Verbal Diarrhoea

I have just fallen in love with Sarah’s travel blog, Where the wild things go. Her photos are so beautiful, so vivid, they look like oil paintings. And her writing! You’ll want more than anything to pack you bags and head for the great outdoors.

 Cup of coffee at La Vie in Seapoint. The service at La Vie is really, really bad.

 Seattle Coffee & Barry

Barry, Seattle Coffee and new friends watching the sunset.Bird landing on the rock.

Today ladies and gentlemen, I’m going to tell you a tale.

This tale takes place in a beauty salon. This was no upscale beauty salon. There were no tiny, little elves serving me endless cups of Camomile tea. No hairdressers gently massaging my head, while pandering to my ego by complimenting my flawless complexion. This beauty salon was housed in a complex of factory shops. An economic will make one do strange things.

I’d walked into the salon in the hopes of vanquishing my very sexy moustache, and had ended up staying for a pedicure. As the beauty therapist went to work on my talons, I lay back and read an article on the risks of baking crystal meth in a plastic bottle, in Time Magazine. And my Time Magazine, I meant People Magazine. And by article on risks associated with “shake-and-bake” meth, I totally mean article on Brad and Angie’s disintegrating marriage. As you’ll recall from my previous paragraph, this ain’t no classy joint.   

After 30 minutes of scrubbing and filing, our beauty therapist informs me that the job is complete. Peering over the top of the magazine, I inspected my toenails.

“Hmmm, don’t you think THAT toe looks funny?” I ask, indicating my big toe on my left foot.

The girl gives me some bland excuse, which I’m clearly not interested in.

“Hmmm, yes I think it looks funny,” I say and settle back onto the pillows. The message is clear. Redo.

With that she reaches for the acetone and starts removing the nail varnish. As she does so, some of the acid manages to fall onto a tiny, OPEN sore on my foot, the fruits of running.

“Ouch,” I say, hastily wiping away at my foot.

And what do you think the beauty therapist’s response was? Do you think she apologised profusely? Do you think she hastened to provide me with a moist towel, to remove the offending substance? No. She did none of this. Instead she replied very coolly, “Oh did that fall on there?”

And that my friends, is how my foot accidentally connected with her face. “Oh did my foot actually do that?”

www.madamezingara.com 

Madame Zingara’s Theatre of Dreams gives new meaning to the word “entertainment”, providing customers with a dinner and circus act that enthralls. Last year, I checked out Vaudeville, which attempts to duplicates Zingara’s winning formula. Having watched both acts, I can honestly say that Madame Zingara makes Vaudeville look like a 2 dollar whore.

The food (four courses) together with the show, was well worth the R400. The chocolate chilli steak was so soft, I could have used a spoon to cut the meat. The appertiser of crumpets and beetroot was interesting and the dessert … Key lime pie, vanilla ice-cream AND Bar One springrolls. Yummy!   

My neighbour’s cat, Gabbana. Apparently she had a twin named, Dolce …

Feel free to watch this deliciously funny video on why women, who own cats will remain single. FOREVER.

Dandilion. Trying to find beauty in the mundane …

Hey remember me? My name’s Sid Kane and I used to blog. I USED to tell such funny anecdotes like, “Remember that time we had a homeless couple staying in our wendy house*? They’d sneak in at night and they’d keep us awake with their coughing and arguing. His fists, her face.”**

Anyway, the lack of blogging is a direct result of my hectic social life. And by hectic social life, I mean that I recently told a friend, “Today was so beautiful. And I knew I shouldn’t waste it. I thought of calling you and arranging something, but then I realized that this would mean putting on pants. And I was prepared to do that.” Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I give new meaning to the word LAZY.

Anyway, I’m currently reading “One flew over the cuckoo’s nest” by Ken Kessey. Extract to follow:

“There’s a shipment of frozen parts come in downstairs – hearts and kidneys and brains and the like. I can hear them rumble into cold storage down the coal chute. A guy sitting in the room someplace I can’t see is talking about a guy up on Disturbed killing himself. Old Rawler. Cut both nuts off and bled to death, sitting right on the can in the latrine, half a dozen people in there with him didn’t know it till he fell off the floor, dead. What makes people so impatient is what I can’t figure; all the guy had to do was wait.”

*Wendy house – Wooden play toy room

** Not even making any of this up. Think I was in high school at the time.

My dad

A few days ago I went running with my dad and his friend. Five minutes into the run, “Are you okay? Do you want to go back home to your mommy?”

My mom

Me: You remember Mohammed from primary school? He’s gay.

Mom: Ag shame.

My sister

Sister: And then he took off his T-shirt and that’s when I realised how smart he really is.

I must admit that I simply love taking pictures of children. Unlike adults they aren’t self-conscious and don’t get annoyed by my “artistic direction”.

Anyway, a few days ago my cousins asked me to watch them while they swam.

Me: Of course. As long as you promise NOT to drown.

