For the ardent bloggers who want to elevate their art... By the way:

I'm evaluating a multi-media course on blogging from the folks at Simpleology. For a while, they're letting you snag it for free if you post about it on your blog.  ¶ 4:43 AM 0 comments

  Be careful... ie full of care This morning I read a news item, about a Jo'burg mum who'd survived an attempted hijacking on her way to pick her daughter up at school. Turns out that family has survived four hijackings in the past few years. She had her Merc window smashed and was shot at, coming off lightly with a grazed shoulder, and the guys made off without her car. The principal of the school she was on her way to, declared that it was a warning to parents and the public in general to be more careful.

I thought about this for some time. Armoured cars are constantly being attacked and regular heists, some successful, some less so, are in the news at least once a week. Strangely, no-one makes them out to be careless and slack about security. Could it be that they are pretty-nigh invincible? They still get attacked. Why are we, the general public, the ones to blame when the criminals decide it's our turn today? We are soft targets, when we decide to drive with our windows open because it's a stinking hot day. On the same day as the hijacking above, two people were attacked and robbed as they were eating takeaway lunches in their car under a tree. The news report tsk-tsked that their windows were wound down...

Well, if we want to be above criticism ('commenting on the rape, Captain/Station Commander xxxx once more reiterated that women should avoid high-risk areas...) we should definitely invest in more armoured cars and try to stay well-armed (and stick to bright, busy places). Surely nothing could be brighter and busier than the Long Beach Mall on any ordinary day. In broad daylight, robbers attacked the Mugg and Bean, sending people screaming in all directions. There were two other incidents, I think, that month, not counting about 10 cars that were stolen from their open-air parking lot.

It's not on record whether anyone called for the public to be more careful in future, on that occasion. Do we still go to Long Beach Mall? It wasn't the first robbery or the last one there in recent times. Or Blue Route Mall, where there was a rape in the toilets? (Management advised women not to use the toilets if there was no-one else about)... Hell no, we're like the gazelles on the savannah, we have to eat, we have to pee, and we hope the predators get someone else when next they feel the urge.

It's high time we stopped blaming the victims/survivors for the crime wave.  ¶ 4:50 AM 0 comments

  Tick Talk

Everyone needs Time. Time is more valuable than money. You can always get more money, but you can't borrow Time from anyone so easily. However, in the courthouse in Simonstown where I am languishing (traffic violation, parking in our narrow road on a yellow line which is occupied by over 20 cars at any time of day or night, year-round) (just in case you thought I led a more interesting life) there is more Time than anyone knows what to do with. Time lies in the passage, gathers in corners, lies in big cushions filling the courtrooms halfway up the walls. It rustles in the smug swish of the prosecutors' robes as they swan off to their teabreaks, weebreaks and other obscure matters. Because in law, the obscure matters a great deal.


We have no choice but to be here, we on the benches, sighing, shifting our bums on the smooth varnished wood. The murmur of voices rises and falls. My deadlines are lying at home, twisted and starved on the floor, dead from lack of regular Time-infusions. So here I am, drowning in Time. I have a book to kill some of it before it rises up and suffocates me completely.

The officials in the timepalace have slow movements and slow voices. Their missions are mysterious and cheerful. They go in and out of doors, discuss the whereabouts of this one or that one....there is infinite promise here, in the repository of Time. They can give you more of their Time by remanding your case to months from now. Or they can give you far more than you need, by putting you in chookie so you can contemplate the nature of Time, the length and breadth and depth of it. To be measured by the second (on late Saturday nights when ETV shows porn and the designated prisoners are raped with more fervour than usual) or by the year.

Do prisoners still draw stripes to measure time? //// What does a stripe represent? It's all up to you. If it was up to me, I'd fill the walls of my cell with intricate cross-hatching.... first horizontal lines, (a sense of calm and serenity) then cover those in oblique marks, slanting from top right to bottom left, (adding some vitality) then a new layer going in the opposite direction, (let's have some conflict and contrast) and finally the vertical ones, (the stately, the noble and dignified). Colouring in my life... How frustrating it would be to be set free halfway!

I can't, as I sit here waiting for the judge, measure time in any way except to watch the sunbeam shifting across the gray-brown carpet. It's divided at intervals by the shadows of the sunblinds. I have no watch here, and since I left my cell at home, no Time. So I'll breathe in....... breathe out....... and read my book on shamanism, which tells me I can transcend space and time......

