Hey-ho

I've moved.

This western feeling

Love. Man, love is a fucker. I've been thinking about it a lot lately, after a new friend asked me if I'd ever been in love. Innocuous question, but one that's so loaded with significance. At the time, I hummed and hawed a little, because quite honestly, I'm not so sure I have. I do like that she's the kind of person who asks those sorts of questions, because I like people that make me think.

It's like this - I've been obsessed with girls, plenty. There's seldom been a stage in my life where I've not been permanently thinking about someone. I've obsessed over them, fretted over them, penned horrible poems about them. Done all the lame things people who are infatuated with (the idea of) someone do. Stalked them relentlessly on Facebook. Poured over every SMS, searching for hidden meanings. Analyzed, overanalyzed, everything they say. But that's not love, is it? No, love is reciprocal. You can't really say you're in love if the person is unaware of your affections, or (is it?) worse, is aware of them, but doesn't feel the same way.

Around the end of last year I went through the last of these infatuations, and swore thereafter I was done. Unrequited love, obsessive, fawning love, putting someone on a pedestal and building up every insignificant thing they do into this perfect construct, this avatar of your affection, I'm straight up calling bullshit on that. It's not healthy. It's not good. It's not cool. There is nothing admirable about the hopeless romantic - it's just sad and depressing.

What I'm pleased about is that I've been true to my word. There's been plenty of girls I've been interested in since then, and the ones that it seemed worth it (there's a long list of criteria - maybe I still overthink things?) to go for, I have, and while the results have been mixed, they've been results. And when it ended, for whatever reason, I moved the fuck on, got on with my life, more often than not with them and I still friends, which is great. It's healthy. It's part of growing up. Being stuck in that self-destructive cycle of "Oh my god if only she knew how perfect we would be together" is a terrifying downward spiral into self-esteem genocide. Even just typing that above made me cringe, because I've been there. Was there often.

So this year has been good. There's been no unrequited love (not from my side, but I have now been on the opposite side of the fence and while it's not much better being the object of said affection, at least it was a change of scenery) but there's been plenty of good fun.

But I still haven't been in love. I haven't shared something special with someone - there's been a handful of girls who I could see that happening with, but it never progressed to that stage. And that's a good thing. It's a natural pruning of compatibility as you learn more about people and find out just how fucking crazy they are (most are very, very crazy). Building someone up into this ideal, putting them on a pedestal and venerating their every move, their every Facebook post, every utterance is personally disastrous and enormously, emotionally unhealthy.

I'm glad that's in the past. It has been a long and hard lesson to learn.

So no, I haven't been in love. Not really. Not by my definition of the thing. And I'm okay with that. The same someone who sparked this line of questioning sent me this, and it made everything seem okay:

I couldn't find the perfect song

Keto, as it turns out, is harder than you think. After two weeks, with only one (fairly substantial) slip-up, I've abandoned it. It's just too difficult, and the cravings for a snack other than biltong just get to you. I thought it'd be the desire for something like pasta, or pizza, but it turns out it's the little things, like honey in your tea, or late-night tuna mayo on rye bread, or cheese and crackers with wine. WINE! Man. Anyway, in the continuing saga of my body, the anecdotal laboratory of dietary experimentation, I'm now doing intermittent fasting (IF).

The response from my usual dietary detractors to this latest dietary change has been more vociferously negative than their response to keto, but I'm finding it interesting. In short, IF entails having a 16 hour fasted period, and an 8 hour feeding period. My feeding time is from around 5 PM to midnight, and my fasting period is from midnight to 5 PM. Basically, you skip breakfast and lunch, have a small pre-training meal, gorge after your training, and then have a smallish meal before bed. Also, I get to have a 'feeding time', like a shark. That's awesome.

Today's only the second day, but I'm finding it pretty easy. Skipping breakfast is easy as hell to do (let's face it - it feels like a chore most of the time), and while I get hunger pangs around lunchtime, it's nothing a cup of green tea and getting immersed in work doesn't fix. In fact, if anything, I feel more focused at work, because I'm not structuring my day around food, and by the time I get home, I'm in truth, not even that hungry. Yesterday's pre-training meal made me feel incredibly full during my training, which was something of a blessing and a curse.

