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26
Mar
10

‘Fuck The Whole World And What Everybody’s Saying Hey’ Friday

By SlickTiger 3 Comments
Categories: Uncategorized
Tags: , , , , , ,

Guys, the end of this week nailed me in the butt (and no Jono, I didn’t enjoy it).

Long and the short of it is that the laptop melted the fuck down and flat out refused to connect me to any network of any description and hence, no blog posts could be written.

There are news reports of entire nations coming to a complete standstill because I wasn’t posting. Empires rose and fell, LAVA consumed ENTIRE CONTINENTS! HURRICANES! Devastated the countryside! And people the world over…were sad 🙁

 

 

But it’s all good now guys, we’re back on track and all indications point to the weekend being filled with awesome, rad times.

So here’s my gift to you this Friday, it’s a little video I like to call ‘Vitriol’ from a little band I like to call ‘Bluejuice’ and it’s about to become the soundtrack for your weekend so good luck!

And don’t dare give up.

Give it a little bit of vitriol, hey!

 

 

Wow, what the fuck just happened there? Tried to paste a link and got a whole video window, badass!

I think my blog just evolved…

Have a great weekend guys. Here’s a hottie I borrowed from my friends www.holytaco.com (again).

 

 

-ST

24
Mar
10

Album Review: Gorillaz – Plastic Beach

By SlickTiger Leave a Comment
Categories: Album Reviews
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The new Gorillaz album is definitely their worst offering to date. Don’t believe what all the music critics out there would have you believe, they’re full of shit and so is this album.

 

 

This album will confuse you. You’ll think it’s interesting and cute at first, but after a few listens you’ll concede that like toilet spray, all the aural bells and whistles that saturate this album are nothing more than a thin disguise to try and hide the fact that this album stinks.

In my humble opinion, Damon Albarn, the creative genius behind The Gorillaz (and former frontman of the best Britpop band to ever play, Blur) is running out of ideas. He collaborates with no less than 15 different artists on this heap of dung album, which probably explains why listening to it feels the same way trying to do long division sums in your head used to back when you still remembered how.

Never trust a pop album that opens with classical music. What that tells you right from the outset is that it’s trying to be something it’s not. Throw that shit the fuck away.

‘Welcome to the World of the Plastic Beach’ featuring Snoop Dogg is, in two simple words, fucking boring. One critic commented how Snoop has never sounded so chilled and laid back in a track before. Yeah, that’s because he’s not even fucking trying!

 

 

I don’t like rap at the best of times, but the way Albarn has allowed it to overrun this album is nauseating. Toneless, repetitive and banal, tracks like ‘White Flag (featuring Bashy, Kano & The National Orchestra for Arabic Music)’ (I know, what the fuck?) and ‘Sweepstakes (featuring Mos Def & Hypnotic Brass Ensemble)’ are so utterly devoid of the quirky intelligence that used to define Gorillaz that they’ll have you banging your head against a wall to get a little mental stimulation going.

The good news is that, with 18 tracks on the album, there are at least some that find their mark. ‘Rhinestone Eyes’, has a nursery rhyme kind of charm to it that, combined with the sinister synth undertones in the chorous is a lot closer to the Gorillaz we all know and love.

‘Stylo (featuring Mos Def & Bobby Womack)’ is also a pretty decent, retro R&B track that kind of sounds like the Flight Of The Conchords track ‘Inner City Pressure’ and ‘Superfast Jellyfish (featuring Gruff Rhys & De La Soul)’ is quirky enough to remain interesting and is reminiscent of ‘19-2000’ (‘got the cool shoeshine’) off their eponymous debut album.

The best track by far on the album is ‘Some Kind Of Nature’ featuring Lou Reed of all people. It’s a classic Gorillaz track and probably the closest the album comes to delivering a ‘Clint Eastwood’ or ‘Feel Good Inc.’

 

 

Besides that, there really isn’t much to say about this album. The general feeling I get from listening to it is similar to the way Sunday night feels after an awesome weekend. You’ll find yourself gazing off contemplatively a lot when listening to Plastic Beach, wandering what the hell happened to put such a downer on the brilliantly-written pop masterpieces that adorned the previous two albums.

Final Verdict: 5/10

23
Mar
10

Short Story: Smooth Baby

By SlickTiger 2 Comments
Categories: Short Stories
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

He couldn’t wait to go home. In all seven years of being alive, he couldn’t remember ever being so excited before.

