No Bubbly for You? Really? How About a Nice Glass of Festive Bile?

Hot on the heels of Christmas comes New Year. And New Year, if it is at all possible, is even more of a nightmare to me than Christmas. This is probably owing to my history of chronological New Year nightmares.

Allow me to elaborate:

Age 0 – 14: Compulsory attendance of annual OAP party in the company of my mother. I would probably really enjoy this party today, since I merrily released my inner OAP the second I turned 22 and have nurtured her with knitting wool and a steady supply of gin and tonics ever since. But back then, it was bad. Reeeal bad.

Age 15: Got caught in the Twilight Zone (read: a nightclub in the Northern Suburbs) after a series of unfortunate events. Got thrown out at 3am after punching a boy with big ears who got Fresh. Attempted to pull tequila drip out of trainwrecked friend’s arm and drag her to safety. She was alternately vomiting in an alley and kissing a man with a mullet and handlebar moustache. Walked 17km to the nearest shopping centre. Slept in public toilet.

Age 16: House party with a boy who spoke in a fake Scottish accent.

Age 17: London. Did not go to Trafalgar Square. Stayed in and watched House Party 1, 2 and 3 on hotel room TV.

Age 18: Millenium party. Friend Bradley thinks it’s funny to tell me it’s a Latino-themed fancy dress. It is not. (That is, neither Latino, nor funny.) Rock up in sister’s Spanish dancing outfit from when she was aged 10, artfully pinned to fit over no-longer-ten-year-old ass. Complete with castanets. Host’s drunk 13-year-old sister vomits on my shoes.

Age 19: Invite 2 friends for dinner. Kick them out at 9pm. Sleep till 5pm on 1 Jan. Best new year I ever had, except the one I spent in a small-town bar, teaching my brother-in-law a rather garbled version of the tango to Tom Jones on karaoke. Other bar guests included a man in full Scottish traditional wear, including kilt and bagpipes, and a middle-aged lady spraypainted turquoise-silver and dressed in a refuse bag.

Age 20: Get stranded in the home of 15 Thai chefs, none of whom speak English. Cut a slip from their basil plant. Walk home. Plant basil plant. Wait for it to grow.

Look, I could take you through the next ten years, but I think you’ve heard enough. Besides, it’s not actually the vomiting 13-year-olds or overcrowded street parties that bring out the worst in me. It’s the resolutions.

So this year, I challenge you to shake your fists at the heavens. Can the self-help books. Hurl the Nicorettes out of the window. Stick your tongue out at snooty shop assistants. Give your jiggling thighs a fond pat. Ditch the stupid street parties and tear up the To Do lists.

And in that spirit, here are 8 New Year’s Resolutions that will make me block my ears and sing LALALALALALA if anyone suggests them.

1. I will be more punctual.

This is the most pointless resolution I ever made, yet I make it every year. Why? I ask myself. I was simply born without a sense of urgency, and no amount of hammering will instil it. My girlfriend recently set fire to my kitchen, and even as the flames licked merrily away at the contents of my home, the conversation went like this:

GF: Oh dear, it’s burning. Do you think we should put water on it?

M-Squeeze: No, I think it’s an electric fire.

GF: (stops and thinks) How about a towel?

M-Squeeze: Good thinking. (ambles off to hunt for towels. Has some trouble finding a set she doesn’t mind burning. Some minutes later):

GF: Sweetheart? Are you bringing those towels? It’s just that there’s a fire.

M-Squeeze: Oi! Don’t rush me!

My attitude was met with similar waves of disbelief when the office fire alarm went off earlier this year, and I stopped to fetch a pillow and a cup of tea on my way out, reasoning that we didn’t know how long we would have to wait outside and thinking it would all be better with somewhere comfortable to lie and a nice cuppa.

Conclusion: Person who does not rush to leave a burning building will never, ever be on time.

2. I will exercise more.

I bring this up not for myself, but for those pesky January exercisers who clog up my gym every summer and force me to get up an hour earlier just to beat rush hour. This resolution is useless to me because I already exercise a lot, and it’s useless to everybody else because they won’t stick to it. I know this, because my sister and I breathe a sigh of relief every February as we claim our machines back. It is with waves of extreme resentment that I greet the New Year’s Resolution crowd every January. With every minute I spend queuing for a treadmill or hopping anxiously from foot to foot as I wait for a lane in the pool, I ache to wander up to those no-good fly-by-nights and say: “You know you’re not going to be here in two weeks’ time. So please just f**k off off my treadmill and out of my gym, and leave the rest of us in peace.” If only gyms managed their queues by giving loyal members frequent flyer miles and sending the rest to the back of the line. That'd learn 'em.

Conclusion: People who start exercising on New Year are merely responding to Christmas-related pudding guilt. Lightweights. Send them packing.

3. I will stop smoking.

Ha! I put this in to be sneaky. Because actually, I have stopped smoking. Nananananananana.

Conclusion: I am awesome.

4. I will drink less and eat a healthy diet.

Doing this at the beginning of the year is very poor thinking. Rather detox in February. It’s the shortest month. Also, if you drink less, you may not be able to quit smoking. I have it on good authority that the best way to quit smoking is to replace cigarettes with gin and carrots. (Gin for the pain, carrots for the oral fixation.)

Conclusion: If you're set on being a hero, pick your battle.

5. I will get organised and stop spending money on avoidable catastrophes.

In my case, this would probably mean restricting myself to fewer than 12 car crashes per year. Unfortunately this, too, is never going to happen. I am the worst driver I have ever seen. In the last two months, I have crashed my car four times, locked my car keys in the boot once, accidentally taken the radiator cap off and overheated in peak hour while needing the loo (this falls under the heading of most uncomfortable human experiences possible), buggered the bearings by driving with a broken oil pump, and driven into 2 electric gates. This is not counting last year’s mishaps, which included my car exploding on Kloof Street, resulting in the entire street being shut down as police, photographers and ambulances gathered round. True to form, when black smoke came out of my air vents, I thought “That’s odd” and kept driving until I started coughing. It was then that I noticed the flames on the bonnet and took a moment to hunt for my 1988 Fine Young Cannibals cassette under the seat before stepping out of the vehicle, surveying the burning engine and saying, rather succinctly I thought, “Oh dear.” (See point on punctuality.)

Conclusion: Some people are just accident-prone. Don't fight it; budget for it.

6. I will be nicer to people.

I’m all for being nice. But really, if people are nice to you, chances are you are already nice to them. And as for the others? At the ripe old age of 28, I’ve realised that some people – no matter how hard you try to like them – will just always make you want to smack them in the head. These people are best dealt with by turning up the volume on your MP3 player every time their lips move. That way, you can pretend they are saying things like, “I love you. Have a cookie. You’re amazing. I am a hairy pickled tax collector. Can I make you coffee?” It’s the only way. Trust me.

Conclusion: You need a better MP3 player.

7. I will not be a spendthrift.

If you do not allow yourself luxuries, you will not be able to buy a better MP3 player. This means you will have to listen to people speaking, and in turn may find yourself becoming mean and toxic through sheer exposure. Thereby breaking one of the most important humanitarian New Year’s Resolutions, and costing yourself a lifetime of potential amusement. Now ask yourself: can you afford to go there? CAN YOU?

