I Think We Should Break Up

 I think we should break up - not because I don't love you anymore.

I think we should break up - because I feel like you've left me.

I think we should break up - because you aren't the person I found here.

I think we should break up - because I struggle to give myself to someone who cannot give themself

I think we should break up - because I find myself in emotional turmoil

I think we should break up - because I can't keep fighting a one-sided battle

I think we should break up - because I love you.

I Thought I Lost You

 I haven't been back here in years. I thought I had lost this blog. I tried to sign in and Google and its many soldiers came and told me that my information was incorrect and I had signed in from a device that was not recognizable on Earth and I should either promptly identify myself or die with the quickness.

I'm sat here in my room listening to Bloc Party live shows. It's funny how when things change, they still remain the same. I haven't blogged since 2019 but I still resonate with a large part of my last post and how I was feeling then. 

I've grown. I've grown a lot since then. I lost over 20 million rand, became heavily suicidal, found a dog that changed my life completely and lost that dog a few years later. I found love in various faces and guises and I've lost it in many the same way. I guess what I'm saying is that I'm a creature of habit in some sense. Am I happy? Right now I would say the things that give me live out weigh the things that drag me down but the biggest detractor of my happiness is the state of my relationship. It never changes does it. I will always come back when things become hard because I really do need an outlet to express myself. 

It makes me sad that I can't find peace and safety in those I find myself in love with. Am I a bad judge of character? Who knows? I like to think I'm not but then again the things I like are often different from the norm so who knows. I love this woman, that much I know but what I get from her makes me realise I am not in love with her. Hey look, at one point I'd fight Goliath 1v1, fist to fist about how in love I was and that was true. It's not to say it's not true now either but the feeling isn't there right now. I am someone who needs assurance. I can't love you if I don't feel love from you and right now I don't feel that. There are a lot of red flags that I am ignoring because I find myself wearing rose tinted glasses so all the red just looks normal. I find my mind state reverting to early MsiziSithole@Blogspot.Com thinking where dealing hurt on the back of my hurt was ok. That's not me anymore. I've grown. Fool me once, shame on me as they say but fool me at least 3 times and we fight. I don't want to get to three.

I'm writing this after a few drinks, often always my best work. In a state of emotional distress, the foie gras of literature. I don't really know if this has made sense but again I don't care. This is my corner of the world and nothing else matters. 

Baby Lion Goes

Baby lion goes
Where the islands go

I've had this line by Arthur Russell playing on a constant loop in my head for the past few days. More importantly, it's the version Kanye West used on 30 Hours as a sample.

I don't really know why it's stuck with me so much but the way it sounds in his song, the almost haunting nature of it has stuck firmly in my brain and I can't help being drawn back to it every time. I don't know if my mind is trying to build a mystique around it, maybe I'm trying to find more in it than already exists but I really do love it and something about it resonates within me.

The last few weeks, no, the last few months have been a really dark time for me. Things I thought were set in stone, experiences I've felt and people I've come to love and hold dear have all seemed to just crumble before me and I've been left feeling quite lost and alone.

For the last two years I've been struggling with who I am and my place in the world. I'm usually the type of person who is very self-assured and I thought I was someone who was extremely capable and able to handle anything that came my way but lately it's been a struggle to shake away my feelings of loneliness and inadequacy. Some mornings I wake up feeling on top of the world, like I'm untouchable and nothing could possibly get me down but lately I've been feeling like I don't quite have everything together. I've been feeling like everything I do has no purpose and mostly I've been feeling like I have no purpose and don't matter and I've got to say, it's tough man, it really is.

I'll often sit and think, trying to find the root of the issue and more often than not, I draw a blank. It niggles at me like a loose tooth and I keep playing with it with my tongue and some days I can ignore it and be fine but other times it really hurts and leaves me unable to do anything. In times like these, I find myself reaching for my earphones and trying to find music that helps me drown out the noise in my head, in hopes that it'll fix whatever it is that's going on and I'll be fine again. There's been a lot of controversy surrounding Kanye West over the last few years. There's been a lot of controversy surrounding Kanye West pretty much his whole career if we're being honest. I've often been able to separate the man from the music and it's always worked really well for me.