His heart hammered relentlessly inside his tiny chest and his mouth felt cotton-dry as he fidgeted and squirmed in his chair, bursting for a pee and not paying one scrap of attention to anything going on around him.

In his mind, all there was, was THE TOY.

He’d first seen THE TOY in a flea market when his mom was shopping for some black dog to grill for supper. Amongst the chaos and the noise and the thick clouds of oily smoke that mingled and moved like dragons through the narrow, dirty alleyways, he’d spotted it.

At first he wasn’t quite sure he’d seen correctly. He adjusted his glasses, thick as coke bottle bottoms, on his practically non-existent nose and squinted across the alleyway at the adjacent stall.

There it was. THE TOY. The most incredible toy ever invented. The second he comprehended what he was looking at, the child’s mind came alive with possibilities.

How was it possible that such an amazing toy had come into being? He had to have it. He would do anything to get it, even crawl over his own dead mother.

He immediately started tugging frantically at his mother’s leather pants, squealing at the top of his lungs, much like a pig being skinned alive.

His mother had never seen her son so furiously locked in paroxysms of overwhelming desire. The way he twitched and screamed almost involuntarily frightened her and she struck him hard on the back of his head to try and knock some sense into him.

If only it had been that easy.

That night, her son refused to eat any of the succulent dog she had prepared for him. He sat in a slack-jawed kind of daze while a thick, translucent trail of drool crept steadily from the corner of his mouth to his shirt front.

He sat like that for days, wasting away. Eventually she began to fear for the child’s life as he halved in size before her very eyes and so, in a huff of desperation, she finally agreed to buy the child THE TOY for his next birthday in three weeks time.

The change in her son was instant. He leaped up from where he was sitting and began to hop around the room, singing irreverent songs of praise to no one in particular in a language only he understood.

The bell for the end of school sounded like a prison exoneration as the boy, after three torturous weeks of jittering constantly and wetting his pants in excitement, jumped nearly two feet in the air and bolted, legs pumping, to the parking lot outside where his mother sat on her motorbike with his present neatly wrapped in her hands.

He ran in slow motion, the sun shining down like a host of holy angels above him as tears of unrepentant joy streamed down his face.

This was finally it, the moment his brief life had been building towards, the reason he was sure he existed.

Finally, finally his wildest dreams had come true.

Finally, he could shave the baby.

 

22
Mar
10

View from a porch

By SlickTiger Leave a Comment
Categories: Being Slick
Tags: , , , , ,

On this porch you can sit in the scorching midday sun and enjoy a beer so cold the sides of the bottle are frosted while you sit in the shade and watch distant cars glide by on the mountainside.

It’s peaceful here, you can sit with strangers and not feel that compulsive need that overrides all common sense to fill perfectly good silence with meaningless garble.

A warm breeze sweeps lazily through the leaves of the trees to the left of the porch, but when it moves through the bushes in front of us, the leaves flash silver as their undersides catch the sun.

We are surrounded on all sides by mountains thick with wild fynbos and at night the stars pepper the sky from horizon to horizon, forming countless constellations that J-Rab can name and trace but that to me just look like random and formless shapes.

You just don’t get this in Joburg. You can search far and wide for it, but you won’t find it.

I picked my way out over the rocks with J-Rab and her friend GoffGirl earlier today, we were looking for muscles on a beach in Pringle Bay. The ocean gathered in natural pools all around us and J-Rab showed me how sea anemone have these tiny tentacles that suck at your finger when you touch them.

 

 

Some of them were powder blue, I stared at those ones for a long time, trying to figure out how they came to be, by what evolutionary turn did they form like that, blue as the sky in those rock pools hundreds of years ago.

I stood barefoot in some of the pools, wiggling my toes in the sand as wave after wave came rolling in.

There was more, starting at Barbarian’s place on Friday, and then Buena Vista and then Stikey on Saturday, volleyball at Caprice, Little Red’s place and his new kid, good times all of them.

But it won’t come right now and I can’t force it. I guess I’ve just run out of words, they must have trailed away as I was driving the winding coastal roads back from Pringle Bay this afternoon.

It’s beautiful out there.

My girlfriend has just slapped me hard on the ass.