Conclusion: You still need a better MP3 player.

8. I will drop a dress size.

No you won’t (see point on exercise). Save yourself the angst. Just take your skinny clothes to the Salvation Army and go shopping.

Conclusion: You, too, can combine good karma with an investment in your mental health. All for the price of one more cookie (preferably offered to you by your former enemy). 

It's our time, people. So seize the earmuffs. Snooze the day. Be a party pooper. For we shall inherit the inert.

Viva!

A Public Grinching.

Good day, world. It has been a while.

Violence is on the increase; road deaths have spiked; everybody’s broke, bad-tempered and feeling fat; shopping malls have turned from merely unpleasant sweat-pits into mimicking the deepest bowels of child-infested hell; ABSA has woken me at 7am two days in a row to tell me my credit card payment is due; and my mother has locked herself in a dark room for three weeks straight, muttering. Yes, the unmistakable signs are there: it’s Christmas.

I’m going to say it: I hate the festive season. At all other times of year I am jolly, even pleasant. I spread love and good cheer and enjoy giving small people presents. I bring colleagues cookies and donate to charity. I pose for pictures with Ivory Soap. I pet stray dogs and shy clear of dope.

At Christmas, I’m 75 litres of pure, undiluted bile.

Of course, there are some happy memories of the Christmases of my youth: like my cousins’ incredible chocolate sauce, and the time I got lost on the way to Rustenberg and ended up instead on a pecan nut farm in Louis Trichardt with three people I adore*. Or the times my sister and I would escape the countrywide massacre and glug champagne straight from the bottle while making up rude lyrics to The Sound of Music on late-night TV. Or the times I’ve switched my phone off and pretended to leave the country.

But for the most part, the whole business is an effing nightmare. I feel no shame at all for grabbing my Grinch cape and marching proudly forwards with a steak knife in one hand and a vomit bag in the other. I don’t like being told what to think and feel, so don’t tell me when I’m supposed to be in the mood for a party. Especially not when the DJ is playing Boney M.

There are other reasons I resent Christmas. Number one, if you are not a Christian, you shouldn’t be celebrating Christmas at all. Fail. If you are a Christian, you should realise that Easter is a far more important festival. Fail.

Number two, nobody actually likes spending their only two work-free weeks stressing about what their relatives are going to think of the turkey and whether the vegetarians will be okay with the mini-bruschettas. You should be putting your feet up. (Plus we live in Africa, so whose silly idea was it to eat hot turkey anyway?) If anyone is going to judge you because your house is not clean enough or your food isn’t good enough, they shouldn’t be invited to your party.

Number three, nobody actually likes spending their only two weeks of relaxation being force-fed so much food that they can’t move. I have never heard anyone say, “Gosh I’m excited for two weeks of bloating and continuous hangover.” I’ve only ever heard people wailing and gnashing their teeth as they stumble onto the treadmill on 2 January, unable to zip up their gym shorts. Just bypass the whole business and cook vegetables. Everyone over the age of 5 is going to thank you later.

Number four: presents. This should be the highlight. Unfortunately, because everything anyone actually wants costs six times more than it should during the festive season, and everything else is a floral notepad or a gilt-dipped photo frame, you have about as much chance of a satisfying gift exchange as Julius Malema has of a one-night stand with Debora Patta. In my family, gift exchanges are particularly difficult, as there are over a hundred of us, which means that if you want to buy something for everyone and eat anything other than All-Bran for the rest of the month, you have to buy everyone Bar Ones. Not that I have anything against a Bar One every now and then, but you see where I’m going with this.

Number five, Christmas is supposed to be about spending time with the people you love. But the people you love are also trying to cram in everybody else they love on the same day, and those people are trying to cram in the people they love, ad infinitum - resulting in a logistical nightmare, at best. Plus, if people really do love you, they probably a) see you fairly regularly anyway and b) understand that you might not be able to see them on Christmas, and don't hold it against you. This results in one usually making apologetic plans to squash in your nearest and dearest on some other date when you can, instead spending Christmas itself with the usually bloodthirsty mix of people nobody else wanted to invite over/ people you haven't seen since Christmas last year/ people you can't really avoid because they will yell at you.

Personally, I think the answer to this whole Christmas dilemma is to pursue a life of crime. The way I see it, the only people scoring during the whole season are burglars and drug dealers. Otherwise vigilant people are drunk, disorderly, and away from home. Tempers run wild. Substance abuse is at an all-time high. The urge for violence is strong.

It’s so simple. Need a bonus? Streets of empty houses - twice the revenue for half the work. Time out? Try a little perlemoen smuggling at the seaside. Annoying relatives? Slip a little black-market Valium in their tea. Presents? No problem. Just grab a little whisky and a hi-fi from some middle-class moron’s cupboard. Done. And that’s a reason to be jolly.

* Incidentally, this otherwise pleasant detour alarmed my relatives so much that it resulted in the entire Rustenberg police force being set on our trail: posters, radio ads and all. But that's a story for another blog post.

Caster in Stone.

The Caster Semenya saga, it strikes me, is becoming rather like an office karaoke party. That is, you keep thinking it can't possibly get any worse, and yet, amazingly, it does.

I have, up to now, refused on principle to say anything about Semenya, because I feel she is already being dissected by far too many people who have no business to do so, and it’s disrespectful to her privacy.

But today I am ANGRY.

I’m so angry that even my trusty high horse got sick of it and rather unceremoniously threw me off en route. I’m so angry that I can’t even structure this into the usual essay format. I’m just angry.

So for what it's worth, here’s why I’m angry. In bullets, because bullets are what I’d like to hurl at the nincompoops who started it all.

• Even the media who are supposedly on her side are making a mockery of her. Exhibit A: Huisgenoot’s grotesque makeover. You know, forget those pesky internal testes, the real problem is that you’ve neglected that all-important splash of lippy in the morning. Wtf? What does this say about what it means to be female? If I forget my spiral perm, am I suddenly a sexual suspect? If this bid for femininity doesn’t work, are they going to crochet her some doilies and photograph her with a baking tray instead? As it is, female athletes already straddle a problematic gender boundary, where unless they happen to look like Anna Kournikova, their lack of “femininity” is brushed off as an eccentric side-effect of being exceptional, excused only by their athletic talent, as though the same level of tomboyishness would be unacceptable in a girl who wasn’t winning medals. In this case, that same rationale has taken the shape of hideous over-compensation, as though to make up for the controversy, Semenya needs a correspondingly large dollop of girliness to ease public horror.
• Even the influential figures who are on her side are saying – in my opinion – all the wrong things. One media report cited the chairman of Parliament's portfolio committee on sport and recreation, Butana Komphela, warning the public that Semenya was feeling really messed up. Which no doubt she is (think of how you’d feel if the same thing had happened to you at eighteen). But the way he put it, although sympathetic, was invasive and possessive, as though the world had the right to access her mental state. “She is like a raped person,” he said. “She is afraid of herself and does not want anyone near her. She has been placed on an altar for all the world to see. If she commits suicide, it will be on all our heads." Admirable sentiments, bucko. But what part of this comment isn’t placing the poor kid on the same altar? Except now it’s not just her physical body that’s up for dissection, it’s her emotional response as well. If she really is suicidal, it is none of our business – if her emotional state has to be discussed, we could at least show enough respect to leave the finer details of her private grieving process out of it. She's already been made into a circus freak; we don't need to paint her hysterically jumping off bridges as well.
• Her family and friends – and some political figures who, ahem, need no introduction – are still bleating about how she is a “real girl”, as though this is the primary concern. Her gender classification is not the issue. The issue is that her gender is being made into an issue at all. She is not ill, she is not dirty, she is not contagious - she's just (hand me my harp, please) built a little differently.
• Gender classification in sport is, in my opinion, ludicrous. (Actually, I think the international hysteria about sport is ludicrous in general, but we’ll leave that for another post.) Forgive me if this is all taking a turn for the Judith Butler, but really, what happens if you take gender classification in sport to its logical conclusion? You can develop athletic talent with the appropriate training, but there are also aspects that are undeniably inborn. Everybody’s hormone levels vary; everybody has certain physical advantages over others. An ambiguous gender classification is no more an unfair biological advantage than having longer legs, a faster metabolism, or the inborn capacity to build more muscle. Where exactly are we drawing the imaginary line that says some physical advantages are fair and others are not? Most of my male friends are weedy literary types (sorry guys) and believe me, some of my female friends – who are very tall* indeed – could whip the crap out of them on an athletics track. As a fellow commentator on Bec’s Facebook page responded to my rant about non-gender-specific athletic advantages,