Something I've noticed about gym during winter - everyone who's there looks like they train. Contrast this with summertime training, where the treadmills are jam-packed with fatties, only the serious fitness enthusiasts are committed enough to make the effort to head out into the cold to train. I realise this sounds incredibly elitist, and I don't mean it like that - it's merely an observation (from an ex-fatty to boot). In summer, it's impossible to get a power cage or squat rack because of the bros queueing up to do brocurls or rack lifts or whatever ridiculous new exercise is flavour-of-the-month, and while there's still a ton of bros working on their biceps now in winter, everyone looks serious about training. There's way fewer of those obviously confused, slightly disorientated people that flock to the gym in summer in a belated attempt to get some sort of beach-appropriate body.

There is however, always an exception, and Flat-in-Front-Fredrick in his bicycle shorts is the main culprit. About a week ago I noticed this guy, immediately, because he was wearing bicycle shorts with a padded front, and looked completely out of his depth.

They look just like this. Just with more padding. A lot more front padding.

Anyway, this guy. I see him because he trains at about the same time as me, but generally in a different section, but I'm always amazed by how androgynous the shorts make him look. There's a lot of padding there, and it just sort of creates this non-descript mound that protrudes out of his loin area that both disturbs me, and inspires a sort of morbid curiosity that means I just. can't. look. away. It doesn't help that he's really rather fat, with these tiny, spindly appendages, and that last night he was sitting on the bench next to mine while I was doing my chest program, and every time I looked left I saw him labouring like some sort of beached whale under the crushing weight of a 20kg bench press, with this perfectly smooth black mound glaring at me like the shiny bald head of a mole emerging from its lair. Again, I realise this sounds absolutely horrible, and more power to him for trying to get into shape, but the bicycling shorts must go man.

I promised you open ocean glow

I had a good weekend and a particularly special Sunday. We went hiking in the Suikerbosrand, and it was beautiful, in an unconventional way. There had very recently been a series of controlled burns, so half the reserve was charred to ash, the other half dry as a bone. It was a strange sensation, to be either walking through so much nature so close to death, everything dry like an enormous natural tinderbox, or the other half already ravaged by fire, nothing but ash. It was like we were walking on that edge of death, where the only thing separating the last vestiges of winter life and their tenuous hold on life from absolute nothingness was a single flame.

And yet, in all the death, a sensation, an idea, just a hint that life struggles on. Not even the first signs of regrowth (it's still too cold for that), but the (almost seditious) idea that life continues, subdued but unabated. The odd gazelle. Sounds of small animals in the sparse undergrowth. The intensely beautiful colour palettes of the shrubs, if you look closely enough. A lizard here or there. An entire herd of skittish zebra.

I positively reveled in the entire experience, if only because hiking is so much damned fun. I suspect I was the only one who really enjoyed it, but I was positively bounding from rock to rock, and pretty much running down the hills through the charred remains of plants, kicking up an enormous cloud of ash behind me and grinning like a madman as I did so. I was sorely tempted on numerous occasions to just break out into a run down a path to see what was on the other side of a group of boulders. I wanted to climb everything, see over the top of every rocky outcrop, explore everywhere. While the people I went with were fun and good company, the expectation was for something less intense, so we did very little running, very little climbing, very little exploring. I'd love to go back, by myself if need be, find the highest hill and climb it. I wanted to take it all in and run until I felt fire in my lungs and sweat in my eyes and feel the pounding of my heart in my hands. I may just.

This is why we get fit. This is why we get strong. It's so we can enjoy these experiences.

On the way back, we saw a controlled burn on a nearby expanse of veld. The plume of smoke it created, tinted pink by the afternoon sun was really quite something to behold. It left me smiling, although the bath I had afterwards, washing the accumulated, caked filth of a day spent in the dirt was probably the highlight of the day.

I spend the next couple of weeks at home, alone. I somehow feel like the timing is fortuitous. I need time to myself. It's been a very sociable couple of months for me, and I need to just disconnect and recharge.

We can go down to the streets and follow the shores...

