:41:00.002+02:00

And when the Lord saw that he turned aside to see, God called him out of the midst of the bush and said, Moses, Moses! And he said, here am I. – Exodus 3: 4

I’ve been hearing the call to start my journey home and like Niggle I’ve been procrastinating and loafing about with the silly notion in my head that it can be put off. If I was to be president of South Africa for one day [the 19th of October for example ;)] I’m pretty sure the country would suffer irreparable damage that would make people think the current administration to be divine ministers of justice.

The scariest thing I do on a daily basis is say to God, “Thy will be done.” As Narnians point out, “Aslan is not a tame lion.” One never knows what He might do to you. He starts out by fixing the leak in your roof and if you don’t stop Him, He starts fixing all sorts of things you never knew were broken and because He sees the bigger picture He breaks all sorts of things in order to make space for new ones. I’m scared of this and I don’t like it one single bit – like my destructive habits.

God worked discreetly, and in the ways that pleased Him. It had pleased Him that the Children of Israel should sweat and strain under the Egyptian yoke for generations. It had pleased Him to send Joseph into slavery, his fine coat of many colors ripped rudely from his back. It pleased Him to allow visitation of a hundred plagues on hapless Job, and it pleased Him to allow His only Son to be hung up on a tree with a bad joke written over His head. – The Stand, Stephen King

I imagine that Joseph learned the lessons of humility and forgiveness thoroughly in his time as a slave, in jail and then seeing his brothers again. Joseph was not perfect and God, through hardships, raised him up pretty damn close to the standard. But Jesus was (and is) perfect, so perfect in fact that He came down from Heaven to be the sacrifice for our sins by suffering unspeakable agonies on Calvary. Peter Kreeft repeatedly points out that Jesus came to set the standard for us and that His suffering was not an exception to the ‘rules’ of Christianity. If Christianity requires that you give your life for people who spit at you, you give your life without complaint. Thus, every time I say to God, “Thy will be done.” I say it with fear and trembling. What I’m really saying in my heart of hearts is, “Thy will be done” if it does not include pain, suffering, sacrifice, humiliation and a host of other unpleasant things. But count me in on the milk and honey parts, I’ll roll with that. I’m being silly, there is no place in the universe where God allows people into His kingdom without having faced the trial of living in this universe where you might get stabbed, hugged, shot, kissed, pelted with rocks or showered with love. With so many other people with the same free will you have about just about anything might happen. All one has to do is to keep on walking the narrow path that leads home.

With great consideration I’ll choose the path to follow
I’ll pick up my sadness, madness and new-found gladness
And together we’ll walk down that winding path
Singing our tuneless song into the sunset - Young Man Going West

2008-09-19T10:26:00.003+02:00

I’ve been feeling overwhelmingly sad at the meanness, spitefulness, pettiness, bickering and stupidity of human beings of late and so I dedicate this post to all the wonderful people I come across in my life. Thank you for touching my heart.

Dean (bestbuddy): No worries about life, let’s stay chilly and enjoy the ride because the best is yet to come. On the 26th we’ll go see Underøath and totally party it up :)

Sleuth: You’re my rock k1d. Respekt!

Anouk: I don’t like that I get to see so little of you :( You make me laugh with your stories about Hermie and Emo Guy. The fact that you talk more than me still perplexes me :?

Leigh (most beloved of friends): If you weren’t already taken I’d marry you. If I was limited to just one friend at varsity it would be you. I’m keeping you in my life forever and there’s nothing you can do about it, you great big lunatic.

Lydia: Even though you’re a girl you’re my boy.

M’jackknife: Hola ntwana!

Tshepiso: Hey bro’ :) I miss you dawg. I hope your gynaecology studies are going well, you great big perv ;)

Sinqobile (lil’ girl): Hugs all the way from Jozi to Cape Town.

Catharine (Katie): Sometimes you and Raycene weird me out but it’s all good.

Raycene: You’re a mad person who asks me too many questions for which I have no answers :) You’re like a younger sibling on crazy pills.

Zay: I’ll bring the movies I promised you. Please don’t bash me ;)

Lulama: When are we going to the pub so you can buy me a beer?

