House Warming Shenanigans

Here’s a quick, honest breakdown of what happens when you invite people to a party you’re throwing according to racial and geographic breakdown and of course, personal experience.

If you’re in Joburg and you invite 20 white friends to a party, 13 actually show up. Conversely, if you invite 7 black friends, about 15 – 20 show up of which, somehow, you only know 3.

In Cape Town, it doesn’t matter if they’re black, white, Indian, Chinese or Austro-Hungarian, you invite 20 people to a party, 2 show up and they’re three hours late.

By those standards, the housewarming we threw on Friday night was a roaring success. Here’s a couple pics of the insanity that went down.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After that point, all kinds of shit went down, so let’s just leave it at that shall we? My mom reads this blog.

It was a killer, killer party and went on until some ungodly hour at which point people started dropping like flies, but not before we got this pic of the Slain Barbarian.

 

 

And now it’s Monday and life continues from where it left off, in my cubicle somewhere, meek and mild.

And people will ask me how my weekend was and what the hell will I tell them?

“Fine and yours?”

Stay tuned for part 2 at Sidewalk Cafe the day after, where we had beer for breakfast, tequila for dessert and dug our heels in for a good five hours of Bloody Marys.

Until then…

-ST

Friends Wanted: Cape Town

A month ago, my chick and me moved to Cape Town coz of a job she got offered, even though a lot of my mates back in Joeys warned us not to.

‘All they ever do down there,’ my mates warned, ‘is smoke dagga and not much else. Also, the people are clicky and won’t be your friend unless you’re rich.’

Of course, I thought my mates were just pulling my leg and having a good lag at their chommie making the big move down to the Cape, but as it turns out, they were right about one thing.

Flip, okes down here smoke a lot of dagga.

 

 

And also, I dunno if it’s coz they get parries or something, but my mates were also right about another thing, it’s flippin’ clicky down here and nobody wants to talk to you.

I’ve introduced myself with a big friendly smile and a firm handshake to every oke I’ve met down here, and not one of them has wanted to be my friend.

Now, because we have no one to chill with, my girlfriend and I drink TWICE as much brandy and coke as we used to and often she carries on about how we have no friends now and I have to klap her to get her to just bladdy shuddup.

And so, I’d like to use this website as a way of making some new mates down here in The Cape, some real okes who I can be chommies with and who have girlfriends that can help mine in the kitchen when we braai.

To attract the right kind of mates, I’ve made a list of me and my girlfriend’s hobbies, which includes:

• Braais
• Fighting
• Gym
• Watching the game at the pub
• Drinking
• Fighting
• H2O (the doof doof party, not the stuff in bottles)
• Jetskis
• Fighting

So if there are any okes and chicks in The Cape who enjoy similar hobbies and wanna be mates with me and my girlfriend, please leave your details in the comments section below.

Also, if you could please be rich and good-looking, that will help us a lot, cause we’re rich and good-looking too. Here’s a picture of us as proof:

 

 

I look forward to hearing back from you ous soon!

Your-soon-to-be-chommie-from-Joeys

-ST

Wonderboy Life’s Just Begun…

You gotta love The Kinks, because they’re fucking cool. If you don’t know who they are, please stop reading this blog immediately and go out and buy at least 5 of their albums. In this instance I don’t even mind if you buy the ‘Best Of’ collections, that’s ok, in this instance, because I just want you to get into them and that’s probably the best way.

 

 

They’re like The Beatles, only they never got as huge, which is really sad. Their music is way better than The Beatles in my over-inflated opinion, with the exception of The Beatles White Album – THAT fucking album is amazing. ‘Rocky Racoon’ all the way, that’s my favourite Beatles’ song of all time.

Anyway, once you’ve bought the compulsory 5 The Kinks albums I mentioned earlier, find the track ‘Wonderboy’ and play that fucker on repeat until you hear it in your dreams.

I heard it the first time back in varsity and it’s been there ever since, playing somewhere in the background of my life.

I appreciate irony, in fact, I thrive on it because it’s one of the most powerful forces that governs our world, and the song ‘Wonderboy’ is loaded to the gills with irony.

