drifting in the night

He walks out of the elevator,
lips slightly ajar... chewing gum...
his mouth moves to the echo
of her hips as they go
boom boom boom
the bouncing of her bum
reflected in his eyes...

eyes salivating with desire
not knowing that mine do the same
I capture the upcurling of his lip
to the left
and mine lifts in response
to the right
as though instructed...
as though...
as though...

about his passing hips
my gaze swivels
as we drift,
gracefully and apart
i into the elevator,
he into the night...
pop pop pop
pops his gum...
parelleling the delicious desire
pop pop popping in me,
for him...
in him... for her...

the lift swallows me
as the night does the same to him...
and my throat is dry...

tjatjarag nhe?

suddenly a feeling of having my constitutionally protected rights to freedom of expression and association threatened by my need to keep both body and spirit in tact. a communique has just found itself into my work email reminding all staff of my employer that we "may not use the workplace to make statements of a political nature… This includes messages which may create the impression among recipients that they are of a political nature, even if you feel that they are not."

while at work for more than 8 hours in the day are we to pretend we do not inhabit a banana republic i wonder? i am deeply troubled by this request...

a very belated account of a summer holiday

One of the first things to come to me immediately upon gaining entry into that interesting, though poor, cousin to the northeast – mozambique – was “straw huts? Really? In the 21^st century, there are actual straw huts with people, real live people – not 3 little pigs, but people – living in them?”. As the perennial snob in the group, my friends dismissed my incredulity with half-drunken guffaws and more than one “oh maan nawe kanene fumbatha”. But I was serious. It was shocking. Like they were waiting for the wolf to arrive any minute and blow the fuck out of that hut in a jiffy. And sadly, the wolf was already inside the house. Not about to blow it down, but to live. And intimidate, every passing minute a stark reminder of the bare necessities of life, and what they are to those living in that hut – scarce and very nearly miraculous.

My friends may consider me now to be a snob, but I like to think that my “snobbishness” has more to do with knowing poverty first-hand, than with any perceived disdain I may have towards those less fortunate than I. Frankly, even now in my late 20's and with some years of financial independence behind me, the vicious cycle of having and having not is one I continue to tango with precipitously more or less on a monthly basis. The idea of having the trough periods metamorphose into a permanent state of being, is one that chills me. I just tend to say things for effect more than any real meaning I attach to the words coming out of my mouth. For everyone's sake I hope I write better than I speak.

One of the last things to occur to me while there was why were we taking malaria pills where there were clearly millions of people in this country who weren't and, as far as I could tell, some of them were in admirably great health. To be true, we witnessed the fitness every where. From topless twinks on the beach, to muscle marries at the market – we had our fill of candy for days! And none of these young, virile - skin so black makes you think of chocolate brownies and sweet strong coffee – boys and their eyes and their teeth and their walk and their portuguese and...

but ja, none of them were taking malaria pills. The propaganda machine, the counter-revolutionary imperialist media of the west, had duped us into expecting a barrage of malaria-moving mosquitos, baying for fresh new south african blood. We took our pills with water. We took our pills with beer (the local brew, lovingly called Dos M). We took our pills with vodka. I even took one with the slap-dash litchi martini i'd fixed for myself for breakfast on new year's morning. We were, after all, in malaria country don't you know.

But back to the straw huts. So it would seem some have cottoned on to the notion to insulate themselves from the afore-mentioned wolf by building for themselves and theirs, a house of bricks and mortar. That didn't turn out so well either. Indeed we have many slums in south africa, everyone in the world knows that. I was perturbed by the fact that in all our meanderings through townships and what passes for iilali in mozambique, only once – I think on the road to XaiXai beach, or was it somewhere in Bilene? Whatever – only one time did I see a school. Where did the kids go when there were no tourists around? Did they know there was more to life than to be an objet to be gawked at by shoe-string budget tourists such as my friends and I? Some sideshow made up of out-takes from a National Geographic special on the masks and history of the peoples of the province of Cabo Delgado? And later we heard that Frelimo had won a ridiculous portion of the vote (75% was it?) once again for the umpteenth time, and I wondered if the people back home knew or cared. Never in the history of a peaceful, majority ruled mozambique has any other party won the election. I looked for parallels in the ideological civil war currently raging in the halls of power in the ANC with the civil war that gripped this beautiful, exotic piece of paradise in the 80's and wondered. I wondered if maybe that wasn't our trade-off. I wondered if I wasn't fooling myself thinking we'd actually escaped it that easily. Especially given the powder keg it is translating into on the ground.