I tend to blog fairly infrequently, but when I do, I feel like it ought to fulfill one of two purposes: catharsis or signposting. Occasionally both. Take my last blog, on deadlifts (of all things). When I did that, back in May, I was lifting like a little six-year old girl, in all fairness, but I felt the need to signpost what limited progress I had made. My progress had been minimal, in retrospect. I was doing a single or double lift of 170kg and was happy with average form. Six weeks later and I'm doing 10 sets of 180kg singles with significantly better form. I'm now working on cracking a 200kg lift. It's still pretty light, all things considered (maybe I should stop using Willem as a strength benchmark though), but it's functional strength and it's in a state of improvement. That blog played an important part in the improvement - it was me planting a signpost in the ground saying "I'm here now, but I want to improve. I must improve."

Anyway, that's signposting for you. This blog is similar. I had a very interesting weekend. Friday was nice enough, I went out with some new(ish) friends and had a good time. Or I thought I did. No, I did. I just felt... unfulfilled afterwards. I didn't know why - I put it down to a general malaise and perhaps tiredness. I attempted to rectify it on Saturday by going out to lunch with a girl who I've been keen on for a few weeks, and I made a move. Man, I'm glad I did, but I got shot down. No, I got massacred. I got a world-ending barrage of anti-aircraft flak. I went down in flames. I'm writing this with something approaching a wry smile on my lips, which is good, because I wasn't feeling particularly amused afterwards, but I guess that's progress.

You see, I used to be a hopeless romantic, but by virtue of the fact that human beings are cruel and heartless bastards all, that has since changed. In fairness, by Sunday I was over it and had a bit of a chuckle about it. And that's a very good thing. It's important to take those shots. It's also never been in my nature to do so, but I have this year, and while the results have been mixed, I'm glad I did. It's also important to get over it when it doesn't work out, and that's something I'm a lot better at nowadays.

The truth is, there are few things as depressing as being a hopeless romantic. I would never go back. It's just a load of horseshit. You don't have to be the opposite either - the hard, cynical, forever alone bastard, but emotional extremes are just an unhappy and unfulfilling place to be. You don't want to be there. Emotionally unstable people are my anathema right now - few things tire me more than people who are captive to their emotional whims.

Anyway, does this blog have a point? Perhaps. In the course of thinking about this whole thing (perhaps something I ought not do - after all, I got shot down, I should just move on? Maybe...) I came to realise that I've had a pleasant break from what Gordy affectionately calls 'my bullshit', but I need to get back into it. I've been having people over, eating whatever the hell I felt like, drinking, smoking and generally acting like I'm where I want to be. Which I don't. And perhaps that's why I have this sort of general malaise - while work is going well, I haven't been approaching my training and diet with the Spartan-like discipline I need. But that has since ended. My capacity for tremendous discipline and tremendous hedonism never ceases to amaze me.

Anyway, starting Saturday, I went on keto, and while it's still early days, it seems promising. I am consuming satisfying quantities of green vegetables and meat, and nuts, which is keeping me pleasantly full. I did feel a bit of fatigue this afternoon, but that might just be the lack of carbs. My ketostix are varying between 0 and trace amounts of acetones, so I haven't gone into ketosis yet, but it ought to be soon. I'm back on creatine, I got a small tub of Jack3d (if my heart explodes in the next three weeks, someone sue them on my behalf) and I'm going to continue working on my goal of a 200kg deadlift and being able to run a sub-1 hour 10km.

Life is good when I'm disciplined. It has structure, and purpose. I have a fantastic bunch of friends right now, some of which are introducing me to new and exciting things like Dungeons and Dragons (*snort*), as well as expanding my musical, film and book horizons. And as of this weekend, for the first time since the beginning of this year, there are no active prospects on the horizon when it comes to eligible, dateable women. While I realise to someone else this might be somewhat depressing, considering my abysmal track record (I am not good at relationships, clearly), and in light of what success I have had this year, I'm quite okay with it. I've had fun, but it's time to get back to business. So I'm hoping that stays the same, at least until summer, when I can cut loose a little bit.

