SlickTiger:2 Moving:0

Compared to the shenanigans of Part 1, Part 2 of our epic move from Stellenbosch to Cape Town was executed with military precision.

In one day we managed to move every remaining stick of furniture loaded in a solid brick of stuff on the back of the bakkie I was borrowing from a buddy of mine.

It was every Tetris player’s dream – a double bed, a fridge, a two seater couch, a TV cabinet and a table all stacked and packed so perfectly together you couldn’t even squeeze a hand between any of the gaps and that was before Captain Albatross got to work tying it all down.

 

 

I now know that J-Rab and my life can be packed up, uprooted and moved anywhere in 3 car loads and 2 bakkie loads as long as one of those bakkie loads looks like this:

 

 

And so, by 3 o’clock on Saturday afternoon there wasn’t so much as one toothpick of our stuff left in the shed which over the past year we’ve come to call home.

Funny how you can still feel nostalgic about leaving a place that drove you completely insane every second that you lived there. Our little wooden house had a certain charm to it and when all the animals living around us finally shut the hell up it was peaceful out there.

I got some great writing done there. Sundays would roll around and J-Rab would go off to work and I’d get up early, make myself some fresh coffee and wander out onto our balcony into the blue morning and soak up the vineyard and mountains surrounding us.

We walked out to the secret dam near our house for the last time before we left. Captain Albatross, J-Rab and I stood looking over the giant Lillie pads that dotted the surface of the dam and watched some ducks float on by while a Cormorant swooped silently overhead and way off in the distance a car glided past on the R44.

I asked the Captain to get a picture of J-Rab and I before we left.

 

 

And so we left Stellies and finally moved to the Mother City to start a new chapter in our lives. My morning commute has now gone from roughly an hour to 6 minutes and the flat we’ve moved into has actual cupboards! And a kitchen! And a spare bedroom! And no rats!

Life couldn’t be better

-ST

My Girlfriend Fell Down The Stairs

For real.

On Sunday night, J-Rab slipped on the top step of the wooden staircase and ended up scraping the shit out of her right arm as she caught the balustrade whilst landing squarely on her bum on the edge of one of the steps.

She also gave herself mild whiplash, bruised her left forearm and tore a lot of muscles in her side, so the poor girl is a bit of a mess.

What’s bad though is it happened really late on Sunday night so we ended up going to sleep at a ridiculous hour cause we stayed up while I bandaged her up and treated her scrapes. When we did eventually get to sleep, it wasn’t very restful because there was basically no way she could lie that didn’t hurt like shit.

 

 

I arrive at work on Monday tired and unshaven and so naturally when people asked me why I looked like hell I told them I didn’t get much sleep the night before because my girlfriend fell down the stairs.

Just pause I moment and read that sentence again.

Yeah. Now I’m one of those guys.

“Wow, how did your girlfriend get all those bruises dude?!”

“Um, she fell down the stairs.”

“Really? Oh well that settles it then. Fell down the stairs. Sure, that sounds legit… I’ll just be over here if you need me… calling the police…”

Luckily her clothing covers most of the bruises so you can’t really see them. Thank God for small miracles right? Hahhahaa… wait, that sounds bad too…

Let’s just end this post shall we?

Send good vibes J-Rab’s way and pray she heals fast because at this rate, I’ll be in jail by the weekend.

-ST

SlickTiger:1 Moving:0

They say that moving is right up there with the most stressful things life can throw at you like losing a loved one or getting fired. They’re all supposed to be on the same level which I always thought was a little over dramatic.

I mean moving ain’t that bad right? Load up a bakkie with all your stuffs, drive from A to B, offload, rinse, repeat.

 

 

So Captain Albatross and myself borrowed a bakkie from a buddy on Saturday and got rolling.

We loaded up two couches, a bookshelf, the washing machine (FAHK those things are HEAVY!), a couple of boxes, a heater or two, and tied it all down so tight you could pluck the ropes like guitar strings.

We nailed the drive from Stellies into Vredehoek and everything was easy breezy. We get to the other side and started unloading stuff and taking it upstairs and even that was going well until we hit one major fucking snag.

My one couch is fucking HUGE.

It’s the Triple H of couches, nearly two and a half metres of soft, maroon leathery goodness that is the most comfortable basterd I’ve ever had the pleasure of passing out on. I mean, I’ve written some of my BEST posts lying utterly inert on that radass couch. Through the good times and the bad, that couch has always been there, it’s like a long, large maroon extension of myself.

(That’s what she said.)

