When you wake up, it is a firm belief of mine that you shouldn’t fuck around at all. You should jump right up and make the bed and make it well so when you get home later you can collapse on it and feel good because even if your day sucked, at least you don’t have to climb into an unmade bed at the end of it.
Well, it’s 5pm and I still haven’t made the bed.
Instead, I’ve spent the day writing. Hammering as many words as possible out of this poor laptop while its sticky-coffee keys squeak and protest under my relentless fingers.
And still, I feel unfulfilled. Like I’ve wasted the day completely. It’s frustrating how on some days you’ll pour every bit of effort into your writing and come out with something that’s only mediocre at best and on others you’ll plonk out a few words that are sheer genius and have hundreds of people commenting and sending the link to their friends.
This definitely won’t be one of those posts.
All I really wanted to do with this post was write about yesterday and what an amazing day I had at the beach in Kommetjie with J-Rab, my cousin Sub-Human and his wife and kids.
It was the kind of day where the beach is the last thing on your mind. It was overcast and had rained that morning, but we had nothing to do after lunch, so we took the kids to the beach and it actually turned out to be a really beautiful day.
Sitting on Kommetjie beach, you are flanked on either side by beautiful mountain ranges with nothing but the sea and all its majesty in front of you. It’s amazing how relaxing it is to just sit there like that with hardly anyone around, thinking of nothing really and just enjoying living in the moment.
I call him Sub-Human because I don’t have any other nickname for him and it’s what some of his friends called him back in the day because he was wild and free in ways you and I can only imagine.
He has an incredibly big heart, the biggest of anyone I know and is fiercely intelligent, but most people when they meet him think he’s beneath them.
My ex-girlfriend thought that. She thought he was white trash and even made that comment about him one evening when we were on holiday a few years back in Cape Town. All I can say is it didn’t go down well with me at all.
She hated me doing this one thing, it upset her more than anything in the world and so, the second she made the ‘white trash’ comment I did that thing, right in her face, to piss her off as much as possible and surprise, surprise, it worked.
Nothing quite like instant revenge to spice an evening up.
Sub-Human is a philosopher and a poet who can strip an engine and put it back together in record time and who is a loving father and husband to his wife and two boys.
But more than that, he’s the best cousin in the world.
Back when I was a teenager, he was my hero. He must have been in his mid twenties, and I loved the way he was so honestly unconcerned with what the world thought about him and completely unafraid to say what he thought and fight for what he believed was right.
There was integrity in the way he lived and I respected that. The trappings of this world have never meant a damn thing to him and he’s always had this way of seeing straight through people’s bullshit that never fails to crack me up.
He freaks a lot of people out, they don’t take him seriously, they think he’s a clown, a buffoon, but if you could have sat on that beach with us, looking out over the oceans and the mountains and heard him speak about the Albatross and how much he loves watching those colossal and magnificent birds glide over the ocean, you’d swear he was the single most fascinating person you had ever met.
‘Act like a pauper, think like a King’ he always used to tell me and I’ll remember those words as long as I live because they take on a new significance for me with every situation I find myself in.
I don’t think Sub-Human is a fitting name for him and I’m almost embarrassed to use it to describe such an amazing person.
Instead, I’ll call him Albatross, that’s much more fitting.
And also, I’ll make the bed 😉
-ST
