by Ben Trovato
According to the newspaper, some pupils are unhappy with the anarchy that has been unleashed at their school. We prayed for anarchy at ours. The only thing that stopped us from running amok was the threat of a beating and expulsion. All threats appear to have been lifted at Settlers Agricultural High and Lord of the Flies is playing out in real time.
The reporter found “algae-infested showers, damp walls and broken windows and doors”. So? This is Limpopo. It’s astounding that anything still has doors or windows. Girls are also having sex in their dorms. Not, as you’d expect, with each other, but with boys. I imagine this constitutes part of their biology practical.
One parent said she noticed scars on her Grade 10 son’s back. He and a few of his mates were taken to the soccer field one night and whipped with belts by a posse of matrics. This is shocking. They have a soccer field? At an agricultural school? What the hell happened to rugby? No wonder the Springboks … let me rather not.
One girl was reportedly traumatised after seeing a large amount of blood when a pregnant classmate aborted in the hostel. Then she was beaten up by five girls whom she had reported to the matron for shagging in the dorm. Then she tried to kill herself. Her mother tried to get hold of Limpopo’s education MEC but it seems he wasn’t taking calls.
The matric pass rate has dropped and fingers are being pointed at the headmaster. “The principal drinks alcohol with pupils and police regularly remove drugs from the hostels where pupils smoke dagga openly,” said an SRC member who requested anonymity for fear of being wrapped in a petrol-soaked blanket, set alight and dropped into a pit of venomous snakes. A harmless prank, as the school might put it.
There was no comment from the principal because, according to the education department, he was on sick leave. Can’t blame him, really. I’d also be sickened with myself.
I hope the government hurries up with land redistribution because next year’s matrics will take farming to a whole new level and I wouldn’t want to miss it for the world.
RIPPED ABS AND SHREDDED UNDERWEAR
After months of no hard work, I have finally managed to develop a classic example of what’s known in the trade as a dad bod.
It hasn’t all been downhill. Well, I suppose it has. But the body is a funny thing. Some are funnier than others, that’s for sure. It’s not as easy as you might think to lose all muscle tone and upper body strength and develop a healthy pair of moobs. You don’t just get a dad bod overnight, you know. You need to keep at it.
Here’s what happens. The body is initially delighted. Beer, bunny chows and no exercise? Woohoo! This is the life. Then the brain interferes. Hardwired to focus almost exclusively on ways of ensuring the survival of the species, it knows the road you’re trying to take it down leads to a place where opportunities for propagation are few and far between.
It knows that the only women who might, at a push, find a dad bod anything less than repulsive are the ones who have a mom bod. In almost every case, though, mom bods are more attractive than dad bods. There’s a reason men on dating sites don’t list their body type as “curvaceous”. Or so I’ve heard.
The brain eventually gives up and says, “Fine. Do whatever you want. Don’t get laid ever again. What do I care?” Parts of the body, overhearing this, shout, “Hey! Speak for yourself. Selfish brain.” The brain sighs heavily. “Stupid body.”
With the brain and body no longer talking to one another, you can get on with the job of developing the most perfect dad bod on the planet. No, wait. This is not what I’m meant to be writing about. This was supposed to be about getting into shape for summer. Nobody wants to see your sad dad bod on the beach.
I went out and bought a magazine for inspiration. I thought I was buying Men’s Health because it had a half-naked bloke on the cover, but when I got home I saw it was in fact a magazine called Fitness. The only reason I never took it back, apart from not wanting to do the 30-metre walk back to the shops after already having sat down, was because it occurred to me that it was more fitness and not so much health that I was after. Health you can get from doctors and pharmacists. Fitness, on the other hand, can only be achieved from a magazine that sports the photograph of a bronzed god with the most perfectly chiselled torso on its cover.