 

 

Anyway, you think we could get that couch up the narrow, twisty stairwell leading up to our flat? Not a fucking chance. We wrestled that thing, we twisted it, we pushed it, we tried to walk it up the stairs one goddamn step at a time and eventually all we managed to do was wedge it in there so tight, we couldn’t get it out.

Which was when we came up with our killer idea of removing the sliding doors to our flat and hoisting the basterd up the balcony with ROPES!

I love rope. I’ve always loved rope. The old-school hemp kind is the best. Soon as I get my hands on that shit I just wanna lasso a fucking horse or climb a mountain or hang a guy. Ropes are the answer to EVERYTHING!

 

 

So we set the couch down the way it would normally sit, made two loops around each side of the couch, went upstairs and got hoisting.

CHRONIC fail. Don’t try that shit without gloves yo! What the hell were we thinking?! Also the couch kept twisting and turning and refusing to cooperate in any way, so we set it back down and had a beer.

Second time around we got the bright idea of standing the couch upright to do the hoisting and tying ropes around it like ribbon around a Christmas present. Right about then, the dude who lives downstairs arrived home and offered to help us, which I found pretty hilarious considering he looked like about 70 kgs of cookie dough and admitted to having just come back from Ratanga Junction where he smoked a joint and went on all the rides by himself.

We told him to go upstairs with J-Rab and to hoist for everything he was worth while we pushed from the bottom. At this stage, drenched in sweat and tired from taking all the other stuff up the stairs, I was pretty convinced the couch was going to kill us all. Soon as J-Rab and the Ratanga Junction Stoner yoinked it up, the weight would pull them off the balcony and they’d end up landing, couch and all, right on top of me and the Captain.

“RIP SlickTiger. His favourite couch killed him.”

All I remember after that was dicking around with the ropes, checking they were all alright before we commenced the yoinking and then BAM! the couch was halfway up the building and into the lounge!

I bolted upstairs, grabbed a hold and helped the Ratanga Junction Stoner and J-Rab get the rest of it in and stared in total amazement at the RJS who had basically single-handedly pulled our entire couch up a second story balcony and into the flat faster than I could blink.

“Babe,” I said triumphantly to J-Rab, “whatever that man is smoking, I want some.”

 

 

I tell ya, you haven’t lived until you can honestly say you’ve yoinked a couch up to a second story balcony with ROPES!

SlickTiger:1 Moving:0

Next week we haul the final load so that’s the bed, fridge, other couch and TV cabinet, so stay tuned for the next enthralling update because you know as well as I do that there’s nothing better to do on a Monday morning back at work than read stories involving stubborn couches, Ratanga Junction Stoners and ROPES! 😉

-ST

Goodbye Rocko

I knew it was going to be rough for J-Rab when she eventually had to say goodbye to Rocko, our favourite of the fourteen Anatolian Sheepdog puppies we’ve been raising, so it was no surprise to me when she called in tears to say he was gone.

But what killed me was how fucking unhelpful the Express Air staff were. They left J-Rab completely by herself to pack the four puppies who were too little to be proper sheepdogs into these tiny crates so they could be flown up to Joburg.

The crates were full of shit-covered old newspaper and were so small the puppies couldn’t turn around in them, so naturally J-Rab lost it completely, tore all the newspaper out the crates and used the puppy blankets she’d brought with to line them instead.

And all the while the puppies didn’t make a peep and let her put all four of them inside their crates without making a sound because they’ve learnt to trust her and they know she’d never hurt them.

But when she had to shut the crates and lock them, one by one the puppies started crying and there was nothing she could do, nothing at all except walk away and probably never see them again for as long as they live.

Fuck, I felt all choked up when she told me the story and I wasn’t the one who watched every one of them be born and who fed them from when they were little furry worms right up until today, when J-Rab kissed them goodbye for the last time.

Life is just plain fucked up sometimes. On Wednesday the rest of the puppies go and I guess life just goes back to normal, like none of it ever happened.

I’ll miss Rocko though, he was an amazing dog. I just hope he gets a good, loving home and people who’ll look after him and treat him right.

Good luck to ya Rocko little buddy, grow up big and strong and brave. Life ain’t gonna be the same without you, but for as long as this junkyard site stands we’ll remember you and probably even if it doesn’t.

 

 

Your dad.

-ST

The Tiger Loses At SA Blog Awards, Drops Trou

What can I say guys? I failed you. I failed you all and I’m a lousy, good-for-nothing faily-failure who gets right to the finish line and then fails.

