Tag: plans

Slave to the word

Background to the texts “Advice about staying or coming back,” “Slave to the word” and “About friends and other personal reasons”: A good friend of mine who was also living in Kaohsiung at the time mentioned via email during her vacation in Cape Town that she felt like staying in South Africa. I suspected that this was only emotion speaking, but I nevertheless took the opportunity to say certain things.

——————–

TUESDAY, 3 FEBRUARY 2004

[…]

I hate the role I sometimes try to play. I hate to pretend I understand more than the average guy. I hate to hold up a picture of someone who knows what he’s doing. Regardless of whether this is what you think of me, it’s the caricature that I sketch of myself on the social landscape.

Here are the facts: I still haven’t decided whether I’m going to return to South Africa on March 4th or stay here for another few months.

I have two choices: 1) stay here but take on more classes; or 2) go back to South Africa next month and fill my place outside all socio-economic classes of which I am aware. It’s a showdown of enormous proportions.

I always say I have my finger on my own pulse, but I’m starting to get the idea and I have underestimated something the past few months. I am addicted to writing. And not in the romantic sense of the word. A heroin addict will go through 72 hours of excruciating withdrawal symptoms if he quits the drug. I believe I’ll slide into a bottomless depression if I write less for the sake of more classes, for the sake of shipping all my furniture and all my cups and mugs and kitchen towels and pillows and old jeans I haven’t worn in four years back to South Africa, and to then be able to afford a life that won’t catch too much wind.

I’m in a difficult position. I have sold my soul for the sake of my cause. And perhaps my cause belongs to a Supreme Being, and then it’s okay, I guess. But I can no longer turn back. I have considered other options and have found them all wanting. I don’t even believe love can help me anymore. (Maybe it will work for a few weeks until I start making notes on the bedsheets while the woman is waiting for something more exciting …)

(At this point, my fingers almost caught fire. I went to buy some instant noodles, smoked a cigarette, talked to [another friend], and read my history book. I now feel somewhat better.)

I don’t think it’s a good idea to send the above text to you.

The fact that I’m apparently writing this text to you at 00:55 on Wednesday morning, 4 February whilst not even sure if you’re actually going to read it serves as a clear indication of how holy I regard The Word. As I sit here writing this text to myself – at the moment, more than to you, I still believe it is relevant to someone other than yours truly.

I wish you and I could trade bodies for 24 hours. I would very quickly resolve your issues, and you could … bump my head against the wall a few times to shake out the loose parts that have caused me to sleep like a baby for the last several years, and to be awake like a madman.

I think I have given up on the idea to send all my furniture back to South Africa. What am I going to do with it anyway? A caravan is too small for it, and I can’t put it in a tree house. And it’s going to get wet on the lawn in somebody’s garden.

If my plans to repatriate myself could be compared to negotiations, the balance of power has definitely shifted over the past year or two. Initially, the one part said, “I want to go back to South Africa.” Then the other part that was mainly responsible for me coming to Taiwan in the first place, would say: “Okay, give me X amount of cash for a house, a car, a new computer, new clothes, a wig, a dog, a cat, and a lawn mower, Y amount of books written, and Z amount of Chinese mastered. Then we’ll consider repatriation.”

Currently the latter party is begging for mercy. He’s willing to give up everything but the wig and the lawn mower, “as long as we can just go home as soon as possible”. And the character who was previously known for sentimental pleas must necessarily be the voice of reason – a role that is obviously new to him, but who else is going to do it if the arrogant one of earlier negotiations is on the point of losing his mind because of too many “plans” he has to keep track of?

Still, I hate to see you walking down a similar path: uncertainty, setting up home on the wrong side of the planet, strong opinions on the choices made by so many of our friends and contemporaries.

[Paragraph where I joke about setting up a business consulting lost souls.]

