Author: Brand Smit

Dark Tuesday | Lighter Thursday

TUESDAY, 29 JULY 2003

You don’t want to unnecessarily keep hammering on the same note, but I think one of these days I’m going to be in deep shit. My suspicion is strong that I have estranged all four of my friends at different times, and for different reasons. (Is this better than to alienate them for the same reason?) More than that, the suspicion is developing that they’re even going so far as to avoid me. Can you believe it? Innocent old me who always carries on in discussions about “struggle and creation” and who delivers such well-meaning lectures to anyone within earshot about how their lives are worth bugger-all if they can’t stand away from their own creations and like the God of Genesis say, “It’s good!” (And to think I’m just trying to help them lead more fulfilling lives.)

In all honesty, I don’t think my theories and sermons are the only blunt swords that scare off friends and potential acquaintances. I am, except for my highly original theories and associated monologues, a highly boring individual. To be sure, I can join in the conversation around the barbecue fire if the conversation is about history or religion, but I might be tempted to be too clever, and maybe to know too much for the other people to also feel good about their general knowledge. So, unless the conversation is about sin, the Iraq war, Hitler, Stalin, or the Middle Ages, I am in trouble. I don’t have a motorcycle (can’t even ride one), and I don’t go along to beach resorts on weekends. I never tell dirty jokes beside said barbecue fires (can never remember the damn things), and I never do anything on my own that will cause people to tell others about it so I can build up a healthy social reputation.

But let’s stop staggering around the nettle tree. The primary reason I’m persona non grata is because I always arrive at events alone, and I never leave with anyone (mainly of the opposite sex). I am, therefore, by definition, a loner. And as people have known since before the time of John the Baptist, everyone shits in their pants when it looks like a loner is heading in their direction.

The Loner babbles on about things that only he understands and finds interesting. The Loner is a leper. The Loner is a hunchback. The Loner has a skin disease that causes his scent to be picked up from a distance. The Loner has tuberculosis, or AIDS … that drips blood from open sores on his hands that threatens to infect all those standing around barbecue fires telling dirty jokes.

The Loner is a fucking genius. It can’t be any other way. I mean, even if he didn’t hold a degree in history and religious studies, even if he hasn’t written a book of several hundred pages about his own life, even if he wasn’t already working on his second volume of poetry (which, like the first, would be an unpublished masterpiece), even if he hasn’t formulated his own principles of a Meaningful Life, he must necessarily be exceptional: An unknown prophet who are not even recognised in a foreign country, let alone in his own backyard (if he could ever afford such a thing in the country of his birth).

He must be something special, someone who is just not understood and appreciated by the plebs that he would have liked to call his friends. Why? Because god only knows, if he isn’t, he’s nothing. Then he’s a rotting carcass avoided even by other intelligent, sophisticated, enlightened people he had once called “friends”. For instinct forces even the most enlightened among us to turn away from what is dead. To flee away from that which once lived, but that has since first taken a turn for the worst, and then went to die a slow death in the half-lit solitude of his private quarters, somewhere in a neighbourhood where no one who speaks his language ever shows their face.

Oh well. Fuck everyone, then.

THURSDAY, 31 JULY 2003

Who read my piece on hammering on the same note?

Since Tuesday, 29 July 2003 at 1:32 in the morning my one friend phoned to ask if I had time – he wanted to show me a new bicycle shop in town. Later I called one of my other friends. We talked for over an hour about work, and about the uncertainties she struggles with every day. And so on. She’s apparently really busy. She apparently really has more friends than yours truly, and some of her friends keep her busy with up to twenty mobile text messages per day. This morning just after breakfast, my other friend called. She was sorry she’s been so quiet recently, but until the end of this week she’s busy from Chinese class in the morning until half past nine in the evening with work. So, she asked, how about coffee tonight at her place.

Oh well.

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Time for calculations again | About potatoes and vegetables

FRIDAY, 25 JULY 2003

I have, seeing that I love calculations so much, counted my friends in this place: “four” is the number I came up with. Of these four, two are men and two women. I currently don’t have contact with any of these people.

It’s Friday night, already five past midnight (Saturday morning, then). A deserted plain of a weekend stares me in the face. I reckon my spirits will be in the gutter by early tomorrow evening. I’m going to want to watch videos all night while rinsing down deep-fried tofu and calamari with ice cold green tea. Then I’ll accelerate my metabolism with one Nat Sherman after another in the false belief that it would prevent me from getting fat from all the greasy food.

I’ll have to get out. Battle for the Soul. Battle for Survival. I know I need people, but sometimes you’re forced to make another plan.

The weekend is an empty canvass, unsullied by actual events. Time to get creative, otherwise reality may get creative with me …

SATURDAY, 26 JULY 2003

Eat potatoes or die – these are my only choices.

We all know what a balanced diet looks like – protein, dairy products, a variety of vegetables and fruits, and so on. But what do you do if you find yourself in a situation or environment that only has potatoes? Do you sit on a rock and cry, “I want fruit and vegetables, and milk and fish and eggs …”?

We all want to eat a balanced diet! We all know we need it! But there’s no fish or fruit or other vegetables at the moment! There are only potatoes! So eat potatoes or die!

