Perspective

Devil's Peak from the Woodstock writing desk of my content: It's the MOST beautiful day in ALL the world; summer gets closer and closer, the days get longer, much longer.

Listening to Heinrich Schütz's, Die Himmel erzählen die Ehre Gottes, SWV 386: In essence, all glory to God. Seems pretty apt as I post this photo.

On another note, which reminds us that Mordor is never far away, the Chilean Government has just recently announced that they are suspending this year’s UN Climate Talks, They were scheduled to take place in Santiago next month.

They have blamed the suspension on the protests that have been wracking the country’s streets these past few weeks. 

"But instead of derailing it, the protests get at the very heart of what global climate talks should be addressing: the huge and expanding gap between the rich and poor, the fact that so many people are denied their basic rights, and an economy that prioritizes big business and polluters over the needs of everyday people." - www.350.org

Inequality fuels the climate crisis, which in turn fuels inequality. This is a vicious cycle that must be broken... but in our lifetimes? It's a struggle to not let oneself be overwhelmed by negativity and cynicism. 

Nevertheless, I continue to sign the petitions.

Black & White and Green & Gold

The arrival, last Sunday of what has now been a week-long cold front: endless downpours roaring and thrashing their way through Woodstock... even the dumping of snow somewhere in our province. 

It was a wonderfully moody coffee-drinking-and-book-reading-filled Sunday afternoon.

Now, as I type these words at exactly 13h00 today, Cape Town erupts in a cacophony of hooters and sirens: South Africa is the 2019 world rugby champions!

As trite as it may sound, this country needed something, this, some good news for a change; the last decade has seen the barrel scraped of its last dregs. There's almost nothing left.

Between storms

Between storms: It was a magnificent day, last Saturday, to enjoy Cape Town after having been away for so long, and to end it with a long anxiety-fee walk through the Company's Garden... 

Wasn't it a Zen master who said that if you sit still for long enough (on a bench in a garden), the world will surely come to you, or, ha-ha, at least past you?

Into the storm

"What am I doing here, what is the point of these smiles and gestures? My home is neither here nor elsewhere. And the world has become merely unknown landscape where my heart can lean on nothing. Foreign – who can know what this word means?"

- Albert Camus, from Notebooks, 1935-1942

Because of the weather, the plane could not land at its first attempt. It took another restless, anxious twenty minutes of circling above the storm and the peninsula before the second, successful attempt. You can run but you can't hide... somewhere along the line, there's a landing. Or an Icarus-like fall from the sky because your fuel is up.

Into the storm: fat, wind-swept droplets spattering my lenses. On the unprotected walk from the back of the plane and into the safety of the airport. I relished gulping in deeply the fresh, bracing ozone-filled air.

Home. 

Every single one of my rescue orchids but one had flowered in my absence. A shot of joy to my heart not unlike adrenalin.

Stale air.

The winter weather of my content.

To unpack for a Friday evening alone at home on the couch surrounded by books, a frosted wine glass and, also, roasted & salted plump peanuts and raisins instead of leaving the flat for a restaurant meal, or to refill the kitchen cupboard.

While the storm raged against the glass like a plague of fat flies trying desperately to get in..

No-man's land

I leave Durban for home on Friday. But only after being warned by weather reports and the pilot of the storm we'll be flying into.

Entering the plane is for me the welcome entry into the no man's land between worlds... "the area between opposing armies and trench lines".

Consciously entering the time capsule of the plane, where my body and mind is locked in and buckled up, followed by my instant body-wide relief as the wifi and my ability to make calls is cut, just like that.

That is the moment when I'm at my most relaxed and deeply immersed in my happy place of mostly solitude and silence.

Except for the noise in my head.

It's a time for processing and introspection as I'm left with nothing but my emotions and thoughts and, in turn, my reactions to those.

I've been away for a month and it's time to join the dots, which some may call staring into the abyss; I no longer fear the abyss and welcome gripping its edge at every opportunity.

Two worlds, often more.

Rather the noise in my head, than the world's... at least mine goes silent with time and reflection.

Heading home and into the perfect storm.

Blue sky illusions

From Mpumalanga province and it's sweltering bushveld to subtropical but drought-stricken KwaZulu-Natal and Durban.

Durban. Childhood-friendly and childhood-embracing Durban.

For a conference on the very edge of the Indian Ocean, and a gobsmacking view from the 11th floor of a hotel that was always on my horizon as a kid, but seemed impossibly accessible.

Friendly, expansive people. If that's what's called 'provincials', then I'm much happier in the provinces, and with them.