If they deny her, surely that suggests testing every record breaker for the same genetic levels as the rest? I look forward to the day when everyone steps up to the start line and the race umpire runs around with a tape measure checking for leg length consistency!

You and me both, lady. I can’t frigging wait till the day when this ridiculous classification is taken to its logical conclusion. Wouldn’t it be a lot more prudent to classify athletes according to their weight and strength, regardless of gender? A-team and B-team instead of male class and female class? Sure, you’d probably find that for the most part, there’s a fairly natural gender division anyway. But at least it would provide some loophole for the exceptions, like Semenya, where their successes would be framed differently. A girl who made it into the male-dominated A-strength class would be a GI Jane-style heroine, not an object of ridicule. Headlines everywhere would scream: CASTER KNOCKS OUT MALE COMPETITORS! or whatever. There, the battle cry would be “You go, girl!” instead of “Get a perm, freak boy!”

I’ve rather viciously bombarded a number of alarmed victims with this idea at parties, and most of them have told me that it would never work, that it would be far too much admin. Why? On a purely practical level, athletes’ hormone levels are already frequently tested, they are classified according to their strength and – more to the point – in practically every sport in the world except Quidditch, athletes are broadly classified into only two categories: male and female. So what’s wrong with taking these same two categories – with an average strength/ weight/ height/ hormone level assigned to each – and just renaming them in a way that could prevent trauma to athletes in future?

Call me an over-simplifier, but I just don’t see the problem.

*Carla, this is to make up for the polagna shout-out. You really are very tall.

All Blogged Up.

From time to time even those of us with verbal diarrhoea run out of things to say or - worse - get given actual work to do. And it is at moments like this that, far from doing the sensible thing and just keeping quiet, we start to repeat ourselves instead.

So in that spirit, I am posting something I wrote ages ago to that great defender of modern manhood, John Qwelane.

His original article is here.

My letter to him is below. And, I might add, he never replied. Rather rude, I thought.

Dear Mr. Qwelane,

We in Orania are retiring folk and enjoy the quiet life, so we have only just heard of your brave deeds. Your words are like swords, Mr. Qwelane, so we offer our humble apologies that we are only paying homage to you now.

Also, some horrible tourist spraypainted our koeksuster monument pink during Pride week, and the women have only just finished scrubbing. As I'm sure you understand, our men were held back in the workplace too since there was no one to feed them, so we suffered a great loss of productivity. The lack of racial diversity makes it very hard to find good help here, but let me not put you off before we even start talking.

You have a point, my good man, and we like the way you think. We have said for many years that this diversity rubbish can only lead one way, and that way is down. Of course, you may be realizing now what we have known for years: that the government's current brand of "democracy" is the very enemy of diversity – where the brave folks like us have to hide on a hill and whisper our views while the Nigerians come and hide in our churches. No, we say. No! If the faggots can have their pink panties and the Bantus can have whatever it is they have out back (we're sure we don't know), then we can have our Boerestaat. Live and let live. It is all in the name of peace, as you know.

Now, Mr. Qwelane, we know you are black, but we like the way you think, so we are willing to overlook it just this once. You've proved your belief in the old ways, after all. Just between you and me, you are a man who stands up for traditional values and doesn't apologise, so if anyone should understand our unflinching stance on diversity issues, of course it is going to be you, not so? No fear of whining about 'isms' from you, oh no! You, my man, are the leader when it comes removing the insurgents, nailing your colours to a mast. You – in your infinite strength of character – have found it in your heart even to stand up for Uncle Bob, so maligned in his old age, with lots of favour but zero fear. So let me not ramble any further and get straight to the point of this letter, before the Zanu-PF beats us to it and snaps you up as their mascot.

We in Orania need more men like you. We pride ourselves on building a state on the solid old pillars, where Men are Men, Sheep are Scared, and no one is afraid to speak his mind. Did the pioneers of Orania flinch when those shirt-lifting liberals shook their manicured fists at us on ever-limper wrists? We did not. We stood, tall and proud, with a koekblik in our left hand and a Mauser in our right, and with our remaining hand we built the koeksuster monument. And it is that hand that we would like to extend to you, Mr. Qwelane. We believe you'd fit right in here.

You're not our usual type, if you know what I mean – but you have the right ideas. We think you'd be really happy here, a great citizen, with your solid family values and no-BS attitude. You'd be free to hate anyone you like – judgement is not frowned upon here, so we'd all be on the same page. Harmony at last!

Please find enclosed a token of esteem from the private collection of Tannie Betsie Verwoerd, a beautiful crocheted doily with which to wipe your brow when the pressure of holding the flag for us real men becomes too much. We have also enclosed a pamphlet from our local estate agents. We have a lovely spot out back that would just suit you.

Should you be interested, we would love to welcome you into our cosseted community. You are a real man, whose views on diversity and solid family values so perfectly reflect ours. Please visit us any time.

Amandla! Velskoen!

With warm regards and an ongoing battle cry,

Pres. Carel Boshoff

On behalf of the Leaders’ Council of Orania

Oh, My Dear, Sweet, Pale, Waltzing Priest in a Petticoat.

There is, it seems, a market for Poodle of the Caribbean.

Photos by Bancroft Media.

I think I may just have a little lie-down now.

Love Thy Neighbour. Long Time.

"I am saving your latest blog post for a moment of work boredom tomorrow, but I need to make it clear that I expect a post about MG and the gang, STAT."

I arrived at work on Friday to find the above comment glaring at me from my Facebook wall. Now, when you only have five readers in the whole wide wonky world, you’re not really in a position to refuse orders. Hack one of them off and there goes 25% of your readership.* What’s more, Bec is really the Fury Godmother to my blog; that is, she suggested I start it, got swine flu to prove it, and has since then even actually read it.