I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am, let’s face it…

 

 

I mean things started out well enough. J-Rab and I got all suited up and hit the One & Only for the pre-drinks at 5.30, made some pleasant chit chat with the people there and took sneaky hits off my tartan hip flask when no one was looking, on all counts it was a great start to the evening.

Oh, and did I mention that J-Rab looked smokin’ hot? You feel like the King of the world with that girl on your arm, no shit. You walk in there head held high because you know you’ve got the hottest girl in the place and nothing and nobody can fuck with that.

 

 

From the pre-drinks we were ushered downstairs where the blog awards were taking place and given fucking mind-bendingly strong tequila cocktails that went down like a freight train. Naturally I had one or two to take the edge off my nerves and then possibly another one or two because I needed something to do with my hands.

Next thing I knew we were all being asked to take our seats for the awards to begin which they did with an opening address by JP Naude that stressed a number of points to make the poor guy look better in the face of all the accusations being levelled at him that the nomination and voting procedures for this year’s awards were retarded.

Personally I couldn’t give a rat’s ass. I got to the final two in my category so I was happy.

The highlight of my evening was our Honourable Premier Lady Z’s speech she made at the awards. She’s a great public speaker and was actually really funny too which I wasn’t expecting at all.

 

 

Then came intermission during which J-Rab turned to me and in no uncertain terms said, “Babe, if you win there’s no question about it, you’ve got to go onstage and drop trou.”

“Huh. That’s a pretty crazy idea.”

“C’mon! You have to do it, this whole awards thing is so stuffy and boring. You have to drop trou if you win!”

“Lemme have a tequila and think about that…”

(3 tequilas later)

“Fuck! You’re a genius! I’m SO dropping trou when I win that fucking award! Ah man, this’s gonna be PRICELESS!”

“Atta boy!”

“I even practised in the bathroom, getting my jeans off, this is gonna be AMAZING!”

 

 

And so I marched purposefully back to my seat, really happy that I’d girded my loins with my “Tiger Scants” when I was suiting up earlier (the Tiger Scants are very sexy black undies with a growling Tiger’s face right where your junk sits).

I think there’s only one other pair of undies more badass than the Tiger Scants, but they’ve been universally banned because they killed a subway full of people with their sheer awesomnity.

I was ready. I was going to do it. I was going to unleash the Tiger and I already had four people waiting to give me a standing ovation as soon as my jeans hit the stage.

But yeah, in a profound Sad Trombone moment they didn’t read the name of SlickTiger that night, no, they read the name of Brainwavez and your poor buddy ol’ pal Slick’s hopes and dreams were shattered against the jagged, rocky shoreline of reality where he isn’t the blogging demigod he thinks he is.

He’s just a man with a clunky laptop banging out fightin’ words, a crazy man, maybe one day a great man, but not today.

 

 

From there things got a little blurry, but the anti-climax of not being able to drop trou onstage proved too much for me to bear so I spent the rest of the evening dropping my jeans at any given opportunity and “unleashing the Tiger” to large groups of unsuspecting people who reacted in much the same way they would had I unleashed a real tiger.

On that note, if anyone out there on the interwebs manages to unearth pictures of me “unleashing the Tiger” or just any pictures of me and J-Rab at the awards, I’ll reward you handsomely for your efforts by posting the pics IMMEDIATELY and writing a humorous limerick about you that you can show your friends.

Needless to say, we didn’t stick around for long after the awards. I could sense I was dangerously close to committing the kind of Tiger faux pas that gets you tarred and feathered in blogging circles. So we caught a taxi to The Fez instead and boogied on down with some of my closest and oldest friends who consoled me with drinks, pats on the back and kind words like “Fuck those fucking fuckheads man! You did good dude, you got the the top 2 IN THE COUNTRY! I mean that’s fucking impressive, that’s th – wait, are you even listening to me? Oh Christ, the tiger underpants again…”

To sum up, I’d like to quote one of my favourite novels of all time:

It eluded us then, but that’s no matter – tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further… And one fine morning –

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

This is not the end.

-ST

Tequilas on me!

It’s a fucking done deal guys, thanks to all your support and the endless hours you spent voting, revoting and re-revoting for Klap Gym Boet, it’s cracked the FINAL TWO for the SA Blog Awards!

I found out last night and started bouncing off the walls like a piece of loose shrapnel with J-Rab while the two of us laughed our asses off that a post about KLAPPING GYM could ever get so huge.

 

 

We drank Savannas because that’s all we had. We ate fish and rice for supper in our wooden shed and fantasised about being rich and famous.

