Why it's time to say goodbye

When I started this blog I was going through a major change in my life. I was moving to Joburg and was planning on starting a new life. In a a lot of ways I did that. I found new friends and old ones.  I fell in love a couple of times and I found new places to work.

Then things stalled and I started updating intermittently. But when I started up last year I did so as a coping mechanism. I was coping with a broken heart. I don't need to anymore. I mean my heart still gets broken but it's time for me to move on from writing that down here for everyone to see. My coping mechanism has served its purpose. There were days that writing this blog saved my life and there were days that it saved my soul. There are days that were the best I have ever had that are not captured here. But they are saved in my head - the most important  place.

There are lots of reasons why I don't need this anymore. I am growing up. I am learning to finally love myself. I am moving on to a new job. I am facing my demons and conquering them.

But the most important reason is that I don't need this anymore. It doesn't matter what happens I just don't.

I will continue to write, but, unless it's for a book they will be private musings,  quiet place to take solace, away from the internet. Maybe in the future I will start another blog to talk about other things but for now the state of my heart, whatever that ends up being, must remain private. My own, precious and nurtured.

So that's it then, Adios, vaya con dios, hamba kahle, see ya later, peace out, goodbye. It is done.

I will leave this up for a while for those of you who actually liked my blog and the stuff I wrote. For the rest of you I leave with you this. My favourite thing from the internet ever and pictures from some of my favourite memories here.

Cinema Paradiso

Breakups

What's better than a dress

Nothing...

Jamming in Jozi

Busting a motherf#ckin move

Wonderwoman

A girl

Audrey

Knitted fingers and bravery

Taking my own advice

Waltzing

Love

What ifs...

How to survive a ... just kidding

I call her Wonder Woman and she calls me Superman. At least we used to.

*******

I knee jerked this morning. I unfriended someone. I never, ever do that. Even if we argue like cats and dogs I won't do it. But to be honest it was the next logical step in self-preservation for me following two weeks which were characterised by mis-communication, bad advice, insecurity and misgivings. I regretted it as soon as I hit the button. It was impulsive and not really something I had decided on doing until I saw her name on my screen. Like I said I regretted it immediately.

I'm jumping the gun. Let's go back a few steps. A while ago I met a really amazing woman, we really just started out as friends but that quickly grew into an attraction and then a complete and utter stuff up of one night together. 

Then months later we tried again - the sushi debacle. Cue four or five months later and a third try. I was skeptical. I had been burnt twice and to be honest even thinking about it stung too much. 

Somehow, however, we ended up trying again - but in that wholly adult but fucking batshit scared way of doing things. We decided to take it slow and get to know eachother. 

I am not going to divulge details, but for a while it all went bloody swimmingly. 

Then I was sent away for work, we had a fight and the fantasy came crashing down. 

That was three weeks ago and the final conclusion of it all came last night when after a week of trying to figure out what she wants, she realised, again, that it wasn't me. 

To be honest I freaked out a little bit in the middle there and perhaps pushed a little harder than I should have.  It fucking sucks.

I don't even know how it happened. What should have been a simple boy likes girl, girl likes boy back situation, turned into a complicated shitstorm of "who knows what the hell is going on?"

Somewhere along the line - way before the waters turned murky - she started calling me Superman and I started calling her Wonder Woman. It just seemed apt. Perhaps we were both creating these fantasy versions of eachother that neither one could live up to. Perhaps it was foreshadowing, everyone knows Wonder Woman and Superman don't end up together.

****

Last night as I lay on the couch in an unfamiliar room, again posted away for work, reading messages I was expecting to come all week, a calm descended on me. It lasted for about 15 minutes but in that moment of clarity I just accepted it. 

So much shit had happened, even before we tried this in the first place. So much presumption and mistrust from both sides and way too much interference from people who had no idea what was happening and which in the end just led to a mess which neither of us could possibly untangle.

Fifteen minutes later I was mad as hell and wanted to break everything in sight but thank God for those 15 minutes of clarity. 

Even now I am not sure what I believe. Some things just don't add up and not one person said anything positive about the situation we were in. A part of me wonders if that even matters. The majority of me feels that it does, but there is that naive, romantic side of me that thinks the only thing that matters are the hours we did spend together without any pretense. The hours where we both let our guards down.

I know she is not real (Wonder Woman), that she is an imagined perfection but crisis I am pretty sure that at least once she was real, not a figment of my imagination.