Sitting here looking at his body, two things occur to me. One, I’m not remotely aroused. Two … there is no two. I’m just relieved that, at my age, I don’t have to start rethinking my sexuality. I’m not even curious about experimenting. But if I were, it certainly wouldn’t be with Cover Boy. I’d take my shirt off, he’d start laughing and I’d have to kill him. In his sleep, obviously. I’d need a pneumatic drill to penetrate his chest, which would probably wake him unless I had dosed him with horse tranquilisers beforehand, and I don’t want to be going around to vets asking for 500 grams of ketamine for my sick pony who’s waiting in the car.
Fitness seems to be a gender-neutral concept so there’s no reason why, if you’re not a man, the advice I am about to glean and share shouldn’t also apply to you. Apart, perhaps, from the feature workout promised on the cover. “Rock-hard abs! No excuse for soft abs this summer.” If you’re a woman, simply swap the word abs for willies. You’re welcome.
For a long time, I thought abs stood for automatic braking system. It was quite disappointing to discover that abs are in fact some kind of rare muscle group that disintegrates when you turn 40. When Darwin was dishing out abs, I must’ve been having a smoke in the parking lot.
The cover also promises a “full-body workout in just one move!” Oh, please. I’ve had that one down for years. All you need is a swivel ’n tilt chair on wheels, a smooth floor and a clear run to the fridge.
Opening the magazine, you’re hit by at least three companies trying to get you to buy their whey. Looking at the models, it seems unlikely they got like that through whey alone. I reckon they’ve been dipping into the curds, at the very least.
The publisher’s name is Andrew Carruthers. In my mind, a middle-aged executive who liked to keep fit but was running to flab as a result of all the meetings he has to attend. Then I turned the page to the publisher’s letter. I’ve had the police, army, ex-wives and hired assassins after me and lived to tell the tale. Having Andrew Carruthers after me is something I’d like to avoid. He looks like the leader of the most dangerous prison gang in the world. I wouldn’t have a hope in hell of out-running or outfighting him.
In his column titled, “Grow your mind, not just your muscles”, he says, “The greatest ideas in history have come from people who were either considered outcasts, insane or mad.” This gives me hope that we could sit down over a brace of tequilas and a couple of whey chasers and discuss the subtle differences between insanity and madness.
Let me flip through the magazine to find ways of developing a beach bod that will blow the girls away this summer. I suspect, though, the only way this might happen is if I strap a bomb belt around my wobbly white waist.
I might have left it a bit late, to be honest. Summer is in full swing in Durban while Cape Town is still trying to make up its mind. Anyway, it’s rutting season and looking anything better than your worst is best for all concerned.
Alan asks, via email, what to do about stiffness in his joints after heavy lifting. Alan, if you’re struggling to lift your joints, you’re either rolling them too big or you have the physique of Mr Burns.
I’ve thought of going to gym at different points in my life – most of them were pretty low points, admittedly – but I’ve never known what to wear so I didn’t go. Good thing, too. A gym T-shirt costs R900 and a pair of shorts R749. I can go to a backstreet plastic surgeon and get the fat sucked out of me for that price. I thought I might learn something from an interview with cover boy Wayne Coetzee. And I did. He says the secret is to never miss a meal, never miss a workout. Excellent. I have 50 per cent of it under control already.
Another memorable quote is, “I always squeeze the muscle with every rep, whether it’s a superset or a max-rep set.�
�� If I ever manage to find out what he’s talking about, I bet I can look like him in no time at all.
Oh, thank god. There’s a sultry, under-dressed fox on page 26. Just looking at her is cardio training on its own. Like Little Miss Muffet, she also likes her whey. And I bet she gets her whey whenever she demands it. Her ideal man, apart from having a body like Achilles (without the dodgy heel), is “good with cuddles and booty rubs”. I am the cuddlemeister and I used to rub my army booties until you could shave in their reflection. Call me, babe.
There is also advice on how to biohack your sex life. Biohack? Sex life? What are these things? It’s suggested that you perform “male deer exercises” and eat a Peruvian root that grows on the slopes of the Andes. I miss the good old days of just whipping off your broeks and getting to work without having to first go to South America or prance about the lounge snorting and pawing the ground.
If pain is your thing, there’s a feature on endurance where you can “learn to suffer”. Please. I’ve been married twice. I know about suffering.