The lyrics are hilarious because Ray Davies (singer and frontman) sings them in this sing-song way that sounds a bit like a nursery rhyme, with this limp and lifeless vocal tone that sounds a lot like he’s just fucking given up with life and the combination of these two things, for me, makes me piss myself laughing.

Wonderboy life’s just begun / Turn that sorrow into wonder / Dream alone, don’t sigh, don’t groan / Life is only what you wonder

I arrived at work this morning and started playing random songs and “Wonderboy” came on and I couldn’t help but smile because over the course of the last day, my life really has turned to wonder.

As you may already know, I’m moving to Cape Town at the end of Feb because J-Rab was offered a killer job at Cheetah Outreach in Stellenbosch which came with free accommodation on Eikendal Wine Estate, very fucking cool.

 

 

The only snag of course was that I didn’t have anything lined up in Cape Town, which I think was contributing to the impending sense of doom that was creeping up on me a few weeks back.

Well, I’m fucking relieved to say I was offered a job yesterday at an awesome PR agency in Cape Town, which is going to be a great step forward in terms of my career and which means I got nothing to worry about except packing my life up and hitting the open road.

Sometimes in life you just gotta let go. Sometimes you’ve got to put a little trust in whatever Gods may be and have the courage to accept that things have this funny way of working out for the best if you just let them.

Cause really, in the end of the day everybody’s looking for the sun and yes, people strain their eyes to see, but I see you and you see me.

And ain’t that wonder?

-ST

Porn saved my life

What’s pretty rad about living in the modern world is there’s not really any stigma attached to porn anymore, provided it’s regular porn and not 2Girls1Cup porn or 1Man1Jar porn (hadn’t heard of that one had ya? Google it! Do it now!).

This means that as long as you’re not at work and you’re a single guy or have an open-minded girlfriend, you can pretty much watch porn to your heart’s content and no one’s going to think any worse of you… except your parents. They might be a little creeped out by the copy of ‘Weapons of Ass Destruction 5’ you keep stashed under your pillow and come to think of it, so am I.

 

 

Ask any guy and they’ll probably tell you they’ve learnt a lot of valuable lessons from porn, like the perks of being a TV repair man for example or how to make light of an awkward situation like walking in on your wife and the babysitter dressed in leathers and lubing up a cucumber.

But how many guys can say that porn has saved their lives?

Well, porn saved my life. I did a solo road trip about three years ago from Joburg to Colesburg to Storms River to Cape Town then to Colesburg again and finally back to Joeys.

It was an epic trip and I had all kinds of cool adventures along the way, well at least I think I had all kinds of cool adventures because to be honest, I don’t remember much of what went down.

One minute I’m having a sokkie-jol with the locals at The Blue Moon in the middle of butt-fuck nowhere, next I’m arm wrestling one pasty Brit after the next at Djembe Backpackers Lodge, next I’m dislocating my arm in a swimming pool (long story) and popping it back in myself in Kommetjie, next I’m wandering around Vortex somewhere in Paarl with a giant pink sombrero listening to a total stranger rattle on about how the entire story of Christmas evolved from people eating too many magic mushrooms in the forest and staring at reindeer.

 

 

It was a holiday so badass I needed a holiday after it just to recover and actually ended up taking two day’s sick leave when I got back because I had bronchitis and felt like hell.

Thing about the trip was that I did every leg of serious driving more hungover than the last and all I can say is never, never subject yourself to that kind of torture. It got so bad that unless I’d swallowed three packets of McNabs Energy Tabs and downed two Red Bulls before hitting the road, I was about as useful behind the wheel as a blind monkey with one arm.

Once I’d taken the edge off my hangovers all that was left to do was keep my eyes on the road, concentrate and drive. Then drive some more. Then drive some more. Then after that, you guessed it, lunch at Wimpy, yum!

Bottom line is I was dead tired for the last couple of trips I did and tried everything to stay awake – winding the windows down, playing music loud, biting my cheeks really hard, slapping my face really hard, having a conversation with myself in numerous different voices, drinking lots of orange juice, singing the theme songs of every old TV show I ever saw (‘Come and knock on our dooooooor, we’ve been waiting for yoooooouuuuu”) and eventually pulling all my nose hairs out, one every 15 minutes.