I have to believe that, that vulnerability she showed when we were alone was not an act. I can't believe, that all the cynics are right, that it was all a show, that it meant nothing. Like a kid who believes in Santa Claus, for some reason, a part of me has to believe in Wonder Woman. 

*****

DISCLAIMER: Of course I am mad as hell at being railroaded again, but the worst part is I also had to stop following Kim Kardashian on Facebook. She looks like KK, except, she is much, much prettier. And yes, I am serious, no more KK.

What if I told you

What if I told you
She is fragile as glass

What if I told you
She is as strong as granite

What if I told you
She is Valhalla

What if I told you
She is the curve of every coastline

What if I told you
She is the break in every cloud

What if I told you
She has lips like Egyptian cotton

What if I told you
She has skin like Venetian cloth

What if I told you,
She scares me

What if I told you
She thrills me

What if I told you
She is everything I thought she would be

What if I told you
She makes me want to be everything I have ever thought I could to be.

Walking tall

Yeah I know, it's been a while. Although I have been writing recently, I haven't really posted anything; mostly because the things I have been writing about are deeply personal (even more personal than the things I normally post here). To be honest, I would feel a little overexposed if I posted them. They are conversations I should be having with people, not publicly. Bloody hell! I must be growing up hey!

Anyway, there's something else I have been mulling for the last couple of weeks. It's something I have written about before, actually.

About seven or eight years ago I had a fleeting conversation with a very close friend, which was much needed at the time. Basically, she told me that it was time to get over the shit that was bothering me and move on with my life. To emphasise her point she told me how I used to have a confident walk. You know: I walked around like I owned the place, but then, I always was a cocky bastard.

But life at the time had beaten me down to such an extent, that I had quite literally lost the spring in my step. I shuffled where I used to strut. My shoulders stooped where I used to walk with my chest out. I snuck around where you used to hear me coming: my heels beating out a rhythm on the floor as I tap danced through life.

I have been shuffling a bit this year. No one likes a shuffler. I think its cyclic: sometimes you forget that you need to strut, thanks to life beating you down.

Last week I was in the grocery store and this kid walked up to the shelf right next to me. He was dragging his feet. I wanted to turn around tell him "Pick up your feet dammit, walk tall".

The words stuck in my throat. I had to choke them down and, for the life of me, I couldn't figure out why. It took a couple of days and I had to think about it but finally it dawned on me: I was talking to myself in a lot of ways. For years after that first conversation I had walked tall.

You see, walking tall is an attitude. It's looking at life and saying "come at me bruh!" It's about not caring what anyone insignificant thinks. It's about backing yourself, to get the girl, to get the job, to win the fight, to be the best. I forgot that for a while. I think we all do. If you have forgotten, I am partly here to remind you.

You're fucking awesome. No matter what anyone tells you and most of all you deserve to be happy. It's there, take it. That's the mind-shift. That's the culmination of the journey.

So screw just walking - now I dance down the passage at work and I don't give a shit what anyone thinks.

I am working on applying the same rule to life. There is really only one other person I want to impress - the rest of them can kiss my ass. My tall walking, dancing down the passage, singing at the top of my lungs ass.


DISCLAIMER: If you can't dance, walk. Shoulders back, chest out be an MMM product!

More beautiful things I really want you to see.

It's hard to see beauty sometimes. Sometimes you simply give up on beauty. Sometimes you might feel that beauty may not be enough.

The truth about beauty, though, is that it is enough. I think it is in everything - even sadness. You have to embrace beauty to survive.

Someone, whose opinion I value quite a lot, said something the other day that surprised me. She said: "What if happiness is a myth? What if melancholy is our natural state?"

I was taken aback at first. The thought of never being happy scares me. But then I spoke to someone over the weekend who gave me another piece of sage advice. He said: "The worst thing you can do is to fight life. Sometimes you just have to let life happen."

And perhaps that is the secret to being happy. Perhaps we need to accept the melancholy and, while we are in it, embrace the beauty of it. Perhaps if we can do that, then we can eventually move forward to find happiness. Perhaps if we just let life happen, we will find happiness and the beauty which it entails.

Perhaps. Wab-Sabi

(This is quite funny considering what happened the last time I ate wasabi)

I don't know. I do know that I have found some more beautiful things I want to share with you. Here are some more of the most beautiful things I will ever want you to see.

 

****

This is Robby Novak aka Kid President.

 

 

Pep. talks. Beautiful.