“Upgrade your paltry four pack to a beach-ready six pack!” That reminds me. I have to get to the bottle store before it closes.
See you at the beach.
WATER WASTE OF TIME AND MONEY
A cloud of panic hangs over the southwestern tip of Africa. It used to be bong smoke, but now it’s panic. Word on the street is that Cape Town will run out of water in less than six months.
I’ve never been a huge fan of the stuff. Salt water, yes, but only because that’s what the ocean is made from. I can understand why people would buy bottled water in a country where landmine victims outnumber cars, but nobody ever died in South Africa from drinking tap water. Unless maybe the tap belonged to a neighbour who suspected you of trying to turn him into a frog and shot you in the back while you were bent over drinking. Which probably happens fairly often in Limpopo.
Every day there are fresh statistics to scare the living hell out of everyone in Cape Town. The six dams that supply the city are currently at 38 per cent capacity. Isn’t this quite good? It’s more than I got for maths in matric and I turned out okay.
In the old days, when rain was a thing, consumption in the metropole was at 1.1 billion litres per day. It now stands at 585 million litres. A massive reduction. But the number is still too big for us to fully understand. Look at it this way. Every man, woman and child is consuming the equivalent of 292 Windhoek draughts per day. That’s a reasonable average for the Cape Flats, but you’re not going to reach those heroic levels in Constantia or Bishops-court.
I suppose not all of it is getting chucked down people’s throats. There’s bathing and watering gardens and washing cars and a lot gets wasted in places like workshops and hospitals where staff get grease and blood under their fingernails.
But apparently that’s still too much. The city wants people to shower for no longer than a minute. If you get caught running a bath, you’re stripped naked and publicly flogged. I tried showering for one minute. At six-foot-four, there’s a lot of ground to cover. Sixty seconds was just enough to lather up into a striking resemblance of the abominable snowman. So no rinsing then? Seems unduly harsh. I went and stood outside, letting the freezing wind blow the suds from my quivering body. I didn’t want to use a towel because that would’ve meant having to wash it at some point. The penalty for washing towels is a light stoning. For now. I expect it will be escalated to the amputation of a hand by the end of the year. I went to the mall later with flaking patches of dried soap on my face and arms. Mothers covered their children’s eyes. I saw one woman gag.
It has also been recommended that you don’t flush the toilet if you’ve only had a wee. This isn’t a problem for me because I wee outside. Not in the street. In my garden. It’s a territorial thing. When I was married, I’d sometimes do it indoors if it was very cold outside. One night my wife caught me in the act of marking my territory in the lounge. I stood there with my willy out, telling her it was the cat. Luckily she was hallucinating on benzos and found it all quite plausible. She poured me a saucer of milk and went back to bed. Actually, she didn’t even bother with the saucer.
In Cape Town, you’re also supposed to stand in a bucket when you shower, then use that water to wash the children who have to stand in their lunch boxes, then use that water to wash the baby in a soup bowl, then use whatever’s left over to water the one plant you have chosen to save.
On the rare occasion it does rain, the roads are suddenly full of people driving around randomly.
“Quick, get in the car. We’re going to Knysna.”
“Are you mad? Why?”
“They’re having rain. The car’s filthy.”
People are advised to close the toilet lid when flushing, presumably to save the seven drops that might splash onto the floor. They are also encouraged to use disinfectants, face masks and gloves where required. I don’t know about you, but once I’ve done my ablutions I generally don’t need to have the crime scene cleaners around.
Apparently Phase 1 of the disaster plan has been implemented. I didn’t even know there was a plan. A better one might have been to make provision for this crisis several years ago. They knew. Oh, yes. They knew alright. But there’s nothing sexy about desalination and groundwater abstraction projects. Not when you live in a city of mountains and beaches and a waterfront that makes Durban’s look like a dumping ground for junkies, vagrants and medical waste. Which is exactly what it is.