To the semi-sweet sipping peeps of ol’ school: Graqa, T-Bash and Lee – I miss you okes :)

Through the Eyes of the Observer

2008-09-09T16:24:00.001+02:00

I wrote this poem two years ago and now it reminds me of Randall Flagg from Stephen King's The Stand and of my goodbuddy Super Sleuth :)

Young, silent observer
In social circles he stands reserved
He is part of all, but not
Jotting down notes with his elegant flowing mind script
Always adding to his intelligence supreme
Like a journalist in a war zone he can do nothing
Nothing but record the terrors
Taking note of human errors
Always adding to his heavily guarded vault of infinite intelligence
Observe is all he can do
It is no fault of his
He seems without feeling
Emotionally void
Grey-eyed ghost
Hands stuffed in pockets of faded blue jeans
He scours rodent-inhabited streets
To add to his already extensive library of thought
His presence paradox, phantom but not
His lips dry like the arid Kalahari from the lack of use
In the shroud of city death the grey-eyed phantom stands
Unseen, listening, jotting down and storing in a box
That might one-day spill all the secrets of life under a cranium saw

“Why do you just stand there?” I dare to ask
No reply
Just a penetrating silver glare

Blood begins to fall from a wounded sky
Drops fall like crimson jewels
He stares at the bleeding sky, emotions from the dawn of time finally stirred
Platinum tears hit the blacktop with unheard plops
He falls to the ground on his knees, arms skinny and limp at his sides
“Father, why?”
He asks in a parched tone

"The Lord said, ‘I was ready to answer my people’s prayers, but they did not pray. I was ready for them to find me, but they did not even try. The nation did not pray to me, even though I was always ready to answer ‘Here I am, I will help you’."

Spring Has Sprung

2008-09-03T18:02:00.002+02:00

Spring has sprung. The sun is shining, birds are singing and the grand theme of the day is rebirth. People are refreshed from hibernating in winter and they’re rocking their summer threads – I’ve been seeing short skirts and legs that go on for kilometers this morning – and steaming cups of java have been replaced by cans of Coke :)

Winter is always hard on my skinny frame so I’m quite happy that it’s over. I feel like a new dude; it’s like I’ve died, decomposed and been reborn in the compost heap of my former self as something bursting with God-given life.

I wish all you lunatics out there sunny days of glory :)

P.S. This post is dedicated to Tamsin Mackay, former editor of PC Format.

Too Much Green To Feel Blue

2008-08-25T07:25:00.002+02:00

Coffee first thing in the morning is not the best idea, I'm sitting here with caffeine surging through my body and as a result I'm one messed up dude this morning. I spent the whole weekend reading three books at more or less the same time because I'm really not into delayed gratification. I feel like my brain has been hijacked by three totally different plots and I keep muttering lines from The Stand about the Walkin' Dude coming to get me and I see vast cornfields in my head that just refuse to go away. My zombie state and the pile of work that looms ahead of me this week aside I'm one happy dude because the sun is shining again. Winter wears me down. Everything's in bloom so a jolly green day to all :)

Life

2008-08-18T07:20:00.004+02:00

Rush headlong and hard at life
Or just sit at home and wait.
All things good and all the wrong
Will come right to you: it's fate. – The Book of Counted Sorrows

I’m sitting here and reading through some of these posts and my goodness! At times I’m such a dramatic lunatic. I remind myself of the guy in Asterix and Obelix who always thinks the sky is falling. I spoke to two people this morning who think that all bloggers are narcissistic people who think that they are really clever. All bloggers do, according to these two sources (who are Honours students in Philosophy I might add), is sit around philosophising about silly things. Looking at this blog they might have a point, most of these posts scream I’m so cool and everyone else is so strange… yak, yak, yak, I’m so misunderstood. I’ve been told to get a life a number of times in my er… well… "life", everyone else has one. Lives are apparently mass produced and sold on every street corner on the planet. One size fits all. I think I’ll take a yellow one; it reminds me of SpongeBob. I’ll bother venturing out of my head and taking my new life for a spin. I can’t seem to find the seatbelt on this thing though… you’d think that at a speed of 24 hours a day a seatbelt would come standard.

