Pie in the Sky

Pic: The Walt Disney Company

My girlfriend and I almost never leave the house. Most of the time this suits us just fine, but we realised things might have got a little out of hand when we received the following invitation:

We were wondering if you and the lovely Janine might be available to come over for dinner this Thursday evening? I know you prefer to do your eating and drinking within the hermitage of your home but we would be happy for you to wear PJs.

Any claim to inaccurate characterisation disappeared in a hail of derisive snorts when we told my girlfriend’s son what had happened. The little bugger actually laughed out loud when we said we were going out. 

Clearly something had to be done - long-term. “Listen,” I said. “We don’t actually have to be normal. We just have to look normal. Sometimes. Like, leave the house. Do normal people stuff.”

The trouble is, it’s not as easy as it sounds when you essentially live in a cave and were raised by wolves. Even in my distant youth my cousins gave me a Gary Larson birthday card featuring a gorilla flapping its arms with the caption, “For Pete’s sake, Phil, can’t you just beat your chest like everyone else?” The truth is, neither my girlfriend nor I have any idea how to behave. When we’re alone, we don’t even bother with nouns or verbs most of the time. We communicate either in grunts or by creating rhyming nonsensical lyrics to the tune of my cellphone ring. We’re apparently terribly rude to each other from time to time (other people need to point it out: we think we get along great)*.

I don’t even blame us. It's not like we had role models. My parents are really happy, but their idea of a balanced marriage is one where the partners are equally insane. They are like Nell in her forest, wandering  around blissfully in a world of their own joys without really understanding that normal people don’t spend their lives balancing pillows on their heads for fun (true story) or playing adventure games during power cuts.

When Eskom was cursed far and wide during load shedding periods, the only people in the country who didn’t hold it against them were my parents. My parents eagerly awaited 8pm on Monday nights, which gave them an excuse to create a new adventure to pass the time. Some weeks it was pretending to live in another century. Some weeks they would haul out candles and flasks and pretend to be camping before gleefully scampering off to bed. And one particularly memorable night, my dad found himself stranded in the pitch dark on the other side of the house, with no glasses and no candle. Clearly there was only one solution for a sensible man.

“MAAAAARCOOOOOOO!” he yelled.

“POLO!” my stepmother hollered back, without skipping a beat.

So what exactly do normal people do? As far as examples go, you understand we are – literally – in the dark.

“I know!” my girlfriend cried, pointing a triumphant PW-finger in the air. “They go to markets!”

So began the long process of finding a market we could attend. We spent some weeks rolling out of our stupor at noon on a Saturday and realising the organic lettuces we’d fantasised about would be more verlep than Patricia Lewis’ hair in a snowstorm by the time we got on the road. Faced with repeated failure, we needed more drastic measures.

“A night market,” Girlfriend said darkly. “It’s the only way. ”

So we piled our struggling teenaged captive into the car and began our attempts to impersonate a normal family. That’s for laughing at us in our hour of uncoolness, we muttered. Voodoo the child with some market mojo.

The trouble is, either we misjudged our target, or normal people don’t effing go to markets. The first people we saw were a quartet of lesbians: two middle-aged and quiet as Quakers, two young, spiky-haired and very, very large. 

To be fair, plus-size lesbians are a sensitive subject for me, since I only recently spotted my own post-Spain cameltoe (a function of sloth and contentment, I suspect). But I nonetheless clawed my desperate way into non-identification and gawked. Because for as long as we watched the four of them, all they did, all night, was feed each other pies.

I don’t just mean they bought pies and offered each other a bite. I mean it was full-scale arm-wrestling shove-the-pie-in-the-face match. If these women were Springboks, they wouldn’t know their scrum from their lineout. Attack and defence mingled cruelly in an epic battle for survival between hand, face and pie.  The pies lost, but only just.

 

We looked around. The entire market was crawling with chewing hippies, shoveling edibles at each other.

“Oh my God,” Janine said. “Is this it? Is this what normal lesbians do? Go to markets and feed each other pies?”

“Yuh-huh,” I said. “Seems so.” 

So that was it for normality. At least our pointless activities are fun, we argued. And we went home and made up harmonies for our polyphonic ringtones. 

But we're working on our social life. Anyone fancy a flipped main switch and some Marco Polo?

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* Example: apparently normal people tell their partners how beautiful they are. We, on the other hand, take attraction as a given, although the assumption does sometimes backfire. Last night I made the fatal mistake of saying I cared more about Janine’s personality. This morning I was putting on my exercise clothes when she snorted and said, “Should you not be doing exercises for your inner beauty, baby? A gym for the soul?”

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** Update: Why does everyone think 'I care more about your personality' means 'You're ugly'? *shaking head* Obviously my girlfriend can never leave me, since anyone else would dump me in about 2.5 seconds for tactlessness. Actually I think she's 'n lekker warm stuk stert, but I wouldn't care if she wasn't. Or maybe I would. I don't know. We should test the theory. Try some of that pie, baby.

Baby, don’t hurt me no more

Being of a philosophical turn of mind, I often ask myself probing questions like: If whisky falls into my glass and nobody sees it, am I still drinking? Is hell really other people? Why do we eat tofu? And how much glitter is too much?