In short, when Bec wants a post, Bec gets a post.

Her own latest blog is about neighbours: a sewer-splashed Etiket Met Emsie guiding you through everything from offering them canapés to vandalising their mail. Which, apart from being chock-full of invaluable tips, also led me prancing down memory lane – in my case, more of a dingy alley – where I have my own share of colourful neighbours.

It is this alley that Bec wanted the tour of.

I should begin by explaining that I am descended from a long line of Calvinists, bred through generations to embrace the simple life. My grandfather’s generation was the first in our family to leave farming behind in favour of academia; the rest never bothered beyond Std 2 education (a sensible move in my opinion). Today, wholesome farm living has been replaced by a certain urban dinginess, but the surviving members of our clan still nurse the belief that there is something vile and muddy about being too posh; that even if you should (God forbid) earn enough to move out of your humble cottage below the railway, you should rather just stay put and find something worthy to spend the money on, like a pilgrimage, or sending someone with less cash than you to university.

Though I have not yet put anyone through university, I have saved up for my share of pilgrimages, and to this day feel a peculiar shame when confronted with anything flashy. My family is so dozy about safeguarding its goods that my father and sister actually had the following conversation one afternoon, when my phone rang unexpectedly** and I, in surprise, sent my dad’s 21-year-old Passat screeching into the wall of Rondebosch Café.

Dad (coming home and surveying the damage): Hmmm. Do you think M had a bit of a prang?
Sister (puzzled): Nah, I think that’s the one I made four years ago.
Dad: Ah. Well, I’m sure M will tell us if there’s anything to tell. Tea?

It follows, then, that my family takes pride in its anti-snobbism; that we find a certain piety in being ever so slightly dodgy. Not too much, mind; but just enough not to be accused of ostentation. And to ensure our share of interesting neighbours.

When classifying bad neighbours, there are really only six routes one can go: noise, mess, drugs, nudity, madness or sex. As a teenager, I was exposed to nudity, madness and sex; as a young adult, to noise, mess, madness and drugs. As a teenager, my neighbours were a naked violinist (beautiful); an angry old lady (deaf) who would turn her hearing aid up as high as it could go and then complain of unnaturally distorted noises from her neighbours; an oily divorcee (depraved) who would leopard-crawl under the security doors of an evening and ask my sister and me out on dates; and a young woman whose orgasms were quite spectacular (perhaps she was watching the naked violinist). No need for any talks on the birds and the bees for me, no sir. I learnt it all from Cath at 103. As a fifteen-year-old trying to get my beauty sleep before exams, I would bash on the wall, to no avail. Eventually I took to imitating her, grunting and wailing against the concrete in the hope that she would hear me and get the picture. She didn’t. Maybe she could tell I was faking, and thought I needed practice.

When my sister and I left the family bosom, we went one better. My sister moved into a flat opposite one of South Africa’s more embarrassing confessional poets, who also boasts a number of sexual harassment charges; and a feisty fellow we came to know as Masturbating George. The poet would sit about drinking tea and having angst, while MG developed a strange fondness for my sister and would spend his days at the window, drooling and wanking, as she typed away at her thesis. Clearly a chap with an appreciation for academia, we thought.

It was around this time that my sister also began leaving her car unlocked so that the neighbourhood kids could sleep in it. The car in question was a tiny Renault with rather ambitious racing stripes down the side, and a radio that was connected to the headlights using a telephone plug. It wasn’t up to much on the highway, but made a fine shelter for homeless children, who were, I might add, rather better neighbours than Masturbating George.

I’ve known a number of homeless people who made better neighbours than MG, mind you. I shared my backyard in Mowbray with two intrepid braaiers who would come and light a cosy, crackling bonfire in my parking spot, sharing companionship and good cheer over a cup ‘o meths and a nice bunny chow. They did this in the company of Drunk James, who lived next door to me and never – to my knowledge anyway – did very much else, unless you count his habit of drunkenly whistling through the keyhole at my parakeet in the wee hours of the morning.

I got to know Drunk James because he would spend his days hanging over the fence and checking out my friends’ cars. If a particularly posh one came to visit, he’d wink and leer.

“Niche wheelsh,” he’d say knowingly.

Come evening, he would light a fire in my bay. “Relaksh,” he’d say. “You gotsha bay wisha besht view.”

I should point out that my bay overlooked the garbage cans.

A little further afield, a friend of my sister’s had a particularly vocal berghie couple camping in her garden, having invited some of the neighbourhood crew to pitch a tent there. The only rule was that good fences made good neighbours; i.e. she would give them their space if they gave her hers.

Giving privacy from her side was more difficult than it was from theirs, since walls are soundproof and tents are not. Returning home one night after an evening out, she heard a woman’s voice ring out through the garden, every syllable dripping with post-coital smugness.

“Justice,” it purred, “Dit was nou soe lekka, ek wens my hiele lyf was poes.”

Drunk James, Post-Coital Patty and the Braai Buddies are not the strangest kids on the block, however.*** I’ve definitely known weirder; for example Sick-Bucket Simphiwe, who lived above me in the Mowbray building. Simphiwe a) vomited into my pot plants from time to time and b) accused me of allowing strangers to park in his bay and harbouring the fugitives in my flat. “I’ll get those motherf***ers,” he would hiss on his witch-hunts, glaring at me through the windows as he ran laps of the building.

Simphiwe, I should add, had a nasty habit of practising guitar at 1am (he only knew two chords) and watching TV so loudly that it would drown out my CD player even on its highest setting.

“You’re cramping my style, b**ch,” he’d say when I asked him to turn it down.

Another intriguing gentleman in our complex was apparently already there when my friend Sally lived there a good ten years ago. This one drove a white bakkie, although drove is probably the wrong word, since I never actually saw him take it anywhere. He spent his days marooned on the roadside, fiddling with the aerial and peering anxiously at the sky.

“He’s trying to make contact with other life forms,” Sally explained when I asked her about it. “He’s convinced he’s going to get through any day now.”

Also fixing their gaze firmly on the heavens was the church choir on the other side of the building. Given who we were living with, I don’t blame them for needing a little gospel. They practised on Sunday evenings, which didn’t bother me so much; there’s something about singing at twilight that colours a building with a strange pathos and surrealism.

“Give us a J!” one would cry as Drunk James drooled over the fence.

“Give us an E!” the next would warble over the bunny-chow-and-meths picnic.

“Give us an S!” another would holler as Simphiwe hurtled past, muttering.

“Give us a U!” the fifth would howl as chunks of beans splashed into the impatiens.

“Give us an S!” the last would trill as ET-Phone-Home hopefully twiddled his aerial.

“All together now: Who we gonna call?...JEEEE-SUS!”

Amen, sisters, I would think. We could probably use a blitz from a celestial clean-up crew. But I never said that bit out loud. It was my best shot at neighbourly love.

-----------

*Or 20%, as I realised later. But I leave the error there as testimony to the fact that BA students cannot do maths.
** How else do phones ring?
***Though their aliases would make a great name for a band. Greatest Fireside Hits by Post-Coital Patty and the Braai Buddies. Instant winner, don’t you think?

A Pair of Original Partici Pants.