Lost in the Cosmos, Project Enlightenment

2008-08-13T13:07:00.002+02:00

This morning it finally hit me. Lo! And behold; illumination! For the past few years I've had a problem with the reality that is people and objects. I could never understand why life just kept happening. Whenever I'd hear people complain about one trivial thing or the other I'd think Dude! You're worried about the colour of your socks in a universe such as dangerous as ours. I always felt like some great pretender when I went about my daily business. Making coffee in the morning never felt real. I mean, what profound meaning is there behind making coffee? Now that I think about it, making coffee is riddled with meaning... Napoleon Hill told me this way back in high school but I think we can all safely conclude that I am a dummy. When I stand there making coffee and thinking about what my plans for the day are I'm enjoying the sweat of many brows; the people who plant the coffee beans, the people who package the coffee, the people who ship the coffee, my mother who earns the money to buy the coffee and so on. What does this all mean? I have no clue but I could go on about the intertwined destinies of all these sweating brows if someone was holding me at gunpoint and I had to say something to save my skin. Okay, I'll just shut up and smile because I'm just talking trash right now :)

The Grand Wizard

2008-08-11T08:26:00.006+02:00

This post is dedicated entirely to the strangest and most wonderful person I know, my dear friend, Lex Luth. I'm a tad bit strange but if there was a category for strangeness in the Olympics between the two of us ol' Lex Luth would most definitely take the gold home with him. Everyone I know has some sort of expectation that I try to live up to; when I speak to my mother I think okay this is my mother, I have to behave in this manner and when I'm with other friends of mine I think okay this is what is expected from me. This is probably a shortcoming that can be attributed to me but when I hang out with Luth life becomes almost surreal. I can talk to Luth about a dragon for hours on end. Seriously. We'll sit there and discuss dragons in great detail, we'll talk about their scales, claws, wings and the fire that they breath and anyone walking by and catching snippets of our conversation might suspect the use of drugs. This is a wonderful quality of Luth, I think, the ability to just absorb everything and to keep up with any of my many fantastical thoughts. We never discuss 'real' things much when we're hanging out, our talks always take place in some realm of Faerie where great wizards wield powerful magic. What makes Luth so wonderful is that he is a traveller in all the realms of Faerie. He spends the majority of his time exploring these realms and like the grand wizard that he is he never imposes his will on any of the inhabitants or objects there, which is why the people of Faerie always welcome him. He is not a conqueror hellbent on conquest but rather he is the sort of guest who shows up at a doorstep and though he is uninvited one is pleased that he came at all. He is ever the unexpected guest that one always has room for in your house. It is said by some sects that you should always be courteous because you might just be in the company of angels. I believe that when you are with Luth you are in the company of a great wizard. There is no way that Luth is a native of this world. Though he does not know it he must come from one of the realms of Faerie. Of this I am certain.

The Ol' Ball and Chain

2008-08-01T07:38:00.005+02:00

We have a weight to carry
and a distance we must go.
We have a weight to carry,
a distination we can't know.
We have a weight to carry
and can put it down nowhere.
We are the weight to carry
from there to here to there. - The Book of Counted Sorrows

It's like the title of Escape the Fate's song, Dragging Dead Bodies In Blue Bags Up Really Long Hills; all one does the whole day is drag around, in my case, 65 kilograms of flesh, blood, guts, bones, water and stuff - it's quite terrible and very funny really. It's also like the Greek myth of Sisyphus in a way, all he does is push a rock up and down a mountain for eternity and people like Samuel Beckett will tell you that that is the lot of mankind. Everyone I know consciously loves their meat suit but the subconscious is a different matter all together; people smoke, drink, get high on banana peels (this is actually possible I'm told) and drive their cars really fast down really long hills because it's fun they say. In a way it's pretty morbid how we kill ourselves bit by bit everyday and then we turn around and tell people not to jump off of buildings. It's the plank in the eye story all over again.

