RockWaste

Dear Richard
Aged 12
1996.

You’re almost half way through standard 4, and you’re preparing for the adventure that is Middle School. You’re leaving the safety of being the one of the oldest kids in the school and going into being one of the youngest. There’s nothing to worry about though. In fact, the bullying stops after this year because the two bullies will move away. Your best friend has been badly affected by the bullying – far more than you have, but you’ll only find out about that much later. For him, it doesn’t stop now. a new bully will carry on picking on him. But don’t worry – he will get his own back when he kicks the bully in the nose. Don’t blame the bullies – they were scared of your brains and it made them want to pick on you.

At the end of this year, you’ll never see Amy again. She disappears and you never find out what happened to her. Only the childhood memories of you and her in the bushes and walking in the forest will be there, and they will be with you until well into your 20s and beyond. You’ll realize soon how pure and unchallenged your friendship with her was. Other girls you know now you’ll know all the way through school – one that sticks out in my mind are one who you’ll save from committing suicide at 22 by being in the right place at the right time.

Remember one thing. Friends come and go. Some of your friends will lead you down paths of drugs and booze, and others will be patient with you while you experiment with these things. Understand that when you choose the friends you do, there is no way of knowing how they will influence you, but know that there is always a choice and you never have to be friends with anyone you don’t want to be. Friends are replaceable, and the sooner you learn that the better off you’ll be.

In the years leading up to you finishing college, your friends will:
• Four of your friends will take drugs with you.
• Two of your friends will get drunk and arrested with you.
• Three of your friends will shoplift with you.
• One of your friends will go to church with you.
• One of your friends will allow armed men to hold you up at home.
• Two of your friends will comfort you when the girls in your life leave you.
• One of your friends will talk sense to you when you won’t cut the girls in your life out.
• One of your friends will die.
• Two of your friends will try and commit suicide.
• One of your friends will fall in love with you.
• Five of your friends will leave South Africa.
• Your best friend will steal your girlfriend.

This list just shows you how little control you have over your friends, so when things go sour – and they will – don’t stress about it and just apologize and move on. If they can’t, then they’re not worth being part of your life.

Your love life is a crazy thing. You only really get your first real girlfriend after school. You do have flings and short term relationships at school, but they all amount to nothing. Two of your ex girlfriends now have kids out of wedlock, and one of the two will totally destroy your self esteem. She’ll belittle you and tease you, but you won’t leave her, because you love her. Even at 24 you still haven’t recovered from it. You get cheated on a lot, and she is the first. Women lie to you a lot and lead you on. It hurts because you develop a habit of falling in love very quickly. One day you’ll learn to pick up on this and do something about it before it’s too late, but until then just be careful. It takes you a long time to recover from broken hearts – and there are many.

Study. You get through school with almost no effort and no studying and pass with a D. You have the ability to get a much higher mark if you concentrate and study. At the same time, realize that school and college only get you so far – the rest of the way is hard work – something you’re very good at. You become good with your hands and especially with computers. Your intelligence scares people sometimes, and sometimes you rate yourself too highly and are disappointed.

Eat less and exercise more. Later in life being overweight becomes a burden. You get teased and judged often for it, and people take you less seriously because of the way you look. It won’t take a lot to change your habits now in preparation for then.

Lastly, you need to be aware of this:
People are your biggest downfall. You trust too easily and too quickly, and when you discover this and cut off your friends, you become lonely and depressed. You need people. You thrive on people contact, regardless of how much you think you don’t.

Best Wishes
Richard
Aged 24.
2008.

Putting on a brave face to the world is easy. Meaning it is something altogether different.

Life is pretty much as bad as it’s ever been for me at the moment. Inspirational messages are welcome.

Today, the excitement can finally set in.

I clutch in my dirty fingers my air ticket and visa for a 6 day business trip to Dubai. I leave Saturday.

I love the internet.

To me, it’s man’s single greatest invention. Information can be pulled and stored in an instant. You have access to absolutely anything you could possibly want. And that is just the beginning. Connectivity is easier and cheaper than ever – communicate by voice and video to anyone anywhere in the world, for almost no cost. What a marvelous invention.

And then we add people.

Whether it be a forum, blog, IM client, IRC or any other form of open forum, people go from nice, gentle, kind people to raving lunatics. Perfect case in point can be found HERE, where a grown 40 year old man reduces himself to childish games over a spat with a woman he dearly wanted, but could never have, or whatever the actual story is. Regardless, what is it about the internet that turns nice people into complete wankers?