 

 

It’s all bullshit. None of it fucking worked. All that happened was I got funny looks at the petrol stations I stopped at because my hair was a bird’s nest, my face was bright red, my nose was bleeding and I kept chewing my cheeks and singing the A-Team theme song under my breath.

I knew I’d hit rock bottom when, whilst driving between Cape Town and Colesburg I looked up to see an entire family of cute little dassies crossing the road and mowed down everyone of them.

I had to find a way to stay awake, those dassies never did a damn thing to me and there I was, smearing them across the road like lumpy jam.

 

 

Suddenly God, or some kind of divine entity, parted the clouds above me and in a epiphanic moment, an infinite reel of every porn movie I’ve ever seen started playing in my head.

It was everything from the classics like “Bang Hur”, “King Dong” and “Laurence of a Labia” to modern day titles such as “Position Impossible”, “In Diana Jones And The Temple Of Poon” and “How Stella Got Her Tube Packed” (don’t ask).

I’ve never been so alert whilst driving in my entire life. My only regret is that I didn’t figure this miracle cure for drowsiness sooner!

So the next time your parents / landlord / boss / the police walk in on you appreciating some fine pornographic material and try to evict / fire / arrest you tell ‘em straight up, “Hey, do you mind! I’m fucking saving countless lives here ok?! Christ, knock next time!”

Hey presto! Problem solved

-ST

Suitcases and Empty Spaces

Nothing sounds like polyurethane suitcase wheels bumping over bricks. You could record that sound and play it to anyone and they’d be able to tell in a second it’s the sound of a suitcase being wheeled around, it’s the sound of someone arriving or someone leaving.

This morning it was the sound of my girlfriend starting our new life by herself. It kills me that I couldn’t be there with her, stepping onto that plane together, hand in hand to face whatever the future brings. Instead I’m left behind, sitting on my bed in a room as bare as it was before she moved in.

And round and round in my head the same line from the same song plays on infinite repeat.

Baby I’ve been here before, I’ve seen this room and I’ve walked this floor, you know I used to live alone before I knew ya…

I never bothered to decorate my bedroom before J-Rab moved in. It was functional; bed, bedside table, lamp, bookshelf, washing basket. Patrick Bateman would have loved it. Then she arrived with her photographs and her drawings and her Indian elephants and her stars and the space I lived in came alive.

 

 

I’ll never forget the Saturday when her and Jenni-fuh busied themselves for hours cutting little golden moons and stars and spaceships out of some wrapping paper they found and sticking them up on our living room wall. It wasn’t long after I started this blog if I remember correctly, you can go here if you want to read that post.

I arrived home on Friday to find J-Rab taking the last of those stars down. There’s only a tiny crescent moon left, high up where her and Jenni-Fuh asked me to put it, too close to the ceiling for either of them to reach.

I think I’ll leave it up there.

We drove most of the way to the airport in silence this morning, her hand resting lightly on my thigh as I drove, and ironically, it was one of the most beautiful mornings Joburg has had in weeks.

“Well, at least Joburg is giving you a nice farewell,” I said.

“Yeah, great. It pisses down with rain for almost the entire summer, then on the day I leave the weather couldn’t be better.”

“Heh heh, yeah,” I chuckled, “asshole city.”

The man at the check-in counter told us J-Rab’s luggage was 2 kilos over the limit and looked like he was going to do something about it until the two of us verbally clothes-lined the motherfucker.

 

 

“C’mon, she’s moving her whole life down to Cape Town, everything! How the hell do you expect her to keep to your ridiculous 20kg limit? So she’s 2 kgs over, I’m pretty sure the plane’s still going to be able to take off. Please dude, help us out here, this is an emotional time for us both…”

Of course he let it slide. Only problem was J-Rab’s overhead luggage was the size of a St Bernard, but he let that slide too. We make a great team, my lioness and me. I wouldn’t want to fuck with us.

I held her for a long time before she went through the departures gate, but it wasn’t long enough. I watched her take her laptop out of her bag and put it through the x-ray machine along with the St Bernard and then put it back in on the other side.

She turned and waved one last time, I waved too. I swallowed hard.

I spent the rest of the morning at Peggles’ flat – he was actually arriving back from Cape Town at the same time J-Rab was leaving so I gave him a lift from the airport back to his flat and drank coffee there and tried to enjoy the morning.

