Sentience in a seed-pod

In his desperate attempt to get everyone in the world to like him, Geoff hereby submits a posting that will have freedomfighter rolling in the aisles. A recent study reported by CNN tells us that many parents no longer give a shit if their kids try a little of the Chronic. Hooray for apathy! Soon the same ennui will spread to government officials and then we'll all be able to toke up whenever you feel like it. Soon the only reason one would avoid smoking a busload of the stuff is to avoid being crapped on for doing what everyone else is doing once you become president.

Alert to the sensitive reader: The following post may constitute toilet humour. It's definitely about toilets - I'm just not sure it's humour.

I am not a homophobic man, I thought to myself last night while peeing standing up (girls, sucks to be you) at a urinal in the city, but I do hate peeing in the company of men. It's not that I don't want them checking out my penis. They can check out my penis all day long for all I care, as long as it doesn't get in the way of my day to day activities. It's that I don't want them to see me peeing. In fact, I think if I were gay I'd have more trouble peeing with other men because I'd be reminded about all the things penises go through before they go in my mouth. Now that I mention it, it'd be even worse if I had to pee in front of a girl. Yikes.

The problem is that peeing has a humanifying (I make up words all the time, piss off (excuse the pun)) effect on me. Before people see me pee, I could be a superhero, or a cool alien from outer space, or a professional television and film actor. But a superhero doesn't pee. A superhero has no bladder. They just totally rock all the time. Who has time to go potty? Not me. I never do it.

The same thing happens to a lesser degree with eating. This is why it's uncomfortable to sit with someone when you're eating and they're not. You're exposing need, and you're out on a limb. They need to eat too, or they're in a dominant position. Do they ever eat? You don't know. They could be a superhero. Superheroes don't have stomachs. They use the space to store gadgets or nuclear fission generators, or other superheroes called the Tiny Avenger. Say hello to my little friend.

Seriously, people, I need these delusions. Let me pee in private!

After a long dry patch devoid of any interesting international travel, I have two possible upcoming trips in the fairly near future. One is to the Philippines, the other is to New Jersey. I'm praying that both come off, or I would be if I were in the habit of praying. I'm not though. Instead I just hope vague hopes.

So, tell me what to do in Manila or Newark, assuming those are the specific places I'm going within the more nebulous regions specified above. Release the travel journo inside and give me your two centavos.

I went out for drinks with my friend Mike last night. Mike and I were news editors of our university paper, Varsity. Alas, the venerable archives do not extend to those faded shores of yesteryear (2000), so that you may not bask in Mike's writing. Allow me a moment to sing the man's praises: He's a quiet sort, but in a mysterious way favoured by people who go wild for Johnny Depp; he's handsome, dresses well, and exhibits the aforementioned wizardry with the written word. Yes, ladies love cool Mike. Unfortunately for the ladies, there's only one who has Mike's heart, and she lives in Korea.

Anyway, Mike is always saying brilliant quoteable things. Last night he said, "When you feel lonely out in the wilderness, that's a sentimental loneliness, but when you feel lonely in a city it's romantic loneliness." Of course, he phrased it better because Mike is a genius and I am a humble scribe. Anyway, Mike told me two things I need to look into:

1. To eat a Korean dish which sounds like "Bibip Bap".
2. To find a copy of The Koln Concert by Keith Jarrett.

You might as well check it out as well. Like I said, Mike is a genius.

But my point is this: Mike lives in Joburg, and he has a completely different perspective of Joburg to me. I'm still right, but in the interests of fair reporting, I feel I must tell the other side. Mike says he's never lived in another city where he has such a real feeling that the city is alive, growing and changing as we eat, sleep, read. He says the energy is palpable, and almost every person he meets is optimistic, ambitious and excited because any minute could be your transition into a cool new job or space. And the money keeps rolling in. Mike says Joburg is like LA, and Cape Town is like San Francisco. He says that Joburg is a city of many cities, and a journey of a few minutes can mean a spiritual reawakening. Mike loves Joburg as much as he loves Cape Town. It's his home, and his inspiration.