No, rather come back, finish painting your walls, and put fresh oranges in that bowl. In the meantime, I will burn all my furniture, barter my books on night markets, and acquire enough cash for a large caravan. When I finally return to our beautiful country, I’ll pester you with dozens of letters every week to make sure you don’t stay here longer than I did at the end. And to remind you to move your bowl of oranges every now and then. Small adjustments like that will make your eventual repatriation much easier on the soul.

______________________

Advice about staying or coming back

Background to the texts “Advice about staying or coming back,” “Slave to the word” and “About friends and other personal reasons”: A good friend of mine who was also living in Kaohsiung at the time mentioned via email during her vacation in Cape Town that she felt like staying in South Africa. I suspected that this was only emotion speaking, but I nevertheless took the opportunity to say certain things.

——————–

TUESDAY, 3 FEBRUARY 2004

My friend

[…]

You know my feelings on the subject of going home. I believe, and have believed it ever since my second year in this country, that the lifestyle we lead here makes it easy for us to deceive ourselves. We buy coffee mugs and lounge sets, and teaspoons and motorcycles; we paint our walls in strange colours, and we start relationships with people who can’t even find Stellenbosch or Pretoria on a map.

We do all these things in part because it’s natural, and partly to compensate ourselves for what we don’t have here: a community of loved ones. Some of us do find love here, and in such cases, things work out. But many of us know that the people who have always mattered most to us are far away. Too far.

Time goes on. We constantly formulate new plans, and we talk about buying a house, and about better socio-economic situations when we finally get so far to shift our teaspoons and paintbrushes to the Republic of Our Birth. Meanwhile, our lives go on, and we get older. On the other side of the planet our loved ones’ lives also continue, and they also get older. We become aware of this every time we go home for a few weeks, to among other reasons blow our hard-earned cash, in ways that would tell everyone who wanted to know that we are doing well in the foreign land.

Is it bad to go abroad? No. Sometimes we need to get away from people and environments that are important to us. Some of us do it because we have “issues”. Others do it because they are bored. There are also those who don’t do it because they necessarily want to but because the socio-economic prospects in their own country are such that they simply have to consider alternatives. Some of us do it for all these reasons, and a few others.

Each of us must, after the lapse of a few months or a few years, decide where our priorities lie. We have to decide whether this temporary arrangement will become permanent, and whether we’re willing to pay the price for it. Or we get to the point where we realise that, despite our personal issues, despite our view of a so-called conventional life, and despite the harsh social reality that will welcome us together with the customs officer back into our own country, we have no choice but to return because we are no longer willing to pay the price for the benefits of a life in whatever other country we have spent a few years.

You must decide where you stand with this issue. Maybe you choose to send an empty seat on that plane back to Taiwan. Maybe you decide to come back, but only for a few months. Or maybe you come back to fulfil your initial plan of another two years. Everything, as you well know, has a price.

As your friend, I repeat my earlier comments: I will miss your company, but if you decide not to come back, I will wish you luck.

[…]

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Post-exile, part 001

MONDAY, 2 FEBRUARY 2004

Why can’t I go home at the end of this month – February 2004?

[…]

I can state categorically that I don’t need a home with a nice address to produce literary material. The issue of a car and house were until recently very important because one of the main reasons for repatriation was marriage-and-children. This issue has also been addressed. If I can’t help myself, and a woman finds me attractive despite her best efforts not to … then that’s just how it is. But I’m not planning to car-and-house anymore just to advertise it as such in an Only the Lonely Corner with a picture of me from ten years ago.

What is it that could possibly keep me here in March, and April … and December 2007? Is it the woman at the fried calamari place that has smiled at me a few times? Is it because I want to improve my Chinese? Maybe I’d like to travel to Japan, and China, and … what were the other places again? Maybe I first want to get my EFL publishing business off the ground? Better reasons? Worse reasons? This is, thank god, not an “Exile” essay …

The only reason why I’m not shoving my books into a box with one hand while typing with the other can be summarised in two words: “furniture” and “money”. And considering that if I didn’t have furniture, money wouldn’t be much of a problem, it comes down to one thing: FURNITURE!