There are many benefits to hanging out with BA graduates. Firstly, they are usually poor and slovenly, and will not judge you if you give them box wine and ready meals for dinner. Secondly, they write the best emails. Thirdly, they appreciate horrible puns. And fourth(ly?), they have a greater capacity than any other population group for talking unadulterated rubbish.
 

My friend Anna is definitely one of the forerunners in this category, which is why we spent eight happy hours last week discussing words which should be assigned new meanings. It’s an interesting thing, this, because if you put a word in the wrong context, it’s not that hard to draw your own conclusions (witness the ease with which one begins to understand A Clockwork Orange a few pages in). With enough people to join our revolution, I think it’s only a matter of time before we get to use words randomly, for whatever purpose we choose. It’s the logical conclusion to how language develops anyway; we’ll just be accelerating it. 

And if cummings could get his r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r across to generations of morons in schools, I don’t see why a little poetic licence should be a problem for the rest of us. We’ll have crayon-smacking ice-cream and witches in our hair. We’ll have gorilla cakes for tea and take road trips in a big-wheel carbuncle. We’ll invite puffers to our parties and jump penguins in the soup. It will be trifle! It will be cherry! It will be dilly! 

(And see, you probably got the gist of that, didn’t you?) 

As things stand, I’m already guilty of word abuse. I am most comfortable in English, but it was not always my first language, and sometimes – especially when I’m tired - I forget surprisingly obvious expressions. And when I want a word and can’t find it, frustration leads me just make new ones up (wangtard or holbungler, for example), or randomly inject adjectives that (to me) sound more accurate, even if I use them incorrectly. I find the DA a little soggy, for example, or I don’t like that scriptwriter; he has a greasy turn of phrase. 

But I have nothing on my sister, who is both extraordinarily imaginative and extraordinarily stubborn. She is magnificent. She doesn’t like rules, and I don’t think she really believes that conventions of meaning apply to her. Over the years, she has developed an entire language; a world of disparaging neologisms. To my sister, “good” and “bad” do not exist; the world is instead divided into “real” and “joke,” which to her seem more descriptive. Hot, milky tea is real tea. A large, snow-white bathroom is a real bathroom. Or, if you introduce her to people who annoy or offend her, she will dismiss them with one regal flick of her wrist. “Sies. Silly joke people,” she will say, and stalk off. “Joke exercise,” she will sniff as she passes the elliptical trainer.

She also has a wonderful array of randomly constructed insults at her disposal. “It’s called a vehicle! Drive it, you puff-eared Oros Man!” she will fume in traffic. LONDON IS KAKHOLE AS REMEMBERED. UGLY PASTY ZITS FOR PEOPLE, was her pithy SMS verdict from abroad. And my personal favourite is her way of raising an eyebrow at thick, dull, waxy skies and muttering darkly: “Van Gogh weather,” before shutting the door with a grunt.

But these are all intentional twists of meaning. Sometimes a word begs so hard for an alternative definition that one can’t help reinventing it. Porsche, for example. Which, as I’ve mentioned before, I spent my entire childhood believing was a kind of fowl. Or participants, as I said to the abovementioned Anna.

“Every time I read the word ‘participants’,” I complained to her, “my brain separates the syllables. I read Partici and then pants, as though Partici is some kind of Italian designer.”

“Yes, yes,” Anna encouraged. “Prada handbag, check; Gucci sunglasses, check; Partici pants, check!”

You can see why I hang out with her.

“Bolshy,” I continued, “sounds juicy, like a fruit. This melon is bolshy.”

“Yes, I see that,” Anna nodded. “Kinda squishy-like.”

“Stomach,” I added, because another of our favourite topics is lunch. “Sounds like a well. An abyss. She fell down into the stomach. Though maybe that is just mine.”

“No, no,” said Anna. “You are far too thin to have an abyss in your stomach.” Because outrageous lies form one of the cornerstones of true friendship. “But abysmal. Now that sounds medicinal, like an anti-inflammatory. And dismal. What a pill. Take two spoons of dismal and call me in the morning.” (Well, tell me you’ve never had that kind of day.)

Crimpolene sounds to me like a laxative or window cleaner; blancmange like a garment or some kind of eccentric ablution procedure. She pulled the blancmange around her shoulders and slipped into the icy night, for example. Or She shut the bathroom door and hurriedly blancmanged her sweaty feet.

Anna, on the other hand, thinks it is “stipple on walls” or “a hideous floral scrunchie”.

Pubescent sounds to me full-bodied and colourful: After the rains the sky swelled into a pubescent rainbow. Mushroom sounds like what it is, a fungus; though fungus in turn sounds like a would-be aristocrat’s name. This is my son and heir, Archibald Ignatius Fungus.

My personal favourite was Anna’s colostomy, which is “what happens when there are too many people in a train carriage and some of them have to hang out of the doors”.

“In a colostomy there isn’t…mushroom!” she sniggered. “HAHAHAHAHA!”

Peanut, she says, is a rodent. The peanut scuttled back into its hole. Pincer is to me a footman; a snooty butler in livery. With one flick of her wand the fairy godmother turned the mouse into a well-trained pincer who took up the whip and began driving the coach.

For that matter, I think Cinderella and Chlamydia should be interchangeable, as should dollop and buttock: Put a buttock of cream on my apple pie, will you? And Princess Chlamydia had a hot set of dollops. She wound up with cinderella after one too many encounters with a pincer.

Nostril sounds to Anna like a wise old man. Tell Uncle Nostril what’s wrong, for instance. Or She approached the wizened Nostril with the reverence of a -

“Of a pumpkin,” I interrupted. “A religious novice. I aspire to be a monk, but I am at present still a pumpkin.”

Well, it was downhill from there; the stories started flowing like custard through cake.

“There is one for mushroom!” I cried. “It’s a dirty beard on a pervert, full of last week’s chicken.”

“Armadillo!” Anna countered. “A fruit. A pink one. Watermelon-and-armadillo salad!”

“Which you can enjoy with Pimms and a dash of candied demon!” I whooped. “Yes!”

“Treble!” came the next. “A pudding, or a coward. Just look at that gibbering treble.”

“Transkei: an embroidered hanky!”

“Gripe: a small grave!”

“Bales: a swollen stomach from eating too many fatty foods. He had such bad bales that we had to bury him in a gripe.”

“But he was dug up by a persimmon!” howled Anna. “The endangered mountain lion!”

“Which was tracked through the bush by a brave and gallant Towel!” I said. “A junior army officer!”

“Yes,” Anna nodded eagerly. “Poor thing, the training module is very bulbous.”

“A weaker man would have broken out in endorsements,” I marvelled.

“Or turned a bit hilary.”

“Drowned in a blog.”

We fell into a companionable silence.

“Percolator,” I said eventually. “What do you think that means?”

“Dunno,” she said.

“I think it’s the weirdo who stares at strangers on public transport,” I mused. “Just look at that percolator giving me the dribbly eye.”

“Indeed,” agreed Anna. “What a mushroom there is on him.”

She paused.

“I wouldn’t want to be next to him in a colostomy – would you?”

Oh Deary, Deary Me.

It's not just the Bible getting the vampire treatment these days. Jane Austen is also getting a whipping of the supernatural kind.