Oh, and one last thing. I was struck by two distinctive memories this weekend, but they came, as memories do, fragmented and discordant. The one was of going to an apartment in Parkhust when I was very young (maybe six?), and the other was when I was older, playing in the pre-pool mud pit that we had at our old house. What's special about both of these is the recollection of a unique tactile experience I had with each. The recollection was so profoundly strong, so overwhelmingly vivid, I could feel the curtains in the first memory as if I were touching them now. The sensation of the fabric, the evening light, even the smudges on the glass, although hidden somewhere in my subconscious came flooding back bright and brilliant. In the second memory, the feeling of mud between my toes was so real, it was all I could do to not look down to check if I wasn't in fact standing in mud when I remembered it. The granularity of the sand, the squelch-squelch sound, it was like my brain had locked up those sights and sounds in an airtight box for 20 years, and now they came flooding back, as clear and distinct as if I'd experienced it this morning.

I'm not sure what this means, but perhaps I'll write about them. In both cases, they are very good memories, and I'd like to have them written down somewhere for posterity.

Memories are very fragile things.

Fail early, fail often

My personal philosophy when training, and in many other areas in my life has been to fail early, and fail often. Simply put it, it means not being scared of failure, but giving it your best shot all the same. It's been a good approach so far, and there's very few exercises where it's more fun to fail than on deadlifts.

Unlike squats or a bench press, where a failure can often be catastrophic, you're unlikely to hurt yourself on deadlifts if your form is correct. Actually, no, I lie. That's true for all three lifts. Failing on a bench press attempt when you're properly spotted with proper form is in no way dangerous. However, take this idiot for example, attempting a 1RM max on bench but with a 'suicide grip' (the thumb isn't wrapped around the bar, so it rolls off his hand). I know it sucks, but he pretty much got what was coming to him:

Or take this guy for example, doing his 2 inch squats, again, if he'd be doing proper deep squats with about 1/3 of the weight, he'd probably have had a much better day over all:

So actually, scratch that. I'm all about failing, but failing safely when you've got 150kg over your head is probably important. Anyway, back to deadlifts, which I really enjoy. I had my training partner, housemate and homie Steyn take a video of me doing some deadlifts this week at the gym, and compared them to a video of myself from six months ago, and I was really happy with the progress, not only in terms of the strength gain, but considering I've worked hard to get my weight down as well.

Here's the first video, taken around the end of last year. At the time, I was about 115kg, and this was a 1RM attempt on 170kg.

So a couple of things, form is pretty horrible. At this point, I was still very much a novice, and I'm lifting 170kg and struggling my ass off on a single lift. Interesting, it was around this point people first started really noticing the weight loss, but I'm still tubby as all fuck. At this point, weighing 115kg and lifting 170kg, it's only a 1.5x bodyweight lift. That's not particularly impressive - it's barely makes the grade for basic functional strength. For what it's worth, I'd define basic functional strength as the following: 1.5x BW deadlift, 1x BW squat, 0.75x BW bench press, 0.35x BW overhead press. Anyway, so yeah, not amazing.

Fast forward to this week, and I rocked a 170kg double with significantly better form, and off a 95kg frame.

Form is still nowhere near perfect, and thanks to a thread I left on the Fitocracy Fittit group, I got some excellent feedback. My back is still rounding an unacceptable amount, and I need to work on that, but generally speaking, it's looking less like the deadlift performed by someone with a debilitating muscle condition and severe lack of co-ordination.

I like progress. It makes me joyful.

Last known surroundings

What a completely unforgettable weekend.

I made up my mind on Thursday night that I'd drive down to the Drakensberg 'when I woke up'. It just so happened that I woke up at 5 AM, and by 5:30, I was fuelled and on the way. To say that the traffic was horrific would be an understatement of the highest magnitude. It was an absolute abortion, and coupled with the mist and the sheer volume of cars, it took me almost three hours to put 100 kilometers between myself and Jo'burg city limits. Once I was was past the second set of tolls, things got a bit better, but what should have been a relatively quick four hour drive was almost eight. Not fun.

