Category: Random Thoughts

  • I enjoy your blog a whole lot, thank you for the suggested links. My question is: do you feel like your perspective would change if you lived in another continent/country?

    I wish you’d come off anon. 🙂

    I’m glad you find some value in my ramblings. I doubt my location would have influenced me much at all. Growing up in South Africa during apartheid has given me some unique experiences and insights, but I can’t say that it actually shaped my perspectives much. As per my previous post, being the kind of kid that I was, I believe I would have been ostracised in any society regardless of community or place. The odd ones are always soft targets for the shallow ones. This is true throughout the world if some of the blogs I follow is anything to go by.

    So I guess I am me independent of location, because even when I relocated to other cities or countries for work, I didn’t find any notable change in my personality or perspective. It simply reaffirmed the universality of the inherent traits of people. Some people choose to resist the urge to be cruel, but others give in willingly.

    Unfortunately I realised at a young age that being cruel is the easiest thing to do in the world. That’s why so many people don’t put much effort into being kind.

  • I pray that I will never be beholden to society. Such obligation has seen the most well-meaning turn into the most attention-seeking. And if the profession of humility is in itself arrogance, then I am already teetering on the brink of such filth by making this statement to begin with.

  • The longer I live, the shorter life seems. The more responsibility I adopt, the less time I have to do it in. Perhaps that’s why time seems to go by so much faster as I grow older. It’s like sliding down poles and walking on rails when I was a kid. It seemed so much higher and playgrounds seemed so much larger. Looking at the same now that I’m older, it all seems so puny. Just another shade of jadedness it seems.

  • It’s a noisy night again. Despite the stillness and the silence, there’s constant crescendos of clutter raging in my head. But I do not wish to release them tonight. Perhaps it’s time they were allowed to rage and fester until they finally assumed a form of their own so that the tangibility of it might yield something more than just the taunts of days gone by.

  • A Strange Incident

    About a year ago, I was home one morning. It was an average morning. Normal clear blue African sky, with a scattering of clouds, and the early morning chill that usually lifts shortly after sunrise. But being South Africa, and being Johannesburg, this is all enjoyed within the confines of high walls, electric fence and burglar alarm systems. The perimeter wall around my yard is no exception.

    I have electric fence all around, coupled with palisade spikes set in panels between solid brick pillars on the front wall, and for good measure, another security gate halfway down the driveway to separate the front of the yard from the back of the yard, also with palisade spikes forming the security gate. So it was particularly surprising on this ordinary morning that I found a pristinely clean husky dog in my backyard. 

    As can be seen from my above description, the only way into this section of the yard would have been to jump over the electric fence, which would have triggered the alarm, or creep through the gap between the electric fence and the palisade spikes, which would have seriously injured the dog given the sharp metal spikes at the top of the palisade. But this dog was without injury, and without collar. I walked towards it, and instead of it reacting in a defensive or threatening manner, it simply rolled onto its side and looked at me with those piercing blue eyes. As I approached it even closer, it remained calm, tilted its head to the side and continued looking straight at me without even a hint of threatening to attack me. In return, I didn’t feel the slightest bit threatened or in danger.

    After a while I stood up and walked back into the house and continued watching him from my window. He calmly walked over to the flower bed under the tree in the backyard, went specifically to a spot where I had recently caught my maid burying some muti* from her sangoma**, urinated on that spot and then quite literally disappeared. I never saw that dog again. 

    * muti is the African word for medicine, but is often used to refer to that of the dark arts. It is a common practice amongst the black population in South Africa

    ** sangoma is the African word for witch doctor, or traditional healer. There are good ones, and there are bad ones. And the bad ones are often visited by house maids who are generally from the black communities in South Africa (legacy of apartheid). They tend to get their muti in the hope that it will help them keep their job, especially when they know they’re at risk of losing it because of poor performance. Again, a common practice in South Africa.

  • What dreams may come…

    Being in a somewhat melancholic mood today, it’s easy to slip into a daze about the what-if’s and the if-only’s of life. Disappointment is born when I see beauty denied, and regrets are born when I see beauty taken for granted, by me as well as others. I have healthy doses of both in my life, but neither is strong enough to taint my optimism for the future even though holding on to such optimism is getting to be quite a challenge on its own.

    I’ve often said that I’m not built or designed to be alone. I have this aching desire to want to take care of someone, to share a life with her and to create an intimate space that is uniquely ours, built on every romantic notion I’ve ever harboured, and embellished with every ideal that I court. I want to prove to myself that a romantic life is still possible against the backdrop of horror that comprised the canvas of my life to this point. 

    I still subscribe to the naive notion that if only a few days of absolute bliss, peace and consoling comfort is experienced in my last moments on this earth, it would render every heartache and every pain impotent. It will cause every regret and every disappointment to recede in humiliation, and will leave me with an eternal smile subtly formed at the corners of my lips when I take my last breath.

    At the moment of my death I don’t want to smile only because the struggle is over. I want to smile because I was successful in proving to the world that despite their hypocrisy and insincerity, I was able to rise above it and still achieve my moment of bliss in spite of their efforts to dismiss me as a dreamer. I know it’s possible. But the fatal flaw in my plan is to find one with as much conviction as me to secure this dream that has been so elusive. But even in this I am optimistic that I will succeed in finding her. The one that will embrace my child-like tendencies, my romantic inclinations, my overbearing responsibility at times, and my overwhelming drive to achieve that which others mock in my aspirations. In return, she’ll enjoy nothing less from me.

    Edit: This was my 800th post.

  • Just realised I’m a hopeless dreamer. And many would be forgiven for thinking that I dwell on the past or live in yesterdays. I don’t. I guess I reminisce often so that I am reminded of the similarities between what I have now, and what I may have taken for granted back then. The greatest challenge for me has always been my inability to focus on the present moment. In many ways, this constant reflection helps me to understand the importance of what is happening now, relative to the future, when I see it within the context of my past. I’m a complicated old soul. 

  • Sometimes I share details of personal struggles with strangers because I need the release, and other times I do so because I hope that they may avoid the pitfalls that I experienced. Nonetheless, the shedding of my veil of privacy is always sincere. More often than not I restrain myself because even I find it hard to swallow the volume of colourful experiences that I’ve had to endure. And when I place myself in the position of the recipient, I can only imagine how quickly they reach a point when they question the voracity of what I’m saying.

    I guess I have yet to figure out the human psyche, especially within the context of interpersonal relationships. I can sense the anguish or regret, hope or passion and even optimism in the words of strangers, but I can never foresee being discarded. That always takes me by surprise. Every single time. Perhaps it’s representative of an over-inflated ego or sense of self. That would be a contradiction of note, given my grave insecurities about my ability to contribute positively in a manner that may be well-received. 

    Hasn’t happened yet. Perhaps I’m plagued by both ingratitude and delusion. A fatal combination for one who desires to connect with others on a human level. I guess my latest experiences just reaffirms my hesitance to want to reduce the story of my life to a book.