There's no doubting that he's made musical gems over the years. Whether you love him or hate him, there's no denying the man is a musical genius. "I am flawed as a human. I am flawed as a person. As a man I am flawed... ... but my music is perfect!" That's a direct quote from him and aptly put. He has many, many flaws and there's always something new surrounding him that has people divided but his music is the one thing no one can fault him on. I've been listening to a lot of his stuff recently, just trying to reconcile my thoughts and it has helped me a lot.

Music is one of the best healers I know.

Sometimes it works. Sometimes I slip out of the funk and the fog in my head clears up and I'm back in fighting shape and the small knocks that life throws at me are easily deflected and I can continue on. Other times, I get set back even further and it feels like I'm down even deeper than before. I'm trying to work out where it is I often go wrong and what it is that leads me down these dark corridors I find myself sometimes. I know the stresses of work often get to me. The constant fight to do good by myself and those around me by being the best I can be in my professional field often weighs heavy on me and that's a struggle I'm trying to win but it proves tough. I also struggle a lot with my relationships with people and that has been my biggest challenge recently. I feel as if I have no real set support around me and that is tough sometimes. I know everyone has their own struggles to deal with in life and I can't rightfully expect anyone to put my feelings and fears in pride of place over theirs and that hurts. Often times I will do just that for them, I will almost always push back whatever it is I'm facing and focus on what it is that's bothering those around me because I do truly want to see them happy and at peace but lately I've realised that steals huge chunks of my own peace and I end up feeling lower than before but I just can't stop myself. When it comes to the problems of others, I'm quickly there to offer myself up and be an ear and a shoulder to cry on but when it comes to my own issues, I tend to push them back for another day. I wouldn't dream of bothering another with what troubles me and so I'm often left trying to deal with things on my own and lately I've been struggling.

I've made islands of people. I treat someone as a small oasis where I can try find my ground again and build myself up. I'm realising now that that's not really a good thing for me to do. People do not exist as a recess from the elements that are in my head. I can't try and use them to replenish me as if they exist solely for the purpose of making me feel like my old self again. Oftimes I feel like I've outgrown a person or a situation and I will set off in search of something new and then I'm back out in the water. I leave feeling like I can make it to the next place, in search of a  place where I will find home but along the way I start flagging and I realise that I wasn't quite ready for this voyage and I'm out adrift, wading water and trying to keep my afloat.

The fault lies with me. Instead of trying to work on what it is that bothers me, that makes me feel the way I've often been feeling lately, I allow myself to be distracted by the excitement of a new island and in doing so, I forget what it is that brought me there in the first place and trick myself into thinking nothing is wrong until I set off again and I'm out in the middle of the ocean where all my issues surround me again and I'm back out there feeling lost. 

I'm trying to work on that and fix that in myself. It's not easy but I owe it to myself to put my issues first and focus on that. I can't expect to be a good person to those around me if I'm not being good to myself. This has been a ramble with no real direction, I've just been writing as thoughts come to mind but it's really helped, I feel a bit better for it. 

Write. Write. Write. Delete.

Write. Write. Write. Delete.

The amount of times I do this is alarming. 

I can sit for hours, fingers attacking the keys savagely and then,

Delete.

I don't know why. 

I don't know why I can't seem to allow my truth to stay intact, alive, existing.

It's not because I don't feel it. 

I do.

Maybe it's because I don't want to accept it.

I don't want to live it.

I don't understand it.

Eventually, I will and when I finally do,

Delete.

Men Are Trash.

Reading all of these terrible things that happen to women on a daily really breaks my heart. 

It's crazy how something as small as walking down the street can be so uncomfortable and frightening for women. I've always thought myself to be as scary as a squished snowball, you know. Barely alarming to anyone besides small babies and birds but even I can be seen as a threat and that's not because I necessarily am, but because of such lived experiences. 