I arrived at roughly lunchtime in Bergville, where my queries regarding the location of the nearest hospital were met with more than a little curiosity from the locals. Apparently, there are no hospitals for 'white people' in Bergville, and I had to make it abundantly clear that I was looking for a rural hospital. That particular phrasing, I'm sad to say, didn't come to me immediately. I tried 'black hospital' in my head for a second before abandoning it, likewise for 'Zulu hospital'. I almost went with 'provincial hospital', which would have actually been quite correct, as I found out later. Anyway, I find it highly enjoyable to make my brain think somewhat outside its comfort zone from time to time, and between pulling over at the side of the road and asking pedestrians for directions (it's been a long time since I've done that) and some furtive guesswork via Google Maps, I eventually found myself at Emmaus Provincial Hospital, a level 1 care facility located smack-bang in the middle of fucking nowhere, KwaZulu Natal. You get urban, peri-urban, rural, fucking rural, and Emmaus. For a city boy like me, it was a bit of a shock. I loved every minute of it, from the goats and children in the road to potholes the size of small swimming pools. Rural as all hell.

Anyway, I was greeted with a fresh quiche, and I quickly found out that Laurene is every bit the chef she claims to be. Will wonders never cease? There's certain things you take at face value, but when someone claims to being amazing in the kitchen because they spent a year in an Irish five-star hotel you don't necessarily get your hopes up. After a bit of quiche we snuck in an afternoon nap - I was, after all, pretty tuckered out. Friday night is very much for the nightlife, and I'm well aware of Laurene's propensity for excessive drinking, smoking and partying. She has a zest for nocturnal mischief that has all but fled from my other friends, and I find it invigorating being around her if only for this quality (although there are many others). Needless to say, there's not a whole lot of options for drinking in rural KZN, which meant we ended up at Amphitheatre Backpackers drinking quarts with her male nurse friend Ayanda, laughing at the chubby American tourists, the dour German backpackers and playing pool, badly.

Eventually just before midnight we decided a change of scenery would be nice, and Laurene 'knew a place'. Cue a dramatic and highly exciting round of getting slightly lost in the Drakensberg looking for a place to go drinking. In Jo'burg, club-hopping is something that one reasonably allocates a few minutes' worth of time to, perhaps half an hour at most. Almost 90 minutes later, after at least one wrong turn that ended up with us on a road surrounded by corn fields (creepy) we find this place, and make a beeline for the bar and some hard-earned libations. At this point, I'm well and truly loose-tongued, and start chatting to a very cute Australian girl named Hannah as I'm setting up for a pool game with Ayanda. Laurene's at the bar getting us a round, and as Hannah asks very sweetly where I'm staying, I use the opportunity to introduce Laurene, who is sauntering back with drinks. "With my friend, Laurene. She's this amazingly talented doctor - oh look, here she comes." One look at Laurene, blonde locks and pouty lips and this poor girl scuttled off, no doubt massively intimidated and more than a little crestfallen. Cruel perhaps, but highly amusing. It was a scene that repeated itself not an hour later, except this time, the perpetrator was an obviously camp young chap named Tom. Fortunately, Laurene was there to save me from his advances, and she ended up dragging me out of the bar in a very protective and amusing sort of way.

After dropping off Ayanda in the middle of fucking nowhere in the middle of the goddamned night (seriously, we stopped in the middle of the road nowhere near civilization to drop him off), we were both starving, so on getting home, while I proceeded to pace about the kitchen, Laurene made what can only be described as the 3 AM steak roll to end all other steak rolls. If this steak roll was a historical figure it'd be Adolf Hitler - massively charismatic and the progenitor of a master race of steak rolls, custodians of a reich that'd last a thousand years. It would enslave and oppress all other steak rolls it deemed to be unworthy. It was that good. There were onions and cream and butter and a mushroom reduction sauce that made me question not just my sobriety (limited) but my very sanity (hopefully still intact). I realise my faculties were somewhat impaired, and in fairness, at that point in the night a petrol station pie would be arguable as well-received as a risotto prepared by a master chef, but this steak roll was perhaps one of the crowning achievements of my culinary life, a true high point not just in drunken cuisine, but in my long and varied (sober) gastronomical journey thus far.

The next morning I drifted in and out of sleep for quite some time, but eventually came around to the sounds of breakfast being fried in the kitchen for me. There are few things better, and Laurene's skills in the kitchen are capable of reducing a grown man to tears. If she's as good a surgeon as she is a chef (and I know she's better) she's going to immortalised in medical textbooks, probably for inventing some highly technical procedure that revolutionises a surgical method. I guarantee it. The woman no doubt resorts to some dark witchcraft to make a plate of eggs, bacon and toast so delicious (she feigned ignorance to any deal with the devil, and instead credited copious amounts of butter and cream) but I was in heaven all the same.

