Saturday 20 July 2013

6.40am, the sky outside has just started going from black to blue, so welcome to this new day.

There’s a cold southwesterly wind blowing, seems to be gaining strength, and the wind chime just outside the door is tinkling pleasantly – a hanging collection of 3 stars & 3 very new moons – except there are only 5 pieces in total – one of them has fallen to the foliage below, either a star or a moon, and when I tried some weeks ago to find it, I couldn’t.

Yesterday was another very full day in town, an auction in the morning until almost 2pm, and then in the afternoon straight after that, a meeting with my new business partner, where we thrashed out years  2015 & 2016 on our Excel spreadsheet, the financial forecast getting better & better as we tweak the different categories, until it starts to look like a viable business  - which I’ve had a strong Gut knowing about since the start about 6 weeks ago – but then our first ‘reality check’ came about a week ago, with the summary forecast numbers saying the business would only just break even one year after start-up – apparently that’s the industry standard for this kind of business, and so our number crunching has shown us at least that we are operating close to the tried & tested model  - just a small fright, after our initial optimistic thumbsuck guestimates made us millionaires overnight – ah well, as Deepak Chopra says, it’s the Journey that counts, and not the destination – and thusfar, this new journey with my new partner is proving an enjoyable & invigorating and optimistic/realistic [I hope] one.....unlike two previous business ventures that I was central to, in the years since 2005/6 – both of those completely failed ventures were started in blind faith, with very good friends, and with my money [of which there is none left since 2010] – and both of those 2 earliest business ventures resulted in much stress, loss of friendships, loss of my time & money, and in the second one, a major depressive episode, that lasted about 18 months – a terrible time indeed, during which I was so fearful, shredded, alone, suffering, hating everything, myself topmost, and during which time I did some very hard labour, building my very humble but beautiful [in the end] adobe cottage, sandbags and adobe plaster, and natural ‘ikalika’ paint, with the added waterproofing ingredient of prickly-pear cactus leaves – a real bitch when you get one or more of those long sharp & barbed thorns into any part of your anatomy...

Which takes me back some years, into the Katberg mountains, and a little place named Post Retief – an officers’ barracks built by none other than Piet Retief himself, must have been in the middle 1800’s – and out of beautiful stone – and where he & his wife & kids & frontier friends took shelter from the Xhosa warriors, and maybe even the British soldiers – a friend of mine, who owns  possibly the most beautiful farm & guesthouse in a nearby valley, has had the ok from his neighbour farmer for some years, to restore the officers’ barracks – and in his own inimicable way, I think he is slowly , sometimes very slowly, keeping the fort from totally falling down – anyway, the point of this memory, or one of the points, is that while filming the fort, I leaned into a very big collection of high prickly pear cacti, while doing a pan sweep onto the fort complex, and came to rest leaning straight against the nearest cacti – much discomfort on the drive back to the farm, about 10km away, and then some sharp pains as I pulled out the offending thorns, which had punctured through my denim jeans, and with sharp miniature barbs, like fishing hook barbs, fastened themselves under my skin, and there reminded me of their presence by stimulating my nerve endings every time I moved – the lesson – don’t lean against prickly pear cacti, no matter how much you would like to have something to rest against to stabilize the end frame of your hand-held pan.

Ok, its full daylight outside now,  and about 7.10am – today promises to be busy again, another auction starting at 9am, a very pleasant one, with the usual rabble of South Africans/East Londoners jostling each other to view whatever item is being auctioned – most of my fellow brother & sister auction-goers seem to crowd the front row, closest to the auctioneer & the goods, without buying much – the more experienced auction hunters stand further back from the action, and bid over the crowd – its a lovely event, always – coffee & tea & takeaway pies & sandwiches, my dog has a free run of the place, and he seems to find the whole thing very exciting, never tiring of running about with his tail awag, and often seeking me out and coming to me for a pat or rub, and then later I will find him outside, in a patch of sunlight somewhere in the large cemented car park area, or sometimes even on one of the grubbier couches that has been sold – he somehow manages to choose the most worn couch/es to make his bed on – and sometimes I let him lie there, depending on who has bought the couch, but most times I shoo him off, especially if its a pristine/semi-pristine couch, that shouldn’t have somebody else’s pooch sleeping on it, when its going straight into their lounge or onto their salesroom floor to be sold to other furniture hunters.

But the Saturday auctioneer is a good man, one of the best, and he has risen, Phoenix-like, with his auction business partner and their spouses, from a badly failed auction house that crashed about 10 months ago, where he was employed as the resident auctioneer, and where the boss of the show apparently siphoned off large amounts of the money, other peoples’ money, into his own various investments & bank accounts, until the whole thing became bankrupt, and was closed down, and he apparently got beaten up by a group of disgruntled erstwhile business associates, whose money he has expropriated without their knowledge or permission – now under some kind of house arrest, somewhere here in East London, court case/s looming, and he must hopefully have learned his own special lesson, that one must not be devious in business, or take too much of money or things that belong to other people.