When I walk anywhere, I tend to do so at quite a quick pace because I want to get to where I'm going as quickly as possible. I hate having to be out and about, I'm not one who enjoys the journey all that much. On occasion, it has happened that whilst walking around someone, I've been the lone guy on the street approaching a woman on her own or a group of women and I could always sense a bit of apprehension the closer I got. For a long time I thought it was because they were worried I'd try chat them up and to be honest, I've never stopped and tried to speak to a girl on the street because I know how annoying that can be for them and I wouldn't want to ruin their day or my own - the embarrassment alone would destroy me. I've never understood people that do this. 

After a while I figured maybe they thought I was some type of hoodrat that wanted to rob them or something. In this country, there's always that thought in the back of your mind and to be honest, I get a bit apprehensive myself when I come across a group of guys or anything because I've been mugged before and it's not an experience I'd wish on anyone. These days it's become even more dangerous because there is less regard for human life and these wastes won't even hesitate to cause you harm. I didn't quite understand it, I would never do that. There's about as much chance of me mugging someone as there is of a dog suddenly one day getting up on its hind legs and running for President. It would never happen. 

The thing is though. After reading all these stories on Twitter about just how vile we men can be to women, I'm really not surprised at all. Not once did I ever stop to think that their reaction to me, a living version of Milhouse, could be because of many things. The fact that I am a man makes me a threat regardless of my intentions or lack thereof. It's painful to think that they have to live a life where theirs could be taken at any moment for something as trivial as refusing to acknowledge a man's advances or any other infantile reason. It's disgusting. And the fact that there still are people out there who fail to realise this hurts even more. There are people who fail to see why things like "Men Are Trash" have gained such traction. The "Not All Men" crowd don't understand that by saying this, they're invalidating the lived experiences of these women who have suffered. They are diluting a very important message with their naivety and failure to understand. 

We need to stop and reevaluate the way we look at things in this country. The statistics don't lie. We as men need to stop treating our women like accessories that come after we've got the house, car, clothes and money. We treat them as possessions, things we can do with as we please and that's not on. These are people, equal to us in every way and in most cases, a lot better on top. There needs to be a change. We as men need to stop being Garbage Children, Dirty Dishwater humans. 

...

I feel in love with a strong, beautiful woman. 

I lost my legs and tumbled down into a deep crevice where the only thing that could lift me out was her delicate, iron-clad hand. 

I gave my heart away and I had no ways to get it back. 

I lost my soul to a strong, beautiful woman. 

My legs were hacked off and careened deep into a dark abyss and the only thing that could lift me out was her delicate, iron-clad hand. 

My heart was wrenched from me, destroyed as I lay watching. 

Half A Cent Of Opinion.

I hate how the greatest minds that will eventually come out of this generation are being fed this idea that to be great, you need to fit into this box that has been designed for you by minds that lost their relevance long ago. I watch how we think, how we perceive things and the way we go about doing the things we do on the day to day. The archaic practices of the past seem to cling to us like moss. We don't fully realise just how they slowly grow on us, manifesting themselves in the way we speak and see things until it's too late and they've blinded us completely.

I'm still building up my understanding in all of this. I'm not fully weighing in on the situation right now, that will come later because I don't have all the information I feel I need to be fully capable to have an informed opinion.

Just watching this situation in Stellenbosch, actually, the country as a whole, I can't help but feel saddened. I'm at a loss of words when I see the new outrage that has been brought up. If it isn't students fighting one another to tell the other why their outrage is insignificant, it's grown men and women trying to point out why others should be seen and feel insignificant. If there's one thing I cannot stand, it is the type of person who comes to you guns blazing, fixing to force feed you their deeply ingrained doctrine. I understand that everyone has a differing view and opinion to the next person and that, I am more than okay with, it's when people are not willing to see and understand that everyone will have a differing opinion and theirs isn't necessarily the correct one when the problem arises. There is nothing stopping you from bringing across what you believe and in the same turn of the coin, taking in and understanding what I believe too. It really isn't that hard. I can only put it down to a pigheaded, blind ignorance and what could possibly be fear.