A friend told me (and it's probably crap) that George W. Bush has refused to retract a statement that Zimbabwe is a terrorist state. You know what this means, of course.

I've been to a place that's part of the axis of evil.

Yes, it was hard living for our intrepid explorer, and there was much work to be done if I was to survive the hardship of Harare. After delivering the plutonium required by immigration procedures, I donned a gas mask and walked through the bio-weapons testing facility to a waiting unmarked car with the engine running. I wasn't allowed in, however. Instead, I was forced to run in my underwear (tighty-whities, if you must know) behind the car while being flagellated by a mad monk on a crazed horse. For two weeks I laboured in a sweatshop the size of a dual convection microwave oven, breathing through a straw and sleeping standing up with my feet covered in excrement. On the bright side I did note a positive change in the foliage on my right branch - a few new leaves and buds.

Boy, I'm glad to be out of that hell hole! Zimbabweans: relax dudes. The US will not attack and depose your leader. Only oil producing countries must be democracies.

So I'm in Joburg right now, which is why I've been so quiet. Joburg is pretty yucky. It's only pretty yucky because there are some redeeming features. If there were no Melville or Greenways, and if you didn't have friends here it would be almost unlivable. People run around here like mad things.

Now, you folks from Joburg might say, "Arg! The pace in Cape Town is too slow. People are too laid back there." Well, I'ma break it down like this: it's because we don't waste time. Joburg people have fast paced lives because they spend like 2 hours in traffic every day, so they have to do all the other stuff faster. Joburg people have to rush to get out because it takes twenty minutes to get out of their closed suburbs and security complexes. Everything here is fucking far. There's not a party district per se, no identified strip where the grass is green and the girls are pretty. There are just individual places which may or may not shine. And the drinks are expensive, because alcohol is very rare here, or perhaps for no reason at all.

While I'm on the subject, let me get it out of my system. The terrain around Joburg is flat and featureless. Don't talk shit to me about kopjes and mine dumps. Your 5 million rand house in the Southern suburbs does not look better because it's set against a burnt out cairn sparsely covered in brown veld grasses. Nor was mauve a positive colour choice. The best advice I can give someone who lives in Joburg is to get out on weekends: drive North to Mpumalanga, my friend, and don't come back till Sunday night. If you like to party, do it in the week between when you leave the gym (8:00pm) and when you lay you down to sleep (1:00am). Do this and you may get your soul back.

Glossary for the International Reader:

Joburg: Johannesburg, Gauteng, a city in Northern South Africa where gold was once discovered.
Melville: A trendy, cheeky, young part of Joburg that is tenable as a place to live.
Kopje: A dutch word that literally means little head: a small hill.
R5 000 000: At the current conversion rate, $867,678.
Mpumalanga: A province North-East of Gauteng where things get green, wet and hilly.

Does anyone else lose all feeling in their feet when they're driving? It happens to me sometimes. It's not a real dead feeling, like that which preceeds pins and needles - it's just that I forget how I'm controlling my feet and then I become unsure if I actually can move them. Pretty scary if you're barreling down on some innocent car in front of you. And no, I'm not drunk or high. I just can't feel my feet, ok!

Hello. I have just come back from drinks with my team leader. Behold my alcohol induced blog entry.

Today I found an old website that I set up when I was working at my old company which no longer exists. It's still up because it has slipped into that part of the internet that god has forgotten. This site was more or less a protoblog. Hooray! A blast from the past free blog entry follows (dated circa September 2001). This is the Geoff of yesteryear:

There are a lot of ants in our office. No-one really knows where they came from, but the first time anybody noticed them they were farming aphids on my poor sick plant, which I'll tell you about some time. So I feel some sort of solidarity with these ants (even though I mercilessly executed them with extreme prejudice to save the life of my plant).

Ants are really cute in a chitinous, eat-your-face kind of way. They bustle around and make a mess and eat sweets - like human young. Unlike human young, they don't occasionally smell and often wake you up at two in the morning. But there are fewer humans, so they're less expendable. It's not like I'd squish a baby under my thumb. Anyway, I digress.