Finished the 'paper; with an hour and a half to go before presenting it; I'm no longer one for stress, not even when it's self-perpetuated. I'm not that gung-ho student working through the night on caffeine or booze anymore, thankfully.

Then, but only then, could I relax, walking kilometres along the beachfront, on golden sea sand and in the pleasant water of this ocean, which is so different to the ocean I tentatively experience at home: icy, frigid and reeking of plankton and seaweed.

Here not only is the air different and laden with subtropical exotics but is reminiscent of growing up barefoot, with bubblegum and ice cream splattered on the scorching tarmac, seagull shit too, in what was a (seemingly) safe and secure world. For sum. Most definitely not for all.

Sunshine. Seagulls. Summer. Sea and sand.

Long walks down going nowhere piers and (seemingly) endless horizons.

Colour blue.

No thoughts of the climate crisis, sharks, SPF50, Isis or Trump.

Just like when we were kids.

Evaporated place and/or Genius loci

I arrived here late on Tuesday afternoon, 1 October. The start of 'the residency'.
I'm a 1,800 km from 'home' and where I work.
Yet, I'm only now really at home. That is home without inverted commas.
Also, I note, my last post on here was just over two months ago. Which was, also, about here. Also, between when I was here and now here again, I was here, too, a month ago. That's four times I've been home (i.e. here) thus far this year.

Here/home is both a geographical and physical space as well as an emotional and intellectual space. That's an awful lot of weight given to place.

Yes, place.

Andreas Vogler writes that "[i]n Roman mythology a Genius loci was the protective spirit of a place. In contemporary usage, "genius loci" usually refers to a location's distinctive atmosphere, or a "spirit of place".

Václav Cílek makes a similiar point in his blog post of six years ago, and by the same title, Genius loci: that "[a] smaller place with which we resonate is more important then a great place of pilgrimage, where one is only a visitor." He calls this "a rule of resonance". I totally get him. I come home to my place of resonance for these among other reasons (more about this in posts still to come).

My place. In the humblest and ego-stripped sense.

*

Other than a burglar alarm sounding outside, closeby and right now, and as unusual as this may be for here, it's perfectly peaceful.
I'm writing this outside.
Got here at about 16h00.
The weeks and days between me leaving here a month ago and returning have evaporated like dew after the dawn.

I stopped at the Middelburg Shell Ultra City on the N4 Toll Route for a quick bite and a pee, also to celebrate that I'm over the halfway mark of the sometimes monotonous drive - even though it's only three hours from Joburg.

Then, another stop, this time at Milly's just before Machadodorp, for a ritual Seattle cafe mocha at a table I sat at for many years when I lived out here fulltime. And wrote fulltime for a living.

The further eastwards I drove from Johannesburg the icier and moodier the weather became, not that I was complaining. I had to put on more clothes.

Now, it's dark. And very moody.
And cold, very cold, indeed icy like in the middle of winter.
I predict rain, I pray for rain. The terrain here is still lion khaki and winter brittle, like a tinderbox.

The alarm has stopped.
A dog barks every now and then, but languidly and in the far distance.
A car or a truck, I think, somewhere in the distance too.

Birdsong. Peace. Quiet. Calm. As the evening draws in beneath a low-hanging elephant-grey sky.

A train's hooter - sharp, shrill, unexpected - in the shunting yards below the town. For me it's an always-welcome sound and a reminder of this town's fascinating railway history.

Today, 1 October, I've begun a writer's residency, in my mind and life at least. It's complicated.

I long for my bed. It will be my first night of full, deep sleep in a while. Thankfully I'd not packed away the electric blankets like I'd originally planned to when I left here a month ago.

Now to pack out some wood in my unique formula, with some charcoal, then to set the fire alight, to pour a glass of wine and to pull the throw tight around me.

It's good to be alone. With my thoughts. And with my God.

This is unexpected weather at this time of year: I'm wearing a tatty vest, two t-shirts over each other, a chunky pullover, my winter pyjama pants, socks, sandals. And the throw.

I'm extraordinarily happy despite my tiredness.

When I'd arrived I had locked myself indoors and in silence. So as to settle in and to decompress me. Thus to begin the process of meeting me, so as to be at peace with myself, and with this beautiful home, this place, which I so adore, in which I'm so at peace.

I'm stoked to be here.
Alone.
And beneath the radar.

Brutal, honest and blunt: Charles (bloody) Bukowski

Not one died. I know now - after being away two years in a row at this time of the year - that my flat-full of plants can survive at least two weeks without and spoonfeeding. Summer would be a different story.