Today’s post on Random Thoughts From Underneath The Table has a little comic in it that made me giggle hyserically for at least 20 seconds. Absolutely genius.

Just becuase we don’t know you personally, doesn’t mean you can be a total fucking wanker.

That is all.
Class dismissed.

You’ll have to excuse the obvious and ridiculous title – it was just too tempting to resist. I caved to it’s whims like a prostitiute chasing a few hundred Rand notes. I accept punishment in the form of lashings and/or sexual advances (preferably at different times if delivered by the same person – violence and sex aren’t supposed to be linked).

Moving along quite swiftly.

I get so irritated by the state of affairs in this excuse for a deocratic nation, and yes, I do complain a lot about it – which most people, if my email is to be believed, think I’m whining. Sure, I could take the stance that if they don’t like it, then they should stop reading it. But that’s not the right way to think. Instead, we’re going to change the focus of the blog a little bit, and make it more about ME! That should be much more interesting! But before we do that, I just have to get one more thing off my chest.

To the fucking wanker in the convertible BMW: Nobody thinks you’re cool because you can afford that car, or because you’re wearing a pink shirt and oakley sunglasses. In fact, most of us laughed at you for looking like a faggot. And please, my dear gay friends, don’t take offence – a faggot isn’t a gay guy- a faggot is a flaming fucking wanker of a gay guy. Anyway, before I end up getting offensive, let me stop there – my mood is far too strange to try and explain myself.

In my blog post about new years resolutions, I made three.

#1. get over her.
I’ve done it. I no longer care about where she is, or what she’s doing. I don’t want to date her again, and I’ll be ok about not seeing her again.

#2. get down to a size 38.
Work In Progress – but maybe a tab ambitious.

#3. get a raise.
Done. The bosses called me in a few days ago to announce it.

66% in 33% of the year. At least something’s going right for me.

Cars are great. The freedom to drive around wherever you want to, and do whatever you want to is awesome. I wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world. Well, except maybe a car that does more than 10km to the litre.

As I write this, the price of petrol is somewhere around R8.50 a litre – I’ve stopped even noting exactly how much it is since it goes up every month now.

Cost per month: About R500 for 60 litres of petrol.

Thieves, on 5 occasions now have broken my windows (once, even 2 windows in one incident) to steal my cd player, speakers, and whatever else they can find in the car.

Cost per breakin: R3000 (Windows, CD Player, Speakers, etc)

And the sundry expenses – brakepads, batteries, oil, brakefluid, wiperblades, and whatever else you need month to month.

Cost Per Month: About R400.

So let’s just say my car gets broken into on average of once a year, thats a grand total of more than R10 000 a year on just having a car. And all you get for that is the ability to drive around. That’s not even a new car – that’s just the running of the one you have now.

Another expense that you could almost get away with not having if this country wasn’t so sordid and had a proper public transport system.

I have an alarm set to go off every day at 15h50. For some reason, that transition into the double digits of time remaining in the working day is a milestone that makes the last half of the day go just that slight bit quicker. That alarm just went off now. In a few minutes, the daily Outlook reminders will start to appear, and I will start to close down for the day. I’ll write my reports, finish off current tasks, send my completed reports by email, and finally leave.

And tomorrow, at about 06h30, I’ll drag myself out of bed, splash water on my face, throw on my work clothes, and drag myself back to work again. I’ll get to work, and open those reports, and begin my tasks, and wait for the sound of that 15h50 alarm to sound again.

Habit.

Although we may say we hate it, it’s this repetition that we need to keep ourselves level-headed with everything else around us being completely barking mad.

It seems that Scott’s bold plan to take MyCokeFest down by any means necessary isn’t even necessary anymore. Apparently during the 12 hours, over 120 complaints were recieved by residents due to noise pollution, and the event, accoring to Big Concerts, will no longer be staged in Cape Town because of these complaints.

Being someone that hasn’t attended either of the two events held so far, I consider myself unbiased. In fact, I’m unlikely to ever attend a future event unless they bring a band I consider unmissable, and even then, I’m not sure if I’d be swayed. I don’t think it’s too expensive, I don’t care that the lines for drinks and food are long – I just don’t like the South African version of a “festival.” Festivals should have multiple bands playing at the same time, so that if I don’t like one, I can just go and watch another. They should also be events that are longer than a single day, and have campsites, bad hygeine, hideous toilets, and great vibes. I’m afraid the South Africa Rock festival has a long way to go to reach the standards set by festivals like Reading or Glastonbury in England.