“Leave the damn furniture right here,” would perhaps be your advice.

“I’ve got about fifty boxes too,” would be my pathetic attempt at talking back.

But let’s talk straight: It’s February. It’s the month of medical examinations to prove I’m healthy enough to live amongst the old and the crazy, and possessed taxi drivers and gangsters. It’s also the month that I have to renew my visa, for a period of what has amounted over the past five years to another twelve months.

I am painfully aware that I have enough money to pay for the plane ticket I booked with so much hope in December. The single ticket will cost me NT$15,500. This will leave me with enough money to keep myself going for a month or two until I can start earning money in some miraculous way in South Africa (as I continue to spend at least twelve hours per day writing material that few people will ever read).

I am aware of this state of financial affairs. I am also aware of the fact that I have suffocated most of my personal issues, or bored them to death.

So I know how much money I have, and I know how many things I will not be able to do. In theory, I can stay here another few months … damn it, in theory, I can stay here another few months and probably add a few thousand to the few thousand I have in the bank. I know full well I could probably sell my two sets of EFL material – did you really think I spend the whole day composing my personal agenda? – to a local publisher.

However, this takes nothing away from the fact that nothing is keeping me here but the need for a little more money, and a few tables and chairs. Can I walk away from the pieces of furniture that other people discarded on street corners over the years, and that I dragged to my own apartment late at night with great enthusiasm? There’s the old cabinet with drawers and gauze-covered sliding doors at which I make my notes; the small, low bedside table; the wooden cupboard in the kitchen; the large wooden table under my computer; other small tables. Then there are the musical instruments I bought in moments of madness in 2000, sofas and sofa chairs, my exercise bike …

You have to sacrifice if you want to move forward. Or you have to hope you get enough capital from somewhere that will enable you to spend thousands of rands or dollars just to put your computer on the same wooden table in your own country.

I’m always so eager to talk of revolution. Can I really do what I have to do if I become aware of the price? Or am I holding on to blades of grass while a large hand stretches out to me? Am I stupider than I think?

Do I know so many “answers” and still I stupidly rush in the wrong direction?

TUESDAY, 3 FEBRUARY 2004

For a long time, I have ignored, or sidestepped the idea of balance. Balance, as I recently discovered again, is essentially about lack of tension, or at least as close as possible to this ideal situation. The idea is central to many religions. A return to the tension-less state before physical birth finds manifestation in for example the nirvana of Buddhism, and the paradise of Christianity and Islam. The desire to return to a state of complete relaxation is, like the primal fear of disappearing into the void, one of the most fundamental aspects of the human experience of reality. No one can escape it. (Odd, this pursuit of complete relaxation, but also the fear of disappearing. Millions of religious people desire entry into “paradise” after their physical death, but at the same time they fear physical death – an essential prerequisite to enter paradise. The Buddhist nirvana, on the other hand, is to literally disappear into oblivion, but many lives must be lived before you get to this point. Isn’t it true that we all believe – deep in our hearts – that we are ultimately going to disappear into nothingness? Does it simply make us feel better giving a name to the place, or by believing the process is complex and protracted?)

Disappointing as it may be, this theological introduction is just a way to get back to my latest plan: to return to my True Home possibly at the end of this month, without enough money, and without proper planning – where high tension is likely to be rife, and where I will likely disappear into the nothingness of an uncharted no man’s land. It is true that I dropped hints in December of airline tickets that had been booked and returning to South Africa at the end of February 2004 has indeed been the plan since last July. However, I have started taking it for granted that I would stay on for a few months beyond February.

My problem, as I have already explained in the first part, is that I realised yesterday that I have a small window of opportunity right now to risk a truly heroic escape. I don’t really have enough money, but I have enough to buy that one-way ticket.

