Let us put away our tools and take out our toys now
There’s a modern Zulu saying that goes Akuqali ngokucosha amaphepha kuphela — Going around picking up random paper litter in the street is not the only sign of dementia. This could possibly explain the general state of the Joburg CBD — perhaps no-one wants to be targeted as a demented individual, which is why paper bags are clogging up our drainage system during the current rains.
But this is not a column about our general piggy disposition. It’s about the general levels of fatigue in our nation.
This past Monday I park my skedonk in the basement parking at Rosebank Mall to get some supplies. When I return to the car, there’s a bearded man hovering around the driver’s door, pressing impatiently at his car keys. I stop dead in my tracks. Is this what they call car jamming? I look around for the uniformed folks who loiter around for a reason I have yet to fathom. Of course, they’re nowhere to be found in this, my hour of need. So I step up to him cautiously and inquire, “Excuse me, but how can I help you?” His response: “My damn key seems to be out of battery. I can’t open this effing car.”
I look at his car key. He looks at it. Our eyes lock. We both cast our eyes towards the key again. The Hyundai key. My car is not a Hyundai. His entire countenance washes over with a mixture of mortification and shock: “Oh Thixo! Ndicel’ uxolo mfondini!”
From the ensuing conversation it emerges that he drives the same vehicle as I do, down to the colour, but on this particular errand was driving his wife’s car, hence the mix-up. His last words before walking away were, “It’s been a really long year.”
I concur. It’s been a looong, exhausting year for me too. When your job is to write lighthearted columns, it’s especially hard. I’ve quoted Queen Elizabeth’s Guildhall’s speech before on these pages, the one in which she invoked the Latin phrase annus horribilis (a horrible year).
Man, has this been a horrible year for this big-headed, marginally podgy columnist!
Ordinarily, I’d say that I just wanna go home to my mommy so she can bake me scones to have with butter and jam and afterwards go outside and play Taxi Rank with my friends, Thiza, Phillip and Mfaniza. In Taxi Rank, you and your friends push bricks on the ground, pretending they are Toyota Hi-Ace minibuses, quibbling over passengers, because your folks can’t afford toys from Reggies. But even the thought of my mother, who recently suffered a tuberculosis scare, is angst inducing. The old man is in hospital battling lymphoma, you see.
I don’t want to be an adult anymore. “Adulting” is an unfunny prank concocted by a sadistic Eskom engineer who was bored with switching the lights off and decided to torture us with the far-fetched fantasy that growing up is cool.
More importantly, like the fellow who tried to open a relic Merc using a Hyundai key, I’m really fatigued, man. No, I’m not being a snivelling little poor excuse for a Zulu warrior. I really am exhausted. I need a break. From myself. Being me is harder than anyone imagines.
In the 1999 movie The Matrix, the character Cypher decides he wants out of reality, saying, “I don’t wanna remember nothing. Nothing, you hear me?” If I want anything for Christmas it is to forget this year. I want to forget any year where my exhaustion reached such crisis levels that I forgot that I have a 12-year-old son who needs to be fetched from a tennis tournament. I want to forget that I went into an elevator on the ground floor of a building headed for the 5th floor and that folks joined me on the 6th and 8th floors. I want to forget that on the 16th floor, a woman shook me awake and asked me what floor I was going to and whether everything was OK at home. I was fast asleep. On my feet.
All I want for Christmas is to go outside and play with my friends.
I don’t want to be an adult anymore. ‘Adulting’ is an unfunny prank concocted to torture us with the far-fetched fantasy that growing up is cool