 

*****

 

I have had a love affair with dance since I was a kid. I used to dance in clubs as a teenager: it was stupid-running-man, Vanilla Ice-type stuff. I have never trained. In my parents' house boys kicked balls and girls danced. Today my love for dance is just as strong, but my knees aren't. I vascilate between going to formal classes for fun and just admiring it from afar. Those of you who love dance, or who have danced, will know what I mean when I say there is an expression of beauty in movement which is unmatched by any other artform. I have fallen a little in love with every Prima I have ever seen dancing. They always seem mysterious and unattainable to me. Ethereal creatures, gracing us with their presence, allowing us mere mortals a glimpse into the magical world which they come from.

 



 

 

Dance. Beautiful.

 

 

*****

 

A side-effect of collecting beautiful things is that you begin to actively search for them. The blessing in that, is that you end up discovering new things and, in some cases, new artists. Creating beauty is the preserve of the artist. Whatever form beauty takes, creating it is the conclusion of a creative process which defines the life of an artist.

I found this the other day. It's been around for a while but, until recently, I did not even know it existed. The net-result, the discovery of a new artist. Watch it. It's beautiful.

 

 

Discover Ryan's art here.

 

 

Thoughts. of. you. Beautiful.

 

*****

 

At varsity I majored in photojournalism. Part of that was learning to print in black and white and also studying the work of the world's greatest photojournalists. Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado caught my imagination. His study of human suffering - specifically migrant workers - in beautiful black and white hit home for some reason. I also found his hard, high contrast, printing aesthetically pleasing. It's how I ended up printing (maybe because that is the way I live my life, black and white - no grey).

 

 

An old lady in Mali. 1985

 

Ordinary. people. Beautiful.

 

 

*****

 

There is not very much I can say about this.

 

 

Love. Beautiful.



 



The most beautiful things I will ever want you to see

What do you think the definition of beauty is? I am not talking about the beauty you see in magazines - you know pretty girls and boys in pretty clothes. I mean beauty as it appears in the world in all its guises, all its forms. 

I was thinking about beauty the other day. What makes someone or something beautiful? Is it simply an aesthetic measurement or is ther more to it?

What takes your breath away?

I like to think that beauty is not just about what you see but more importantly how something makes you feel. Something is truly beautiful when you look at it and the way it makes you feel surprises you. It's difficult to put into words exactly what that feeling is. Difficult to describe, as difficult I suppose as describing what beauty is. So what is beauty? I don't know.

What I do know is that over the years I have seen many things that I have thought are beautiful. Some of those have been in life and some of those have been on the internet. Some of them I have experienced and some of them I long to experience still. Some of them you might not find beautiful and some of them might be the most the beautiful things you will ever see. That's the beauty.about. beauty.

Here is my collection of some of the most beautiful things I seen recently.


Humans of New York is photoblog. Brandon takes pictures of New Yorkers and writes candid captions to accompany them. Check out the pics - they will make you believe in the goodness of people again. The stories these people tell made me fall in love with a city I have never been to.

This picture and the caption is actually what inspired this post.

He doesn't always waltz.

But when he does it's in public.

Dancing. together. in. public. Beautiful.

*****

Here's a beautiful thing about kissing. A group of strangers were asked to kiss for the first time on camera. The result is surprising, but what's more surprising is the reaction you will have to watching this video. It reminded me of kissing a girl ... just a girl.

First. kisses. Beautiful.

*****

 

 

 "I want to do to you what spring does to the cherry trees."

This is my favourite line from my favourite poem by Pablo Neruda. It's Poem #14 from 20 Poems and love songs of dispair.
I don't know the name of the woman who tortured Neruda, but she did a pretty good job of it.  Thanks to her, however, some of the most beautiful words in history were put to pen. Reading Neruda is an achingly, beautiful, almost torturus experience. Find out why I think that here (if you are brave enough): http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/tonight-i-can-write-the-saddest-lines/

Read the rest here:

http://www.poemhunter.com/pablo-neruda/poems/

Tortured. words. Beautiful.

 

*****

 

 

This is aerogel, widely regarded as the most fragile substance in the world.  According to Wikipedia, nicknames include "frozen smoke",^[2] "solid smoke", "solid air" or "blue smoke" owing to its translucent nature and the way light scatters in the material. It feels like fragile expanded polystyrene (Styrofoam) to the touch.

 



Aerogel is widely regarded as the most fragile substance in the world.

It's used to extract stardust.

 

So the most fragile substance on Earth is used to extract a substance found in meteorites which were formed four billion years ago. That's surprising.

 

 

 

This is where stardust comes from



 

Surprising. fragility. Beautiful.