Then we discovered random wi-fi clouds all over Maputo, and I was convinced I was emigrating. This was the plan: i'd find myself a boy that speaks portuguese – brazilian, angolan or mozambican – and carry on a relationship of a sexual nature with him and learn portuguese; then after a couple of years of hopping from one portuguese bed to the next, careful so as not to catch any spanish fleas, I would quit my job and move to Maputo. Bem? Non?

It would seem, the tsunamis of tourists from all over the globe had insinuated internet culture into everyday mozambican life. And drive-by hacking became our favourite pastime – we were rogue south africans here to steal your internet and you couldn't see us. It was thrilling. It more than made up for the R300 bribe we paid one of the cops for making an illegal u-turn. Upon having the u-shaped arrow encircled in red against a white background with a red line going straight through it pointed out to us by the gentleman in ill-fitting official-looking garb, we protested that we couldn't read portuguese signs. Nonetheless, we parted with three-hundred of kruger's best.

Our relationship with the authorities in mozambique was a strange one. Amidst the chaos at the mozambican side of the border, they barely acknowledged our existence choosing to communicate – if you could call it that – in barely perceptible grunts and vague pointing motions – made half-heartedly and in some mixture of portuguese and whatever other languages are spoken there (we found out also that shangaan and swahili weren't as widely spoken as we expected). Then there was the R300 bribe – it was to come to haunt us later. And then there were the peeps that stopped us and admitted to all our paperwork to be tip-top and A number 1, but couldn't we still bribe them anyway coz they were expecting it anyway so may as well oblige. Thank goodness that was the extent of our interactions with the law. While it may seem that mozambique would be a country that doesn't take it's laws all that seriously, it is surprisingly low crime than one would expect for a country of so many poor people. And then I understood why. There are about 5000 white people in mozambique. In a country of around 22 million.

The correlation I'm trying to draw, racist though it may be, is that black people tend to have not and white people tend to represent the haves – whether they have or not. Add to that a constant referral to the apartheid past and it could be an incitement to lawlessness.

I must say though, that to steal anything only to exchange it for meticais did seem a little farfetched to me for a minute there. For one thing, I found it difficult to take the psychedelically coloured paper seriously. To me it looked like if you, for whatever reason, put it in your mouth you'd be guaranteed the most awesomest acid trip – enough to make you believe you are, indeed God, and burdened with the maintenance of, amongst other things, the upkeep of over 6 billion hapless wonderlings. And for another, it came in such obscene denominations I had to consciously remind myself that there was no chance of me purchasing hotels and houses on Eloff street, and neither did I obtain some of it merely by passing “Begin”. So the concept of theft in pursuit of it's very definition, i.e. so as to unlawfully enrich oneself at the expense of another, seemed somewhat comical to me if said enrichment was to then be measured by so inadequate a store of value. And yet, here they were – beggars and businessmen, hustlers and housewives – all making their own world go around and around and around again. Their conduit for trade? Why the flaccid metical, of course.

So, with a wallet of real leather from Hugo Boss' faux line (purchased from one of many overly eager travelling salesmen at the fish market) full of MT1000 notes that felt like ill-gotten funds, we went on a rampage through the city, buying whatever struck our fancy (read: beer and more beer) and wilfully neglected making the mandatory exchange rate calculation to keep us grounded. There's something empowering about paying by the thousands, even if it is meticais.

The rude awakening came some 14kms from the south african border on our way home. Before we had taken in the spectacle caused by the bottleneck at the border, our cute and oh-so camp drop top conked out. In the fast lane. In the middle of a serious traffic jam. Adventurous travellers that we are, we'd pinned our faith on the universe's ability to correct itself in our favour under the most dire of circumstances. Our faith was tested, but not for long. We pushed the car, awkwardly and with great comedy, to the shoulder of the road. And strategised. There wasn't much MT1200 could do for us at that point, and that was all the cash we had between ourselves. Our strategy was simple: we would sit there and wait until a plan obviated itself. Options were a luxury we could scarce afford at this point, and panic was completely out of the question.

Our faith paid off in time. After a false start with a local towing outfit heading towards the border requiring MT2000 to bring us to the border whereupon we'd have to strategise afresh, a fellow south african happened along in a flatbed truck heading for Inhambane. He was a godsend. He towed us as far as Matola and the universe persisted in revealing its favour towards us.