The fact is, I'm a pretty live and let live type of guy. I figure, if it's not hurting me, I don't have a problem. So when I accidently left the office in a hurry with a pack of sweets standing open next to the computer and an entire colony took advantage of this glut of supply and moved into the fiddly bits on top of my CPU, I was perfectly happy.

David wasn't.

You see, David is pretty anal. Stuff gets to him. He cares about little things like order, planning and his environment. Not rainforests, you understand. Just his little desk and his personal space. He likes things to operate within his parameters and has a healthy respect of the existing way of things. This is not something he's thought about - it's just the way he is. I think it's a below-the-radar technique. Anyway, it's his core of normality that allows him to operate in society, so let's leave him to it.

So David makes a huge noise not unlike the mating call of the South Seas Yak, only warped into language. And Daniel comes running with a screwdriver. What does this say about Daniel? That he likes to take stuff apart, any time, any excuse. (What were you thinking?)

Then the two of them set about taking my computer to bits. Screws come out, panels are removed. Structural integrity is compromised. The hull is breached. Suddenly, the front of the computer is removed, and the centre of the colony is discovered. Ants run like the Styx through the warm dark recesses of my tortured machine, which otherwise seemed fine at the time.

At this point, David has a panic attack not unlike the claustrophobia of John Bobbitt in bikini briefs. He grabs my computer, ripping trailing cables from the back and dashes for the door like a fireman in a burning building with a puppy under his arm and an e tv news crew outside.

Soon after this I lost track of events as a man came to sell me some choc chip muffins.

When I surfaced, bits of my computer were dumped on my desk. The proud exterminators preened themselves and awaited my eternal gratitude. I asked them to put it back together.

His sense of order restored, David merely chuckled and continued in his little world. Daniel, who cares (thanks, Dan) took a screwdriver to my computer, and after only minutes had my computer working fine as long as it lay on its side. Much later, it returned to normal functionality, with the minor proviso that a hard knock resets the machine. Yes I save often.

The moral of the story - don't trust David. If you can get a desk across the room, do it. That's all I'm saying.

I just finished making myself tea in a glass. The last time i had tea in a glass I must have been around eight years old. It's nothing special. Just tea. In a glass. But it tastes completely different. Kids, try this at home.

It got me to thinking how much of a treat this was for me when I was a kid. It was like catnip to a pussy. But I couldn't have this every day. My parents cautioned me that tea in a glass should be enjoyed carefully and in moderation. This was because (drum roll please) dumping hot liquid into cold glasses can make them crack, and then you have to throw out the glass.

Now that I'm big, I go through glasses all the time. Hell, I lost all my glasses, not to mention crockery, when my cupboard fell off the wall. I break at least a glass a month and it doesn't matter. I buy more glasses. But back at home breaking a glass was a HUGE deal. In fact, my earliest memory of subterfuge was me hiding a broken glass in the back garden so I didn't have to come clean that I broke it. Back then I understood this principle as law; now I just don't get it. My parents had a lot of cookey rules like this - couldn't use a teabag for just one cup of tea, couldn't run around on the front lawn naked - you know, things I do all the time now! Makes me wonder just what craziness my kids may have to endure.

Here's a little feel-good disney type story about karma. First let me say that I think St. Valentine's Day is a crock of shit. There, I said it. It's not because I always feel sad and lonely on that day, although a lot of people do, and that's fucked up. It's not because I'm unromantic and anti anything cutesy. I can cutesy with the best of them. It's not even that impersonal financial concerns exploit the situation by packaging mass-produced kitsch for the unthinking to consume. It's that there are some things in life you just can't force. There's nothing endearing about a Pavlovian response to a media splash. Ooh, Valentine's day? Well, I love my lover so much more today! Let me buy her flowers and chocolates and take her out to a nice restaurant. Like Chris Rock says, some niggaz always trying to take credit for some shit they supposed to do. You made your girlfriend breakfast in bed? What do you want, a Noddy badge? You're supposed to, you stupid motherfucker!