Instead of writing one more word of this waffly shit, I think I’m going to return the favour.

She is the best.

-ST

19
Mar
10

Holy Taco Friday

By SlickTiger 2 Comments
Categories: Uncategorized
Tags: , , , , , , , ,

You guys are fucking cool.

You are my invisible friends, and you are fucking cool. No, no, don’t downplay it, be PROUD of that shit. If I say you’re fucking cool, then it’s gospel truth. Hallelujah brothers and sisters!

Let’s sing kumbaya.

As you’ve probably guessed by now, I don’t have too much so say on this beautiful Friday in Cape Town. Truth be told I’m counting the minutes until the long weekend lands.

What are your plans? I’m going to Pringle Bay to get sunburn! And drunk! It’s going to be flippin sweet 😉

So anyway, there’s this site called www.holytaco.com that is pretty damn incredible because it’s stacked FULL of hot mamasitas and so, because you guys are so fucking cool, the rest of this post is just going to be smoking hot pictures I’ve ‘borrowed’ from Holy Taco.

Women are beautiful creatures. Let’s celebrate that fact this long weekend, and on Monday, let’s send those pictures to SlickTiger.

Group hug.

 

 

 

 

 

Have a killer long weekend everyone! I’m going to try post, but there’s a better than average chance I’ll say fuck it and go lie on the beach instead.

Until next time 😉

-ST

18
Mar
10

How To Deal With A Dick Cupcake – a Lesson For Guys

By SlickTiger 4 Comments
Categories: Tiger Guides
Tags: , , , , ,

Sometimes in life, you come back from a meeting, everything is cool, everything is going well, you’re having a great day and you get to your desk and next thing you know BAM! dick cupcake.

 

 

The thing about dick cupcakes is you never know when they’re going to sneak up on you and, even worse than that, you never know how to handle them.

I surprised myself today by handling what could have been a really embarrassing, awkward situation really well by doing the following two crucial things:

1) Remaining cool
2) Sticking by the ‘MAN CODE’

See, dick cupcakes are never given in a malicious way, that’s the first thing you have to keep in mind. A person will never give you a dick cupcake because they hate you or because they want to piss you off, rather, they want to see how you react to the dick cupcake, THAT’S what’s really going on.

This is why remaining cool is a must. Just think to yourself, What would Cooldog do?

 

 

First thing you must do is acknowledge the dick cupcake immediately. Don’t try and brush it aside or down-play it. You might not realise it, but everyone’s watching you to see how you react, so don’t hold back.

‘Aahhhh guys! Hahaha, who left this dick cupcake on my desk?’ was the line I went for, and it did the job perfectly.

Other lines that could work well include:

  • ‘Woah! I don’t remember leaving that dick cupcake there! Hahahaha! But seriously guys, who’s dick cupcake is this?’
  • ‘A dick cupcake! Hahahaha! Ahh you guys, you shouldn’t have!’
  • ‘Hey guys! Who wants to eat a huge dick cupcake? Cause I know a lucky guy that just found one on his desk! Hahahaha!’

Here are some lines that wouldn’t work so well:

  • Who the fuck left this dick cupcake on my desk? Huh? WHO? I’m throwing this dick cupcake THE FUCK AWAY!
  • Oh how considerate. A dick cupcake. This must be some kind of mistake though, I ordered a VAGINA cupcake. Where the hell’s my VAGINA cupcake huh? I’d eat that!
  • Oh god, a dick cupcake, oh god, I LOVE dick cupcakes, nomnomnomnom, aah, nomnomnom, tastes so good in my mouth, mmmmm…

Then of course comes the difficult question of what to do with the dick cupcake.

‘Eat it!’ The girls in my office shouted, ‘eat the dick cupcake, hahahahaha!’

Any guys reading this post please note the following: by throwing down the gauntlet of actually eating the dick cupcake in front of a room full of women, what my colleagues were doing was testing my mettle as a MAN.

No self-respecting man eats dick cupcakes. End of story. That my friends is a fact of life.

 

 

Still though, never lose sight of the fact that it’s only a joke. They want to see if you get ruffled, again, remember to keep your cool.

‘No,’ I replied in a stern, yet friendly voice, ‘I will not eat the dick cupcake. Eating dicks goes against my code as a man.’