Take a look at this.

I would say a few words about it, but really, there aren't any.

Here, Piggy, Piggy.

As some of you already know, I bought my own home recently, and moved in this weekend. I am at the moment still so in love with it that my head is good for very little else, and I spend an inordinate amount of time staring at my brandspankingnew sundeck, gaping and drooling.

But even in this lovesick state, I’m able to see that since I named my blog after that ole pig virus, I might as well add my two cents’ worth on the subject. Especially since at least two of the messages I received this weekend were not rhyming odes to the beauty of my flat (I mean really!), but warnings to “be careful” of swine flu.

Now, this annoys me on a number of levels. Firstly, because if it is not a love sonnet to my north-facing slice of perfection, I don’t want to hear it.

Secondly, what the heck is “be careful” supposed to mean? Don’t get flu? (Because, you know, most of those twerps went out and got it on purpose.) Pack up my H1N1 in an old kit bag? Forbid random passers-by to spit on me or sneeze into my hand? I mean, how exactly does “be careful” help me? There are many situations in life where one can reasonably be careful, and it might make a difference: don’t cross the road without looking; don’t sit on high ledges if you are prone to talking with your hands; make sure your bikini straps are properly fastened; if you’re planning on reheating your lunch, smell the chicken first; don’t trust a corner-café pie in the wee hours of the morning; don’t trust a boy in a Haile Selassie T-shirt at all*. But honestly, how is one supposed to modify your behaviour to prevent the flu germs from finding you? It’s not like you can put up signs on your front door forbidding them to enter (though I’m told there are plans in place to teach them to read before 2010).

Sure, you can go to the doctor once you already have flu symptoms, but by then it’s too late, isn’t it? And in any case, it’s not a good idea to accept Tamiflu unless you are on death’s door, since the biggest danger associated with swine flu is not the virus as it stands now, but the virus as it will evolve if Tamiflu is overused and the bugs develop an immunity to it. Then we’ll really be in trouble. So really, the only way to “be careful” when you have swine flu is for the sake of others; i.e. stay put, keep your sneezes to yourself, and don’t overuse flu drugs. But, I’m sorry to say, there’s not much you can do to “be careful” for your own sake. Unless you count postponing that brisk hike you had planned to take up Table Mountain, but I am pretty sure that if you had swine flu, you would not be chomping at the bit for it anyway. This “be careful” business is certainly no use to those already suffering from the virus; if the gong’s going to bang for you, it’s going to bang for you and there’s nothing you can do about it. Except bedrest, and that’s what you should do for ordinary flu anyway.

There’s another level on which this swine flu hysteria is bugging me (excuse pun). And that’s the feeling that it’s all so terribly out of perspective. Now, I’m not saying I’m not sorry about the chaps who have died, because that’s awful for them, really not very nice at all, and I’m very grateful it’s not me. But so far, one person has died of swine flu in South Africa (the other, the Dept of Health was quick to point out, died of other complications unrelated to H1N1) relative to, um, how many of HIV/Aids? HIV has been galloping across the globe since the New Kids on the Block were actually new, and in all the intervening years I have not once received an email or SMS from a friend warning me to “be careful” of HIV. Which is rather a shame, since that’s the kind of SMS one probably should send your friend at four o’clock in the morning when she is having drinks with some silver-tongued, statuesque creature whom she doesn’t really know, but who has all sorts of opinions about her cleavage.

The point is, a message warning your friend to “be careful” of HIV/Aids is not only more to the point (since it is a far worse pandemic, meaning it is more widespread, and death is a sure thing rather than an occasional possibility); it is also more useful, since HIV/Aids is mostly sexually transmitted, and being careful might reasonably have some impact on your chances of contracting it.

And even if you take HIV out of the equation, swine flu is still not the most dangerous thing out there right now - not by a long shot. Poor nutrition is a global killer, as are aggression and stupidity: people take drugs and get into bar brawls and blow each other up left, right and centre. Car crashes are one of the single biggest causes of death in cities all over the world, and the number of first-time car buyers increases every year; yet I notice that nobody is messaging me to say MILLIONS OF YOUTHS ON THE LOOSE IN THREE-TON KILLING MACHINES; FREQUENTING URBAN AREAS! BE CAREFUL! FORWARD THIS TO 20 FRIENDS AND SAVE A LIFE!

If you really are that keen on saving your friends’ lives, there are a million messages I can think of that you might reasonably send instead, assuming you really care and are not forwarding random rubbish just because you are a hysteric with nothing to do. Call me if you have been drinking; I will fetch you, for example, or Are you sure about that hotel in Hillbrow? I know a great backpackers in Dunkeld West. Or Don’t go out with that guy; he has shifty eyebrows.

But people (and I use this word in a very general way, I know) seem to have the bizarre idea that warnings are more fun if they are more pointless**; or maybe they are too lazy to think up a personalised warning to suit a particular friend’s lifestyle, but want to look like they care, so send out mass messages instead. Or maybe chain messages make them feel informed and important, as though they are privy to cutting-edge information spreading through the underworld; specialised knowledge not even the officials have their grubby paws on yet. Or, in the case of the HIV warnings that never come, it might be that because HIV is often sexually transmitted, it is considered impolite to warn your friends about it, for fear that it would make them sound nasty or make you sound like a killjoy. But if you’re worried about sounding nasty, I’d venture to point out the suggestive nature of the word “swine”; and if you’re worried about being a killjoy, I’d say that stampeding people at parties booming “BE CAREFUL OF SWINE FLU!” is just as likely a conversation stopper.

So, I suppose, barring genuine and personal concern, what’s left is paranoia. But for what it’s worth, I’m sick of pointless warnings about things that are beyond my control. I’m sick of people bombarding me with horrible stories of germs that are out to get me, serial killers that have their heart set on changing my tyres at shopping malls, or rapists leaving tape recordings of babies on my doorstep. I’m sick of the completely superstitious belief that if you only follow instructions, somehow you will be immune to life’s unpredictable catastrophes (and the accompanying implication that if tragedy does befall someone, it must in some way be their fault for not BEING CAREFUL.) If you think memorising a million poorly-spelled chain mails is going to make you immortal, I’ve got news for you. Terrible things happen to people every day, at random, through no fault of their own, and that’s part of life: if you are one of the lucky ones, it is nothing to be righteous about. So stop warning me about all the ways I could die, since that’s a given, whether it’s swine flu or a car crash or HIV or a tumble down Table Mountain. When it’s my time to go it will be my time to go, and the only way to cheat myself of my rightful, joyful time on earth will be to waste it pondering all the ways I could trip the light switch on my way out.

*Thanks to the ever-pithy Judi Stewart for this

** See previous post on proportional relationship between pointlessness and fun

Countin' Flowers on the Wall.

I bought a mood ring this weekend. This is because, diseased kidneys and all, I was up in Johannesburg, working at a SARS function – and believe me, a weekend with 400 tax collectors can leave one in urgent need of silly jewellery.

I also bought it because when mood rings were actually in demand, I was 12, and in those days 25 bucks would buy you two movies or a Spur burger and chocolate brownie, and somehow being at the cutting edge of Grade 7 fashion never measured up.