Lately, the seemingly mundane task of packing boxes has led my multi-faceted brain to ponder: what is love?

Is it the moment where you decide to spend your morning offering a removal company everything bar sexual favours to help you out on less than 24 hours’ notice because your drunk fool girlfriend didn’t call them two months ago when you first gave her the number?

Is it the moment where, surrounded by newspapers and other moving carnage, you applaud her warbling Lionel Richie impression across the hall floor because you know that if she does not do karaoke at least once a day something inside her will die, and it’s already 1am and she has not performed this life-giving ritual yet?

My girlfriend is very, very good at wasting time. She dances. She sings. She dismantles DVD players and makes cardboard mousetraps. She arranges layers of synthetic fuzz on my head and photographs it. (Really.) I have personally witnessed her sending over 700 pointless emails in less than a week. And when times are really tight, she pretends she’s a porn star or practises the moonwalk. She so good at making nothing happen that I have recently found myself in the hitherto unexplored role of being the organised half of the outfit, which is a little frightening because I pretty much have procrastination down to an art and have spent many Beckett-esque hours calculating exactly how much time I am wasting by calculating how much time I am wasting. Really, it is quite poetic: in a metaphysical, Russian doll, room-within-a-room kind of way you might almost say I had distilled time down to a living, kaleidoscopic mechanism, mapping its fractal dimensions on infinite loop. I mean if you think about it, Einstein got a kick in the absolutes for trying the same thing.

All of which is leading up to this: it’s been an unusually eventful week. Owing to our combined talents for spending endless, circular hours waking up, having a snack, sleeping off the snack, waking up, having another snack, sleeping off the snack, waking up, having a snack, sleeping off the snack (it’s like Groundhog Day for the greedy and slothful) – well, let’s just say time made fools of us. We woke up one week before Moving Day and realised nothing – nothing – had been done yet.

It’s not that we didn’t have good intentions. Every weekend since early autumn the conversation has gone something like this:

GF: Baby.
Me: Yes?
GF: It’s Sunday.
Me: So it is. I do like how we agree on everything.
GF: We do though.
Me: It is because we are always right.
GF: We are though.
Me (pause): Why did you tell me it was Sunday?
GF: Because it’s not Saturday.
Me: Good God, you’re amazing.
GF: I know though.
Me: What does this mean?
GF: It means we can’t go tile shopping. I will have no bathroom and we will not be able to bath.
Me: But we will be able to have snacks.
GF: You make everything light again, my dove.
Me: I do though. Let’s have a snack. * violin *
GF: Okay.
(Food materialises. Rainbow forms. Fade out.)

This is how our capacity to be productive, successful adults has been sucked away by an endless capacity for naps and mutual validation. I am reminded of the Collyer brothers, whose similar habits ended up in their being buried to death behind – among other things – a wall of old newspapers, folding beds and chairs, half a sewing machine, boxes, parts of a wine press, the frame of a baby carriage, a rake and some umbrellas. One was squashed under a makeshift booby trap he had designed himself to keep out nosy teenagers; the other died from the combined effects of malnutrition, dehydration, and cardiac arrest.

So this week, I decided something’s got to give. “Okay,” I said, all reassuring experience. “Let’s do it. It won’t take long. We just have to get started.” I have, after all, moved several times and usually managed it in record time, owing to Zen-influenced short cuts such as simply taking drawers out of their chests and walking with them just like that to the new place. It would be okay. We just had to motor.  I would bring dinner. She would buy masking tape. It would happen.

I had not counted on GF’s hitherto unsuspected – and apparently entirely random – leaning toward perfectionism.

“No!” she cried as I attempted to throw out an empty envelope dating back to 1998. “What do you mean I don't need that? Put it in. No, not that box, this one. No, not like that. Like this! Honestly woman, have you never packed an envelope before?”

The trouble with these bursts of control freakism is that they are both random and entirely unhelpful and, almost as though she has a tic of some kind, come bursting out at unpredictable intervals between equally unhelpful behaviour.

“No!” she screeched, as she Commodore-slid* her way down the hallway. “You can’t pack that underwear! It’s too wide!”

“Wait!” she yelled, as she rugby-tackled me and we went hurtling across the kitchen in a sudden – and apparently life-or-death necessary – attempt at reviving the traditional Sokkie. “You can’t put that jacket in there like that! It’s shiny!” And then, as I moved to take it out: “No, you can’t do that now. We’re busy. We’re dancing now. Move your pelvis more. Keep the shoulders still.”

True story.

The funny thing about all of this is that I swear she spent half the morning last week complaining  - in outrage - that her son, late on his way to an exam, had interrupted her lecture on the importance of education to say: “Look at me dancing, Mommy! Every day I’m shuff-ell-ing! Look!”

“Why?!” she wailed in despair. “Where does the child come from? Where did I go wrong?”

Which begs another probing question. Should I tell her?

* She actually did do this; and spent a further ten minutes berating me for not fully appreciating the how smoothly she executed said Commodore-slide. Because, she pouted, I was too focused on the stupid boxes.