Where god hates the trees.
The Karoo is hot. Like fucking sun-massacred hot. The land where God hates the trees. She loves only the scrubby, fragrant bushes that refuse to die and the Orange river. The leviathan that cuts its way through the flat line of the horizon like an old boxer – no speed remains, only power.
We who will live
I dunno sometimes. It feels unfair, y’know. But I can’t pretend nobody told us. That we didn’t know it was coming. Just this morning in the paper, with those strikers gunned down like that… It was like bits of ash drifting in on the breeze. We’re going to watch the world burn. Hell, we’re going to be the fire.
The Next Asana
Night makes for such delicious confession. Only the warm insomniacs inside, writing their muses into weary pages, and those few in the cold beyond. Who use the dark to play their own games deep past the witching hour. Inside is music, coffee, and self reflection. This three-year asana is drawing to its close. Existential tendons have already begun to draw into something different. Steeling for the years abroad. I’m headed overseas.
The Politics of Promises
It’s been hard to write of late, as some heavy fugue settles over my heart and holds otherwise dextrous fingers from their dancing. A creative humidity that permits a degree of heat, but kills any brighter spark as it tries to burn and leave. Partly, I think...Work in Progress
It’s been five years (or close to it) since this blog last had a change of theme, and a lot has happened in the interim. Skinny jeans became fashionable, apparently. So it’s time to prettify this blog a little. Smarten up the ruffles a little, and get some...
Words like Oven Gloves
Finding the words is key. Not just any words – the beautiful, blunt ones. Each one imprecise by itself, but when assembled in a constellation suddenly able to carry an emotional texture unmatched in its depth and fine, fine resonance. A little like oven gloves. Clumsy and useless alone, but once paired, capable of so much more.
Dark And Light: Into Weapons
[Taken from the Ugandan Journals]
In transit at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, I bought a copy of Six Months in Sudan by James Maskalyk. I vacillated over the decision to buy it. Mostly because of not wanting to draw shillings from the ATM just for a book. In the end, of course, I would.
Page one
[From the first pages of the Cape to Cairo manuscript, Nov. 2009]
This is a story about traveling from Cape Town to Cairo on public transport. It’s also a little about what happens when you throw yourself out into the craziness of the world and try to do something you never thought you could.
Writing the knot
It’s quiet outside. The world is sleeping and I shouldn’t be here. I should be asleep, but here is where the writing happens. It’s a place that the ghosts of the eloquent words finally come gently to my dancing fingers. Like intricate little knots, stories need to be understood before they can be written. Sometimes its as simple as the right words providing the momentum that coerces the string. Flopping into a loose and beautiful pattern. Sometimes it’s so much harder than that.
DRC by Numbers
Returning is only over when you are back at a place you recognise as home, waking up in a bed that remembers how you like to spread out at night, for more than a week. By that yardstick, I’ll be home on Wednesday and you will get delicious audiovisual treatery soon after. For now, though, a brief storytelling interlude via some quick stats written on the dirtiest back pages of my journal.