Magic

2008-07-25T16:38:00.004+02:00

I propose to write a short piece about magic and the nature of magic both in our world and in worlds beyond our own of which we sometimes catch a glimpse in the work of various authors who have written accounts of their visits to those wonderful countries. Before venturing any further I need to define what magic is and how I plan to make use of the term. If you were to refer to Peter Kreeft he might tell you that magic and technology are similar in their vision of progress. Technology means instant everything and magic (in a Faustian context) meant turning lead into gold in an effort to satiate man’s greed. This, though, is not the sort magic that I wish to speak of. The one thing that one has to understand about magic from the onset is that like gravity you can use it to work for you or against you. Like all good things evil can pervert it and use it in a mocking fashion but that is about all. J.R.R Tolkien noted this fact; when magic is wielded for the benefit of others it can be used to, in the term that Tolkien uses, sub-create. In a letter Tolkien refers to in On Fairy Stories he wrote:

“Although now long estranged,
Man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed.
Dis-graced he may be, yet is not de-throned,
and keeps the rags of lordship once he owned:
Man, Sub-creator, the refracted Light
through whom is splintered from a single White
to many hues, and endlessly combined
in living shapes that move from mind to mind.
Though all the crannies of the world we filled
with Elves and Goblins, though we dared to build
Gods and their houses out of dark and light,
And sowed the seed of dragons – ‘twas our right
(used or misused). That right has not decayed:
we make still by the law in which we’re made.”

Man is like Hagrid, the half-giant in the Harry Potter books, who had his wand broken but continues to wield it in secret when no one is looking. Man wields the magic to sub-create art that is so beautiful that it tugs at the heart strings of his peers. This sort of magic is simply as Peter Kreeft puts it, "the magic worked by our souls". Our ability to sub-create stems from a certain magic "that is worked upon our souls" though. Every single beautiful thing that man creates is inspired by a power he does not understand though that power knows him through and through. I think of artists as wizards who specialize in different fields, like the wizards in Terry Goodkind’s Sword of Truth series. Some artists are prophets, some are healers and others are war wizards. I watched Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children yesterday and in it I found magic that did marvelous work on my soul. All the epic stories whether they are Eastern, Western or African tell the same story: they all tell of the war between good and evil. That is the drama of our lives. With the little pixie dust that is given to us we sub-create great art to remind us of the ongoing war between good and evil. The best magic, I think, is the sort of magic that goes unnoticed. In one of the Sword of Truth books Zedd (if my memory serves me well) explains the role of wizards in a war to Richard. Wizards on both sides of the conflict always seem as if they have no effect because their magic reaches an equilibrium, the one side works magic to counter the other's magic and then tries to slip a spell past their defences until an equilibrium is reached and the men at arms can fight it out. But if the one side fails to maintain the balance one witnesses the destruction that magic can cause in a battle. Real magic is something like this, it works for people without them ever noticing its presence but if if it were to stop working the repercussions would be felt immediately. In The Matrix, the Oracle notes that we never notice the programmes that do their job, but you always hear of those that are not doing what they are supposed to.

There is also the magic that can be found in nature; the magic of trees, lightning, the ocean, the roar of a lion. This magic is so awe-inspiring that pagan societies fell down on their knees before the majesty of nature. With the invention of telescopes and spacecraft nature has become even more majestic. Even when you try to reduce the universe down to science it never ceases to astound. Sir Isaac Newton said:

"I do not know what I may appear
to the world; but to myself I
seem to have been only like a
boy playing on the sea-shore,
and diverting myself in now and
then finding a smoother pebble or
a prettier shell than ordinary,
whilst the great ocean of truth
lay all undiscovered before me."

The universe, multiverse or whatever you wish to call it is lined with mysterious magic that we sometimes capture in the beauty of art and thus I believe that artists are prophets of something so huge and beautiful that it would blind us to look at.