Instantly the room fell into awed silence. Aahh yes, the CODE OF THE MAN. I could see that they had heard about it, but never seen it actually invoked in a real life situation. This was good stuff. I had their rapt attention.

‘HOWEVER,’ I said, holding a finger up to show them that this next part was important, ‘I have no qualms about eating the cupcake WITHOUT the dick.’ As I said this, I carefully removed the dick from the top of the cupcake.

‘There you go,’ I said, handing the dick to a random girl walking past ‘I’m sure you’ve had a lot more experience dealing with these kinds of things than I have.’

‘Hahahahahahahahahah!’ the girls laughed, ‘Bravo! Bravo old chap! Huzzah! How delightful! Three cheers for good ol’ SlickTiger!’

And THAT ladies and gentlemen, is how to deal with a dick cupcake.

-ST

17
Mar
10

Album Review: Johnny Cash – Ain’t No Grave

By SlickTiger Leave a Comment
Categories: Album Reviews
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

I say ‘Johnny Cash’ and you say ‘Joaquin Phoenix’. I say ‘brilliant and deeply troubled country musician who struggled his whole life with alcohol, drugs and his relationship with God’ and you say ‘a feel-good Hollywood love-story that ends when guy marries girl and they live happily ever after.’

 

 

Walk The Line ended just before Johnny Cashes life actually got interesting and way too much emphasis was placed on his relationship with June Carter, which was basically the focal point of the entire movie and the reason why there has to be a Walk The Line II: Cash Comes Back which I will of course write and direct.

The tragedy of Johnny Cashes life was that for over a decade the world completely forgot about him. He reached the height of his success in the 60s and 70s and had one hit after the next, as well as numerous appearances on TV and in film, but when 1980 hit, the world turned its back on the Man In Black, leaving Cash feeling forgotten and dejected.

 

 

And that’s pretty much where Johnny Cashes story would have ended if it weren’t for Rick Rubin and his formidable skills as a music visionary and producer. Under Rubin’s supervision, Cash recorded the album American Recordings in his living room in 1994, a collection of cover songs and original material that won a Grammy that year for Best Contemporary Folk Album.

Another three ‘American’ albums followed, Unchained (1996), American III: Solitary Man (2000) and American IV: The Man Comes Around (2002). American IV is widely regarded as Cashes epitaph as it was the last album he recorded before his death in September 2003. It contains his cover of the Nine Inch Nails song ‘Hurt’, the video of which is immensely powerful and I’d urge anyone reading this to watch it right now.

After his death, a fifth American album was released from left-over material he’d recorded with Rubin entitled, American V: A Hundred Highways (2006) which has sold 337,000 copies since its release and which looked like it was going to be the last album of new material to be released, until now.

This year sees the release of American VI: Ain’t No Grave, also produced by Rubin and all I can say is I hope this is the last American album that Rubin produces because while it really does shine in parts, mostly it ambles through one overly religious country song after the next and then ends, somewhat bizarrely, on the Hawaiian song ‘Aloha Oe’ 32 minutes later.

 

 

The title track and opening song ‘Ain’t No Grave’ is definitely one of the album’s stronger tracks and the line ‘When I hear that trumpet sound / Gonna rise right out of the ground / Ain’t no grave / Can hold my body down’ is strangely prophetic given that Cash has basically released this album from the grave.

It’s a slow and badass country song which, when combined with the lumbering drum beat and the repeating sound of chains being dragged, makes for a haunting track. You kinda get the feeling that at any moment you could look over your shoulder and be greeted by zombie Johnny Cash, covered in dust and dirt, wearing a tattered black suit, grinning and playing a banjo carved out of bones.

The mood doesn’t lift as the second song ‘Redemption Day’ (a Sheryl Crow cover) plays, but that’s not a bad thing. Cashes rendition of the song, with his old and quavering bass-baritone voice is heartfelt and moving. It sure as hell won’t get the party started, but it just might keep you company in moments when life is shitty and hope is hard to come by.

The song ‘Satisfied Mind’, which featured in Kill Bill Vol. 2 is also a great track. It’s just Cash and his guitar, strumming a slow song about how ‘There’s one thing for certain / When it comes my time / I’ll leave this ol’ world / With a satisfied mind.’ I’ve always loved this song because it perfectly captures the space Cashes mind was in during his twilight years and it’s a space I hope I might reach someday myself.

