Drifting in a peculiar Cosmic way

I am spinning. In the Cosmos.

Yarr, a week of a new online editing system has seen Dispatch journalists biting their keyboards, old dogs are doing the cha-cha, new dogs are running around with digital bones in their mouths, the lords of the Cosmos the computer geeks are lounging in the corner: watching, groovin’ and occasionally tappin’ their paper-thin silver tablets.

The main oke is in the trenches with us, watching as Sir Lancelot of Layout turns upside down. It’s what Lancelot said would happen, to us, ehehe!

Travel? Delores? What is that? I am streaking through the universe, lost in TBG Agnostic, and exploding through holes in space, scuttling about the interweb looking for bits of reality we call stories.

And in the midst of all this digital dust, all this newness, this change, we turn to the simple stuff of journalism pencils, paper and rubbers to keep track of the copy chaos.

This widening gyre is temporary of course, much like life in this insignificant solar system, this planet, and even this plastic, net-backed, chair which wobbles a bit deliriously as we hammer away in our forge, panel-beating the crap out of words and ideas. We are trying to find those magical facts in words which seem to slither like endless rain into a paper cup, slipping away across the universe.

Damn, I need a long goef or ride. I need to find waves of joy drifting through my obliterated mind, away from these processors (with apologies to the Beatles).

So ya, the first week of media Hades will be followed by a momentous ebb and flow into the digital era. It will all pan out.

The boss has flown, the pizza is over. Kiff, bro. It is done.

I got a badge this week from the pope, rather our lead open water swimmer, Sean, cloaked in his special robe made by Gail and friends, to say that I chased after my swim crew 8km down the Tyolomnqa River the other day.

We were all hanging out at the East London Yacht Club. Don’t get the wrong idea it is humble and spectacular all at once, just lovely people in a most amazing harbour-ocean setting.

I had arrived with my chop ‘n dop. Delores was not impressed with my non-vegan choices and promptly broke a whole lot of eggs in her top box on the way there, meaning I was even more conflicted by the runny smell of eggs all over my brown-paper wrapped wors.

I still fail to understand why it is such a struggle for us the, customer, to refuse to purchase plastic bags. I had expressly asked a shophand for the brown paper and no plastic, and she snapped at me that she was merely using the plastic bag to keep her hands off the vleis.

She was woes over the wors, and I felt I was the one needing to apologise for being a crusty old cur. I swear I saw her tip that plastic sakkie into the bin!

I want to ask retailers, who issue out all the plastic pollution in our town, why they still offer plastic bags, or more specifically, why they don’t send down the instruction that customers may find their food being automatically placed in a plastic bag helluva offensive?

I hope there are more of yous out there who are insistent that they don’t want store plastic.

You’d imagine that if there were more curmudgeons making a stand at the tills that the bosses would use us to move along with getting rid of plastic.

Change is upon us. Why pollute your own city? Just take those single-use shopping sacks of sadness away, make a paper bag cost 60 cents and take a hit for humanity.

I have yet to see a poor retailer. Anyhoo, we are all going to be OK, here in the cosmos, if we use common sense and stop poeping plastic into our happy froggy pond.

By the time you read this, I will be away in the sea, one arm in front of the other somewhere, 250m offshore at Orient perhaps, and if, per chance, a great white, decides to get curious, remember I have an Australian magnet dressed up as a Sharkbanz strapped around my ankle for protection.

I tend to assure myself that if all they find is the Aussie magnet attacked to a limb, that the trippy gadget sort of worked in a cosmic kinda way.