The Numinous

2008-07-24T15:06:00.003+02:00

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in our philosophy. – Hamlet

The one book that is constantly on my mind at the moment is C.S. Lewis’ Till We Have Faces and Peter Kreeft’s talk thereon has me thinking about the central question that the book asks. This astounds me because when it comes to Christianity I am a simpleton – I simply believe. I am one of those people who do not need a concrete reason to believe (by which I mean I cannot present a convincing argument for my faith to a board of very rational people), I simply believe because in some indescribable way Christianity makes sense to me. Religion is difficult for anyone to practice but throughout human history it has been constant. The ancient civilizations looked upon the sun and the sea and felt the need to bow down to these forces because they were greatly moved by the majesty of nature. Everything in the universe shouts the existence of God so loudly that people who have never heard of Him feel the need to bow down to the things that symbolize Him. All religions stem from humans realising that there is some higher power that governs the affairs of man. All religions are like pictures of God by different artists and naturally some of the pictures are clearer than others. The central question that Till We Have Faces asks is this: “Why must holy places be dark places?" Why must religion be so mysterious? If I was a detective I would either be uncannily good at it or the worst detective in existence because I would primarily rely on my “sixth sense” to crack mysteries. The mystery of God is the same for me, I simply believe because in a strange way it makes sense to me. For other people, though, this is frustrating and they demand clear answers. The only thing I know is that, like C.S. Lewis says, Christianity is hard in many ways and very easy in many ways. Christianity is not an escape from earthly suffering it is simply the truth. Like Morpheus, Jesus only offers you the truth. In fact He, Himself, is the way, the truth and the life (John 14: 6). Zion is under siege and inside the city walls there is pain, bloodshed and sorrow. Christianity is like J.R.R. Tolkien notes of good fairy-stories in his essay, On Fairy Stories; it is a eucatastrophe – “the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous ‘turn’”. Our lives are ones of suffering but in Christ the shadow will pass to reveal infinite beauty and we will not know whether to laugh or to weep. We will be like Samwise Gamgee in the heaps of Mordor when he sees the white star twinkle for a moment and its beauty smites his heart and he realises that the shadow is a thing that must pass and that there is light and high beauty forever beyond its reach.

In a previous post titled, Life’s Wonderful, I said that all the really good stories that have ever made you so happy that you both wept and cried are more or less true and in his essay Tolkien agrees; there is no other story that is so wonderful that everyone would have it be true than Christianity and then Joy of all joys! It turns out to be really true.

People must believe what they can, and those who believe more must not be hard upon those who believe less. – George MacDonald

Knowing People

2008-07-22T15:36:00.005+02:00

About two weeks ago my friend, Raycene, asked me if it is possible to really know people. I replied that one can learn to know people but only to a certain extent. The thing with people is that they are not very stable - they are like radioactive atoms just waiting to go berserk. I'm reading A Passage To India for my English Literature class and the same question popped up, this time in a different guise. Can human beings really know the world around them? The linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure, tells us that language is arbitrary and that the words we use to describe things are just random letters assigned to objects we wish to describe for the sake of convenience. A cat does not look like the letters C-A-T but when one sees the word cat the animal that it represents comes to mind. In this sense language is like an allegory for reality; words stand for real objects in the world. The primary tool that people have for interacting with the world and each other is language but the snag lies in the fact that we do not know anything other than language to describe ourselves and our world. Imagine standing in a cave and having an experience that shakes you to your foundations and trying to tell it to someone else. Words fail to truly capture what you felt, they simply fall short. We have nothing outside of language to work with or to critique language with. Humans and language, I think, cannot be independent of each other. Language can be regulated by people but it is also self-regulating. I can get, in my mind, a glimpse of someone else through language and I can give other people a glimpse of me by language. God gives us a glimpse of Himself in language, a way to get closer to Him. I thus figure that it is not possible to truly know every aspect of someone else or the universe in our current state. Every single person I know hardly know themselves. There comes a point where language is not enough, a point that requires a being to transcend. This whole business is like the arguments Job and Orual (in C.S. Lewis' Till We Have Faces) present before God and then they realise that language fails when one sees God face-to-face. Orual says: "I ended my first book with the words no answer. I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away. What other answer would suffice? Only words, words; to be led out to battle against other words." I think that we cannot truly know ourselves, other people or the world in which we find ourselves in Till We Have Faces, we have to transcend above something that is not language. I personally believe that that something is God.