Furthermore, I see no shipping containers in my coffee beans, which means I will finally get to do what some esoteric characters speak of with great conviction: I will have to travel light. No tables, no boxes, no chairs or comfortable sofas. I will have to throw my books, and a few small ornaments and pieces of cloth in boxes and mail them home. Then I’ll have to pack two suitcases, and load them together with my computer, my camera, and the body that houses my spirit on that Cathay Pacific aircraft on Thursday, 4 March.

Why would I lift my exile after all these years in such an almost impulsive and irresponsible way, after so many “better” plans, so many financial calculations, so many elaborate scenarios and backdoor options? Because the organism is experiencing tension. And when the organism experiences tension, when he sees there’s not going to be immediate relief, he smiles at irresponsible plans. Then the voice of reason is suddenly occupied somewhere else, because even this voice knows full well what its real purpose in life is: to ensure the organism’s survival for as long as possible.

If the tension becomes too great, a plan must be made to restore the balance. And if “better” plans, and more “responsible” strategies don’t line up with the primal needs of the organism, then it’s time for revolution.

______________________

The last exile

It is Monday, 22 December 2003, seven minutes past twelve in the afternoon. I got up about an hour ago, had breakfast, and then read about the relationship between Russia and Europe up to 1856. Then I took care of my laundry, washed my dishes, brushed my teeth, and turned on the computer. First, I counted the words of two pieces I wrote last week, and then I started playing a game of FreeCell. The latter became too complicated, so I thought it might be better to write this document about the changes that have to be made in my life in the new year.

Actually, I just wanted to put a few things on paper, and I wanted to type rather than write. My intention was specifically not to write a piece – I just wanted to gather my thoughts.

The moment I typed the first sentence, however, I knew what was coming. This type of text is how I express myself these days. I can’t help myself anymore. I sit down at the computer to write a harmless note to myself, and when I open my eyes, THE WRITER has rudely pushed me of the chair and has manically started throwing his two fat fingers across the keyboard.

My plans vary between two extremes. On the one hand, I am desperate to go back to South Africa at the end of February next year; on the other hand, I would like to stay in Asia for another seven years. Between these two extremes lie all my desires, my fears, my interests, and my hope for a life that is better than the one I now call my own.

I have to force myself to stare some facts in the face, though: a) I am not 25 years old anymore. b) My problem with a permanent position at an institution or corporation in my homeland has been well documented by now. The fact remains that I need money to survive and carry out plans, and I need to take steps to ensure that I can continue to buy food for – who knows? – the next forty years. c) My big dream is a three-bedroom house with a garden and a patch of grass, in a quiet suburban area in a town in South Africa (the country where I was born and where I grew up, otherwise this book would have been written in French or German, and my name would have been Dieter or Pascal).

Of course, it’s not good enough just to say you want a three-bedroom house. Of course I need to take certain steps to obtain such a house. But sometimes I feel like these things are all preordained, and if it’s not in your cards, you can try until you’re blue in the face. So, if it says in your tea leaves, “Apartment in Kowloon until you die of loneliness,” it won’t help if you scream back in desperation, “Three-bedroom house in a quiet suburb!”

It usually helps if my mind rushes in such a direction late at night when I’m considering lying down for a few hours anyways.

This morning I got up, and after my usual piece of history (the uneasy relationship between Russia and Europe until 1905), I decided that just because I apparently can’t be a socialist any longer doesn’t mean I can’t establish my own social system and associated relations through the use of rational thought and action. Which is a cumbersome way of saying that I don’t think I’m necessarily doomed to a lonely existence on a subtropical island in Northeast Asia.

But does this mean I can go back to South Africa next February – in a little more than two months? Can I go stand in line for a three-bedroom house in a quiet town or suburb? Clearly not.

The other day I was reminded again that one must be patient. It’s all fine to sort things out and to seek answers, but answers don’t drop from the blue sky just because you asked an intelligent question. Same with our ambitions. Just because I’ve been able to mutter the words “three-bedroom house in a quiet area” after all these years without thinking I’m betraying myself is not to say that I already have title deeds for a toilet and half a bedroom.

