Fahk, today was a car crash.
Didn’t see that comin’ did ya? Ol’ Slick calls the post ‘Today Was A Car Crash’ and then launches right into the opening sentence, ‘Fahk, today was a car crash’!
Hahahahaha! Um, why am I the only one laughing?
On the way to work this morning I saw two taxis all fucked up, twisted out of shape, people (dead people?) being packed into ambulances and driven to state hospitals to get nasty infections.
I drove on in the driving rain and I turned my fog lights on. I don’t know what I hoped to achieve by doing this, but it made me feel marginally more safe.
The whole day, my guts have been melting. They feel like hot coals inside me. The weekend was a harsh mistress and all I can say is thank the good lord that J-Rab was stone cold and able to get us from A to B cause I probably would have been lousy at it.
Friday night we headed out guns blazin’. Bottle of tequila on the backburner and a pile of beer you could build a fort with. We hit The Barbarian’s place first, then Da Vinci’s for the best goddamn pizza I ever tasted, then a house party with some good people, and a man, we’ll call him The Giant, who had hands that were so massive he could probably break your skull if he ever flat-handed you.
He reads this site everyday, The Giant. He said it keeps him sane on days when office life is too boring to handle. My life had a lot of purpose in that moment, and everything, everything was worth it and I guess it still is.
It was his lady’s birthday party and I arrived sprouting tequila like a leaking ship.
It’s not rocket science. If you’re going to a party where you don’t know a lot of people, take a bottle of tequila. The people that drink it, make friends with those people. The people that don’t drink it, tease them until they drink it, then make friends with those people.
No one remembers you this way. But somewhere down the line you’ll be at another random do on another random night and a person from across the room will call out, ‘Hey! You! I know you! You’re the Tequila-guy from that party that one time…’
We drove to Komemtjie after the party, we snuck into my aunt’s house, passed the hell out and slept like dead people.
Saturday my cousin, Captain Albatross, woke me with a beer and a firm pat on the shoulder. ‘Cuzzy’ he said to me, ‘come let’s talk.’
We sat on the upstairs balcony in my aunt’s old comfy blue chairs, sipping cold beer and watching the cloudshapes changing with time and he told me about his crazy night and I told him about mine.
I kicked a soccer ball with The Captain’s kids and taught them to strum a few chords on the guitar. Dylan is a natural. All of seven years old and already he can count a solid 4/4 signature. I could make a rockstar out of that kid.
We ate mountains of braaied meat and it was good. Jimmy’s marinade was the clear winner that day. We drowned everything in it, even the boerewors and fuck me it all tasted like sticky, glazed heaven. I ploughed through a lot of it and afterward I lay on the grass and didn’t do or think of much for a long time.
A few hours later, J-Rab drove us back home and I dozed like a kid in the passenger seat, waking only when we went over bumps, then gazing through half-shut eyes at the spaces where ocean and land met, those brilliant white beaches along Baden Powell, the greeny-blue ocean the sun reflecting red off the mountains.
We ate at Buena Vista that night with The Loub, a good meal, good company, good times. I kinda wished I wasn’t already half dead at that stage. Energy was hard to come by, it had been a long day.
Sunday I got up late, sat on our balcony and played my guitar for 2 hours to a rapt audience of Anatolian Sheep Dogs. The low chords made them growl and the high chords made them howl. I felt like a demon guitarist, dragged back out of hell to play auditoriums full of growling, howling animals for all eternity.
Not a bad gig come to think of it. Better than rolling a rock up a hill.
I met a man who reads this site from time to time on Sunday afternoon. We’re working on a project together, something that’s going to blow people’s fucking minds.
And that’s really where this is all leading up to.
There are things, big things, in the pipeline for this site. I’m stepping up and calling a couple of shots for once and if this works, if I can actually manage to pull this one off, you’ll be proud to stand and be counted as one of the first people that found this crazy, fucked up place.
‘Oh yeah, SlickTiger?’ you’ll say, ‘I was following his blog WAY before …………… happened. Yeah, those days he used to write differently, like he was talking to us, like it was a private conversation. We liked his stuff mainly, but sometimes he clearly had nothing to write about, so he’d just write about his own life.’
‘We enjoyed some of those posts…’
It’s happening people. It’s all coming together and I couldn’t be happier 😉
-ST