 



 

*****

 

These are my friends. And these are just some of the memories we have made. Some I have known since I was 12, others just in my adult life. But they, and many others, have brought beauty and love into my life. One is my spiritual guide, one is my escape, one is my colleague, one is my sounding board, one is my strength, one is my reality check, one is my yardstick, one is my motivator, one is my intellectual test, one is my rock.

 

 

 



 

Friends. and. memories. Beautiful.

 

 

******

 

Lupita Nyongo'o won the Best Actress Oscar this year for her role in 12 Years a Slave. Her performance has been hailed for its strength and courage but it is her public speaking and in particular this speech about beauty which has gained her admiration in many circles.

 

 

 

True. beauty. Beautiful.

 

 

******

 

 

There is not very much that I can say about this.



 

 Love. Beautiful.

 





Fixing balloons

Some people are lucky in love. My baby brother (he hates when I call him that) met his girlfriend when they were 12, started dating her a couple of years later and they are still together today. He is 25. She lived around the corner. I mean, who does that happen to?

I am different. I have been in love a few times and almost every time I thought it would last, but unfortunately it hasn't. I say unfortunately, but the reality is I might have just been lucky.

I have had my arse handed to me a few times in my life.

I had my arse handed to me once in high school by a girl with strawberry blonde hair. Then twice in University - once by a blonde girl from another land and another time by a girl with curly blonde hair. When I lived in PE, a girl with blonde hair who was way too young for me handed me my arse when I thought I was indestructible. Then finally, when I moved to Joburg, a girl called Bean with blonde hair handed me my arse. I loved one other girl but I fucked that up. She also has strawberry hair.

I'm sensing a trend :-)

Anyway that's not the point. The point is every single time one of those girls, all of whom I truly loved by the way, handed me my arse I was pretty much convinced that I would never love like that again.
 
The truth is I didn't. I loved differently every time.

The strawberry blonde girl was my first. The girl from another land was short and sharp. The curly blonde haired girl and I connected mentally. When I was with the girl who was too young for me, I wanted to take care of her. Finally, being with the Bean was passionate and angry and like being thrown into a deep end of a pool when you can't swim.

They were different but I loved them all - in my way.

A lot of people will look at that and say I fall in love too easily and that, because of this, it can't be true love. I don't care what those people think, because as much as each of those girls handed me my arse, they also handed me a priceless gift. They taught me forgiveness.

People are complicated, difficult beings to understand and, until recently, I didn't realise just how much.

One night when I was wallowing in the deepest pit of self-pity (don't judge, we have all been there.) I read something which blew my mind:

"Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand

that this, too, was a gift."

It's a poem by Mary Oliver called The Uses of Sorrow. Finding the meaning is something you will have to do yourself but I think I have discovered what it means for me in the last month. It has come as a relief.

I have digressed. Back to people being lucky in love: in a lot of ways I am jealous of my brother.

He has never known what it's like to lose someone you love. To watch them get in a car and drive away before they fly off to their island. To hear them say it's over and know they mean it by the look in their eyes. That's lucky.

I just can't shake the thought, however, that I have been lucky as well. In some weird way I am thankful that I have been through the things I have. I think we all should be thankful for having had the chance to love someone, no matter how fleeting it was or how painful the ending was.

I found this the other day. Please click the link and read it before you carry on reading this. It's short, I promise. Also, please note that he is wearing a bow tie.
http://www.spiritscienceandmetaphysics.com/this-comic-about-love-will-touch-your-heart/

It's weird how sometimes this kind of thing will come across your path when you least expect it, or even when you most need it.

The analogy is almost perfect. If your heart is like a balloon, my brother's is unblemished, still gleaming as it floats next to his girlfriend's. Mine is scarred and covered in plasters, but you know what? It still floats.

At my age every woman I meet has a balloon that is either scarred as well, or locked up in a box where it can't be deflated again.

Most people would be scared to put themselves out there if their balloon was covered in plasters. I mean how much more of this kind of sh*t can it take?
The answer is different for everyone but my biggest failing (or success, depending on who you ask) is that I am a hopeless romantic.

I bought a girl roses every day of the week last week just because it wasn't Valentines Day. It's stupid and a bit ridiculous but I didn't care. It felt right and I would do it again in a heart beat. My balloon is beaten up, a little shabby and it's been broken a few times, but you know what? I fixed it and it still floats. That's all that counts really.

DISCLAIMER: It has dawned on me that perhaps, I should stop dating blonde girls.