Yep, I’ll make an excellent parent one day.

Photo taken at Rick’s Cafe in Park Road. Cazz ordered the Turkish Ravioli for R48.

Have I mentioned that I absolutely LOVE taking photos of food. And occassionally I like to eat it too!

Photo taken at Muizenberg beach.

It’s silly really. But there it is. I was afraid. Of a 15km race – a distance I’ve done at least a handful of times.

I’d overheard my brother talking about the route; the slow steady incline that went on without let-up. And my stomach muscles started to clench. Fear rose unabated.

It’s funny though. It was exactly the thought of the gruelling route that attracted me to the race in the first place. Ever since I’d heard about the race, about a year ago, I’d wanted to run it. I’d listened to the veterans’ tales with awe. I wanted a war story. I wanted battle scars. I wanted to push my body to its limits and see what it could endure. I wanted to be anything but ordinary. And so it started.

But as the race day drew closer, my anxiety intensified. With all the December festivities, my training schedule had been disrupted, leaving me feeling unfit and unable to do anything more than 10km. I felt sure that midway through the race, I’d come to a dead halt. That I’d find myself standing in the middle of the road, unwilling to move. That I’d hear a little voice in my head that screamed and begged, “THIS is not fun. This hurts. Please stop.” And there I would stand, dazed and on the verge of tears.

Realising and quantifying my fears, spurred me into action.

I did the equivalent of cramming for an exam. I bounded out the door and onto the road whenever I had the opportunity. Covering stretches of 6 to 18 km.

I practiced the race route. Being mentally prepared for a race is a huge key to success. It means no surprises. There’s nothing worse than running full steam ahead, exhausting all your resources, only to find that you still have a bitch of a hill to tackle.

I charged my iPod and set my gear aside the night before the race.

I envisaged myself at the start of the line. I envisaged myself relaxed and calm.   

And I told myself that it was “no big deal”. I wasn’t trying to attain a new personal best, I was simply trying to finish.

Come race day, and all my fears dissipated. It just came so naturally. One foot in front of the other. That’s all I needed to focus on. The PRESENT and how I felt in THIS moment. That was it. And when it did become tough, as I expected, instead of repeating my usual mantra of, “Stop being such a wuss and make this race your bitch”, I opted for something simpler, “Peace and serenity. Peace and serenity is what awaits you beyond this hill.” I’m not entirely sure why my brain had hooked onto those words, but they seemed to right.

And so I ran 15km. and I ran it in 1:34.

I’m currently reading Born to Run by Christopher McDougall.

Cue extract:

“A good pacer is a huge help during an ultra, and Ann had one of the best: not only was Carl fast enough to push her, but experienced enough to take over if Ann’s brain fritzed out. After twenty or so hours of nonstop running, an ultrarunner can get too mind numb to replace flashlight batteries, or comprehend trail markers, or even, in the unfortunate case of a Badwater runner in 2005, distinguish between an imminent bowel movement and an occurring one.

And those are the runners who are really keeping it together. Hallucinations are no strangers to the rest; one ultrarunner kept screaming and leaping into the woods whenever he saw a flashlight, convinced it was an oncoming train. One runner enjoyed the company of a smokin’ young hottie in a silver bikini who Rollerbladed by his side for miles across Death Valley until, to his regret, she dissolved into heat shimmers. Six out of twenty Badwater runners reported hallucinations that year, including one who saw rotting corpses along the road and “mutant mice rats” crawling over the asphalt. One pacer got a little freaked out after she saw her runner stare into space for a while and then tell the empty air, “I know you’re not real.””

And in completely unrelated news, I think I’d like to train for a marathon … Erm, but don’t keep me to that.

Above photo taken in New York.

The following passage from Hell’s Angels haunts me. Sensitive readers be warned!

At a party many months after I first met the Angles when they were still taking my presence for granted, I came on a scene that still hovers, in my mind, somewhere between a friendly sex orgy and an all-out gang rape. It was not an Angel party, but they had been invited, and twenty or so showed up for what turned into a two-day bash. Almost immediately several of the outlaws located a girl, the ex-wife of another guest, who agreed to make the beast with two backs in a small building set apart from the main house. Which she did, and happily so, with the chosen trio. But word quickly spread of the ‘new mama’, and soon she was surrounded by a large group of onlookers … drinking and taking a quick turn whenever some vacancy occurred.

I keep a crumpled yellow note from that night; not all of the writing is decipherable, but some of it reads like this: ‘Pretty girl about twenty-five lying on the wooden floor, two or three on her at the time, one kneeling between her legs, one sitting on her face and somebody holding her feet … teeth and tongues and public hair, dim light in a wooden shack, sweat and semen gleaming on her thighs and stomach, standing around yelling, wearing no pants, waiting first second or third turns … girl jerking and moaning, not fighting, clinging, seems drunk, incoherent, not knowing, drowning …’