You cannot tell me all these issues we see around the country do not stem from a sense of fear. The "Afrikaaner"(and I'm only picking on them because of the relevance) in South Africa fears that his culture is dying. As the youngest in the world, it would make sense for it to be wiped out if it were not given enough nourishment. As transformation comes, this plays on the mind and in an effort to safeguard what they hold dear, they lash out. In an effort to keep their sense of belonging intact, they try to undermine those trying to find their feet and in doing so, begin to exclude not only the people of colour in the country, but also the English speaking white South African. Most of the focus though, unfortunately, is thrown on race and it becomes a savage, fecal flinging match between the two sides and in a place like Stellies for example, there is no hope. How can you as a South African, turn to another and tell them they are not good enough to be at a place where they are more than able to afford and get through academically and tell them they don't belong just because they're of another skin colour? Is this not ignorance? Is this not a fear of change?

 But what gets me is this. How can these new minds, these fresh ideas, these new visions that we need to keep this wonderful country afloat be shut down like this? By an institution that many find to be one of the very best. How can you possibly justify giving certain learning packages in one language and then be shocked when people fail to understand? English, as we all know, is the universal accepted medium and I would understand if things came as standard in English and then other language options were given, with the very same material in them like any other right thinking university would do. Many a time I've heard from friend, black an white, how certain things get left out of certain packages and they then have to scramble to find all they need. It's almost as if the creative is being killed by the rigid codes of the Institution.

Of course this is only my opinion on something I am still wrapping my head around but what I fear is that by the time I do, it would be too late.

Full Transcript of Kanye West's speech at the VMAs.

“Bro. Bro! Listen to the kids. First of all, thank you, Taylor, for being so gracious and giving me this award this evening.

And I often think back to the first day I met you also. You know I think about when I’m in the grocery store with my daughter and I have a really great conversation about fresh juice… and at the end they say, ’Oh, you’re not that bad after all!’ And like I think about it sometimes. … It crosses my mind a little bit like when I go to a baseball game and 60,000 people boo me. Crosses my mind a little bit.

And I think if I had to do it all over again what would I have done? Would I have worn a leather shirt? Would I have drank half a bottle of Hennessy and gave the rest of it to the audience? Ya’ll know ya’ll drank that bottle too! If I had a daughter at that time would I have went on stage and grabbed the mic from someone else’s? You know, this arena tomorrow it’s gonna be a completely different setup. Some concert, something like that. The stage will be gone. After that night, the stage was gone, but the effect that it had on people remained.

The … The problem was the contradiction. The contradiction is I do fight for artists, but in that fight I somehow was disrespectful to artists. I didn’t know how to say the right thing, the perfect thing. I just … I sat at the Grammys and saw Justin Timberlake and Cee-Lo lose. Gnarls Barkley and the FutureLove … SexyBack album … and Justin, I ain’t trying to put you on blast, but I saw that man in tears, bro. You know, and I was thinking, like, ’He deserved to win Album of the Year!'”

And this small box that we are as the entertainers of the evening … How could you explain that? Sometimes I feel like all this s–t they run about beef and all that? Sometimes I feel like I died for the artist’s opinion. For artists to be able to have an opinion after they were successful. I’m not no politician, bro!

Look at that. You know how many times MTV ran that footage again? ’Cause it got them more ratings? You know how many times they announced Taylor was going to give me the award ’cause it got them more ratings? Listen to the kids, bro! I still don’t understand awards shows. I don’t understand how they get five people who worked their entire life … sold records, sold concert tickets to come stand on the carpet and for the first time in they life be judged on the chopping block and have the opportunity to be considered a loser! I don’t understand it, bruh!

I don’t understand when the biggest album, or the biggest video … I’ve been conflicted, bro. I just wanted people to like me more. “But fuck that, bro! 2015! I will die for the art! For what I believe in. And the art ain’t always gonna be polite! Ya’ll might be thinking right now, ’Did he smoke something before he came out here?’ The answer is yes, I rolled up a little something. I knocked the edge off!

I don’t know what’s gonna happen tonight, I don’t know what’s gonna happen tomorrow, bro. But all I can say to my artists, to my fellow artists: Just worry how you feel at the time, man. Just worry about how you feel and don’t NEVER … you know what I’m saying? I’m confident. I believe in myself. We the millennials, bro. This is a new mentality. We’re not gonna control our kids with brands. We not gonna teach low self-esteem and hate to our kids. We gonna teach our kids that they can be something. We gonna teach our kids that they can stand up for theyself! We gonna teach our kids to believe in themselves!”