That’s not what this post is about. The post is a giant middle finger to those who complained about the festival. Your reasons are selfish, and ridiculous. Out of a whole year, for 12 hours, you have to put up with a bit of noise. So what? There were something like 25 000 people at the festival. That means for every person that was unhappy about the noise, 250 people were loving every minute of it. Those odds in themselves are good enough to dismiss the complains as nothing more than an irritation. The Cape Argus Cycle Tour inconveniences a lot more than 120 people every year, both on the day of the event, and motorists for the months leading up to the event with cyclists training. People attending a rock concert don’t make time to practice for the event and inconvenience the same 120 people day after day for months – nor do they block the roads and prevent those 120 people from leaving their house – but nobody complains about that.

The reason?

We’re the young people. Our entertainment is “reckless” and “uncouth” – nothing like a civilised cycle race. All we do is listen to loud music and mainline cream soda, causing a ruckus and damage to everything we touch.

Can a perception of people coming together for the love of music be any more wrong? Why can’t it be the same perception as people coming together for the love of cycling? The truth is, that we’re inconveniencing a whole lot less people. I’m willing to bet every single person that complained is over the age of 40, and will list that as their reason for complaining.

Dear complainers, for one day of the year, go out for the day – to a mall or something, so that us “young, reckless, irresponsible kids” don’t wreck a single day of your year.

To the Previously Disadvantaged

We are sorry that our ancestors were intelligent, advanced and daring enough to explore the wild oceans to discover new countries and develop them.

We are sorry that those who came before us took you out of the bush and taught you that there was more to life than beating drums, killing each other and chasing animals with sticks and stones.

We are sorry that they planned, funded and developed roads, towns, mines, factories, airports and harbours, all of which you now claim to be your long deprived inheritance giving you every right to change and rename these at your discretion.

We are sorry that our parents taught us the value of small but strong families, to not breed like rabbits and end up as underfed, diseased, illiterate shack dwellers living in poverty.

We are sorry that when the evil apartheid government provided you with schools, you decided they’d look better without windows or in piles of ashes.

We happily gave up those bad days of getting spanked in our all white schools for doing something wrong and much prefer these days of freedom where problems can be resolved with knives and guns.

We are sorry that it is hard to shake off the bitterness of the past when you keep on raping, torturing and killing our friends and family members, and then hide behind the fence of “human rights” with smiles on your faces.

We are sorry that we do not trust the government. We have no holdem poker downloadpoker americanoomaha h lpoker per pc gratispoker gratis multiplayerpoker multiplayertexas holdem no limitsexy poker onlineparty poker bonuslive poker tourgratis giocare a poker onlinetexas holdem calculatempoker in tourdraw poker goldstanza pokerpoker on line italiacalifornia pokertornei texas holdemstrip poker gratistorneo poker gratisgiochi carte poker7 card stud gratisil pokerstrategie texas holdemtexas holdem online,giocare texas holdem online,texas holdem poker onlinegame pokerstreet poker onlineil gioco della roulettegiochi black jack in lineacasino bonus senza depositoclub player casinowww casino netcasino online mobilevideo poker strategycasino online itmetodo roulettescaricare casino gratiscasino on line gratis,casino italiani on line,casino on linewww giochi casino,giochi casino,giochi di casinocasino online con bonusplay baccaratmigliori casino onlineroulette systemsvirtual gamblingeuropa casino onlinecasino on line roulettecasino en lignevideo poker gratuitoroulette da scaricare gratisgiochi di casino gratis reason to be so suspicious because none of these poor hard working intellectuals have ever been involved in any form of corruption or “irregularities”.

We are sorry that we do not trust the police force and, even though they have openly admitted that they have lost the war against crime and criminals, we should not be negative and just ignore their corruption and carry on hoping for the best.

We are sorry that it is more important to you to have players of colour in our national teams than winning games and promoting patriotism. We know that sponsorship doesn’t depend on a team’s success.

We are sorry that our border posts have been flung open and now left you competing for jobs against illegal immigrants from our beautiful neighbouring countries. All of them countries that have grown into economic powerhouses after kicking out the “settlers”.

We are sorry that we don’t believe in witchcraft, beetroot and garlic cures, urinating on street corners, virginity testing, slaughtering of bulls in our back yards, trading women for cattle and other barbaric practices. Maybe we just grew up differently.

We are sorry that your medical care, water supplies, roads, railways and electricity supplies are going down the toilet because skilled people who  could have planned for and resolved these issues had to be thrown away because they were of the wrong ethnic background and now have to work in foreign countries where their skills are more needed.

We are so sorry that we’d like this country to fulfil its potential so we can once again be proud South Africans.