Rutter's Requiem: III. Pie Jesu. I turn up the volume, rewind, play, rewind, and play again. One of my favourites. Takes my heart up somewhere high; maybe, rather use the word lofty, Charles? Spotify; I'm on a three-month free trial; so far so good.

Maybe I'm buzzing these last two weeks because I've a muse in my life who doesn't yet know he's a muse. Intensely blue and beautiful eyes. Germanic features. A goofy smile. A highly disciplined mind that also burns with an intense brightness, and superb intelligence.

Much happened, actually, and without me necessarily consciously aware of it at the time, during those potent two weeks in my Mpumalanga hideaway. It's a reminder of why I must overcome the initial resistance to leaving these overflowing, intensely distracting and luring fleshpots of Cape Town.

Every morning I had time with God in the front room of the house, which used to be a verandah. It's where the sun rose over the koppies and trees in front of the house, at about 08h00 this time of the year, and poured like liquid apricot over my head, shoulders, lap, then pages, finally my legs.

Morning birdsong. Also, sometimes the believe-it-or-not comforting sound of a chainsaw - confirmation that this is a deeply rural setting, not the city - in the near distance. Also, sometimes, a train en route to Maputo screeching (steel-on-steel) in the valley's shunting yard, in this town famous for its rail origins.

It's warming up, my hands are no longer chilled and sore from the cold; yesterday and last night were icy. Today's temperature has risen by a sharp 5 degrees; that's what I love about Cape Town: the cold fronts have a passionate arrival, but then just as quickly move northwards, and westwards, to torment the rest of the country, quite often dumping snow on the mountains between us and the rest.

I've the flat sliding door wide open so as to welcome in the warmth and glare reflected off of the shiny and also rusted corrugated iron roofs of Woodstock.

Just before heading 'home' late in June I'd serendipitously picked up a copy of Charles Bukowski's novel Women lying, literally, across my path. He's another favourite writer of mine.

I'd started reading the work immediately but had somehow been revolted by his coarse but awfully impactful writing. I had thought it would make great reading for the two-hour flight to Joburg and back again. I decided against it. I wanted to get it back to the library ASAP.

I've picked it up again and am devouring it. I'm ready for its nuggets now. I'm learning much, also laughing lots, making pencil notes on the pages, turning the corners to mark fascinating pages. I will get my own copy though, maybe even later today. That's if I even venture out.

Bukowski is revoltingly larger than life character, which is why he constantly has to appear in his own writing (there's nowhere else to put him); though he makes no effort at all to pull punches about himself.

Breathtakingly brutal. Repugnantly honest.

(The days are lengthening.)

Long & winding road

I'm back in Cape Town. Three weeks, about, have passed since my last post here. At the start of the uni vac, I'd been invigorated into believing that just maybe I'd be able to write a post every day, especially since most of the time I'd be alone, in my home space in Mpumalanga, far away from the countless distractions of this city's fleshpots.

It was not to be. I was busier than ever, just with different things to do in a starkly different place.

I was there, mostly alone, for two weeks.

I managed to work in the garden. And to remember what it feels like to walk barefoot on the wet lawn, something I once took for granted. No longer, since I'm living on the sixth floor of an apartment block.

I also realised how pale and insipid my skin was, untouched by the sun. I lay on the lawn reading, turning over like a rotating lamb spit so as to absorb vitamin D all over my body.

Tingling with life, I relished lying there in the winter sun and walking barefoot around the garden and in the house.

I did mostly complete my daily three-page Morning Pages sessions which I've been doing regularly since April 2002 when I was gifted Julia Cameron's The Artists Way.

Also took long walks at the end of the day and on the outskirts of the town, along the road past the hospital towards where the tar peters out, close to the escarpment edge and where the forests begin. I walked at this time, and on the outskirts, to minimise my possible exposure to people.

The veld was lion coloured and in many places had been scorched black, as is natural at this time of the year.

*

I've just poured myself a glass of red wine.

It's Friday evening: chilly, moody and wintry, also I've gratefully airplane-moded my phone. A reprieve, for sanity's sake, and for my peace. I'm swimming calmly in a pool of warm light at my writing desk. Devil's Peak has been disappeared into the winter's night; there are only the orange lights of Woodstock between me and the dark smudge - above the last line of street lights - that was The Mountain.