Anyways, I can carry on dancing in circles, talking about how I smoked a cigarette, about thoughts I had on the train about the beautiful mountains, how I eventually went to pay my phone bill, and how I came home to continue writing this piece. The intelligent reader can surely guess what’s coming next: I need a plan.

* * *

I’ve been thinking for years that this profession of teaching Asian children the lingua franca of the world is better than sweeping the streets or moving papers around on an office desk. I also know all too well that the tedium of it can dry out your soul.

It has also not escaped my attention that the times I have been the happiest in the last few years were the times when I only had to spend two or three hours a day making money, with the rest of the time spent behind my computer working on my own projects.

When I do spend an hour or two in a classroom and cash exchanges hands shortly afterwards, I cannot ignore the implication: To be an expatriate English Teacher in Taiwan is ideal for people with unresolved issues that cause them to be unable to find peace in a nice middle-class suburb (or unable at the current time, anyways). There are other advantages to this way of making money – you can master a foreign language, first-hand contact with other cultures, and sometimes you meet people you never would have met otherwise.

In short, where else could I teach English for twelve hours per week and earn enough money to cover my basic living expenses? Where else could I, without having to draw a single line on a contract, move into an old apartment and nail my pictures to the wall? Where else could I eat even my oatmeal in the mornings with chopsticks – which doesn’t work, by the way, and have a conversation in Chinese with a beautiful woman outside the supermarket in the evening when she throws a fresh chicken thigh on her grill for me?

Where could I do all these things … while writing the one exile essay after another full of melancholy and longing for my people?

I have to finish up. I see short stories in my tea leaves, and Chinese dictionaries in my coffee beans, and if I cast my eyes to the stars, at least another seven years of teaching in Northeast Asia. The benefits have already been mentioned; the disadvantages are spread over this entire literary project.

One thing, however, has to go in the struggle that lies ahead: Exile!

For years I’ve been suffering from this feverish hope that the life I now call my own will not be the best I can ever bring about. This hope fuses to my fears and my desires through the burning fires of frustration and longing. That is what has driven me to write exile essays since June 1999. That is what has kept me from looking beyond the next six months. What else if you’re constantly looking, with narrowed eyes, for ways to get away from an unsustainable situation?

I am tired of exile.

* * *

Are you as reader as confused as I am? It should speak of talent to say so much, and at the end get away with so little that is new. Am I going back to South Africa on flight CX1749 departing from Hong Kong on Thursday, 4 March 2004 at 11:50 at night? That is certainly what my travel agent believes.

______________________

Factor X kicks in

[Briefly, the background to this piece: By September 2003, I was seriously considering leaving Taiwan for a large town in Gauteng, called Bronkhorstspruit.]

MONDAY, 15 SEPTEMBER 2003

Bronkhorstspruit is … a shit place, everybody knows that. But it is also the place where my youngest sister and her husband decided to establish themselves. The town has about fifteen funeral parlours, twenty “Eazy Credit” joints, a Wimpy Bar, and a stationery store that sells a few books. There is no music store. There’s no 7-Eleven that is open 24 hours a day. There’s no lively scene in the centre of town every weeknight at ten o’clock when people come out to enjoy a late supper at temporary pavement restaurants. There’s no coffee shop that stays open until after midnight. There is a huge temple and educational centre built by a Buddhist order from Taiwan. And in a neighbourhood about twenty minutes from town on foot, lives my beloved youngest sister.

Can you justify giving up everything that is familiar to you – or that has become familiar to you over the past five years of your life – just because you miss your family?

[…]

What is everything about at this point? What is the whole story of Taiwan, Bronkhorstspruit, South Africa, and the Far East about? What is the idea of “business”, and writing, and barbecue and dessert at “home” about?

