The poet learns to be smart

[The next piece was initially recorded in my notebook on the weekend of Friday, 27 June to Sunday, 29 June 2003, in my favourite place in this region, Hong Kong.

There was a problem with the booking of my flight between Hong Kong and Johannesburg. I arrived in Hong Kong on Friday morning at eleven o’ clock, but because I immediately had to meet an old friend at the airport, I didn’t confirm my flight to Johannesburg later that evening.

After brunch in the city my friend had to rush back to the airport. I walked around for the rest of the day and enjoyed myself thoroughly. At around nine o’clock in the evening back at the airport, a lady at the check-in counter courteously informed me that they were overbooked. She further explained that I had no choice but to wait for the next flight – which would only depart on Sunday night.

At first, I was taken aback. I had only had two hours sleep the previous night, and I was exhausted from all the walking around that afternoon and early evening. The lady assured me that they would provide a room in a good hotel, and a limousine that would take me directly to my lodgings for the weekend. And if I still thought about writing angry letters to the airline, they also conveniently had HK$2,500 on hand with which I could amuse myself (a sum of money roughly equal to so many South African rand, or about USD300).

I said I was very angry because it was my birthday on Sunday, and what now? But the fun I had had during one day in Hong Kong weighed heavily on my mind, and who was I to be rude when a big corporation wanted to pay me to spend an extra two days in one of my favourite cities? I said, okay fine, get my bags and show me where to get that limo.

I started writing the following note shortly after my registration at the counter for which I truly thought was going to be a long, luxurious car that would transport me to the hotel.]

SUNDAY, 29 JUNE 2003

I find myself in one of those absurd situations where I, the “poor white” poet, has to be treated like I’m rich and important. All the parties, myself included, are somewhat confused.

“But everyone can see there’s a tear in his shirt,” I imagine the young lady whispering to her colleague.

“I know. Shush …” the older man probably replies.

Telephonic confirmation is made in hushed tones. Sweat is wiped from a brow. Eventually everyone realises the unpleasantness simply has to be endured.

“Please come with me … sir,” the man with the sweaty brow reluctantly commands.

The Poor White Poet hesitates for a moment, first heads in the wrong direction, and is then called to a row of comfortable red chairs. An orange sticker is stuffed in his hand. He correctly interprets the label as a badge indicating his new status as someone who should be treated like other people who spend time at luxury hotels. He plasters it on his light blue “Tokyo III” shirt. It keeps peeling off. The other stickered individuals are several chairs removed from the poet. He speculates that it may be because of the small tear in his shirt, and doesn’t immediately consider the possibility that, after a day’s walking around in hot, humid Hong Kong, he no longer smells of the cologne he had so arrogantly sprayed under his arms that morning.

After fifteen minutes, the man who had given them the stickers approaches again. “This way please,” he friendly winks to the waiting group. This time the Poor White Poet walks out in front. Then he remembers the deodorant spray he had thrown in his bookbag and is suddenly annoyed with himself for making notes rather than refreshing himself.

Over the next two days the poet wised up to one important thing: One learns. In fact, the whole fancy hotel business, like the fancy restaurant business and certainly all the parts of a luxurious life are a game. You can figure out the rules and tricks of a complex video game and master it to some extent after a few practice runs. Even more so with the fancy business.

It’s about confidence. The more you are exposed to situations where you have to make certain “movements”, like in a video game, the more you learn to do it right. And the more you learn, the fewer mistakes you make. And the fewer mistakes you make, the more your confidence increases – and the less your sensibility becomes to being a stranger in an environment where you don’t really belong.

——————–

[After two days and three nights the poet reached the town of which he had been dreaming for months – Bronkhorstspruit, fifty kilometres north of Pretoria. Forgotten were the months of adolescent humiliations and growing pains (have I mentioned that he had spent his primary school days here?). The school where he was prefect in his day, looks different, smaller. The Vetkoek Corner is still on the corner, but with a different name. The town seems generally shitty, but there was a joy to being back. And it was winter, the man’s favourite season. Dead yellow grass, a chill in the late afternoon air, and the smell of coal all overwhelmed the senses with a bashful question: “Welcome home?”]

______________________

The question remains …

WEDNESDAY, 18 JUNE 2003

I want to go back to South Africa. If it’s within the next six months, great. If it only happens three years from now, then I accept it. However, it’s important to know where you’re going. And to know this, and to know why you want to go there, it is important to know where you come from.

I know the answers to these questions. I know them a lot better now than six, and three, and two months ago. I thus know where I’m going, where I want to be – not only in terms of geographical location, but also in terms of the Great Hierarchy, and why specifically I want to be there.

