Posts Tagged ‘love

07
Aug
14

Tuesday

By SlickTiger 3 Comments
Categories: Being Slick
Tags: , , , ,

2014-07-21 22.12.24 I had to make a tough decision today. When J-Rab and I left South Africa, she took The Cub with her to Boston for two and a half weeks while I focussed on finding a job and a place for us to live in London.

Time slipped away and before I knew it, the two and a half weeks were almost up and I’d found nothing, so we paid to have J-Rab’s return ticket postponed for another two weeks, making her return date this Friday.

Problem is, despite countless meetings, interviews, positive conversations and optimistic recruiters, after a full month of being here I still have nothing.

During the month we’ve been apart, J-Rab has been amazing at sending me photos of my daughter, sharing funny stories about the things she does and putting her on Skype as much as possible, which has made it a lot more bearable.

Still though, it doesn’t change the fact that my baby girl is changing and growing and experiencing things for the first time and I’m not there.

If you have kids, you can imagine what this is like or maybe you don’t have to, maybe you’ve experienced it yourself. If you haven’t had kids, I can only explain it in this way.

The two most amazing things about being a parent are watching your child grow and learn and adopt quirky little mannerisms that they learn from you, and being able to take your child in your arms and comfort them when they’re sad or tired or afraid or hurt.

I worry that when I next see my little girl, she would have adopted a whole bunch of mannerisms that are totally alien to me, that I have no idea who or where they come from, that make her fundamentally different to the perfect little bundle I kissed goodbye over a month ago.

But more than that, I worry that when she’s hurt or sad or scared I won’t be able to comfort her the way I could when she left, that she won’t want me, this guy who was there all the time and then just left for no reason.

I had to make a tough decision today. I had to decide between having J-Rab and The Cub return on Friday to a life of turmoil in which I have no job, am bouncing from one friend’s spare room to the next and am rapidly running out of money, or to extend their ticket again, this time by an entire month, so they can stay on in Boston with J-Rab’s mom where they’re safe and loved and looked after.

For purely selfish reasons I wanted them back. Long distance is hell, but long distance when you have a baby is ten times worse. “Everything will work out,” I reasoned, “just bring them over and figure it out as you go along.”

Problem is, sometimes things don’t work out. Sometimes, despite your best efforts, worst case scenarios start erupting like volcanoes all around you, spewing ash clouds of doubt and lightning storms of anger and resentment.

I have a roof over my head until the end of August. After that I have no idea where I’m going to live.

I don’t care either, I’ll find a way, I always do. But to drag J-Rab and The Cub into that is not fair and besides, I can’t bear the thought of the three of us holed up somewhere, relying on nothing but the slowly waning hospitality of our friends and families.

I had to make a tough decision today, but I made it none the less. J-Rab and The Cub will join me in London on the 5th September and shortly thereafter we will throw the biggest party you could ever imagine.

At this party there will be balloons and there will be cake and there will be clowns and there will be jumping castles and trampolines.

There will be all our friends who live here and all our family and we’ll be together and we’ll be happy and not for one second will we take one another for granted because all you have in this life are the people who love you.

It has to be the biggest party there ever was because it will be The Cub’s first birthday party, and it will be 26 days late.

She turns one on Tuesday.

 

 

-ST

19
Oct
12

To J-Rab On Our Five Year Anniversary

By SlickTiger 2 Comments
Categories: Being Slick and Good Times
Tags: , , ,

IMG_2267Ain’t it funny babe? The way every time I write one of these I make all these promises of how stinking rich I’ll be one day and how much I’ll spoil you on our anniversary and then the next one rolls around and I’m still pretty much broke?

Thank Christ you’re not with me for the money. It’s always been a source of great happiness for me that you’re not one of those girls.

The ones obsessed with material bullshit. Obsessed with shopping and girly pop music and puke-worthy rom coms and things that are pink.

It’s always been a great source of happiness for me that above everything, you are real.

You have the courage to speak your mind and are incapable of lying or putting on false airs for the sake of impressing people too shallow-minded to accept others for who they really are.

That takes real guts. I’m sorry I don’t give you more credit for just being you, in this photo-shopped world of glossy fabrication, that’s a rare quality.

So here we are, five years down the road, living in our little flat in Vredehoek with a stray cat you brought home that has since become a part of our family of two, and no shit, I couldn’t be happier.

What a rare thing to find in this life. True happiness, the kind that flows effortlessly and in abundance and fills your life with purpose and a sense that this crazy fucked-up world ain’t so bad after all.

When I walk into a room I stand that much taller and prouder because I know that no matter what the people there may or may not think about me, I must be worth a damn because you love me.

You’ll never know the calm strength that gives me.