It’s about being as happy as you can be. And it’s about regret, especially in my case not regretting later that I didn’t spend more time with my family. It’s about not just following a tedious script like a second-rate actor. It’s about being who you are (if you have finally sorted that out), rather than just being the by-product of all the measures that you implement to survive and to suppress your fear of the day when the gods strike you out of the blue with a bolt of lightning. (Or, realistically speaking, to express your real personality as much as possible after putting all the necessary measures in place. Everyone is afraid of lightning at the end of the day, aren’t we?)

Why am I writing this piece on this Monday at seven minutes past two in the morning? Because I’m moving to an apartment in Benevolent Light New Village in the Mountain of the Phoenix. Is it a bad place? No. Is it a bad neighbourhood? No. Is it a laborious irritation to scrape grease deposits off the kitchen walls with a potato peeler? Yes. Am I wasting valuable time having to suddenly pack rather than to work on my projects? Yes. But I console myself with the thought that I had to buy some boxes anyways to start packing; that I had to leave the dark dump I’ve been calling my home for the past almost five years at some point.

Why does my new apartment inspire me to write this particular text? Because I was reminded of the fact that my life in this country doesn’t follow a script; I write the story as I live. To name but one example, I most assuredly did not know two weeks ago that in two weeks’ time I would be sitting on all fours on top of a marble slab with a pair of surgical rubber gloves on, scraping off clots of grease with a potato peeler. (Sorry, I just had to mention that again.)

But this little insight, and the photographic potential of the view from my new kitchen is not what is really important (or it’s just part of the larger story). What really bothers me is the fear of what lies ahead for me when I no longer hope for the day I return to the land of my birth. I think I’m afraid my life in South Africa will become … ordinary, caught between the fear that someone will break into my apartment while I’m out shopping for garlic sauce or biltong, and the fear that I would suddenly wake up one morning and I’ll be thirty years older.

[…]

“Anxiety” is for me more than just a psychological term. As long as I run around and struggle for a better tomorrow, as long as I faithfully make notes on THE PROCESS, I feel like I’m doing what I’m supposed to do. Then I feel as if I am on my way. I think I fear the day I’m supposed to declare that I have arrived, and someone jumps from behind a bush and shouts: “Surprise! In the end you did follow the script! You (also) win the prize!”

Then again, maybe the prize is happiness. Maybe the prize is that you feel you belong somewhere, and your life has meaning because it has meaning to people who are important to you. Maybe the prize is that you feel you can go ahead with your creative work, because you did arrive, but it’s still important that you say what you want to say.

Or am I just afraid that, despite the wide availability of garlic sauce to enjoy over your barbecue, I will still get bored with Bronkhorstspruit?

[…]

Am I trying to run away from what I already know? That we are highly developed animals that must try our best with our fantastic, yet limited capabilities to serve Good rather than Bad, and to carry forward the flame of Polite Civilisation until our time is up and we must pass the torch to the next generation.

I need to stop dancing in circles.

[Later on Monday, 15 September 2003]

I’m worried that I would feel my purpose has been served and I that I am rewarded with a “normal life”.

Why is my current life to some extent still okay, even if I want to get away from it? Because I am still fighting for a better life. But what happens when you reach that point of which you dream? Or do you keep moving the point further away?

What if someone were to tell me that life is never “normal”, and that a “normal life” is a dream beyond most people’s reach? “Everybody is constantly struggling for something better,” the person would say, “even though their lives on the face of it, to observers like you, might appear normal and ordinary.”

Still – I would ask, for what do they struggle? For financial security? That’s not good enough for me. The struggle for financial security is to me just a way to give a greater struggle a better chance of success.

Perhaps my opponent in this debate would then give a sly smile before he played his trump card. “You know what man,” he would say, “you’re just grumpy because you don’t have someone to brighten your day a little bit.”

In such a case I won’t have much of a choice with my counterargument: Is this the best we can do? Fifty thousand years of evolution since our ancestors huddled together in caves and bludgeoned each other to death with mammoth bones, and that’s the best answer that we can come up with? You just need a little love?