Another thought: If you’re a millionaire, it is very likely the result of images you had nurtured in your mind at some point and actions that you had taken. Most “ordinary” people are convinced that they will always suffer. If they’re lucky, they keep their jobs until they’re 65 and then they retire with their aches and pains, and a small retirement policy or two. The fact is, if you imagine the right things and take the right actions, more than enough money can be one of the fruits you will reap.

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Last outburst (before the end my vacation)

[By Friday, 18 July 2003 I was back in what was formerly known as Johannesburg, but which goes by another name now that one can only use if you actually live in (Johannesburg). Funny, these rules of tribe and place, and language and rituals of membership to a group …

This particular Friday morning I suffered the final burst of inspiration and insight before the end of my vacation, and from 06:01 until shortly before 06:24 I jotted the following in my notebook:]

Principles of a Meaningful Life:

STRUGGLE

BELONGING

CREATE

and:

BASIC LEVEL OF EXISTENCE

INTERMEDIATE LEVEL OF EXISTENCE

HIGHER LEVEL OF EXISTENCE

Identity is the Key to Membership.

The past few weeks I’ve said a lot about the so-called adult world and how I view myself as immature in this world (or have done so, until now). I want to change this to the “world of money”. I am by far mature enough to take my place as an adult in this so-called adult world.

The real problem has always been my ignorance, and consequent fear of the world of money. My fate, until now, was sealed because I didn’t want to take the “easy” way of just getting a job somewhere – or at least trying to find one. However, it is non-negotiable that one needs money. But what to do when you don’t want a regular job or a formal career, and you don’t know how to make money in any other way in South Africa? Ignorance, fear, Korea, then Taiwan …

What I’ve realised the past three weeks though is that the dreaded World of Money can be investigated, studied and mastered. In the end, it’s like most things that make you nervous – if ignorance is replaced by knowledge, fear disappears.

Two words:

FREELANCE

ENTREPRENEUR

[And since I had produced these profound insights in the spare room of a house of a friend of a friend in a city that is not my own, I thought, in conclusion:]

MY HOME IS WHERE MY NOTEBOOK IS.

______________________

Word games

SATURDAY, 12 JULY 2003

[The Irene Craft Market, forty kilometres north of Johannesburg, is a bustling epitome of creativity. Every second Saturday of the month people from everywhere in Gauteng (and beyond) set up stalls to hawk their paintings, handmade jewellery, homemade clothes, sausage rolls, pancakes, and homemade lemonade. My parents also make use of this opportunity to promote and sell their unique pottery collection, and to hopefully earn enough cash to fill up the tank and make it back home (about 160 kilometres away).

On this particular Saturday I also made my annual appearance, to appraise all types of homemade items, test as many sausage rolls for quality as I possibly can, drink coffee at R5 per cup, and stuff pretty much anything in my mouth that looks more or less edible and which I know I won’t get in Taiwan.

In between all the hard work I also took pictures of camels and recorded the following piece of scientific truth in my notebook:]

STRUGGLE-CREATE-COMMIT-BELONG

STRUGGLE-COMMIT-BELONG-CREATE

Struggle precedes creation. Belonging is the end result of commitment. But you also struggle whilst you create, and create whilst you belong. The one feeds the other. But struggle must lead to creation, as commitment should lead to belonging.

______________________

Reason for uncertainty, and a new mantra

THURSDAY, 10 JULY 2003

I’ve identified a weakness in my future plans. Financially it can work, but there is an uncertainty that shines through in my idea to perhaps set up home in Bronkhorstspruit, and then to return to Taiwan for a few months.

In my usual scientific way, I worked out that it had to do with identity. I know who I am, how I want to live, and what I want out of life. As long as I stay in Taiwan, this is all possible. As soon as I set up home in Bronkhorstspruit, so I reckon, I’ll be a little uncertain about whether who I am, how I want to live, and what I want out of life is still going to be so anchored in External Reality.

I took a nap, and the message came through: Be who you are – a writer.

The uncertainty disappeared almost immediately, like a playground bully would vanish when his victim’s older, bigger brother arrives on the scene.

The reason for the uncertainty is that I have a terrifying anxiety to live an aimless, meaningless existence. Just living in Bronkhorstspruit and making “enough” money is not good enough for me. In Taiwan I’m a teacher, a writer, and a student. If I make it clear to myself that I will continue to be a writer in Bronkhorstspruit, then I am saying that I will also there know who I am, how I want to live, and what I want out of life. And there it will also be rooted in external reality.

* * *

I look through my old photos (1990, 1991, 1997), and I read through old journals (1996, 1997) and I begin to wonder: Have I at least done something with my life in the past seven years, and perhaps more specifically the last four and a half years?

The answer is: “Yes.” (I asked a similar question a few days ago, so fortunately I already knew the answer.) I have learned over the past seven years who I am, how I want to live, and what I want out of life (thanks to Steven Burgess and his book SA Tribes: Who we are, how we live and what we want from life in the new South Africa for this line I recite like a mantra these days). I also specifically worked on being a writer for the past five years, not merely wanting to become one.

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