The rest of the songs on the album waver between sounding like hokey church hymns (‘I Corinthians: 15:55) and down-trodden, my-girl-left-me-and-my-horse-just-died country ballads (‘For The Good Times’, ‘Can’t Help But Wonder Where I’m Bound’, ‘Cool Water’) that could very well bore you to tears.

 

 

Unlike previous American albums, this won’t appeal to a younger audience. If you’re a die-hard Johnny Cash fan, you’ll appreciate this album, but will also concede that it’s not his best. However, if you’re one of the many who’s only real perception of the Man In Black was shaped entirely by Walk The Line, you won’t find any of the upbeat tracks like ‘It Ain’t Me Babe’, ‘Ring Of Fire’, and ‘I Walk The Line’ on Ain’t No Grave and probably won’t find it appealing in the slightest.

For me though, it’s a fitting end to the body of work that Cash recorded throughout his life and I’m glad I bought it, even though sometimes it makes me suicidal.

Final Verdict: 6/10

-ST

16
Mar
10

Are Women Getting Hotter With Every Decade?

By SlickTiger 4 Comments
Categories: Killer Posts
Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

It has been a theory of mine for some time now that women have gotten better and better looking over time. Just when you think they can’t get any sexier, BAM, another stunning supermodel seems to pop out of the woodwork, even more beautiful and unobtainable than the last.

Then again, maybe it’s just me, maybe I’ve just been brainwashed by the media to think Miss X, Y or Z is so incredible, when actually drop-dead gorgeous women have always existed, the only difference being which one the spotlight shines on, from what angle and after how much photo-shopping.

And so I approached the authority on such issues, Google Images, and started looking for pictures of ‘sexy’ women through the ages.

I started at 1900 and found the following gem:

 

 

Let me break down what we’re dealing with here. I see a woman with a strange-looking, skunk-like mop of hair for a hairstyle, reclining suggestively with a book, inches away from showing us a little nip, but thankfully keeping the PG rating of this pic at a 10.

This is the kind of girl who would make a great librarian, pre-school teacher or postal worker. All in all, I think she should go back to reading her book and pull up her dress for heaven’s sake! No need to scare the children.

Moving right along, here’s what 1920 yielded in the form of the first popular female actress to make it in Hollywood, Florence Lawrence:

 

 

Yeah, are we making any progress here? Yes? No? Sure, there is some kind of charm about her, but let’s be honest, if you passed her in the street would you give her a second look? I mean, besides to stare at her hat, which is making my balls shrivel up inside me.

I think this is what people mean when they describe a woman as ‘handsome’. She’s a handsome woman, ie. good-looking… for a man.

Just wait though, cause with 1950 comes good ol’ Marilyn Monroe, hooo-weeee!

 

Was Marilyn Monroe really the belter everyone makes her out to have been, or was she just the first attractive woman with enough confidence to be able to pose half-naked and make it look sexy?

What I’m seeing in this picture is a woman with smallish breasts, some pretty meaty thighs, a stomach she’s definitely sucking in for all it’s worth and a face that’s attractive the way your sister’s best friend was attractive back when you were 11. Then you realised her mustache was thicker than yours and never spoke to her again.

Let’s move onto 1970 shall we?

 

 

All of a sudden, things are starting to heat up a little. Meet Veruschka von Lehndorff, one of a dozen or so ‘supermodels’ that were popular in the 1960s and 1970s. Veruschka, with the right kind of make-up, lighting and wardrobe could easily nail an FHM front cover.

Still though, can she compare to modern-day beauties? Maybe not quite, but I’d say she’s damn close.

Then I stumbled on this picture of model Gia Carangi, who was big back in the late 70s and early 80s. They made a movie about her starring Angelina Jolie called Gia which, if you like seeing lots of Angelina’s naked body, is DEFINITELY worth watching.

 

 

Now THAT is a good-looking woman and one that is definitely comparable to any modern-day beauty. She was also one of the original ‘supermodels’ on the scene, but died tragically at 26 from AIDS, which she got from shooting heroin with dirty needles.

Still though, would you say she’s better or worse looking than a modern-day supermodel like say, Joanna Krupa, for example?

 

 

Or the woman who seems to be topping a lot of lists these days, Megan Fox?

 

After trawling the interwebs for literally hours to find pics to base this post on, the conclusion I’ve reached is that yes, women are getting hotter and hotter and it’s all thanks to the invention of the supermodel way back in the 60s and 70s.