Before you I was a piece of loose shrapnel, bouncing off the walls, tearing everything around me to pieces, getting slowly crushed by my own vices and full of so much rage babe, so much unfocussed anger and hate at the world for all the times it chewed me up and spat me out.

I was a time-bomb. Dramatic as it sounds. I was a statistic waiting to happen.

After that first weekend we spent together all those years ago, I went around to Peggles’ place and the change I’d undergone after just two days with you was written all over me.

He could see it, plain as day, the inferno had died down, the churning maelstrom inside had finally grown still.

Sure, that age-old rage still wells up in me sometimes, that powerfully destructive energy I’ve fought to control my whole life, but one look, one touch from you and it subsides.

Thank you babe, for dating a fucking maniac like me. The world needs to know how brave you are because there isn’t a woman I know who would have toughed out the hard times with me like you have.

You might have the nickname Jessica Rabbit, but deep inside you’re a lioness. The Tiger and the Lion. When we have kids they’ll be Ligers.

I know we came close this year to ending it all and we went through some dark and heavy times, but we made it through all that shit and I swear, we’re stronger for it.

I know this because despite everything we’ve been through, I’m still the happiest man alive to fall asleep with you in my arms every night and wake up next to you every morning.

This is the real deal babe. The giant L-word people search their whole lives for and in some cases, never find.

But I know I’ve found it with you. You’re my companion, my lover, my strength and my sunshine.

You’re my perfect piece of DNA, caught in the flashing rain.

I love you Jess, happy anniversary.

 

 

-ST

23
Mar
11

Clifton Second and The Douche Parade

By SlickTiger Leave a Comment
Categories: Being Slick and Good Times
Tags: , , ,

Monday was sick, not only because it was a public holiday, but also because we managed to get our shit together and head to the beach for what turned out to be a glorious day in the sun, sneaking red wine when no one was looking and laying in the sun, staring at the big beautiful blue sky.

We chose a spot right at the back of second beach and set up base camp, right behind some pretty innocuous looking green towels, nothing special going on there.

Then, about 15 minutes later the owners of the towels came back and turned out to be the second and third most gorgeous women on the beach (after J-Rab of course – BOOYA!).

What followed can only be described as a total feeding frenzy. One total douchebag after the next came to get in on the action with the lovely ladies in front of us, each one trying a totally different angle to win them over.

Lemme tell you, reality TV has NOTHING on watching that shit unfold in real life. Our favourites were team no.1, who approached the belters with possibly the worst line in the history of lines: “We’ve been watching you from our balcony up there for the last 30 minutes and wanted to come down and say hi.”

Congratulations. You have miraculously managed to come across as creepy, desperate AND too fucking rich for your own good in one fantastically cringe-worthy line.

It just got better from there. Here’s a pic The MAEN! snapped off his GuyPhone which shows both men perching, just like vultures, on either side of the hotties.

 

 

Had I the presence of mind, I would have definitely taken my cell phone out and documented the guy that came after them, AND the guy after that who the girls seemed to actually like (he had a cute dog though, bonus points) but to be honest, I was enjoying the wine and the sun too much to think about that.

Action was with us as well. He said that he was pretty sure one of the girls was Tanit Phoenix but who’s to say? You can’t really tell at all from this pic.

Bottom line is I felt a strange kind of liberation watching all this because there was a time when I would have been cooking up a whole lot of bullshit lines in my own head to approach girls like that whether it was on the beach or in a club, and it felt good to honestly not give a shit about that.

When you have a good woman the rest of them take a back seat and let me tell you brother, it’s like a lead blanket being lifted off your shoulders the moment you realise you’ve found something worth fighting for and it means more to you than any random piece of ass on the beach or anywhere else.

There isn’t a day that goes by when I don’t think about how lucky I am to wake up next to J-Rab every morning and lay my head down next to hers every night. There isn’t a woman in the world that can hold a flame to that gorgeous Tigress and God knows, I love her with every fibre, cell and sinew in me.

-ST

03
Dec
09

Short Story: Summer Love

By SlickTiger Leave a Comment
Categories: Short Stories
Tags: , , , , ,

Summer Love

Once in a while, her face would slide off, and for the briefest, most terrifying of moments, I would be able to see her real head.

She did it right at the end of it all, on the last morning that we were together. Returning home from where ever it was that she had spent the night, I met her just outside the front door and told her that she had broken my heart.

I forget how exactly the conversation progressed, but eventually I found it necessary to threaten her, so I informed her of the fact that unlike the other spineless men she surrounded herself with, I wouldn’t be strung around like her personal yo-yo.

‘The difference between them and me,’ I said with wavering conviction, ‘is that I have balls.’

At that exact moment, her face slid off, and she castrated me with her smile.