I still have a question, though: What do you do when you’re alone?

Most people want to be surrounded by family and friends and be close to a person with whom they have an intimate relationship. I am no different. But what do you do if you find yourself in a situation where your immediate family are thousands of kilometres away, where you have increasingly alienated yourself from people you used to call friends, and no one is waiting for you at home with whom you could enjoy a cup of tea and discuss the day’s events? Perhaps this situation is the result of circumstances beyond your control, or maybe you yourself are fully responsible for it. (If the latter is the case, it doesn’t mean it’s not for good reasons.)

The question remains: What do you do if it is only you, and you don’t want it to irreparably cripple your moral or your mental health?

______________________

Reality, and a few other facts

TUESDAY, 17 JUNE 2003

“What I used to think was me/is just a fading memory/I looked it straight in the eye, and said goodbye/I’m up above it …” ~ Nine Inch Nails

I don’t have much of a choice other than to renew myself, do I? My dog is dead, and my friend and flatmate has decided to seek her salvation on a different continent. Some people first ignore me, then they decide they just want to be friends, and then finally they come to the insight that even that is too much for them. Other people play cat-and-mouse to show me who needs whom the most. The rest of my acquaintances avoid me for a variety of reasons – I never go on weekend trips, religious differences, and perhaps simply because I’m not fun enough to hang out with. My TV is broken. My computer is broken. My bicycle is only half of what it was a year ago. My scooter has been dripping oil on the porch for almost a year. My water bills haven’t been paid in months, and my scooter registration has never been paid. My student loans are also still outstanding. My apartment smells like a shack in the woods. Insects fly and walk all over the place like they own the joint because I killed the only predator, a giant spider. I don’t currently enjoy any female companionship because most South African women here are strictly group-oriented, and I walk in and out of places on my own. And Taiwanese women find me too bizarre – even for a foreigner. The old geezer who owns the school in the countryside where I teach twice a week thinks I’m a lousy employee because I cancelled a one-hour class because the train was late by half an hour, and I don’t want to start the class half an hour later because that would mean I would have to wait 45 minutes for a train back home. And the principal at the other school fails to understand why I have to leave two minutes before the scheduled end of my class on Mondays and Fridays, despite the fact that the owner said it was okay to leave five minutes early. In about ten days I’m going to South Africa for three weeks, but it already feels as if I am going to look, feel, sound and act like a failure, until I get on a plane back to Taiwan. In the meantime, the insects would have taken over my apartment as a new ecological system, my bike will be a rusty pile of junk, everything will be wet outside, and damp inside because of all the rain, and I will have nobody to call and say I’m back, let’s go have a cup of coffee. My computer will still be broken, and if I buy a new computer my savings will run out much faster, in which case I will probably, if I’m lucky, again have to sing “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” to four-year-olds who either want to scream or sleep.

There – there’s the reality of my life on Tuesday, 17 June 2003 at 10:22 in the morning – at home, because the train to Number Nine Crooked Village was delayed by 35 minutes. However, my dishes are clean (for the first time since late April), and the washing machine is giving my bed sheets a final spin. A nap, therefore, sounds like an excellent plan.

(Finished napping, 12:05)

It’s just as well. You can’t start a new life if the old one is still kicking. I’ve tried it before, it doesn’t work.

[…]

What’s next? I don’t know. Anyway, isn’t it a bit like asking about the sex of the expected child if you’re not even pregnant yet?

Fact: Not everyone always needs to work for other people.

Bad news: At this stage of my life, I need to work for other people.

Good news: My life is not of such a nature that I need to be a slave to a rich man sixteen hours a day, seven days a week.

Fact: I do need to work for someone for a few hours every day (or five days a week) who will make money from my effort.

Fact: Since 1991 I’ve had an almost uninterrupted series of relationships with some or other employer (I counted about seventeen “bosses”).

Fact: I accept that.

Old fact: Establish yourself as an expert in some area and build up a professional reputation.

Thus, fact: Improve your chances of making money in a way that fits your personality and that keeps your interest by establishing yourself as an expert in an area in which you are interested, and by building a professional reputation in a market where what you deliver has commercial value.