I wanted to take in some of the 'Berg that day, so we headed off to a local hotel which served as a departure point for some of the more scenic hikes in the area. Because she was recovering from pneumonia earlier during the week, we limited our hike to a fairly easy two hour affair up to a local waterfall. Yes, she's fucking hardcore. She works 80 hours a week, sleeps three hours a night, had pneumonia earlier that week but was still up for a hike. Anyway, reflections on her testicular fortitude aside, it was honestly one of the most profoundly enjoyable afternoons of my life. Easy conversation, albeit about very intense and varied subject matter, staggering, breathtakingly beautiful scenic vistas and nature all around us. I had an enormously good time, and was tremendously sad to hike back down the mountain to the hotel. We did however enjoy a decent snack before we headed back, which was nice. I had a French onion soup, and although the croutons were oversized and soggy, it was hard not to enjoy the view.

Saturday evening was always going to be a lot more chilled. Supper was a prawn noodle soup, lovingly prepared entirely by hand from fresh ingredients. I learned the secret to amazing pan-friend prawns (the butter needs to be slightly burnt) and watched in no small amount of awe as what was quite possibly one of the most finely crafted, subtle dishes I've ever eaten was prepared from scratch in front of my very eyes. It's a real treat to watch someone so talented work, and enjoying a magnificent bottle of Rupert and Rothschild while I did so certainly didn't make it any less of a pleasure. The end result was a dish as picturesque as the Drakensberg itself, artfully crafted with the skill and passion of a true artisan, full of complexity and subtle flavours that danced across my palette with a such a sense of uniformity of purpose I was honestly emotionally moved. I may have proposed marriage. I'm fairly sure I did. Apparently, it's a fairly common reaction to those fortunate enough to sample the dish. I am in rare and distinguished company then.

We moved fairly quickly from supper to a blanket in front of the fireplace along with a further two excellent bottles of red wine I'd brought down from Jo'burg on a recommendation from a friend. By happy chance, the Kanonkop was her favourite wine, and the conversation flowed easily on all manner of topics as varied as scrotum splints (she's going to be a urologist, so there was more than a little discussion about the subject) and Jazz and modern art. At some point, we started running low on firewood, which prompted a highly amusing foray into the wood behind her house in the pitch dark to forage for firewood. "After all, we are in rural KZN, we may as well make like the locals and forage!" she grinned before bounding off into the darkness, leaving me to breathlessly run after her, more than a little tipsy, laughing and tripping in the mud and generally behaving like a raucous child under the most majestic night sky I've seen in many a year. When we ran out of the good wine, we made Gluwhein (and when I say 'we', I mean her, naturally), and by the time we ran out of Gluwhein we were both exhausted, the fire was mere embers, and it was already early morning. We still chatted for hours afterwards and eventually fell asleep to the sounds of some musician, now long dead, playing the piano and the saxophone. It was an entirely surreal experience, and I suspect I'll never forget it as long as I live.

I had to break myself away today after breakfast (croissants, preserves, coffee, cheeses). As I drove back, I put on the new Explosions in the Sky album and savoured the afterglow of an entirely majestic weekend. Despite the fact that all the goodness of that weekend was limited to that weekend (I don't know when next, if ever, I'll see her again), I wouldn't change it for the world. Sometimes it's worth taking a shot just for taking it, and it was great.

No, it was glorious. There are no other words.

No one is ever going to love you more than I do.

Life continues, more or less according to plan. I love saying that, even if at best of times, the plan for my life is sort of a general feeling in a particular direction, but regardless, things are going well. Life at Twisted Toast is enjoyable and stressful, as I knew it would be, filled with very good creative energy (and tension, at times) and good times. I am looking forward to getting really stuck in in May, but we've done well for the past two weeks - we've launched our website and we've signed our first client, so we're off to a good start.