But seriously you guys are the best. Without all you crazy fuckers backing me on this, God knows I’d still be banging out these words, drunk and belligerent, to an audience of about twelve people.

Big up to my good friend MJ though, she’s up against the Tiger for Best Post with this gem she put out there last year that gives a detailed overview of how District 9 was marketed on the web. It’s an excellent and well-researched piece of writing and if MJ bags the award on Saturday, I’ll be really stoked that for once, the good guys finished first.

 

 

In other news, you may have noticed that the site’s been a little thin on the posting side of late but truth be told, life, the universe and pretty much everything is scrambling for a piece of me and like I said in last week’s post, I’m bleeding time like nobody’s business right now and there’s only so much of me to go around.

I’m working on creating more of me though, but it’s proving tricky because to do that I need to KLAP 3 SESSIONS OF GYM, SMASH 6 PROTEIN SHAKES, 12 RAW EGGS, 5 STEAKS, 9 CHICKEN BREASTS and 3 INJECTIONS OF DANGEROUS ANABOLIC STEROIDS EVERY DAY!

So guys, tequilas on me this week and wish me luck for Saturday. If I KLAP this one, maybe some kind folks will help me redesign my site for free because let’s be honest, it’s getting a little ropey and I got plans to p1mp it out flippin’ HECTIC charna!

Good times I tell ya. Good times 😉

-ST

USOMFA Tour: Dusk Approaching

On Sunday we went to Rockport, a sleepy little seaside town in Massachusetts and J-Rab and I walked the streets there, ducking into the little shops we found and browsing through the trinkets inside them.

It was a sunny day, one I think we’ll all remember for a long time to come, and walking past a shop window, we saw this shirt:

 

 

Now, with less than 4 days of our holiday left, I’m tempted to take the advice on that shirt and just never go back.

J-Rab and I would drive down south, jump the border to Mexico, find menial jobs to get by and start a new life together. I’d write a lot more in our new life, actually get started banging out some of the scripts inside my head, maybe do some short stories here and there, land a few writing gigs, build my portfolio.

A few years down the track I’d land something legitimate, move back to the States, find that tiny seaside town and rent a flat there.

In summer I’d learn how to surf. Collect a few shells for J-Rab to make some jewelry. Leave the corporate world that I’ve become entwined in so far behind that I’d clean forget I was ever a part of it.

 

 

In about an hour J-Rab’s sister and her boyfriend are both going to leave for the airport and fly back to London and though we still got a few days left, I keep getting this feeling like the best parts of our holiday have already happened and all there is left now is that slow march back onto the plane and back to our day jobs and the thousands of emails that overflowing from our inboxes like a burst sewerage pipe.

Fuck, listen to me, whining like a little bitch. It’s been one of the best holidays of my life and all I’m thinking about is work when it hasn’t even ended yet.

Fuck that shit. I’m going to drink another beer and relax to the fucking max.

Catch you crazy cats tomorrow. Also, NOMINATE ME FOR THE SA BLOG AWARDS (click the badge on the right. Scroll up a little bit, theeeerreee it is…). Or I’ll jab you in the gums with a screwdriver.

Love from your buddy ol’ pal:

 

 

-ST

USOMFA Tour ‘10 Update: America is FULL of Viruses

What happens when you don’t blog for awhile is this crushing feeling of guilt sets in and slowly saps the life out of you until you find yourself blind drunk at 4 in the morning, running around the desert in Las Vegas, looking for strippers and cocaine.

Or maybe that’s just me 😉

Thing is, the day after that last post about our flight getting delayed and taking a badass detour on our way to USOMFA, J-Rab’s laptop got hit by about 5 really malicious, bloodthirsty viruses that fucked shit up but good.

Worst thing was I was mid-post when they struck so I look like Mr Badguy, surfing midget porn or something right when shit started going down.

We fought the viruses for a good couple of days during which I put my blogging on the backburner, thinking that it would just be a day or two before we got J-Rab’s machine back to normal. Sad truth is it’s totally fucked in every conceivable way, so I jury-rigged the computer J-Rab’s stepdad uses as their printer server to blog off and here I am, at 10pm on a hot summer night in Massachusetts, finally banging out a couple of words about this crazy trip.

I wish you could see this place, spend a day driving the green and leafy roads that connect one place to the next here because I’m not sure me writing about it is going to do it any justice.