Enough facts. Time for another poem:

I’m still wearing the clothes
of my former, discarded life
the same ass itching to go somewhere else
is still comfortably stuck to the same old chair

______________________

Soldier for the soul (if his weapon just wants to fire)

SATURDAY, 14 JUNE 2003

On Friday, 13 June, I couldn’t get past the password on my computer, because the a, the Backspace and the Caps Lock keys decided without warning to go on early retirement. It didn’t take me long to wise up about a few things:

1. The development was highly disturbing.

2. People put their hopes for happiness on something that’s part of their daily lives. Sometimes they know what it is, and sometimes they only discover what it was when it’s gone. For some people it is an intimate relationship with another person. For someone else, it’s taking care of a family. For others, it’s the fact that they have a lot of money. And sometimes it’s all of the above. For me it is writing. In practical terms it means typing the password on my computer every day and working on a project.

3. If I’m a soldier, my computer is my weapon.

4. The thought occurred to me that I might just have to buy a new computer.

For the record, the reason I bought a notebook computer in June 2000 was because it was portable back to South Africa. It was insurance: If I ended up in servant’s quarters again, at least I would have my own computer. A desktop PC – big box with a big screen – meant that I had to remain here for long enough to be okay with writing it off when the time came to pack my backpack again.

And now? Has a dysfunctional a key forced me to address the Big Question earlier than I had planned? Will I stay in Taiwan long enough to justify buying a new computer – and probably not the portable kind?

I also wonder, just in passing, if I’m not still a little naïve about what awaits me, a certifiable poor white, in South Africa.

Thus a thought came to me as I was looking at computers this evening: Stay here for long enough to enable myself to eventually afford an apartment in South Africa – of course in a neighbourhood and in an architectural style appropriate for a self-respecting poor white intellectual.

To be honest, similar ideas had been jumping around in my head before the a became a Caps Lock. Early in the morning I had already thought, “now in July for three weeks with the family, then next March. And if you don’t return to South Africa at the end of next year, also next December with the family somewhere on a beach.” (If business goes well enough for the family.)

Time will of course be getting on, and my Chinese will eventually reach a point where one could make money with it in South Africa. So much more time is also so much more time for the publication of textbooks and writing inspired by a life in the Far East. And there’s of course the old-age insurance of 15,000-kilometre railway journeys, a few weeks in Japan, a few weeks in China, and even a visit to New York.

But on a much simpler level, this point: To own my own house or apartment in South Africa.

What’s the alternative? I return to South Africa before the end of this year. From March 2004 I barbeque every weekend at my younger sister’s (as long as I can afford my own boerewors and garlic bread); I continue paying down my student loans for another three or four years, and rent an apartment in Bronkhorstspruit for the rest of my life. This while I listen to other people’s stories of journeys over Russian mountains and Chinese deserts, and trips to Japan and New York, and Paris and Amsterdam, at barbecues where my garlic bread’s flavour is getting weaker and weaker, and as I get older by the day, with my enthusiasm for doing battle with my keyboard decreasing dangerously fast.

But at least I’ll get to see my family more often, right?

No one said this would be easy. But I’m a soldier in the Poor White Battalion, fighting in the front trenches in the Battle for the Soul.

And you win as long as you remain standing.

______________________

Pale-beard does his math

FRIDAY, 13 JUNE 2003

The question of the day: Do my ambitions surpass my financial capabilities? Answer: Not as long as I stay in Taiwan.

You move in the direction of making calculations. You say: Okay, I am this old, and I’ve done this and that. I own a toaster and a nice laundry basket. My health is here and there, and I have so many years to go before I strike forty, or fifty.

You also look at what you don’t have. You look at what you don’t own – maybe a house or a caravan, or a microwave oven; things that have always been out of your financial reach. And you look at what you haven’t done; things that are important for reasons only you can explain. This last point is the one I want to address for the moment.

The thing is, you get older by the year, and you start thinking about insurance for the day that will come sooner or later if you are … lucky. And the big question, which you try to evade until you realise you can’t ignore it any longer, is whether you at least enjoyed some of your life while you were looking for all the pieces of the puzzle, for all the answers, all the tags you wanted to hang around experiences, and incidents, and desires.

In answering this question one usually finds it almost impossible to lie – the truth tends to reflect even from under the darkest sunglasses.

I have chosen to hang the tag of “Things I Really Enjoy Doing” around travel experiences. The pleasure of arriving in a place for the first time and taking pictures of yourself in places you’ve previously only seen in movies or on CNN. It carries the type of weight I want to throw on the other end of the scale that age causes to lean so heavily to one side.

There are other things, but it mostly involves emotions that sometimes get out of hand. To have a family – to be married and have children … is a pleasant enough thought. But it’s something that will make this discussion much more complex, and that brings its own uncertainties.

Another thought sometimes infiltrates my grey matter despite noble resistance: Are the odds completely against us in this life? Or is life not about math and science? Is it, as I have been suspecting for several years, a struggle that you win as long as you remain standing?

______________________