By lunchtime it was pissing down again and I drove through the deluge back home and wandered aimlessly around the flat, opening the cupboards, staring into the fridge, stacking the dirty dishes but not washing them, eating the couscous salad J-Rab made us for dinner last night and then finally collapsing onto the bed with all my clothes on and falling into a restless sleep.

We watched Dexter until 3 in the morning together, season two, we had to finish it before she left because it’s not the same watching it alone. I think I dreamed about it, but I can’t be sure.

I know I dreamed about something.

She called once she’d arrived at our new place and took some pictures with her phone and sent them to me.

I found myself squinting at them, trying to get a feel for the place, weighing up the pros and cons. Here the pictures are. It’s weird to think this is going to be the place where I’m going to live and you, a bunch of perfect strangers mostly, know as much about how it looks as I do.

 

 

 

Tomorrow I’ll wake up and look at this city with new eyes. I’ll drive down the same roads I have been for years, but they’ll carry a certain charm that they didn’t before and the tiny details that make up this city will jump out at me, larger than life because in two weeks and two days, I’m packing everything up and hitting the open road.

In my mind I can see myself pulling into the dusty driveway of the wooden house where we’re going to live and I can see her running out the front door, her henna-red hair moving in slow waves as the afternoon sun sets quietly behind us, and the distance between us closes for the last time.

It’s not long now… not long at all.

-ST

Saturday Night – A Photo Journey

So yeah, we lost radio transmission for a few days back there and yesterday’s post wasn’t exactly what you’d call ‘worth a damn’ (not in my opinion anyway, I mean sure, there’s nothing wrong with pics of girls with see-through bras splashing around in pools, by there was no goddamn SUBSTANCE there! Nothing to sink your teeth into!) so here’s what went down at our farewell party.

In the beginning everything was cool, everything was chilled. The sun actually broke through the clouds for the first time in what felt like months sometime around 1pm, just before the party started. Not long after that, we posed for a sexy photo, me, J-Rab and THE CLAW OF DEATH!

 

 

A bunch of radass people arrived, one of which was Action Jackson who, even though he’s been at almost every party I’ve documented on this blog, has never actually had his picture published on this blog.

Ladies and gentlemen. With no further ado. I present to you. A great man and a personal friend of mine for the last 15 years. Wearing a Woody The Woodpecker T-Shirt and a badass grin. Mister. ACTION! JACKSON!

 

 

Another radass person to arrive was Graumpot. I asked him to hit us with his best ‘Heeeeeerrrrrrreeeeeee’s JOHNNY!’ face and good god did he nail it!

 

 

At this point, Jacey-got-the-aceys pushed me in the pool. The Red Mist descended. I got out, wrestled his ass to the ground, tried to tear his head off and generally put on a killer show for everyone else at the party, who all just stood around staring at us in a kind of shocked silence.

Shortly thereafter, everything was forgotten. Jacey gave me a high-five, I gave him a *5! and much hilarity ensued. Here’s a picture of some hilarity ensuing.

 

 

Then something weird happened and things took a turn, a dark turn, for the worst. Night fell and the volume of alcohol consumed took a sharp increase. Confusion reigned supreme, all around there was wailing and gnashing of teeth and somewhere, out of nowhere, a strange 40-year old man arrived and drank too much.

He then proceeded to try and pose in a ‘cool’ way for photos. But it wasn’t cool. I’m… sorry you have to see this…

 

 

After that, everything went to hell in a handbasket. More people arrived and we instantly made friends for life and then forgot each other’s names and had some more tequila. A loud splash was heard from the direction of the pool and before I knew what the hell was going on, I was in there, surrounded by ladies, it was amazing, it was like girl soup in there, party on Wayne!

 

 

And THAT my friends, was only the beginning of the party. Things still carried on until the wee hours, it was a truly sick, sick, sick party, wish you could have been there!

To end things off, here’s my favourite pic of me and J-Rab from Saturday. Sure, we might look a little drunk, a little starry-eyed, but more than anything we’re just happy to be surrounded by our friends on a warm summer evening, shooting the breeze and making some of the last memories of our life together in Joburg.