 

30
Nov
09

A post on unrequited love

By SlickTiger 7 Comments
Categories: Killer Posts
Tags: , , , , ,

While I was thinking what to write for today’s post, my mind dug up one of my favourite quotes from one of my favourite authors, Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

The quote’s from one of his novellas called Memories of my Melancholy Whores. I read it about four years ago because my boss at the time bought it at a CNA before we boarded a flight to Cape Town.

 

 

The guy was really fucked up in a lot of ways, but was also a lot of fun. He basically only read books that had some kind of smutty angle and so bought the Marquez book based purely on its title.

We used to work out of a small house in a complex on Grayston Drive in a team of three people, and so I was often left totally alone in the house while my two bosses were out ‘interviewing’ people for the ‘report’ we were working on for an esteemed in-flight magazine.

It took me three or four days to read Memories of my Melancholy Whores, but that novella has had a profound effect on my life.

The story is about a 90 year old man who has only ever slept with whores his whole life. The guy is hung like a mule, but unfortunately is really, really ugly and so finds it impossible to bed normal women.

Obviously as he gets older his appetite for sex decreases and when the novella starts, he hasn’t been with a prozzy for at least a decade.

However, on his 90th birthday he decides to contact his friend, the mistress of his favourite whore house, and ask her a favour. As a birthday present to himself he wants to sleep with a virgin.

Miraculously the old man can still get it up and so, after much debate, the mistress decides to help the old man out and actually finds a 13 year old girl who needs the money desperately and so sets everything up.

Because it’s the girl’s first time, the mistress gives her a powerful kind of sedative to relax her, but gets the dose completely wrong and so when the old man enters the bedroom to deflower his prize, he finds her naked on the bed and fast asleep.

 

 

Watching her lying there like that, something miraculous happens. The old man falls completely in love with her. She looks so innocent and so pure, this young girl poised at the brink of becoming a woman, that he doesn’t even touch her that first night, he just watches her sleeping until it starts becoming light outside, then quietly leaves.

There’s a lot more to the story, but you’ll have to read it to find out the rest and I strongly recommend that you do, but the line that really stuck with me goes like this:

‘The invincible power that has moved the world is unrequited, not happy, love.’

It’s weird that my mind dug up that quote because it’s been years since I last experienced the all-consuming feeling that is unrequited love.

And yet, it’s not something you forget easily. Even as I write this at least three or four girls spring to mind that at different times in my life, I was completely in love with and either too afraid to admit it, or even worse, they knew how I felt and just weren’t that into me.

 

 

The weirdest case was a blonde girl who used to hang out in our circle of friends post-varsity, we’ll call her Jacqui.

I’d met her a few times, I thought she was smoking hot but that was about it. Then this one night at The Doors in Edenvale we were all sitting on the upstairs balcony and the weirdest thing happened.

I was talking about how varsity sets you up nicely for life because of the simple fact that it teaches you how to digest and understand massive amounts of information. It was a really boring topic of conversation, but the next thing I knew sweet, blue-eyed, blonde-haired little Jacqui sprang to life and spent the next 15 minutes passionately agreeing with me.

I have no idea how the fuck she did it, but during those 15 minutes I fell completely in love with her. To this day I still can’t explain it, but I fell for her so hard and fast that I remember standing by the bar moments later, my heart racing, knocking back as much booze as I could stomach to try and calm down and think straight.

Peggles was with me that night and I remember cornering him at one stage and trying to explain what this girl was doing to me while intermittently punching the wall and eating the ice out of my empty drink.

I felt ill. I drank some more. I don’t think I spoke another word to her the whole night but I so badly wanted to. I watched her dancing for a long time, trying desperately to think up some way to approach her, but… how?

I collapsed in bed that night, drunk and alone, but couldn’t sleep and when I eventually did, I swear I dreamed of her.

But the weirdest thing is I saw her about a week later and felt nothing.

I felt nothing. I mean, had she initiated anything, I would have happily reciprocated, but she didn’t and I just got this feeling like even if I made a move, she wouldn’t be interested and so just as quickly as I fell completely in love with her, I fell completely out of love with her.

Most of the girls I’ve fallen for don’t know I fell for them, well, to my knowledge at least and I wouldn’t change that if I could go back and do it all over again.

Even though it tore me up a lot of the time that some of the girls I was into felt rocks for me, I was also keenly aware of the fact that in many cases, love moves in circles ie. the person you’re chasing is chasing someone else who is chasing someone else and so on.

Also, it felt good to move the world.

It’s all part of one system, it’s all energy being transferred from one form into another into another into another. Love is a powerful form of energy and yes, I might have poured a lot of it out there needlessly, but I guess what I want to say is this: it comes back.

-ST