kagablog

14 Sep ‘05-01:59

Aah, Sea Point. Maybe it’s just the ho pheromones, or the exhaust
fumes, or the soupy mist of oil from cheap takeaways, or the blinking
lights, relentless through the fishy smog… Maybe it’s the
conglomeration of them all… The whole place reeks of overtiredness.

Know how the Durban beachfront feels at night? All sodium glare and
humid candyfloss and hooting and “rayban” pushers, stumbling over
sprawling elephantiasis limbs; cabbagey piss and rotten elephantiasis
limbs underfoot at every turn, elephantiasis limbs EVERYWHERE?

Or the water slides in Muizenberg? Icecream sticks and rusty fishguts
and cocoabutter thick in your nostrils? Shrivelled bikini grans and
stubbed toes and burnt children scrambling back up, over and over,
getting their money’s worth, with fresh snot to add to the circulated
stream? Kinda like that.

Like a casino, or a circus, or the school parking lot half an hour
before the last night of the end of year play. Just like that. The
cement, the tar etched with residues of action, the erratic paths of
people hopscotching between the pavement’s wet patches of unknown
origin, beat-up cabs snaking through the gutters, cruising for someone
going somewhere, doing something… you never can be certain what.

There’s a interminable vacancy in all the hyperactivity, a loneliness.
A sense that whatever’s done is probably being done mainly to keep up
appearances, because it’s in the script. In bar toilets, in sighing
lifts and entrance lobbies of peeling flats, people wait,
unexpectantly, for something undisclosed… The sour gaggles of Jewish
crones… The fags in the coin-op laundrette… The makwerekwere…
The goosefleshed trannie under the stop sign.

It’s a frustrating place, a titillating place for anyone with even a
pinch of the voyeur in them… You never know if today’s gonna be your
chance to be privy to that something, to overhear the deal… Well,
it’s hardly likely to be above board, is it? You daren’t blink in case
you miss it, yet you virtually never get to see the loops close,
experience the denouement. And your imagination goes crazy.

Oy vey, it’s a schande. Happeningness rubs your nose in it, but, from
a distance, it’s too pungent, too slippery to pry open cleanly… You
know your conjecture’s amusing but empty.

Romanticism breeds covetousness, even of the sordid. So, you’ve read
Burroughs, Bukowski, Genet, Sade. Ballard, Palahniuk, Sartre… Your
own illicit missions never feel as archetypal.

It’s like being hopelessly in love, but not being in 40s Casablanca,
y’know? Like rainbow soap bubbles popping on your tongue… The bath
gets cold before you stop being too distracted by the froth to immerse
yourself fully.