So back to my current business venture & partnership – this time with a professional associate, who it feels is slowly becoming a valued friend, a man with his own chequered inner patios of life experience, and who it seems has honour, and intelligence, and honest intent, and is prepared to put in the work required to made a success of something – I’ve found that my previous partners who caused collapse of businesses, were very lazy men, and schemers, whose main goal was to somehow earn a lot of quick money, by doing as little as possible, while promising to clients things that they must have known they couldn’t deliver – a crook’s recipe for survival, parasiting on society, and going home to wallow in front of their tv sets, and bicker with their housemates/families – hill-billy stuff, I think I might have some seed stories for Quentin Tarrantino, if he ever had time or wanted to make a movie about some of the psychopathic types who I know from experience, lurk in their various decrepit homes, across the Amalinda/Haven Hills/Greenfields curtain in East London – without doubt there are many noble citizens inhabiting those suburbs too, but my experience has taught me that there is a sector of white society, the hill-billies amongst us, who live what I’d acll ‘primitive’ lives, in those Western suburbs – which tend to be also the centres of ‘AWB’ support – there has also been a massive infiltration of other colour peoples into those areas, as they are our less expensive real estate property areas, and as people & families claw their way upwards, from renting to buying their own home, those are the border suburbs that offer the cheapest homes – and as happened with Hillbrow in Johannesburg, and with Observatory in Cape Town, a cancer of creeping population change/shift happens in those cross-over suburbs, long after the far-sighted

Intelligentsia have fled to usually leafier suburbs, where the political climate is cross-over DA/ANC, and where their children are sent to the more expensive schools – what a simplistic city sociologist I have become – nwhen the truth of any city/suburb is a much more complex inter-weaving of people, pathos, individual striving, and sometimes stabbings & killings at the local shebeen [of which there are usually a few, and actually an increasing number, in the cross-over suburbs, which can, in extreme cases, become the fiefdoms of Nigerian druglords, and die-hard AWB Vitokes, with their crossbred bull-mastif/rodweiler dogs, that sometimes do turn on their owners, and give them large skin rips requiring visits to local trauma rooms and very many stitches – I’ve seen the scars with my very own eyes

So there we have it, our very own South African spaghetti western/Pupl Fiction movies happening right now, in real life, in our very own sometimes no-go-zone suburbs, and good luck to those sensible folk who long ago moved away, to the outlying coastal fringes, and who also held onto their handguns and rifles & shotguns – I handed my own prized 9mm automatic pistol in about 2004/5, a tumultuous time for me, on the edge in Cape Town, and when my surname came up on the alphabetic list of gun owners who had to declare their legal firearms, and pay for training in how to use those weapons, and show the police their gun safes in their homes or under their beds – I was renting, no gun safe, and I’d never been for shooting training, and life was hectic at that time, so I handed my lovely pistol in at a nearby SAP station, I think I was given about R200 for it, and there went my firearm licence – meanwhile those braver people who held onto their guns, and didn’t obey the police proclamations like nervous sheep – they came through all these years later, still having possession of their arsenals of guns, and caches of ammunition & bullets, and maybe a gunsafe here or there – but they tend to sleep easier in whichever suburbs they now find themselves, as the hordes of young men running & lurking about at night, probe any weak link they can find in any home’s security shield – its become a war out there at night, folks, just ask your local alarm company reaction man/team, who sit/s in a parked car through the night, waiting for the call-room staff at their alarm company call centre to call him/them with news of the most recent uninvited incursion into the lounge or bedroom of some possibly hard-working and God fearing and tax paying member of the human herd....

OK, firewood to load, a tarpaulin [6mx6m] to drag off of a pile of stuff its been keeping from getting wet, and my trailer to hitch to my bakkie – all to help a friend who has his own very busy day ahead of him – as he prepares to host a very  large group of possibly disorderly people, invitees to a 40^th birthday party he is throwing tonight for his wife, who has just hit that magical number, which says that its basically downward from here on out – but at least she has populated the world with her two own lovely boys, who come with their pleasures & trials, their nosebleeds inflicted on each other, and recently burning soap in the younger one’s eyes, caused by his older brother firing off a water pistol while both of them were skirmishing in the bath, around 6/7pm – hidings, crying & even some tears, from pain and dented pride and skin of buttocks etc – the joys of parenthood, when the parents would prefer to have live-in childminders who also cook, wash clothing, and the dishes, etc.

But times are hard, if not also sometimes very nice – especially when I have time to remind myself, as Deepak Chopra has been telling me for the past week, for FREE, via the internet – that I have an unlimited capacity, of inner Knowing, and inner Bliss – and if I somehow manage to clear away all the interfering mind/emotional junk that has been heaped on me since I exited my mother’s womb, by doctors spanking my newly-born ass, to nasty teachers and schoolroom/yard bullies, male & female, to AWB policemen at roadblocks during the Emergency years in SA, to poser-friends in later years, who were much more interested in the contents of my wallet & bank account, than in my welfare, to finally some sweet honeys, who in their very own styles broke bits of my heart, and disappointed me sometimes terribly – if I can take some deep breaths, and exhale all the accumulated poison that will otherwise cause little pockets of cancer to take hold and develop in some hidden places under my skin – and if I can find enough time to practice my new mantra –

that “I am/have unlimited potential to be the Pure Joy that is my essence – and I have my very own pool of Knowing everything instinctually in my very own Gut” – well then, I can/could be a very Blissfully Happy person All the Time – regardless of who I meet up with, or how little diesel there is in my bakkie’s tank, or money in my wallet, let alone my long since completely overdrawn and maxed out cheque account and credit card J

Its a wonderful life, for which, thankfully, I have become grateful to have J