I'm finding it easier than I thought to deal with the lack of internet at home. Tomorrow will be a month since I had uncapped DSL at home, and with my DSL installation only scheduled for 3 May, I've got another two weeks without it, but it doesn't particularly terrify me. I realise that's somewhat sad, but I really do consider myself a denizen of the internet, and in the past, not having access to uncapped, high-speed internet has been an exercise in agony and frustration for me. I've made do the past month by doing normal stuff, like going out, and the like, which has been actually a lot of fun.

Fortunately, we've had uncapped internet at work which I've abused (outside business hours, naturally) to download some stuff. I finally got around to watching Arrested Development (I was harassed into submission by a new friend to do so) and I feel ashamed that I never watched it sooner. It's genius in a way that defies comprehension. People so much cleverer and funnier than me poured so much effort into it, it's a show that is both ridiculously entertaining and in a way, humbling, to watch. I've also started watching It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and I'm finding it pretty enjoyable as well. I'm also slowly but surely making my way through Downton Abbey, and despite it being slower than a Home Affairs queue, I'm getting into it. I'm generally not a fan of period pieces, or slow dramas (Downton is both) but I'm getting caught up in the language and style of the whole thing. I could totally be an English gentleman, with a valet and butler and footmen to wait on me.

I've also gotten stuck into Sim City 4k whenever I've had some free time (of which there's been precious little of late) but frustrations regarding commute times in larger cities has once again stymied me. There's this whole subculture of Sim City players who delve into the details of creating mass transit systems for large metropolises in minute detail, and it's just a layer of complexity that's too much for me.

Beyond that in terms of gaming, it's been somewhat quiet. I've finished Dragon Age 2 on two characters now, first a mage, then a rogue, and now I'm in the process of playing through as a 2H warrior. The last has been the most fun, just because of the ridiculous cleave damage when partnered with another 2H warrior like Fenris. Add Isabella into the mix, and Anders as a buffbot, and my party is effectively a three-man whirling dervish of blades that don't so much kill street hoodlums as much as resemble a highly efficient sausage machine, turning human flesh into neat piles of minced meat, organs and bones. It's all very fun. Speaking of Anders, there are very few characters in film, TV or games that I've detested as much. Such a fucking whiny, annoying little child of a mage. "Ooh, the mages are being oppressed by the Templars again!" Fucking hell, Bioware really sucks for making him the only viable support caster in the game, so you have to drag him along all the time. Really grates me.

I've also installed Crysis 2 and I've given it a whirl. It's not really game-changing in terms of actual gameplay, but it is kinda fun. The stealth capabilities are in my opinion, for the single player at least, highly overpowered, and I totally cheese the ability to destealth, fire off a single headshot, and then restealth with no penalty. Still, it's kinda fun, and I'm enjoying getting into a shooter again. The most impressive thing about it is without a doubt the graphics. Even on the lowest settings, it absolutely blows me away. When the game started, I didn't realise I was ingame - I thought I was looking at a pre-rendered cinematic until I actually had to do something, and I was like, "Wait, what now? Is this ingame? Holy shit!" True story.

Right, so enough about games. Back to TV series! I've just finished downloading the first episode of Game of Thrones and I absolutely cannot wait to get home tonight, get gym out of the way and come home and watch it. I'm going to make popcorn and everything. If I can look forward to the birth of my first child as much as I've been looking forward to the TV debut of this show I will consider myself a great parent. I'm seriously so psyched, and I suspect that if this show is a disappointment I will have to seriously re-evaluate my approach. On a somewhat related note, the rest of tonight will be spent playing Portal 2 with my homie Steyn. Busy night.

All in all, life is good. The move to JHB has been everything I had hoped for, and then some, with some surprises in ways I had not expected (let's just say there's substantial (and good) differences between Pretorian girls and girls from Jo'burg). Having a 5 minute commute is glorious, fireplaces are win, space is good, and a turntable was a fucking hipster but fun buy.

I'm headed off to the Drakensberg this coming weekend, and I'm looking forward to it. There may be pictures.

New skin for the old ceremony

The coolest things about weight loss are the things no one tells you to expect. I mean, everyone tells you how great it's going to be to fit into new, smaller clothes, or how healthy you're going to feel, but no one ever mentions that you're never going to struggle again to get out of your car in tiny Joburg parking bays. No one mentions that airline seats, while still pretty uncomfortable, no longer feel like you've been poured into them. No one gave me a heads up that finding things like hip bones would be so much fun.