*

I made a roaring fire outside every single night of the two weeks that I was there, but for one night. I sat outside until the flames were scorching embers, before I braaied meat, eating straight off the grill. And drank wine. And read. And thought. And turned out the lights, so as to savour the red-heart embers and the southern sky diamond-packed with stars.

While there I got even more to grips with the monk, Thomas Merton. I've been lured to him many times over as many years but never took the bait. I'm not sure what this time around inspired me to search for his bestselling 1948 autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain at the uni library, which I still have in front of me despite having finished it before I headed northwards for my simple house, 1,800 km from where I sit.

Merton has inspired me both as a writer and a writing contemplative.

"And you began to get some of the feeling of the bigness of America, and to develop a continental sense of the scope of the country and of the vast, clear sky, as the train went on for mile after mile, and hour after hour. And the color, and freshness, and bigness, and the richness of the land! The cleanness of it. The wholesomeness. This was new and yet it was old country. It was mellow country. It had been cleared and settled for much more than a hundred years.
When we got out at Olean, we breathed its health and listened to its silence (Harcourt Brace & Company, 1998: 219)."

More about Merton later.

Women; and Charles B the poet of Los Angeles

Just walked past a battered copy, not unlike his face, of Charles Bukowski's novel 'Women', left behind by some or other lazy student on a shelf at the uni library.

I grasped it, opened it to the introduction by Barry Miles, read two lines, then - promptly and gleefully -borrowed it.

I was introduced, quite randomly, to Bukowski in Prague in the dark, moody but Christmasy November of 2014.

Somewhere along the line, during the many hours I'd spent holed up in the city's (awesome) Globe English bookstore & cafe, I'd come across and then left with Barry Miles' 2009 biography of Bukowski.

This volume I'd just as promptly devoured, hanging onto Miles' every word, even before my return flight to Cape Town had landed a day or two later.

I've been a fan ever since, especially savouring his short stories but still to acquaint myself with his poetry.

He's hardcore!

What follows is the first paragraph of Miles' introduction in the novel (Virgin Books: 2009) I've just borrowed, and again, I love every word, which both titillates and inspires me:

"Charles Bukowski was the poet of Los Angeles. Not the LA of ranch homes in the Hollywood Hills with the breathtaking views of the glittering chequerboard of lights, the swimming pools, palm trees and sports cars lined up in the drive, but the LA of tarnished dreams, of dead-end jobs, of hookers and workers in the sex industry, of beaten down, damaged, dysfunctional people. His people. He loved old Hollywood: the cheaply built bungalows shaken by the freeways, dead palm trees and cracked sidewalks, overflowing garbage cans, cars up on blocks, the neighbours' TVs blaring through open windows, screams in the night and police helicopters circling overhead. He loved the corner bars, the tawdry fast-food outlets, the sex shops and brothels, the graffiti on walls and thick steel security bars on the shop fronts and liquor stores. It was his city." 

Yes, it was his people and his city.

Both of these men, Bukowski and Miles, know how to write.

Brisk

Walked across the city after a day cooped in a convention centre.

Streets, of winter, relatively quiet.

I then walked up the pedestrian avenue, a broad knife's edge between the back of Parliament and the Company's Gardens; it felt bleak, ugly, unusually so.

There are always many homeless folks around because it's a free space, and understandably a space within which to find respite from a harsh city.

This late afternoon they were especially conspicuous to me because many were already covered like mummies with their blankets against the cold and night.

The nights must seem endless to them.

Was almost sorry I walked that way.

Then, I looked up and saw the Centre for the Book in the descending gloom. And took a photo.

Before walking on to the Kimberley Hotel bar for a glass of wine that became two.

Even as soon as I took the first sip I was sorry that I'd dropped in there, that I'd not gone on home. I suppose, though, that I just did not fancy being more alone than I already was.

Not that I sought company.

Lower Main Road, Woodstock

Winter nudges closer. With it, the welcome change for me in the less harsh light. Also, are interesting and unusual cloud formations. This is as increasingly hostile cold fronts push up from Antarctica and ravage the Peninsula, before sweeping northwards and eastwards over the country, quite often bearing snow.

Even closer to home, it's also that time of the year when the odd, slender and sleekly-black millipedes escape my pot plants and haphazardly crisscross my floor going God alone knows where. At first, I put them back where I thought they belong. Then I realised that I know nothing about the behind-the-scenes machinations inspiring their actions and that, rather, I should stop meddling. Because I'm quite helpless, but nevertheless in awe, before the 'algorithms', formulas and miracles that wire our magnificent world.