Once supermodels came into existence, all of a sudden female perfection had a benchmark to measure itself against, and now women are not only getting hotter and hotter, but the mainstream media is flooded with images of them on an ever-increasing basis, causing untold damage to ordinary men and women alike, who do all manner of fucked up shit to either date women like this or become them.

Which is why sometimes you gotta take a step back from it all and realise that while these women might be incredible to look at, chances are they have really shitty personalities and are plagued with insecurities.

Bottom line is when you look that good you’re so used to getting your way and walking all over people that you think behaving like a sycophant is totally normal and acceptable.

I say let’s go back to a time before supermodels and celebrate what true female beauty is and so, I’d like to invite you in appreciating the following NSFW image with me of a woman from 1920 who has great breasts (if this is your gran, I’m sorry, but she had a great set and you should be proud of that).

 

 

The lesson here is not to let the mainstream media dictate your tastes. Instead, you should get into 1920s porn and not only will you be an INDIVIDUAL but you’ll also have a great conversation starter (and ender) at the next dinner party you attend.

All those girls in magazines, all the ones in the movies and on 50ft billboards, let that shit go. Look for beauty in the real world and when you find it, hold onto it, cherish it and you might just find something close to true happiness instead of shallow pleasure.

-ST

15
Mar
10

Short Story: Who The Fuck Is SlickTiger?

By SlickTiger 1 Comment
Categories: Short Stories
Tags: , , , , , ,

‘So yeah, this SlickTiger guy, he’s got a site, I read some of it the other day, it’s really crazy shit up there. Really crazy shit. I mean, reading it I feel like we’re connected somehow – does that sound fucking crazy to you?’

Dr Schmeizer shifts slightly in his chair, sighs and rubs his eyes.

‘Yes. That does sound fucking crazy to me.’

‘Um, are you allowed to say that?’

‘Say what?’

‘I dunno, swear at me during a consultation?’

‘Under normal circumstances, no.’

I start to say something, but the good doctor cuts me off, ‘But considering you come in here sprouting the same gobbledy-gook week after week, month after month since we started these sessions, and considering your total lack of progress during that time, I hardly think it matters what I say or don’t say.’

‘Yeah, but I pay you to be professional. I pay you a lot to give a shit.’

‘Do you know how many sessions we’ve had so far?’

‘Of course! I’m paying for them, of course I know…’

‘Ok, how many?’

‘Um…’ I cast my mind back. I get as far as about a month ago, I’m wearing my ‘The Internet Is A Fad’ shirt, driving here. Some guy in the traffic is waving furiously at me. Do I know this person? I’m swerving to avoid getting side-swiped by the crazy fucker.

No, it can’t be a month, it must be longer. I cast my mind back further. It’s like throwing a fishing line out there. I remember when I was a kid learning to fly fish, watching my dad, the long, slow motion of his line like an extension of his arm, the way the reel used to spin, making that zinging sound as it unravelled. I do the same in my mind, I cast a line way the fuck out there, the reel zings, then snags abruptly, cutting the line.

I watch as the line floats through the air, anchored to nothing. It sails over the opaque waters of my mind, and lands like a long, thin snake on the water.

It sinks.

‘Um…’ I say again, stalling for time, ‘like, about three months?’

The good doctor’s head slumps forward and he stares at me through his thick, heavy brows. This is a passive-aggressive gesture, he’s doing it to show me he’s pissed off. I’m always pissing someone off.

‘Try six months. September 28th, that’s when you first started coming here, do you remember that?’

Do I remember that? Sure, I think I remember that. I mean, if he remembers it then it happened right?

‘I dunno doc, I try not to sweat the details, things like that, they’re neither here nor there really, I say three months, you say six months. I mean, in the universal sense of time, does it matter? In the universal sense of you know, the way things work, is it really a big deal? I don’t think it is. This conversation, my life, your life, I think maybe we j-‘

‘I took the liberty of recording our last session.’

‘Eh?’

‘And if you don’t mind…’ The doc opens his desk drawer and pulls out a dictaphone. He hits play, I’m saying something, but he stops and fast forwards it, he’s saying something, he stops and fast forwards again. I’m saying something. Boy do I love the sound of my own voice.