The Daily Grind

2008-07-21T08:21:00.004+02:00

I'm inherently more of an observer of life than one who participates (I'm attracted to the sidelines more often than not), I enjoy stories and the most mind-boggling stories, for me personally, are those of people going about their daily business. I commute to university, thus I have a lot of time to sit and observe people on their daily grind and it fascinates me how immersed people are in their routines. On some strange level it's like watching ants. The lady with the umbrella - just in case it rains - will always be standing at the corner at 07:45 waiting for the car that picks her up and the man in blue overalls, whom I assume is a plumber, is always at the door of a corner shop at 07:50 eating a sandwich. It's like clockwork the way this all happens. Maybe this is because I'm crazy, but I imagine that underneath all of this preciseness there is some sort of anarchy waiting to be unleashed. In my head I see people throwing stones at buses, burning cars and strangling cats... they're all just waiting for an excuse to escape from mediocrity of the daily grind. That's how all the crazy things happen in the world, one cog becomes loose and all of a sudden there's a revolt against something you did not even knew existed... but it's always been there, looming. Thus I sit on the bus surrounded by the chatter of people on their way to work and a little part of me is afraid that this serene picture could easily explode into a huge ball of violence.

One Door Away From Heaven

2008-07-18T14:34:00.002+02:00

One door away from Heaven,
We live each day and hour.
One door away from Heaven,
But it lies beyond our power
To open the door to Heaven,
And the key is ours to lose.
One door away from Heaven,
But, oh, the entry dues.

- The Book of Counted Sorrows

The idea that life is the most precious thing that we possess, like Jesus Christ’s or Barty Lampion’s birth, was not announced to me by celestial trumpets or a gigantic green bird sitting on a high hill and whistling in an unheard of manner. I learned of my mortality the first time I fell and scraped my knee and I almost fainted at the sight of my own blood. My life, as it now stands (sometimes it just decides to sit down), is the result of the culmination of things that are intertwined like a spider's web. As I walked to the library yesterday to pick up a few books for my good friend, Raycene, two people kept knocking on the door of my mind, Dean Koontz and Peter Kreeft. They came over to tell me to stop straying from the main path because I have in my pocket a Golden Key and that I must continue my search for the door that this key opens. Ours is a journey similar to that of Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee to the black land of Mordor. For us, though, Mordor is not the destination but a place through which we must pass and we do not seek to destroy our key, we seek the door that it opens. There are so many things that we use to keep ourselves ‘busy’ that we forget to search for the door. Let’s just take a few minutes from our busy schedule to get our bearings so that we may continue the journey.

My son, attend to my words; consent and submit to my sayings. Let them not depart from your sight; keep them in the center of your heart. For they are life to those who find them, healing and health to all their flesh. Keep and guard your heart with all vigilance and above all that you guard, for out of it flows the springs of life. – Proverbs 4: 20 -23

Echoes of the Voice Calling You Home

2008-06-30T12:00:00.004+02:00

These people all died controlled and sustained by their faith, but not having received the tangible fulfillment of [God’s] promises, only having seen it and greeted it from a distance by faith, and all the while acknowledging and confessing that they were strangers and temporary residents and exiles upon the earth.

Now these people who talk as they did show plainly that they are in search of a fatherland (their own country).