If my grandfather was here right now he would not let me back down! I don’t know I’m fittin’ to lose after this. It don’t matter though, cuz it ain’t about me. It’s about ideas, bro. New ideas. People with ideas. People who believe in truth. And yes, as you probably could have guessed by this moment, I have decided in 2020 to run for president.”

Catfishery

When I'm at home, there are three things I enjoy doing more than anything else. Playing Xbox, listening to music and watching strange TV programs. From 9pm things on TV start to turn weird and you find some pretty interesting shows. Just last night I watched a show on people who were trying to survive in the jungle with no clothes on. It makes you wonder what goes on in these TV show pitch meetings. 

"We need an idea for a new type of survival program"

"I know. Let's throw two random strangers into the wild

With no help, crew or tools."

"Yeah, I don't know. Seems a bit dated."

"Well, what if they had no clothes on?"

"Brilliant! We have a winner!"

I've been off work for the last two days and decided to catch up on all my PVR recordings from the last few weeks. I've collected about 6 new episodes of Catfish and they were calling my name. Now if you don't know, I love Catfish. I can honestly watch that show for hours upon hours and never get bored. It always blows my mind how people get swept up into these internet lies. I'm also astonished at the types of people that get dragged out from behind their desktop lies. Some of the characters on the show really make me wonder if people in parts of America have taken to mating with vegetables. 

How can they be so twisted in the head? 

I watched an episode where this girl was using the pictures of another girl and was telling people to go kill themselves and disgusting things like that. In this day and age, with all the mental problems that people suffer, how can you say hurtful things to people. What if these people were suicidal and that was the straw that broke the camel's back? When they finally met her, she was this cheerful, almost psychotic teenage girl that saw absolutely nothing wrong with what she had done. She even went as far as to say that she was angry with the girl whose pictures she had stolen because she had gone and told everyone that they were being fooled. 

How messed up is your life, how truly cooked in the head are you, for you to pretend to be someone else on the Internet and spin a web of lies so intricate that it becomes your life? When do you finally realise that what you're doing is completely messed up and that maybe you should just switch the ADSL off for a few days. 

Another thing I love about Catfish is just how Nev and Max go about things. Nev is the softer one. He's all, "Hey let's be understanding and open minded" and Max really is like any one of us, he's very much "What the fuck!?" I think if I had to be on the show with them I'd also be very much "what the fuck." I often wonder how they manage to keep their cool and process these things because often, the things I see on that show just wrinkle my brain. I remember there was an episode where this guy pretended to be a musician and conned people out of thousands of dollars. How and why would you be doing that my dude? I would throw the most vicious hands known to man. The amount of people I would have punched on Catfish would be longer than the amounts of people Jet Li has beaten in his movies. 

Anyway, I've completely lost what the actual point of this was. I think this was meant to be about my nightly routine but I got carried away on a Catfish tangent. Now I've lost the point of this. Eh. I think I'll just watch another episode. 

Greek Tragedy - The Wombats.

We're smashing mics in karaoke bars

You're running late with half your makeup on

This method acting might pay our bills

But soon enough they'll be a different role to fill

I love this feeling

But I hate this part

I wanted this to work so much

I drew up our plans on a chart

Cars are flipping, I'm in hot pursuit

My character's strong, but my head is loose

She hits like ecstasy

Comes up and bangs the sense out of me

The tarot cards say it's not so bad

And the blades rotate, there's just no landing pad

And better have said it, but darling you're the

best

I'm just tired of falling up the penrose steps

I hate this feeling

But I love this part

She really wants to make it work

And I clearly want to let it start

We'll build a waterslide

As soon as I get home

Oh and she hits like ecstasy

Comes up and bangs the sense out of me

It's wrong, but surely worst to leave

And she hits like ecstasy

So free up the cheaper seats

Here comes the Greek Tragedy