The question is simple: Am I on the right track with my current plans? Or is my face in the right direction, but my feet not quite on the right path? (Do I still reckon there is only one path that goes in that direction?)

I recently did some research on ways to make money without having to work for someone else. I concluded that even I might be able to be successful with a few ideas. Now, maybe it was all that scratching off grease in the new kitchen, or the fact that I was going to have an apartment with proper windows for the first time in nearly five years in Taiwan. Perhaps it was inevitable that I would have thought about it at one point or another. However, earlier tonight it struck me as I pedalled through the dark streets on my creaking bicycle, that I have never been in a position where I could say I knew how I could make money in South Africa, which is important considering that I have always regarded money as the main reason I couldn’t go back. I’ve never been in the position where I could ask myself whether this is truly what I wanted to do without any reservation; if I were truly ready to plant my feet in a piece of South Africa full of fresh cement; if barbecue and Sunday lunches with my family would truly be a panacea for all my ills.

These thoughts are the reason I’m writing this particular piece on this Tuesday morning, 32 minutes after midnight, rather than packing the dozens of pieces of junk I’ve accumulated over the years that I exhibit as “ornaments” in my living room.

[Tuesday, 16 September 2003, almost one o’clock in the afternoon]

As I was riding back last night from my new apartment, I asked myself an administrative question: Do I really want to stay in Taiwan? I was mildly surprised at my immediate answer: No.

A short distance down the street, past the general store where the beautiful woman hits the till, past a few old gents sitting outside someone’s miserable home drinking rice wine, past the deserted morning market area that smells of rotten tofu, comes the follow-up question: Do I want to go back to South Africa? The tentative answer: Yes, but …

Beyond the military base with the overgrown wall I first thought was a castle, into the last stretch of road before you’re back in a part of town where fruit sellers are still open shortly before midnight, and where lonely men chant songs about lost love in cheap KTV parlours, I repeated the answer: “Yes, but?”

“But,” I said out loud under the leopard skin mask covering my mouth, “two weeks after I had found an apartment in Bronkhorstspruit, after I had unpacked my books and hung sheets over the windows, I want to go to Mainland China. For three months.”

Back at home I was annoyed because it seemed as if I had come up with a new plan. I got comfortable behind my computer and wrote the previous page (including the fact that I’ve never been in a position where I could say I know how I could make money in South Africa).

Just as I was considering the merits of last night’s final paragraph, my phone rang. When I saw it was an international call, I realised it must be my friend L. I knew why he was calling. Fifteen minutes later I chucked the last drops of gin from the little airline bottle down my throat, lit up a cigarillo, and repeated the words to myself: “Born at eight minutes past three … a little blue in the face, but doing well … four kilograms.”

I felt happy for my friend, his wife, their families, and especially for the little guy who finally saw daylight. I thought by myself the timing was interesting. Suddenly the whole idea of being a grown-up and having your own children, and the huge financial and moral responsibilities thereof were no longer just an issue that could fill up a piece of writing. It happened to my best friend! And I had no choice but to mumble through the cigar smoke, “It’s fucking profound.”

The few drops of gin weren’t really enough to celebrate the great news, so I jumped on my bike and raced to the 7-Eleven to buy a half-jack Jim Beam – which they no longer had in stock. Fifteen minutes later I was sitting with a can of Qing Dao and another cigarillo at my dressing table. Good thoughts about my friend and their firstborn led to renewed speculation about my own life.

I wondered again if I had come up with a new plan with the three-months-in-China remark. Meaning to spoil my fun, I wondered what I would do after the three months.

I was hoping that I would say I would go back to South Africa then, to plant my knees – rather than just my feet – in some fresh cement. But I realised that I was still not sure about “what then”.

That’s when I lost it and whispered menacingly in the direction of my reflection in the mirror: “Your life is a wheel! It’s going to continue turning and turning and turning! Round and round and round!”

My life is a wheel. And it will keep turning until I throw a spanner in the spokes. Or until someone else does it for me …

______________________