It's not unlike how I've, also, let go of my fear and dread around the climate change spectre; it's really too late, I believe, to effect change, although I'll do my best, and trust somehow I do, that everything is exactly as it's meant to be. And I don't mean that fatalistically, but rather faithfully. (I strive with all of my might to not let my heart be troubled, worrying has never got me anywhere.)

From my writing table, as always, the handsome charcoal and white Edwardian facade above the District Six Meat Market on the corner of Lower Main road and Devon street draws my eye. As is often the case, on the electricity wires rigged between the old silver-painted street poles, a haphazard flock of dark-jacketed pigeons perch as if at a convention for serious-minded undertakers.

A seagull brilliant white, in contrast, with wings widespread soars in sheer gracefulness across my window view, quickly followed by another one, its partner?

Then an unexpected gap in the hum of the traffic, which is just as suddenly filled with a seagull shriek. Followed by the deep attention-grabbing clarion call of a minibus taxi as it scavenges the streets for passengers; these are the most informal bottom feeders of the city's transport system, often dangerous, always effectively uber regular.

I reign my gaze back inwards:

This is my sixth year in Woodstock. I'm happy here, much more so than I believe I would be elsewhere in much of Cape Town. Woodstock - harsh and rough, but real - is certainly not the bourgeois suburbia of the Southern Suburbs, nor of the Atlantic Seaboard. Well not yet at least... but make no mistake, they're working (hard) on it.

I'm still alive

Sitting in a small pool of warm light on my mattress on the floor.

Surrounded by quiet and by books, my May Day reading, and a bottle of cheap red wine and a tumbler.

I bought the plonk last night at a garish yellow on the street bottle store in Rondebosch; a friend coerced me into going with her in the rain to her favourite and extremely cheap Italian restaurant

Because they don't have a licence you're encouraged to buy whatever booze you want with your meal at the dodgy store next door. Which we did. She was so proud, like a child, of how cheap the wine was, R39 for this bottle, which she strongly recommended, that I felt compelled to buy it.

And then to drink it, over a flickering candle, just her and I alone in the restaurant, as the rain came down on a busy, even turbulent Main Road: minibus taxis honking and plying their trade in the dark, last minute pre-public holiday shopping at Pick 'n Pay and the fast food joints, people scurrying frantically between shops and across the busy road as if it was Friday night, students darting mostly alone into the liquor store to get their cheap booze for wherever they were heading, or for whoever they would soon be romancing.

That was last night.

Now, from all of the seven or so kilometres away from the Mouille Point lighthouse I know myself to be, I hear it's mournful foghorn sounding right across the city bowl; Moaning Minnie she's known as; I'm strangely comforted and snuggle deeper into both myself and the futon.

Then suddenly - it's the grinding of steel-upon-steel that makes strangers to my home lookup wide-eyed ("what's that?") - another train screeches-and-grinds to a long-lasting halt on the iron tracks in front of my building. It's the dangerous no man's land that separates Woodstock from, firstly, the highway into town, and then the harbour. The train is either going to the city's main station, not far away, or 180 degrees in the opposite direction to Simonstown.

Curious about the fog I pad across the flat to my front window. It's silently, and wonderfully, not slowly, seeping across the city and into the suburb.

Down below, Argyle Street, directly in front of me, remains a brightly lit artery on the x-ray sheet before me. Brightly lit for now, and very pretty.

I wince from the pain in my back and chest; my ribs were cracked when I was mugged at Easter.

Panoptican

Had dinner with a friend on the weekend. Caught myself staring into the fire a few times, and supper was a subdued affair, compared to our normal.

His father died unexpectedly last year. One of his coping mechanisms has been to throw all caution to the wind and to travel at short notice and with his now depleted savings.

After some wine, he told me that his hair was falling out and that he was extremely anxious about it. He had been looking particularly dishevelled of late, I hadn't realised exactly why. Stress?

After supper, he played at his piano and sang. That's when he came alive again as I know him.

My mug of tea is cooling, I'm not sure why I made it. It's a distraction. To fill the long spaces between me doing, accomplishing anything. Just as logging into the app every time, in case some stranger has messaged me. It's a distraction, from what I should be doing.

Not so much at the back of my mind, I dread that call that will alert me to my mother's or father's death. Of course, I may die before them but I don't wish that on them either. Statistically speaking, they will die before I do.

We are, all, essentially, alone. No matter what we try to fill our lives with, or choose as our distraction/s.