‘I dunno doc, I mean, life’s too short to sweat the small stuff, y’know? Does it really matter how long it’s been?’

‘Humour me.’

‘Ok, phew, um…’ uncomfortable silence, broken only by the sound of me squirming in my chair, in the recording and in real life. ‘About 3 months?’

‘It’s been six months.’

‘What? Really, that long? Phwoar.’

‘Does that surprise you?’

‘Yes. No. A little. But really, in the bigger picture, is it really that important? I mean, in the universal sense of time, does it matter? In the universal sense of you know, the way things work, is it really a big deal? I don’t think it is. I could be wrong. But I don’t think it is…’

He hits the stop button. This profound silence hangs like a punching bag in the room.

‘You have a serious problem,’ he says, his hands doing that pyramid thing when people touch the ends of all their fingers together and move their palms forward and backward. I think this is supposed to have some kind of calming effect. It’s like watching lungs. Or a jellyfish.

‘Hahaha, okay, and it’s taken you six months to figure that out?’

‘Your memory is abnormally impaired. In most cases, once a number of weeks have elapsed, it seems you forget things completely. The people you’ve met, the things you’ve done. In other cases, it’s instant.’

‘Huh. You don’t say.’

‘It’s a rare condition, and I must admit, I’ve never seen it before. I’ve heard of it, but I’ve never seen it.’

‘Okay. That’s… fucking great…’

‘There are a number of psychiatric drugs we can put you on to try and improve your memory function and promote higher levels of concentration, I th-‘

‘What?! No fucking way. No drugs.’

‘You have a very serious problem and I really think what wou-‘

‘I didn’t come here to get dosed up to my eyeballs, what the fuck?! I came here so you could help me figure out why the fuck everyone thinks I’m someone I’m not!’

‘SlickTiger?’

‘Yes! Fucking SlickTiger! Who the fuck is SlickTiger? Why the fuck does everyone think I’m SlickTiger?’

Dr Schmeizer stares at me through his brows again. Man is this going well. He presses fast forward on the Dictaphone. The sound of the heads whirring inside, intricate mechanisms spinning, working like tiny insect bones inside the machine.

He hits stop. He hits play.

‘I’m not interested in your bullshit miracle cures! What the fuck?! I didn’t come here to get prescribed a bunch of bullshit drugs that are going to make all my fucking problems go away! I came here for answers! I came here to figure out if I’m losing my mind or not! I need to know that shit!’

‘You need to know what shit?’

‘I need to know who the fuck SlickTiger is!’

It’s like staring into a mirror reflecting a mirror, reflecting a mirror, reflecting a mirror…

‘It’s you. It’s always been you. You just don’t remember.’

I say ‘Holy shit’ at the same time the me on tape says ‘Holy shit’.

The good doctor hits stop. I slump back in my seat. Sandbagged.

‘So… does this happen every week?’

‘For the last four weeks, yes.’

‘And you think drugs will help me?’

‘Yes, it can’t hurt to try.’

I sigh. Do I want to go down that road? There’s a reason I’m forgetting all this stuff, do I want to know what that reason is? It feels like a bottomless can of worms.

‘Okay, I’ll try it, what the fuck. Why not.’

‘Excellent. And in the meantime, I need you to do me a favour.’

‘What, like a homework assignment? I’m not good with favours, I always forget the- oh yeah, you already know that.’

‘I want you to get off your lazy fucking ass and write something funny for fuck’s sake!’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Something funny! I don’t read your site everyday for this metatextual bullshit! I read it for the Klapping Gym Boet articles! Stop fucking around or I’ll go read some other site. LOL-cats or something. Maybe Motifake. Do you understand me?’

I understand him. And I know what I have to do.

‘You’re fucking fired,’ I say as I get up to leave.

‘You say that every week.’

‘Yeah, but this time I’m fucking writing it down!’

I storm out of his office, slamming his door hard behind me. What a fucking jerk. I can’t believe I’ve been going to him for such a long time. Three months totally wasted, what the fuck.

Outside I light up a smoke. It looks like it’s going to rain, did I do any washing? Maybe. But fuck the washing, I’ve got bigger fish to fry.

Like figuring out who the fuck this SlickTiger guy is.

Yeah… I think I’ll start there…

-ST

14
Mar
10

Sunday Post – 5pm and still haven’t made the bed

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

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

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