Rambling Life Situations

  These shorts are written as practices in writing and all are unedited and are not proofread.  

 Have you ever sat down and thought about the last ten, twenty, thirty, conversations you have had with friends and family?

Have you then also come to the realization that apart from a few surface level conversations you never really talked about what interests you, or even what you spend your days doing?

To be honest, I love talking about the country, politics, world events, and everything else we all know we talk about. But I have also come to the realization that every conversation I have usually runs dry because that which interests me is not a real topic of discussion.

Instead, I must divert back to other topics, “How was the flight?”, “Did you do something new?”, “Oh, yeah, I’ve heard about that American TV show”.

I spend almost no time whatsoever doing any of these, instead I wile away my time, playing games, reading articles, or watching anime. A conglomeration of topics that few people are interested in, at least in the groups I love to hang out in.

I once spent an entire afternoon with a group of people talking about traveling to Europe, skiing, and the overall best investment one can do with the money made from rented out properties. What, do you wonder, did I have to add onto this conversation?

Nothing, in fact, most of the time I had to pull information from finance books I had read or recent Reddit articles about what dudebros are doing with their money. Yet, that was the only topics anyone had any interest in, and upon hearing I played games, the only questions were if I played COD.

In the modern age, I daresay, if all you are playing is Call of Duty you are as much a gamer as watching Friends makes you a TV writer. Yes, you are gaming, and it is a thing you like, but if I mention Baldurs Gate, Hogwarts Legacy, Fable, Battlefield, or even Fortnite and you look at me like I crawled out of the ground wearing an all-crocodile leather suit. Well, then I daresay that we may have different sets of knowledge.

The less said about the world of anime in South Africa and the sneers I have received the better. The commonly held belief among those I dare to talk to still lingers around “Isn’t that just cartoons for children?". Which I would argue is the same way of asking if murder-porn is only meant for married couples in the bedroom.

That does cause some confusion for some, murder porn is that thing couples love to watch where the series is only about murderers, the oldest that I can remember being CSI: Las Vegas (as it came to be known). As a single man I usually find these series painfully boring, mostly because no one is cuddling up to me, so I usually spend some time googling things and quickly I get bored by the unreality of it all.

With that I can continue the ramble about conversations that never seem to develop, as I am stuck in a location where I never really converse. No one I know, offline, can tell me about the recent global expo scene, or which YouTuber does what, or in the year of our lord 2023 even know what a Vtuber is.

No joke, just a week ago, a 23-year-old man looked me in the eye and said “Vtuber? Oh, those animated AI girls that stream on Twitch?”. Which was a sentence that took me a few minutes to process, as they had the right platform, a shock, but no matter how much I told him they were real, he did not believe they were not AI.

A new buzzword that is akin to Industry 4.0, something that is always on the way but never seems to arrive. My personal monologue shouted at me to move the topic along, with many people wondering what I think, but never really hearing what I say.

This has been compounded by a full year of unemployment, while living alone and almost secluded. The Dam offers brilliant vistas of clouds, setting suns, nature sounds, and complete isolation from all you know and love. Each incursion into Pretoria becomes a mathematical war with oneself, nothing is truly around the corner, not even the small town that has shops that close before 5pm.

As I have continued to work through my way in this place, I have learned that cooking dinner is something that requires your full attention, cleaning is a weekly unending task, and doubting yourself leads to days of depression to follow. When you live alone no one randomly comes up with an idea to lift your spirits.

In fact, I would say that is the thing that probably causes the most depression for those that live away from friends and family. No longer do you get invites to visit on a Saturday morning nor do you get called to help someone move, rearrange a house, or to help in emergencies. Instead, everything happens at a snail’s pace, if something happens you are the person they must remember to tell.

The life of your friends and family becomes that of a movie, a series, a sitcom with much more personal involvement. Each thing is read through Facebook, Instagram, or WhatsApp messages that tells you exactly what others have been up to, in a compressed easy to read form.

In some ways this can be fun, seeing someone move and not waking up with backache, works. But more often it just means you see life happening around you, but never really happening to you. The thing that really gets to you is that you cannot seem to break the mould around you. Fridays, Mondays, Sundays, and every other day just becomes another day.