Mozambican hospitality is a funny animal. For everything there is a price, but for the things that matter no payment is required. After parting with the rest of our meticais in thanks to the kind gentleman of the flatbed, we exchanged south african coins with a group of street urchins – the only mozambican enterprise that will accept foreign coin for exchange, at a steep premium I might add. We bought a few meager snacks at the garage we'd been towed to and waited for an angel. She arrived promptly within half an hour. Our car was attended to and in a couple of days we were ready to brave the journey home once again. In the between time, we were witness to a kind of courtesy that is in severe decline today. We wined, we dined and we learned. For instance we learned that there were indeed schools in the townships. We learned that mozambique was in fact a very very big country and one that I am glad to have visited.

why is no one following me?

mmmmhhhh... a couple of blog newbies that i'm following aren't following me... must get new fans, i mean friends...

i haven't published much lately because a) my laptop was stolen almost a year and a half ago, and b) my new laptop and i haven't bonded like that yet (i'm currently using my first macbook, sans iWorks or MS Office for Mac. instead i'm using Open Office which, for all it's virtues as a distinct up yours to the microsoft monopoly, is still a pretty crap piece of software). my "documents" folder is filled wiht half-written, half-baked, half-arsed random rants that i keep thinking i will flesh out, but obviously this hasn't happened.

but be patient dear loyal reader, i will soon be with you once more... wait, who am i talking to? i don't have any fucking followers!!!...

My letter to the editor of the Sunday Times Lifestyle section in response to Diane Awerbuck's review of "A Man Who Is Not A Man" by Thando Mgqolozana

Reading Ms Awerbuck's review of Thando Mgqolozana's novel, A Man Who Is Not A Man (Ritual Abuse, July 26) has left me with feelings that can only be described as being in conflict with each other. As a Xhosa man having experienced the rite therein described, my natural instinct is to defend my heritage and cry out in outrage at such sacrilege. This is something, while the antipode of my urge to applaud Mr Mgqolozana's courage in shedding light on so misunderstood a tradition, that I nevertheless am unrepentant about. Though I too have broken the vow of secrecy in one way or another in my own personal effort to demystify a tradition I cherish as one of the few remaining links to the mythology and religion of amaXhosa.

Ms Awerbuck's analysis gifted me with a certain sense of empathy which elevated my notion of the book's value in a campaign I would like to assume I share with Mr Mgqolozana. Having successfully completed my own period of “eating little” and “tending [my] small fire” with not so much as a sneeze in the middle of a somewhat sunny Eastern Cape winter, I do confess that the plight those of my fellow initiates who weren't as fortunate was completely lost on me. I was told stories of boys my age or even younger whose uncooperativeness resulted in the most horrendous of outcomes. Disobedience was not to be tolerated. It was important to remember that I knew nothing of what was to happen and therefore I should listen, watch, and repeat – to do as I was told.

I also confess that I did eat quite a lot – including an almost complete goat left over from umojiso that hung in the middle of my hut for about a week while my cousins who kept an eye on me and the extremely humourous gentleman who nursed me went to it daily and cut enourmous chunks to put on the fire for any and every mealtime. These would be consumed over raucous and unbelievable tales of days gone by, things that happened that afternoon and plans for tomorrow. Each time I was reminded that this bounty was all my doing and that I was a gracious host for inviting all there gathered in the very first household I could call my own. And this was my reward for allowing myself to be led like a small child, new and unknowing, through a world I was experiencing for the very first time.

And so arises my conflict with Mr Mgqolozana's novel. Although I am yet to read the book and believe, from what Ms Awerbuck tells about it, that it really is worth reading – especially for umXhosa such as myself – I also think that it threatens the very thing I believe pivotal to the success of my own circumcision. I would like to believe that the secrecy around the rite of circumcision is not some throwback to a world of superstition and conspiracy. To not know what awaits you beyond the moment you are led from your home, coupled with the knowledge of the gravity of tradition, transmogrifies you into a blank canvas. This is the very mindset that is encouraged in order to train out of a young recalcitrant boy, the folly and irresponsibility of youth, and imbue in him the values and tenets of manhood.

In a time when much of what is manifestly evil and horrible about society is acted out by black men, the power of such an institution and the value of its outcomes, in the instance of appropriate execution, cannot be underestimated. But the blackballing of those who are not as fortunate as myself and indeed any of the majority who do come out alive and intact, is a sign of the unfortunate application of the tradition. One, I'm ashamed to admit, that I have never stopped to consider until I read Ms Awerbuck's review.