 

 

The houses have no fences here and they’re mostly wooden and have two or three stories. Every third house flies an American flag by the front door and the cars are all fucking huge 4x4s that people drive at considerate speeds down the highways and byways so as not to upset the other drivers.

It ain’t Africa here. You won’t get randomly cut off by some maniac behind the wheel of a taxi and when you stop at traffic lights, there’s no one begging for change or waiting for an opportunity to rob you blind.

Those little things, those are the first things you notice.

When I first got here, I tried to see if I could spot some kind of key differentiating thing between Americans and other people, but came up with nothing. They are no fatter or thinner than people back home, they are no darker or lighter in skin colour and they are no taller or shorter in height.

They’re just people. There’s really nothing distinctly American about them except their accents, but I’m sure there’s a lot more under the surface, but you don’t get that stuff until you live in a place.

We visited Salem on Thursday and checked out the cemetery where the Judge from the Salem Witch Trials is buried, the sick fuck who condemned at least 18 people to death for being ‘witches’.

 

 

Craziest thing is that just around the corner there’s a second cemetery where they’ve engraved a number of stones with the names of the people who were hanged for being witches because they were never given proper graves with headstones.

Among the names I read was John Proctor himself, the protagonist in The Crucible. It was eerie reading his name in stone that day, it was one of those rare moments when the real world and the world of fiction collide and you find yourself in the middle of that collision, changed in some way you can’t quite grasp yet.

And from somewhere deep in my soupy brain, I remembered the words Elizabeth Proctor said to John in The Crucible and smiled.

“You’re a good man John,” she said, “only somewhat bewildered.”

 

 

I’m going to try do this again tomorrow and the next day and the next. My time here is fading fast, I need to capture these crazy days while I can.

-ST

USOMFA Tour Chapter 1: The Phenomenal Pilot

I tell ya, the tour kicked off on Thursday night to a fucking killer start. It was like something out of a movie, a whole host of shit going all wrong and fucked up, one thing after the next.

Craziest part was the accident that one of our crew members had a few hours before our plane was scheduled to take off. J-Rab heard it was one of our pilots – the poor guy got into a car accident and couldn’t fly.

So they had to get an emergency pilot to take the guy’s place which delayed our flight by 2 hours.

That pilot, the one in the accident, he has no idea what a party we had because of his accident, no idea. If I could meet that pilot, I’d fucking hug the man. I’d thank him personally for the badass time we had, a lot of which I filmed on my cell phone and am panning to cut up into a nice, shitty-quality show reel and put up for you crazy cats tomorrow.

In the meantime, here’s a clue where we wound up for the day because of that phenomenal pilot.

God bless that phenomenal pilot.

God bless his phenomenal pilot soul.

 

 

Watch for the video party people, it’ll be epic 😉

-ST

Saturday In Jonkershoek – A Photo Journey

It’s funny how ‘the real world’ has this way of catching up with you sometime in your 20s. One minute life is kinda breezing along like it always did, and the next you’re elbows deep in bills, car insurance, medical aid, deadlines at work, traffic, grumpy co-workers and then what? Marriage, children and a whole other heap of stuff I don’t really want to think about right now.

Sometimes you’ve just got to leave all that shit behind you and go for a walk. That’s what J-Rab and I decided to do on Saturday. We packed a backpack with a couple of beers and drove about 15 minutes to the Jonkershoek Nature Reserve where we had lunch and took goofy pictures of each other.

 

 

After lunch we entered the reserve, excited as kids at Christmas and got a killer picture of us getting ready to hike the SHIT out of that place.

 

 

The road we took meandered round in a wide circle past a huge dam and through a pine forest. The smell of pine needles, the cool, fresh feeling of winter’s edge biting through the dappled afternoon sunshine.

We talked about a different life for us, a different future where J-Rab becomes a rich and famous model and I become an award-winning novelist and script-writer, and we pose on magazine covers together and holiday in exotic places that we sail to on 500ft luxury yachts with all our friends.

“It’s on the cards babe,” I told her, “it’s fate, you can’t fuck with fate.”

All around us, mountains stretched up to the sky and I wanted to climb the highest one and stand on the top, my arms outstretched in the sunshine and shout down into the valley below in my own invented language until my voice got horse and the people listening all chuckled and, shaking their heads said, “Crazy fucker…”

 

 

I know Saturday is probably going to be a day I’ll remember for a long time because it was simple and easy and filled with laughter, J-Rab’s and mine. Days like that you lock away somewhere deep inside and, when times get bad, you take them out again and hold them up to the light and remember that life was better once, and it will be better again.

 

 

-ST