- Hebrews 11: 13 – 14

All of us have read or heard a story that is just right, the sort of story that makes one think that its author had the right idea of what the universe really should be like, a story that makes you examine your life and think, if only I’d been born during such exciting times. I’ve just listened to a talk given by Peter Kreeft on Christianity in Professor J.R.R. Tolkien’s epic tale, The Lord of the Rings, and I remembered that every single time I’ve read a story that tugs at all of my heart strings like The Lord of the Rings I’ve heard echoes of the voice that wants me to come home. It’s like stumbling upon a strange country for a brief moment and getting the queer feeling that it’s the one place in the universe that you’ve always known and then stumbling back to the country of your birth and realising that it’s not where you belong at all and you spend your whole life searching for that strange country you surely must be a citizen of. Sometimes you see something spectacularly beautiful in our world that echoes how the object really looks in that great country you stumbled upon. It’s like Plato imagined it in his theory of the immaterial world of ‘forms’ in which all objects in world, such as tables, draw their ‘tableness’ from a real table in the world of ‘forms’. When Lucy stumbled upon Narnia through the wardrobe she found a country that echoes the country of her soul clearer than England ever could and at the end of The Last Battle she finds that country that Narnia was only an echo of (a very good one I might add). For a long time I wondered why I always found ‘real’ life so tedious and glum compared to stories, for me ‘real’ life was always worse than even bad stories so I was always on the lookout for any medium that provided some sort of escape. A good story is like hearing the echo of the voice calling you home to the country where your soul belongs, it’s not the real thing but because it projects what the author believes life should be like and one of its purposes being to entertain it’s always better than ‘real’ life. The voice calling you home is also present in your ‘real’ life but it gets choked by everyday mediocrities like stress about money, your job, newspapers and what not. We live in a strange age where the benefits of technology are many but the disadvantages are just as many, if not more. Take for example the internet, you have all of the world’s information at your fingertips but you have to wade through tons of rubbish to get to the information you really want. From the moment you wake up you’re being spammed, it’s no wonder you never hear the voice call you. When you are reading a story your mind is alert and thus you hear that echo and it makes you think about that strange country.

I find myself feeling like King Tirian did in the last days of Narnia, I read the epic stories of old and wish that such a wonderful adventure would find me. King Tirian’s adventure finds him and he rises to the challenge, fighting bravely as the last king of Narnia. I feel that we are living in such times and that for us the end is looming, we need Tirian’s courage. In a previous post I said that life is wonderful and that all the greatest stories you’ve ever read are true and that the greatest of these, Christianity, is true and all the others are tables reflecting the true ‘tableness’ of Christianity. Well that’s still the case. The echo of the voice you are always hearing after reading a story that is just right is the Lamb calling out to you… be silent for a few minutes and you’ll hear Him calling you home in this world and in this world you will hear his voice more clearly because you are a pivotal character in the greatest story ever told. Right now, where ever you are, just stop and be quiet and listen to the Lamb’s voice.

"Who is this?" they said to Me
“That the wind and waves obey
Come, let's hang Him on a tree
That His reign should pass away”
But here I am I say to you
Though you turn away, it is My will
To love you for forevermore
Peace be still, peace be still

- Intermission: The Lamb Knocks by Showbread

Small Packages

2008-06-09T10:58:00.003+02:00

It has been said that dynamite comes in small packages and this statement has been proven time and time again over the centuries. The elf, Galadriel, in Professor Tolkien's epic tale, The Lord of the Rings says of the minuscule Hobbit folk, "Even the smallest person can change the course of the future." Frodo, Sam, Merry and Pippin who are of very little significance if compared to great beings like Elrond, Galadriel and Treebeard whom they share a world with prove to be made of such stuff as to play pivotal roles in the freeing of a world from the clutches of an evil force of a staggering magnitude. The ring has the power to twist the nature of people and it seems that the more power a person wields the more susceptible they are to its evil influence as Galadriel says, "Instead of a dark lord, you would have a queen, beautiful and terrible. All will love her and despair." Galadriel is an ancient and powerful elf and the ring would twist her nature to the point that she would use her power to become a tyrant. Frodo, having very little power for the ring to work with, is thus small enough to be the ring bearer. He has the heart of a lion though because with the help of his gardener and steadfast friend, Sam, he ventures into the very heart of the Enemy's land to destroy the ring. In a paradoxical deviation from the norm the Hobbits' weakness is their strength. As I write this I am browsing through a master's thesis titled Representations of Satan in the Narnia Chronicles by C. S. Lewis written by Caroline Goodwin and I'm in awe of the the faith of the valiant mouse, Reepicheep, who sails to the end of the world in search of Aslan's country. Reepicheep is another example of how the smallest of us can make the biggest difference. I went to go and see Prince Caspian yesterday and now as I'm browsing Ms Goodwin's thesis I realise the influence The Chronicles of Narnia have had over me as a person. When I started this blog I said that one realises that this series of books is gunpowder on re-reading it as and adult (a state of existence many doubt I've reached) – by that view I firmly stand. This is a series written for children and yet it serves to inspire love, faith and kindness in many adults. Like a Hobbit its strength lies in the fact that it is easy to read and it takes the core Christian values and presents them in a simple allegory. Many churches water down Christianity to suit the masses but Lewis simplifies it so that children (and adults) can be inspired to seek out the real thing.

