Living on my Birthday

Yesterday I met the most ridiculous person I have met in a long time... jesus shit! I went to some writing club meeting in South Melbourne with little expectations considering the previous meeting in December wasn't so much a 'writing club' as it was a bunch of people who share writing in common meeting up for a drink. I mean, that could be called a writing club, I guess, but it wasn't really what I had in mind... it can't have been all that terrible though, because I went back, albeit half an hour late.

So when I walked in some lady – who I later discovered was a 'writing guru' (someone else's words, but not difficult to believe) – was talking about journalism and a writers' group/course thingo she'd set up and I sat at a stool on the far end of the table and proceeded to crackle in a violent ray of sun that was beaming through the front door of the bar. A sun-tan indoors – well life is just full of surprises? Tee-hee-hee. Anyway, Mrs Guru (Valerie, her name was) was interesting and she had some cool stuff to say, but the ridiculous person that I met wasn't our speaker, no no, she was a lady by the name of Samantha.

Samantha was a early/mid-thirties (I hope that guess is accurate) writer who had been sending off a few bits and pieces of comedy writing to competitions and doing quite well, but what grabbed me was when she said to the group that her preferred method of writing was sitting down with a bottle of red wine and headphones full of hip hop. YES! My People! She told me about her writing, and then her life before her writing, which had consisted of about a decade all around the world (Denmark, Spain, Portugal, Egypt, South America) as a tour guide for a travel company. She had been taught how to play backgammon by Sean Connery and serenaded by Alanis Morissette, and received a donkey from native people in some far flung corner of the world... the details elude me at this point, friends, as I stand in awe of a person who has truly stepped up to life and nutted the beast between it's piercing eyes. She said that at twenty-three she was engaged and stuck in a dead end job, but one day she woke up, looked at her fiance and said, “I really don't like you”, and within two weeks she was off. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. These are the people that we all need to know, my friends. This is the person that everyone should be.

And then, a few days before that, there was another lady, this time someone I met on a tour, who was originally from Adelaide (of all the promising beginnings) but had lived in South Africa for twenty-five years including the apartheid era and Nelson Mandela's release from prison. She told me about how many households, including her own, had had black slaves during the era of segregation. One day, after a law had passed which would have nullified the black/white segregation of beaches within six months, she and her kid went to a whites only beach. They also took their slave's (I think she used a different word, but I heard slave) kid along, and the kid would have been no more than ten years old at this point. So while the segregation law was due to be repealed in six months – the decision had already been made and passed – for the time being the beach was still 'whites only', so when they got there a police officer saw the young kid and told the mother that she had to take him off of the beach or they would all be arrested. That's right, that shit happened. Imagine the kid – how confused. Imagine the mother, and the looks, and imagine people actually abiding by these laws and legitimately believing in their righteousness to the point where they knew they were going to be defunct soon, but until then the plan was racism as usual.

She talked about Nelson Mandela and the rugby game depicted in that movie Invictus and she talked about the feeling of national pride and togetherness when Mandela walked out onto the field wearing the national team's jersey. She told me about his ex-wife, who was apparently a part of some underground group and used to send her harems of male entourage on assassination missions. Mandela had to leave her and distance himself from the warring clans – the divides between different groups of black people in South Africa were apparently just as pervasive as the one that we heard about on the news. She lived through that, she saw it first hand. What have I seen? Maybe I've been a part of something important already, I just don't know it yet... maybe the eyes of history will look back and see Melbourne, 2013 as a strange pocket of human existence... maybe. Maybe not.

Crazy, disjointed thoughts on this sunny February day, this day that happens to be my twenty-second birthday. Samantha, this outlandish specimen of a person, has forced me to look at what I am doing and make absolutely certain that what I am doing with my life is exactly what I want to be doing. How can I possibly spend one single day doing anything other than that, when there are people out there in the dankest pockets of existence being given donkeys by villagers and playing board games with James Bond. Not a single second, my friends, not a solitary fucking moment can we afford to waste. Wring with all your strength, and drain this life for every drop. Be sure, it can be done.

Peace, Taco.