The south-easter is pummeling the city and thrusting a thick tablecloth of cloud over Table Mountain. With it, suddenly, is a smell of fire. It's tinderbox season now that it's late in the summer. The dryness combined with the ferocious wind fire on the mountain slopes is a real threat.

In the space that I find myself here at my desk at home, I also mourn the connection between me and once dear friends that have been unexplainably severed. As strong as the wind is, those memories and thoughts, their ghosts, are impervious to it and glue to me and my clammy skin on this insipid day.

What does, however, give me joy is the countless rusted, colourful tin roofs of Woodstock down below. It has become my hood, blissfully unpretentious. For now.

A helpless world of idiots

Last night the south-easter continued raging, torrenting thick and turbulent cloud over The Mountain and into the City Bowl.

So much so that it prevented the 16-deck 93‚000-ton cruise ship MSC Musica from docking from Thursday until early this Saturday morning - when the Cape Doctor halted as suddenly as it had started.

Cape Town Magazine explains to the uninitiated that the up to 160 km/h speeding Cape Doctor is the local name for the strong [read ferocious!] south-eastern wind – also known as South-Easter - that blows from False Bay and funnels through to Cape Town and Blouberg.
Then the sun finally set behind the basin between the edge of Table Mountain, on the corner where the cable car trundled 4 million visitors up and down its predominantly quartzitic sandstone 'wall' - laid down between 510 and 400 million years ago, it is the hardest, and the most erosion-resistant layer of the Cape Supergroup - and Lion's Head.

It was a glorious sunset, unreservedly impossible to capture by camera as usual, despite that, I never stop trying.

I'm reading, or rather I'm being swept along by, or, perhaps, devouring better describes it(?) Henry Miller's 1941 Greek travelogue 'The Colossus of Maroussi', which I found in the chilly, mostly neglected basement of the University of Cape Town's Main Library a week ago.

His description of a Greek a sunset is much better than both my attempt or, a thousand photographs:

"We sat on deck watching the sinking sun. It was one of those Biblical sunsets in which man is completely absent. Nature simply opens her bloody, insatiable maw and swallows everything in sight. Law, order, morality, justice, wisdom, any abstraction seems like a cruel joke perpetrated on a helpless world of idiots."

This morning the scene from my 'deck' is a starkly different one, so much so that I draw what flimsy excuses I have for curtains: calico drops.

Woodstock's subdued in ugly, bleak sunshine. The traffic on Lower Main is also subdued, sporadic. A dog barks half-heartedly. Bleak, barren, dishevelled. It's ingloriously rundown. The rusted corrugated iron roofs are like the deep red-soil gashes of some of my favourite places in the north of the country. There, on the other side of Pretoria, and in the deep bushveld of the Northern Province.

Saturday morning books & blues

I begin this year, putting down on a virtual page of an electronic notebook, with three pointers - actually far more than mere pointers for me - that have serendipitously crossed my path and shortcircuited a lay line in my mind:

* Write about what really interests you, whether it is real things or imaginary things, and nothing else.
- Clive Staples (C.S.) Lewis

Why the above triggers me is because, in all honesty, I have hardly ever dared to write about what really interests me, presses me; perhaps it's because, firstly, I don't have balls... and, secondly, because of my mom and dad still being alive. I certainly hope, and fear, that freedom will only come when they die.

* Every time you do something that comes from your needs for acceptance, affirmation, or affection, and every time you do something that makes these needs grow, you know that you are not with God. These needs will never be satisfied; they will only increase when you yield to them.

- Henri Nouwen 

With reading Nouwen's words above (I'm ploughing through his works, as well as a biography about him) I'm struck by the realisation that my lifespan consists of layers upon layers of automatic behaviour that I no longer even interrogate-analyse; it's empty - and energy- and emotion-sucking - actions in perpetual scan/search mode, but never ever finding satisfaction, except momentarily, and mostly sexual. But, nevertheless, empty. And meaningless. Surely, by now, surely, I can intellectually acknowledge that I'm quite simply wasting my time, that it's going nowhere. And never will.

* I believe that writers, unless they consider themselves terribly exquisite, are at heart people who live by night, a little bit outside society, moving between delinquency and conformity. 

- Guillermo Cabrera Infante

While 'in public' I will almost definitely argue that I don't need an excuse for being who I am, I do know that - naturally, like for most of us mortals - that my upbringing, my school education and growing up in the apartheid state fucked me up six-nil. Nevertheless, while I take full responsibility for who I am and where I find myself, it's good to know that despite an implanted chip that tries it's damndest to programme me into conformity, I am anything but a conformist.