I look forward to reading Mr Mgqolozana's book, but I hope no one that is yet to go through this rite does. And I hope the powers that be will be able to open their minds and read it too.

genesis - the beginning

so how did i get here?

well, when i came out (makes me sound like a debutante don't it?) internet dating was something you rarely heard about on american tv shows. in sunny s.a. we could hardly even get enough bandwidth to send email, let alone create fanciful profiles complete with pics of various bodyparts and video, webcam, instant messaging... ndibala ntoni na?

when i came out, being me was still very taboo and you were either closeted behind 3-inch reinforced steel or you wore your pride colours on a sequined dress and 10" heels. the only way you could meet someone was if you were the blatantly OTT one attracting the DL brother, who would follow you out of the shebeen you were drinking at with your friends to the dark corner you went to pee in. he would then say something like "do you know " to indicate that he knew what you're about and is therefore interested. you would then have to ply him with alcohol until he was near-paralytic, but not quite comatose as he still had to drag his own damn self to your friend's house, where you would proceed to have your way with him. or rather, he would have what he wanted from you and promptly pass out, snoring, next to you, facing the other direction and smelling of yesterday's brew, feet, armpits, balls and ass.

when i came out, being with another gay man was considered a rare form of lesbianism which would result in endless taunts from bitchy bosom buddies, and in some rare cases ostracism from the gay community to which you belonged. and so it became that we took on the heterosexual model and applied it to ourselves. we became bottoms and tops. we assumed the requisite roles, and played "poppiehuis" with a never-ending revolving rollerdex of new (and sometimes recycled) boys every weekend. we wore mascara and women's pants and tops. we spoke at the highest octaves we could muster. we carried ourselves with a regal demeanour befitting of a wife of the house of windsor. we were antagonistic. we were well-liked and loved by everyone because we were entertainment.

and then one day i woke up (literaly and metaphorically) and realised i'd had enough of entertaining the masses. i'd had enough of playing someone else's caricature of what they think i should be. and so i did so intense soul-searching yada yada yada yada... and i arrived somewhere... not where i am now, but somewhere...

it wasn't until i had a full-on back and forth with one of my oldest and dearest friends did the lightbulb finally go off... he said: be the man you want to attract. simple nhe? not so simple in application though...

it demanded that i do a complete overhaul of me. well, ok maybe i'm just being a little melo there, but it did require a shift in perspective. i became less of a character, and i became... me.

but what to do about attracting a mate? it's all good and well to be me and feel comfortable in my own skin and not have to endure the unbearably judgmental stares of complete strangers, but it won't get me the cute boy in the till in the next aisle at the suparmarket's phone number now will it? i mean i have no way of telling if he bats for my team, and now, with my newly made-over self, he wouldn't be able to tell that i'm a wide receiver either. conundrum. catastrophe. loneliness???

in steps the internet...

but that's a story for another day....

intro - the first movement

welcome.

being a novice at this, and not much inclined to reading others', i'm a little at a loss for what to say in my very first blog. that is not to say that i have nothing to say. in fact i think the problem is that i have too much to say.

maybe i should start with what i'm hoping to achieve here.

this is going to be collection of my most intimate ramblings.

to begin with: i've just discovered the facebook party. i believe it's the future.

i'm sitting at the southern sun grayston on rivonia rd with one of my oldest and dearest friends. both of us with our laptops on the table, barely saying a word to each other and conducting multiple chats with friends, both mutual and exclusive. what is this world coming to?

the fun part is we're sharing the experience.

this is what one might come to expect of this blog.

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and so after a few stops and starts with the initial entry into the blog, i've finally settled on an overarching theme for it. the blog that is, not this particular entry necessarily.

my friends have been hounding me to chronicle my exploits in the invariably treacherous dating field. having been single for most of my life, i'm what you might call a seasoned dater. i recently experienced love in what was on my part it's purest form, and since that ended i've been on a never-ending quest to reclam it - not from the same person, mind you. i'm not one to peel potatoes twice.

but yesterday, as i was walking out of my office to catch a taxi i had an epiphany. an oprah a-ha moment. i don't really want to be in a relationship. i'm quite content with being single - bar the little problem of lonely nights in an empty bed (worsened by the mandatory jozi evening thunderstorms). so what i've resolved to do is to do it like the do it on american tv. i will now become a professional dater. and to that end will go on as many dates with as many people as i can handle. and you, my dear reader, will get to hear about it - blow by blow! (was that a pun?)

why, you may ask, would this be interesting to you? well it doesn't have to be really. but you're here and my mission is to both entertain you and myself, while preserving my experiences for posterity, here on the life and times of the fumi.

i mean, i'm the same guy that went on three dates with one guy and decided he was to be the father of my childred - i moved in with him, bought a stationwagon, a labrador and we had 2.5 kids... all in my head of course. and when he told me we were just friends, i went on a never-ending drinking spree to drown my sorrows (or rather let them float while i poke at them with my cigarette), which culminated in me crashing my car (which would explain why i was running after a taxi yesterday). of course, the events didn't quite follow on with such precise and rapid succession as i'm letting on at the moment - but it helps with the pathos so indulge me.

so let's get on with it... and i hope you enjoy what i've got to say... i know i do ;-)