And try as you might you can never move away, unemployment has trapped you where you are, unable to even change the bed sheets you have had for nearly two years. Things are moving, people are growing, changing their lives, and inevitably you are stuck watching it all, like characters in a sitcom getting their lives together, while you drink another cup of tea.

What’s worse is that after a while you get this nagging suspicion that those around you are indeed talking about you, but never asking you about what you are doing. You can spend three days reworking a CV, sending it out, and getting rejections. But no one would know, instead by the time you can tell anyone it has already been forgotten even by yourself, since holding onto them is a way to get ever more depressed.

Instead, you feel like those family and friends that would talk to you are starting to believe that you simply do not want to work. That you “study” but never actually feel like you are ready, because what they see is you never studying.

This causes an ever present spiral to continue to develop, where you feel a pressure, always on you, but still you sit. Stuck in a house that is almost falling apart, unable to visit friends, family, random strangers from dating apps. Those who offer you jobs seem almost inhuman too, as you have a baseline minimum now of what you need to survive in modern day South Africa.

Possibly the biggest driver of wonder for me has become how people survive at all in a country where going to the store for bread, milk, eggs, and butter can easily reach more than 300 rand. A feat that should be near impossible, because dear reader, I live so far away from anything that there is only one shop to choose from.

And now we get to the part that makes my skin crawl, the mere fact that the jobs, work, help I am offered are continually from those that are out of touch or simply delusional. A 21-year-old living with his parents can easily survive on nothing but 8000 rand, having to buy nothing more than his fuel and meat for the fire.

However, as a 30-year-old, less than 2 weeks away from 31, I can tell you living alone, R8000 is a pittance. Yet, that is what is on offer, companies that require you to be in the office, in Sandton, Braamfontein, Centurion, Pretoria North, Faerie Glen, and wherever else a writer is needed.

“Come, do our socials, our designs, our websites, and our copywriting” – this is a position that I was offered four times now, each time no more than 10 000 rand was on offer. Something I would have jumped for had I still lived with my parents, and I still wished to not have a social life.

You see, just getting into an office has become an issue for me, every single place is 70km or more, which means every four to five days I need to refuel, a full tank of 1500 rand diesel. That, dear reader alone is around 6000 rand a month just to get me into the office. What then I hear you chime, “Move closer!”

People, rent in a rundown, bachelor flat that used-to-be-a-garage, has now reached 5 300 rand a month. The assumption would be that I somehow get a place right next to whichever work I do find, which we all know is as possible as a man looking for a light switch in a black hole. From the decade of experience as a copywriter, writer, journalist, and whatever I have in South Africa, I will have to drive at least 30km to work and then another 30km back each day.

This has the effect that I still need to fill my car’s tank four times a month, brilliant, but dear reader, that is still 6000 rand a month, with an apartment minimum of 5300 rand a month, that gives 11 000 rand just to live and work anywhere close to any city, be it Pretoria, Cape Town, Bloemfontein, Durban, or even PE.

So, I dare ask, what about the rest? Currently, as I am at home the whole day, I manage to eat less than I ever did while working, a budgeted 2500 a month for food, cleaning equipment, and generally just things to shove into the fridge each month. But when living alone you also must pay more than that, water, power, insurance, taxes, phone, internet, and even as I sit, I can’t imagine what else. These costs must be included when thinking about what job will work.

Instead, I must sit through conversations about traveling to Europe, what to do about fourth houses, boats that just aren’t fast enough. My field of conversation has become one of pain but also worry, these worries are things I wish to have, as is I worry about the mental and physical tax, I have on those that support me (I Love you mom and dad, more than ever) and what I can do to lessen it.

Yet, with each passing day I find myself unable to find an answer. So instead, I go sit at the dam, talk to strangers, about things I don’t know, regarding things I don’t care about. Because my games, my anime, my old sitcoms, that is where I escape. Reality has become nothing but pain, even if I get every qualification there is, something which I will accomplish, who will take a 30-year-old overweight single man to show him the ropes?

No, reader, instead, I’ll crawl into my cave and hope that like those cans of beer you always see in the bush I’ll be forgotten.  Wasting away, and hopefully helping something else grow strong enough to see the light that shines down on us all.