These days, however, I’m more gainfully employed, and fortunately able to afford both food and a vast array of totally pointless things. I try to exercise this right as often as possible.

Which brings me to a weird thing I noticed about this mood ring. Now, I know it’s all really about fluctuations in your body temperature (spent a few happy hours alternately tossing it into iced water and dangling it in front of the heater to observe the effects. Like a magic diaper baby, only with more colour variety, and no awkward gender stamp on the bum. Anyway.) But here’s the thing. When it’s on my body, it mostly hovers around sky blue (dozy, serene, relaxed). Yet when I eat, it immediately swings to a deep, satisfied indigo, which, according to the key, is “joyful, loving, amoreaux, romantico”. (And if my mood ring says so, it must be true.) The only exception to this rule has been right now, as I sit here stranded at the Wimpy in OR Tambo airport after my flight home was grounded, eating what is arguably the worst sandwich ever made. In response to this warm-plastic-and-monkeymeat horror, my ring has turned an awkward amber-red, translated as “aufgewült, unsettled, anxious, troublé, sin resolver”; a mood change not even Kulula could induce when they told me that, after a 21-hour shift and 7 hours’ sleep in two days, I would be placed on standby indefinitely.

It’s a curious thing, this, because it got me thinking about pleasure, and why we don’t spend more time seizing it in easy, accessible areas. The way I see it, happiness is like a great big bank. Here’s how it works: bad stuff = debits, good stuff = credit. If your debits exceed your credit, you will become unhappy.

Then you get the currency. Big bad things cost more than small annoyances. Big happy things give back more than small happy things. So here’s the thing. If you don’t have an array of enormous happy news items to stock up with (a wedding, the purchase of your dream home, sticking your foot out as Natalie Becker approaches the stairs) then you have to focus on accumulating a larger bank of small joys. And many of the most joyful small joys are the most pointless things, like buying a mood ring you did secretly want when you were twelve, or having liquorice for breakfast just because you can, or waking up early on a Sunday to run along the seaside, or emptying out an entire bottle of Shipmate Bubbles into your bathtub because there’s no one around to stop you. This is because duty is the opposite of fun, so the less necessary something is, the greater the fun injection.

This means, then, that you should absolutely not compromise on the little things that make you happy. We’re told not to sweat the small stuff; I think we should start. Don’t put food in your mouth that you don’t really love: if you have a sweet tooth, don’t bother with Beacon, buy Lindt. If you love pesto pasta with roasted pine nuts and pecorino and fresh spinach, spag bol in the bag is not good enough. Don’t read books that don’t grab you by the scruff of your neck and refuse to put you down: if you think The Grapes of Wrath is overrated (I do) give it the finger and read Harry Potter instead. If you don’t feel beautiful – not just okay, but beautiful – in what you’re wearing, don’t step out of your door until you’ve put on something that makes you feel amazing. If the gym freaks you out and you hate their playlist, get an mp3 player and take up a sport that you do love. Doing things you hate doesn’t mean you’re a hero, it means you’re to lazy to look for what you love. Chores are for kids with strict parents, and you’re all grown up now.

Incidentally, I think one of the biggest benefits of being a grownup is directly related to this; that for the first time you do really get to be a kid, something you can’t really do when you are young, because everyone is so busy telling you to grow up. I love getting older. I love that I can fill my life with the things only I want, and that I don’t have to explain it to anyone. I love that I can do all the stuff I wanted so badly when I was little. I love that I can wear tinsel wigs and coloured hats if I’m in a bad mood. I love that I can have Kir Royales for dinner or draw pictures on the walls or turn a perfectly good pair of socks into a puppet if I feel like it. I love that my bathroom is peppered with quotations that I like to read on the loo, and that nobody tells me to hurry up and stop hogging the facilities. I love that my parakeet attacks anyone whose shoes she doesn’t like (it’s true) or that I can open my doors to friends 24-7 if I want to. I love that my bookcase (which I only found out some years too late is actually made of stinkwood – oops) is now lime green because I happened to have the paint and needed some cheering up one gloomy afternoon. I love that the most expensive skirt I ever bought died an honourable death in a pool of mud when I got too carried away running races across a field after a formal dinner. I love that my shopping trolley bulges with all life’s essential items, like Nutella and lemons and reject Bonnie Tyler albums and balloons and champagne (which I keep in the fridge at all times because I believe life is there to be celebrated, and it’s stupid to wait around for Christmas).

I have been unhappy for long periods in my life, and now that I’m feeling better about the whole business, I refuse to compromise in areas where it doesn’t cost me much to be demanding. Occasionally I look at the balloons and party hats and streamers in my life and worry that the whole thing is turning a bit Michael Jackson, but mostly I just think I’m right. As human beings, we spend so much time compromising on big issues (relationships that aren’t good enough, but which we stay in because we are afraid of cutting ourselves loose and drifting out into the big wide unknown ocean; friends who feel too far away, but who we never say anything to for fear of appearing tense or clingy; jobs that don’t satisfy us but which we are afraid to leave because when you really chase a passion, failure hurts more) that I think it’s positively irresponsible not to seize happiness in the less challenging areas, where we know we can. Especially when it comes to the small things, where a little selfishness won’t harm anyone else. Refusing to compromise on the big issues in life can cause hurt to others; spraypainting your dustbin in a funky colour will not.

And because I seem to really like lists (something I only realized looking back over earlier blog posts), here is a list of things I refuse to live without, because in their small way, they are essential to happiness. I’d love it if you’d add your own.

1.Running along the Promenade on sunny Sundays in winter, listening to Belinda Carlisle and Barry White songs. The fitter you get, the better it is, because then you can sing along.

2.Pine nut, pecorino and spinach pasta. It takes 10 min to make and is so insanely delicious that I come over all funny just thinking about it.

3.Janis Joplin.

4.Good sandwiches with loads of tasty goodies in them. As the girls at gofugyourself put it, “This is why we are in favour of more flattering pants. More flattering pants = more sandwiches and far less agita from people squawking about your minor holiday weight gain. Also, more sandwiches = more happiness. It’s like one of the fundamental rules of basic math.”

5.Pyjamas.

6.Fiona Apple. She is pure poetry.

7.Heroes.

8.Kath and Kim.

9.Yoga.

10.Harry Potter.

11.Sister Crazy (the world’s most beautiful book).

12.Tabloid news from Romania. Romania is a screwed up place. My favourite news item reported a nasty incident where a wall collapsed on the minister of agriculture’s head. Instead of renovating the houses of parliament, government held an exorcism.

13.The International Society for Giant Pumpkins. (It’s real.)

14.Jewellery.

15.Beetroot.

16.Sentimental country songs.

17.Gothsinhotweather.blogspot.com

18.The Princess Bride/ Legally Blonde/ But I’m a Cheerleader/ The Wedding Singer.

19.Kid-type jokes (e.g. the muffin joke, the one about Snoop Dogg’s umbrella, the moose and the tortoise, or Sebastian the prawn. If I haven’t told you these yet, tell me and I’ll post them).

20.Weird Al Yancovic’s parody of Bob Dylan’s music video for Subterranean Homesick Blues.

21.The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency.

22.The lyrics to Subbacultcha.

23.Bebe’s exceptional upper arms. It makes me happy that somebody achieved arms like this.