We are warned that supply might be disrupted during peak water-usage times. Being self-employed, I don’t know what this means but it seems unlikely I’ll be affected. People who live in high-lying areas will experience outages. I live two metres above sea level. I’ll be fine until Donald Trump melts Antarctica.
The city has appealed to people in low-lying areas – like Mitchell’s Plain and Gugulethu – to curb their usage to help their less fortunate brothers and sisters who are suffering terribly up on the slopes of Clifton and Camps Bay. Seems fair.
The city has also installed seven thousand “water management devices” on the properties of “delinquent” water users. These are not juvenile delinquents. These are grown-ass people who just don’t give a damn. So their pipes are fitted with the equivalent of ankle monitors.
The city is divided into pressure zones. For instance, there’s no pressure in Observatory. You can wake up at midday, smoke a blunt and get a tattoo or a shot of tequila right there in the main road. No pressure at all.
There’s been talk of remotely manipulating valves in the reticulation network, but this seems to be some sort of code and nobody understands what it means. Apparently it reassures people. Not the paranoiacs, obviously.
If an area is using water above the daily limit, pressure will be reduced to force consumption down. Once consumption is reduced, pressure will be restored. It’s the old “I’ll have sex with you when you give up drinking” ploy. It’s the carrot and stick method, although I’ve hardly ever used either during sex, and it doesn’t work because there’s always one guy who wants to fill up his pool and wash his Range Rover, racehorse or trophy wife.
On my way for a surf at Muizenberg the other day, I passed two lots of people down on their hands and knees on the side of the road. This being Cape Town, I expected they were drunk, praying or doing yoga. Being the deep south, it could easily have been all three. But no. They were hunkered around outlets from a mountain streams, desperately filling bottles and drums.
One of them looked a bit like Immortan Joe, the disgruntled civil servant who featured in Mad Max: Fury Road, a documentary about water shortages and how even a woman from Benoni can survive without an arm or even a sense of humour.
It just occurred to me that a water shortage might also mean a beer shortage. Let the stockpiling begin.
PLAYING CHICKEN WITH THE YELLOW-BELLIED YANKS
We are all going to have to start doing what we can to help boost our bedridden economy. This includes those indolent indigents who hang a
bout the traffic lights waiting for a handout instead of studying for a degree in astrophysics or putting in the hard hours working at Nando’s.
For my part, I intend eating more American chickens. A lot more. And I suggest you do the same. If you don’t want to do it for me, do it for our relationship with America.
Recently, 16 million kilograms of chickens from the land of the free and the home of the brave flew into South Africa. Not physically, of course. Chickens aren’t exactly up there with seagulls when it comes to aeronautical ability, and they’re even more clumsy with their heads off.
Thanks to a piece of imperialist fuckery called the African Growth and Opportunity Act, our supermarkets will be bombarded with 65 million kilograms of chicken a year for the next few years.
The Act, as it relates to chickens, is an opportunity for American chicken farmers to get richer and an opportunity for South Africans to grow fatter. This deal works out at 280 kilograms of chicken for every man, woman and child every day of the year. I don’t know if my maths is right. I don’t get paid enough to do calculations.
Poultry farmers in the US obviously sell the best bits to their own people because they’re a very discerning nation. You can tell this by the number of people who wanted Donald Trump as their president. When it comes to chickens, Americans care only about breasts and wings. The other bits – what we know as “gimme-a-thigh-and-drumstick” – are regarded as by-products and therefore eminently suitable for Africans.
South African chicken farmers are less than impressed. Flooding the market with fowls pumped full of cancer-causing filth has traditionally been their responsibility. How dare these … ah, who cares? We’re all going to die at some point. It may as well be with a face full of giblets riddled with arsenic and brine.
Speaking of fowl play, the safest place to be right now is in a neighbouring country. I am currently hunkered down in Windhoek. It’s not a place I return to lightly. I have an ex-wife and a daughter here. One of them still talks to me. I lived here from 1985 to 1995. The most appalling people spent the first five years trying to kill me and, when their methods failed, I spent the next five years trying to kill myself. Death by beer. It’s a slow and often rewarding process.