Now if you make her breakfast in bed on some idle Tuesday, or surprise her at work with some flowers on some otherwise unremarkable day, that's romantic. That says I think about you when I don't have to, because I can't not. The only possible function of Valentine's Day is to desublimate a repressed relationship. That said, I quite like platonic Valentine's wishes. Dunno why, but I guess that seems less forced.

Anyway, picture me, circa 17:32 yesterday, running my ass off to organise new keys and buy a passable bunch of flowers that did not involve orange roses and yellow chrysanthemums wrapped with red ribbon. I don't want to get into it now, but where are these incredible flower arranging schools which encourage turning real cut flowers into something that looks like a plastic funeral arrangement? Seriously, people!

Now, I'd handed in my keys earlier that day, and forgotten to pick them up. This is not unusual for me - I have a great memory, but I don't pay attention. If you need a metaphor, I'm a foreign tourist who always forgets to use his camera because he's spellbound by his surroundings. So I get in the door, and this plump bald moustachioed dude ambles behind the counter. The following exchange ensues:

Geoff: Um, I brought my keys in earlier and forgot to pick them up.
Stache: Excuse me?
Geoff: [repeats self]
Stache: We close at five.
Geoff: [looks incredulously at open door]
Stache: I had to wait here because I don't know whose keys these are.
Geoff: Oh, I'm so sorry. I didn't realise. Really sorry.
Stache: We close at five.
Geoff: Um, so sorry. Can I also have one of those remote thingies?
Stache: [expression indicates I have asked if his mother can service me sexually] Well, there are two kinds.
Geoff: I want that one. That one there.
Stache: There are two types.
Geoff: I want that one. No, not that one. The one next to it. Yes.
Stache: We won't take it back if it's the wrong one.
Geoff: I promise I won't come back if it's the wrong one.

Now, the one I got looks EXACTLY like the one I lost. I was so sure it was right I was all cocky, plus rushed for time, plus a little pissed off for being chewed out by someone I was giving R200 to. You know where this is going. It was the wrong one. There are no switches inside. I just wasted R140 on a lump of plastic I can't use. Because I was an asshole. Never be an asshole. There's no excuse, and you always pay.

I've been doing the wrong goddamn thing all my life. Here I am, ambling the ladder of Information Technology in a casual way, when my real calling is somewhere out there dialing the wrong number and pissing the shit out of some couple in Germany.

How do I know this? I met the couple, who have just moved here to a house they bought in Camp's Bay. They have two children and a dog named Dieter. They're not all called Dieter - just the dog. Anyway, this whole paragraph is untrue.

How do I really know this? I went to my theatresports workshop course this weekend and loved it beyond description. I had fun, fun, fun, and I love every one of those beautiful people who are also on the course. On Saturday it took me a while to get into things. Those of you who know me also know that in real life I am the kid who comes in late chewing gum and sits at the back of the class making wisecracks. In this class I am the nerdy kid who sits in the front row and takes notes. I haven't changed. The people around me are just so flamboyant and arty and acty and other things ending in y. By Sunday I was ready to get down and happy though. And when it became time to leave I wished I didn't have to. And I thought to myself, damn, self, why are you not doing this for a living?

My mind goes back to that time I auditioned for that part in that thing. I was so excited and then my parents visited the school and the thing mysteriously disappeared. Do my parents have a secret pact with Kathy Reimers to ruin my life? Or do they really just want the best for me in their misguided munificence?

Ok, so I've got one week of work-a-day before the final weekend of workshop. A weekend which carries the dreaded possibility that I may have to sing and worse, sing a song that doesn't exist yet to no music and with a topic someone else suggested seconds ago. But I'm man enough. Bring it.