24.Reading dictionaries and wikipedia.

25.Googling random statistics (largest-ever tiger, tallest-ever wave).

26.Imogen Heap.

27.Doing nothing.

28.Polar fleece.

29.Naps.

30.Muesli.

31.Sprinting.

32.Peaches.

33.Balloon animals.

34.80s rap.

35.Long swims out to sea with my dad.

Absinthe Makes the Heart go Wander.

Have been lying low as kicked in the kidneys (literally) by a vile disease which makes me grunt a lot and also prevents me from walking upright, having drinks, signing in online or performing any other task which would help you differentiate between me and a Neanderthal. (And it's a tough riddle at the best of times, I know.)

But, as Plath writes so insightfully, the box is only temporary. And, as the pithy Schwarzenegger added just a moment later, I'll be back.

Holy Moley.

I think I might finally be getting over the fact that I actually have a blog; that is, enough to take a breath and temporarily move onto matters of real importance, namely Christian vampire fiction and anti-masturbation propaganda from the 1950s.

Well, that’s not entirely accurate. The theme of this post is really my extreme gratitude that I am not a teenager, mostly because I don’t have to do tiresome things like crystal meth or dressing like Kristen Stewart, but also because I can finally, categorically, and with authority state that being a teenager is not the best time of one’s life. I always suspected it was true, and now I know. Being a teenager is crap. And most of the benefits of adolescence still apply when you are an adult, with the possible exception of being able to leer at youths in the school pool* or spend hours puzzling over why one gets seasick when you try and focus on Miley Cyrus’ lips. (But even these are negotiable, provided you are okay with being the neighbourhood creep. Which really isn’t so bad once you’re used to it; plus I know a great game called Offer-Them-Milk-and-Cookies-and-See-How-They-Run. Come over and I’ll teach you sometime.)

Anyway.

Even teenage fiction is better when you are an adult. And, for that matter, teenage non-fiction. One of my more eccentric habits is collecting vintage coming-of-age manuals, including one ominously-titled It’s Time You Knew (for girls) and my personal favourite, the religiously-themed On Becoming a Man (for boys). The latter is by Dr. Harold Shyrock and was published in the 1950s. Gems include a number of technicolour plates featuring wholesome youths doing manly things like letting their mums measure their height or photograph their first attempts at shaving.

One of the captions actually reads: “What youth has not experienced the pride and delight of discovering the first downy fuzz on his upper lip?”

What youth, indeed.

But my favourite parts of On Becoming a Man are the passages on homosexuality and masturbation. Dr. Shyrock writes:

"A young man who follows a wholesome, ideal pattern of living does not experience ejaculation except as nature provides. Such a young man keeps his reproductive organs in trust, as it were, until the time of his marriage.
When masturbation becomes a habit, it tends to rob a young person of his incentive for accomplishment. He loses interest in worth-while enterprises, largely because his supply of nervous energy has been depleted, and he does not feel equal to the demands for honest effort. Being thus deprived of the satisfactions that a healthy young person should experience by way of the rewards of work well done, he loses interest in the lofty things of life. Masturbation can become a tyrant that robs its victim of the incentives for worthy accomplishments.
The young person who has been so unfortunate as to develop the habit of masturbation feels constantly let down and fatigued. He adopts an attitude of stupidity simply because he cannot muster sufficient energy to remain alert. Study no longer appeals to him, thus his mental development lags. Whenever two possibilities present themselves, he chooses the easier way."

And in case he hadn’t yet frightened all nerve out of any would-be deviants, Shyrock adds:

"There is a freakish manifestation of human friendship regarding which I should take this occasion to warn you. I refer to those relationships between members of the same sex that are included in the term homosexuality. This term is often surrounded with a bit of mystery. And properly so, for normal people with wholesome personalities find it difficult to understand how a bond of sentimental affection can develop between two men or two women.
It is only necessary that you be on guard against the early advances of some individual who, unbeknown to you, may have homosexual tendencies.
The first approach of a person with homosexual tendencies is usually in the nature of some manifestation of personal regard or even mild affection. He may write notes to his younger friend, and if this practice continues, the notes may actually take on a sentimental tone, so that he writes almost as though he were in love with the other person.
Other such manifestations include evidence of jealousy when anyone else seems to 'rate' with the friend of his choice.
You ask, 'Why the arrest in the development of a personality?' There is no accurate answer to this question, but our best information indicates that the homosexual tendency is but one of several evidences that the personality has not developed symmetrically."

Ah, yes. If we could only rid the world of those pesky homosexuals and masturbators!

I always love the wonderfully unscientific moral backlash that strikes teenage literature whenever some left-of-centre sexual trend threatens to become acceptable; as though the world’s moralists realise there is only one sensible course of action, and that is to catch the youth before the gawd-daym competition does.

The latest manifestation of emergency adolescent re-socialisation is Christian vampire fiction (yes it’s true), which is presumably a response to the phenomenal success of Twilight. Despite PublishersWeekly.com claiming it is the result of Rose Fox’s random genre generator, it is in fact catching on fast and is – allegedly – extremely marketable.

As a matter of fact, I think the Twilight series is already sheer genius when it comes to moral positioning. Unlike Sweet Valley and Sweet Dreams, the protagonists here are pure not simply by virtue of being thin, blonde and disapproving of smoking**. Twilight offers no such sanitised beach babes. Cunningly, it manages to combine equal measures of chastity and deviance in a suitably angst-ridden, sex-laden and wonderfully plain-Jane package, without once allowing the characters to do anything even remotely risqué. There’s all that appealing bad-boy sexual hunger, hidden beneath a layer of innocence so thick it would take Belle du Jour ten years to get to the bottom. Your sexual urges are perfectly normal, children, it says. But if you act on them, you’ll DIE.

And then, because a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down: Here, have some sparkles.

This, apparently, isn’t enough for our intrepid moral army, witness the rise of hardcore Christian vamp romances designed to wipe out the tainted alter ego in one bloody, metaphor-loaded battle. I quote Jezebel.com:

“[T]he vampires here apparently represent ‘demons anyone must overcome’. Thirsty, a Christian vampire tale from Tracey Bateman, will hit shelves in February, and will feature a vampire named Markus and his target of obsession, Nina, ‘a divorced alcoholic dealing with addiction.’ Oh, lord help us and save us said Mrs. Davis, as my mother would say. Somehow, Markus the vampire and Nina the drunk divorcee will lead the reader towards redemption and the idea that any demons, even those with fangs, can be overcome. Or at least that's what editor Shannon Marchese wants you to believe, saying: ‘These are themes that work in the Christian life. You have to fight to say, ‘Am I going to choose unconditional love and redemption or a life of following obsessions, a life with holes in it?’”

Well, I for one pick the holey over the holy. Partly because dinner with a drunk, divorced, homosexual masturbator sounds like a helluva night out. Partly because Jesus hung out with crooks and hookers all the time, and didn’t point fingers, and what’s good enough for Jesus is good enough for me. But lastly – and mostly – because if there were nothing for puritans to get hysterical about, the rest of us would have nothing to read.

Viva!

----------------------------------------------------
* Unless you are Alistair
** Fnarr, fnarr.