(copied from handwritten version in the back of book)  ¶ 12:24 AM 0 comments

  AS MY BODY IS MY WITNESS If you're a dreamer desiring to be a lucid dreamer, and even better, having accomplished that, to become an astral traveller visiting the 'sleeping self' still in its bed, the advice from Those Who Know is to look at your hand in your dream. Or a light switch, for some weird reason. And to switch the light switch on and off. You then can become conscious that you are dreaming, and confirm what up till then was only a suspicion. (Of course. I knew I could fly. I must remember how to do this.) Strangely, when waking life takes a turn for the weird and unexpected, I never look at my hands. This might be a very good habit to cultivate.

What I have done is looked at my feet or my knees, invading new territory. When I was an 8-year-old from the Natal Midlands, I visited the great and faraway city of Durban. One moment stands out very clearly. Walking down the passage of the exotic Plaza Hotel, with the "Persian" carpet runner rushing beneath me, I looked at my knees for reassurance that we were all still together and actually here in this wonderful place. I spoke to my legs and said "Well here we are!" to make it real. And checked that the mole above my left knee was indeed there and so it was indeed I who was wafting down the passage to the communal bathroom, tightly clutching my new floral pink 'toilet bag' and towel.

Now and again the looking down in wonder has extended itself to a photo. The one I plan to attach to this blog loosely or tightly according to my skill with this new territory under invasigation, was taken at Dalebrook Pool here at Kalk Bay. Dalebrook is a wonderful place. It has hollows for fat bottoms to fit into and be cuddled, rocks that bake your back, kelp that fondles you in a most frightening way in the dark, (or was that the famous baby shark?) and it's big enough to swim lengths without the usual eye-searing chlorine that accompanies the swimming of lengths. And red hair needs bits of green algae to set it off and form a contrast.

So the moment deserved a photo on that day, when I looked out over the sea beyond the pool, gulls gliding about and mountains dreaming over the bay in the distance, and Kalk Bay containing all that beauty and quirkiness (and my cottage surrounded by neighbours from heaven) at my back. Incredulous at my excellent fortune, I looked at my feet dangling over the pool (am I really here?) and pondered the strange turns life takes and the wonderful spots it deposits me into. A photo seemed fitting as lasting proof.

I moved here at the beginning of February, into a tiny little fisherman's cottage (the cottage, not the fisherman, though I wonder about that too) and in the first few months life seemed very dream-like. It was like being within someone else's movie. And perhaps we all are. Sometimes that idea takes hold quite strongly.

When life has become too intense it's as if I live next to myself. Someone once called it disassociation, or dissociation, who knows what the right term is or whether it's even describing this.... but it feels as if one has become a watcher of it all, taken a step back. Evidently buying one's first house is the most emotional purchase anyone will ever make. My body bears the mark of that day. A year ago today I heard at roughly this time, that my bond had come through. It had taken a very long time. Banks don't really like lending money to self-employed artists. I had yearned for the news, with what seemed like every cell in my body. Then, according to the Rules of Manifesting What You Want, I let it go, out of pure exhaustion, even sincerely feeling 'I actually don't want it anymore, buying a house is too scarey.' And after that point, of course, it happened. They phoned me on my cell, and joy coursed through me like champagne. Stars popped and my body sang. The feeling was unforgettable. The sun shone brightly, and nothing was ever going to be impossible, ever again.

So what caused an indentation to appear horizontally across each fingernail? I think it was the waiting, until that moment. I don't think joy dents fingernails. Something similar happened recently, when I waited in Durban for a big job to come through and a little bit did, the (much, much) larger part eventually going to other artists because by then there was no time left for one artist to do it all. The dents are there again, dated a month ago. Perhaps it's because the mind is so powerful and so pervasive that really does involve every cell in our bodies. So when we wait, our whole body waits, and 'everything is on hold.' Even the growth of our fingernails.

My body is my dear companion through fat and thin, the waiting and the result. Have you noticed how a crisis always involves the waiting? Outside the maternity ward, inside the maternity ward, sitting at a deathbed, waiting outside a courtroom... or a principal's office, or the bank manager's office. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting is a skill women are said to have innately. Perhaps we acquire it out of powerlessness? Or is waiting patiently one of the most powerful things you can do? In love, strategic waiting can be the thing that finally wins you what or whom you want.

Death is the end of waiting, and hair and fingernails continue to grow. Perhaps it's the final letting go. The body is now left to its own devices and what else can it find to do, but continue in its old habits and entertain itself by growing its fingernails perhaps purely out of boredom and habit?

What I do know is when I've passed from this waking dream, at some point I will definitely look at my new feet. If I have some.
  ¶ 10:32 AM 0 comments

  ...and the water really is that clear.
  ¶ 2:30 AM 0 comments

  A Great and Famous Day


Finally I am a blogger. More tomorrow.  ¶ 7:57 AM 0 comments