Last night I went out to a club called the Orchardbank. While I was there someone set off a can of mace. I consulted with my lawyer this morning:

Geoff: I was in a club last night and someone set off a can of mace. It was mildly unpleasant. Can I sue?
Counsel: Dunno. Were you injured?
Geoff: I coughed and my eyes watered. Emotionally I was devastated.
Counsel: Wuss.
Geoff: Yes, but am I about to be a rich wuss?
Counsel: No, you're not about to be a rich wuss.
Geoff: Ok, ok - how about this: due to the mace trauma I lost my keys.
Counsel: And?
Geoff: Well, now I'm out a set of keys! I should sue.
Counsel: It would cost a lot more than the set of keys to sue...
Geoff: But I couldn't get into my house for hours.
Counsel: Did you suffer any financial loss?
Geoff: I could have caught chingcough while I was out in the cold.
Counsel: Chingcough?
Geoff: It's what my mom said I would catch if I walked around barefoot on cold tiles.
Counsel: But you didn't catch it right? So no medical bills?
Geoff: Technically no.
Counsel: So stop whinging...
Geoff: But people can't just go setting off mace with impunity! I demand punity!
Counsel: Complain to the club owner then - maybe you will score free drinks or something.
Geoff: Ok, going for lunch. Laters.
Counsel: Cheers dude.

This morning when I was about to board the train a short lady I'd judge to be in her fourties was coming out of the door I wanted to enter. 'HELP ME!' she fairly shouted at me, 'HELP ME! JUST HOLD ME!' I gave her a hand as she lowered herself to the platform. 'Thank you,' she said, as I slipped onto the train. Her voice is the voice of modern man, lost in isolation. She is angry that she has to ask. She is alone, but surrounded. Sometimes we all need to be held. Sometimes we all need to get off the train.

You know how sometimes you get so bored you're actually desperate? This morning I was energised. I was full of the joys of spring. I was full of beans without the nasty purported flatulent side effects. I was good to go. I was on top form. Two hours of meetings later and my brain can be compared to that chewing gum you would spit out if only you had some place to put it.

So there I was. No escape. So I followed the steps of descent into desperate boredom:

1. I wisecracked with naive optimism.
2. I listened attentively.
3. I spaced out.
4. I started microsleeping.
5. I doodled.

At some stage I started to suffer boredom claustrophobia, fearing that my mind might actually asphyxiate and die due to a glut of superfluous information.

Now I'm a trainer right. I do this shit for a living. And I can tell you that today I fulfilled the archetype which comes in the form of the bored guy who knows too much actually to be in the class in the first place. We hate those guys. And we tell ourselves that the dude is an asshole. And we wait for him to get to stage 4 above and then ask him a really hard question to which he can't possibly know the answer. Then guess what, he can't answer the question and gets an adrenaline rush from the humiliation and wakes up a bit but completely hates you. That's ok, 'cause the feeling is mutual.

What's not ok is that you then go off and say to yourself, "Well, self, he was wrong. He thought he was too smart, but he didn't know the answer to my sneaky question, did he? He really wasn't smart at all." Which is complete crap. The problem is that between the bits of salient information is all this overhead that he indeed is too smart for, and this crap puts his brain to sleep. So take out the fluff, or get better at making fluff interesting, and stop thinking you're the yellow jersey of trainers until everyone else does too.

Who am I actually talking to? I don't know - I dosed off.

Alright, I may as well let you know that I've been cohabiting with a girl recently. She's mad, which is good. Madness has a way of glossing over details like my weak points. You may be asking yourself what such weak points are. If so, you may be mad. If not, was it something I said? Come on people, I know I'm only human, but I'm pretty perfect right? Am I right? I love me - why can't you?

Contrary to popular belief (and sadly I may be using that term with multiple applicable meanings) I am still not dead. The dentist's appointment went swimmingly and only hurt a little, so it was all worry for nothing. Before you rush for your comical wuss buzzers, let me just say that the reason dentists scare me is that I once had work done by a very bad man who only gave me one injection when I really had two nerve routes to a tooth he was drilling into. It really was the most painful thing I'd ever experienced. But this time was ok, and the lectures were kept to a minimum. Still, I remain unconvinced on the point of Kathy's involvement, and I read her blog attentively looking for clues as to what she is planning next.