 

 

Thank you for taking this photo journey with me and my pals. Next stop CAPE TOWN MUTHUFUKKAHS!

-ST

The One Thing I Feel Is Missing From The Interweb

I’ve been using the interweb since the day it was first launched way back in 2007, and as such, I consider myself one of the leading experts on anything to do with the literally hundreds of things you can do on the interweb.

 

 

Don’t believe me? Fine. Here’s a list of all the things I’ve mastered on the interweb so far:

• Gmail – remembering my password and login name, sending, receiving and forwarding electronic mails and spotting scam emails in a second, Fishers beware!
• Facebook – becoming friends with people from as far afield as Cape Town, Bloemfontein and Durban in real time. Also, I’ve ‘friended’ three people from outside the continent, all of whom are influential businessmen from thriving countries such as Nigeria and Zimbabwe. These businessmen are trusting me with literally millions of dollars of money they’ve inherited now that I’ve given them all my banking details. Can you say CA-CHING!
• Google – searching for online information on anything from stock markets to unit share prices to Federal Intelligence Agency files, you name it! Have also mastered boolean algorithms like TYPING SEARCHES IN ALL CAPS TO MAKE IT GO FASTER
• Porn – watching any kind of porn I want, like robot sex machines, or midgets FOR FREE, ANYTIME I WANT! Um, except for at work… some guy used all our bandwidth in two days awhile back, right after I first started, and now certain sites are banned…
• Twitter – getting thousands of followers by clicking a simple link. I’m definitely winning at Twitter, the aim of which is to get more followers than your friends so you can tell them what song you’re listening to, what you’re eating and what it was like the last time you went to the loo

Now that I have your respect and you can see the mad interweb skillz I have, I’ll tell you something that I always thought was missing from the interweb.

If you’re instant chatting with a friend or family member and are in a friendly mood, on the interweb you can send them a ‘^5!’ which isn’t some kind of strange maths equation (don’t worry, I also thought that), but actually a really ‘sick’ way of writing ‘high five!’.

 

 

Off the chain.

There is even a variation which I managed to decode in a mere matter of weeks which is ‘v5!’. No, this doesn’t mean Version 5! it actually means ‘low five!’, which people use to indicate that they want one ‘down-low’ instead of ‘up-high’.

What I believe is missing is the kind of ‘five’ you see in a lot of sporting games like rugby, soccer, cricket, hockey, ice hockey, football, American football, tennis, croquet, darts, badminton, judo, pole vaulting and shuttlecock when the one guy does scores a goal or shuttles his cock really well and his team mate gives him a jocular pat on the arse.

 

 

My buddy Stikey felt the same way and actually took things a step further and went ahead and invented the ‘*5!’ which is used to indicate a jocular pat on the arse.

So far I’ve tried it out on a number of my buddies with pretty damn hilarious consequences. Here’s some IM chats copy / pasted for your reading pleasure. In this one I was mid sentence when I did a complete 360 degree turn and launched into it:

me: sure, im down with that we’re organis- hey, what the fuck?!
  dude, it’s Elvis!
name withheld: where?!
me: (*5!)
  hahahah! too easy
name withheld: hahaha
  you threw me off guard there
  i even looked!
me: you have no idea what just happened, but you feel violated
name withheld: i feel let down that elvis hasnt showed up

Classic! Then there was this chat that happened yesterday:

me: have you been there with [name withheld]?
  be honest
name withheld: no. some married complication.
me: cool
  never cross that line
  shit gets ugly
name withheld: you been there?
me: nigga please!
name withheld: did his wife find out?
me: actually, her wife found out
  and joined in!
name withheld: ^5!
me: ^5!
  hahaha!
  hey, look it’s elvis!
  (*5!)
name withheld: *facepalm

See what I mean?! Flip, I really think I’m onto something here. Thing to do is start *5!-ing all your friends as soon as possible, and let’s spread the word of this awesome way to interact / practise borderline sexual harassment over the internet.

 

 

I really think this has legs guys, I really think this could be the thing that I will be remembered for in days, nay, weeks to come over the interweb. So let’s all band together and sprea-

Hey, what the fuck?! Is that Elvis scrounging around in that dustbin?

(*5!)

Heh heh heh.

It’s THAT easy

-ST