The Wolves of the Calla

2008-05-29T14:43:00.002+02:00

I went down to a second hand bookstore that allows you to bring in your old books and they give you credit which you can then use in the store. I saw a copy of The Wolves of the Calla which I just had to get at any cost. After begging and threatening to burst into tears (because my credit wasn't enough) the nice girl at the rigster said I can take it. I'm downright chuffed!

The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.

Old School Gaming Nostalgia

2008-05-27T12:31:00.002+02:00

My goodbuddies are six feet deep into the PlayStation emulation scene (Lex Luth is deep into all sorts of emulation when it comes to video games...) and they got Tekken 3 for me which I remember playing in shady shops where even shadier people would stand around the arcade machines smoking what I presume were cigarettes, waiting to prey on some young victim to put in his hard-earned money (by which I really mean his mother's hard-earned money) into the machine so they can challenge him and kick his behind with Paul (everyone plays with Paul!). With some practice I became fairly good (with Hwoarang I might add) and I could hold my own against those buggers but then they'd simply intimidate me by flashing a knife and telling me to stop pushing buttons. Naturally I'd throw the match and walk away with what little dignity I had left.

A friend of a friend was playing Tekken 3 last night and my goodness! He still remembers all those peoples' combos. He totally owned the scene and now I'm determined to practice until I utterly defeat him! Mwahahaha, mwahahaha, mwahahaha ... *cough, cough*.

P.S. Yoshimitsu reminds me of Mayuri Kurotsuchi from Bleach....

goodbuddies inc.

Setting Fire to Life

Cupboard Person of the er... Year

Fuck It!!!/Back in the Swing of Things

Running Away From Home

The Plan

There Be Dragons!

The Nerds Have Taken Over

Cupboard Person of the Week

Cupboard Person of the Week

My First Proper Article!!!

Brain Explosion

A Bitter Truth or Two

The Big Purge

Cupboard Person of the Week

Final Crisis

The Church's Badassery

Heaven's Magic Machine

Cupboard Person of the Week

Recovery

The Days of My Zombie Life

Glory, Splendour, Hierarchy, Height, Formality

The Month That Was

2 A.M.

A Human State of Affairs

The Road So Far

Attack of the Bloodthirsty Couch: Zombies of Doom

Cupboard Person of the Week

My June/July Reading List

On Being Blue

At it Again

New Year’s Resolutions: The Circular Ruins

The Little Boy Lost

Attack of the Bloodthirsty Couch

rAge

4 AM in the Morning

Bats on the Brian

Spring Has Sprung

District 9

A Life Lived

The Sea, the Sea . . . it calls out to me

Meeting the Master

Living or Not Living

The Horror

Reading the Archetype

A Lazy Weekend Taking Over Middle-Earth

No Rest for the Wicked

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

The World Is Too Much with Charlie

Er...: Laughing Men Co.

Totally Out of the Loop

The Change We Need

From the Elder Days to the Dark Tower

There's Life After the Party

Christmas According to Dickens

Doing Stupid Things

Labor omnia vincit

Cool Bargains

*Burp*

Catching My Breath

This Momentous Year

The Blandness of Our lives

Prayer

Inner Peace

Lady Leigh of the Meadows

Life's a Game

The Power of Words

GravityGunSlingers & Exams

A Dude Named Dean

Natura Morta “Howling with holy wildness”

To The Light House (And Back Again) [2nd Revision]

Galápagos

March On

International Translation Day

Underoath Concert

Defing My Great Line

Answering This Calling

Through the Eyes of the Observer

Spring Has Sprung

Too Much Green To Feel Blue

Burp