Anyway, I should probably not talk about too much about the whole fitness thing. A couple of beers recently loosened a friend's tongue sufficiently for him to tell me off over the whole body transformation thing. Apparently, it's made me a complete douchenozzle, and his words were that while I've always been someone who's been completely arrogant (and I quote verbatim here) "very difficult to be friends with", apparently it's become infinitely worse since I lost the weight. This was understandably something of a shock to me, but I'm trying to not let it bother me. Truth is, you can make new friends. Also, I did a bit of digging, and it seems that this is a fairly common issue among people who lose a lot of weight. When you're the funny, joking fat guy in a group, that's your role. If you decide to change that role, things can go sour. Ce la vie.

Anyway, on to somewhat more lighthearted topics. I had a superb Valentine's Day, and an even better birthday. In the past, it's always been a massive downer to share my birthday with Valentine's Day, but this year it worked out pretty well. I ended up giving gifts to all the pretty girls I know, which went well (many of them gave me things back), and I got some absolutely amazing birthday presents, including two of the books I most wanted to read, namely, Machine of Death and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Thank you so much - you know who you are!

Speaking of zombies, I'm looking forward to Dead Island in the biggest way since watching the epic teaser below:

What an awesome video! I love how conflicted I was after watching it for the first time. The music, the composition, everything about it is brilliant. What a unique way of presenting the zombie apocalypse. In a genre that I thought was starting to feel stifled and unoriginal, they've found a hook and presented it well. I can't wait.

So much for everyone

It's been a fairly adventurous couple of days. Thursday and Friday last were the UCM Management Conference, which was a fantastic opportunity to discuss issues of strategic import and spend some time with colleagues I've grown very close to over the past three years. We did some workshops and discussions in the morning, followed by quad biking, archery and spa treatments in the afternoon.



The quad biking was particularly fun, and I managed to completely wreck my quad's suspension and blow out a tire. I just kept on going, which was probably foolish, considering a quad with a blown tire barely needs a whisper of a reason to flip, and I had to actually stop myself from flipping over on a few tight corners with a some well-placed footplants. Anyway, good fun, as was the archery. Looking at the photos, I suspect I was the only one who was more impressed with my archery form as opposed to how great I look. I was really chuffed - check the straight arm, straight fingers, eye lined up with the arrow. Even the mohawk is getting in on the target-alignment action!

The spa treatment was heavenly. Any reservations I may have had over the ability of a female masseuse to really adequately massage the knotted, twisted mass of muscles that is my back and shoulders were soon assuaged as my skilled masseuse employed fingers, the palm of her hand and eventually her elbow to knead every last ounce of stress and fatigue out of my tortured muscles. It was glorious.

Thursday night was raucous. There's no other words really to describe it, and it shall remain so.

Friday was rather emotional, driving back the three hours to Pretoria on my lonesome, feeling like death (I've drunk to excess perhaps twice in the past nine months) and completely emotionally drained. UCM has been a fantastic time in my life, and good for me in many, many ways. It deserves a more thorough examination and a more respectful retrospective, but I'll leave that for another time.

The focus for now must be on the days ahead.

I miss the rewarding gaze of a friend from my younger days...

There are some nights where you hit the gym and you lift weights until your muscles scream for mercy before dying a thousand deaths as each muscle fiber fails completely and absolutely. Nights where you get on the treadmill and run until you can feel your heartbeat in your temples and knees want to explode and your veins pump battery acid and you taste blood and bile in your mouth. Tonight was one of those nights.

They're good nights, because they afford you the opportunity to clear your mind of all distractions, until it's just you, the feeling of blood coursing through your veins and that inescapable feeling of being alive. What a cherished sensation it is, that feeling of existing, the feeling of having a body that works, and perhaps most amazingly, not thinking about anything in that marvelous, endorphin-induced post-gym high. My internal monologue is at times, maddeningly rapid-fire, like a machine gun, and annoyingly, seems to process ideas and concepts in parallel, which can be enormously confusing if you're not paying attention. Yes, sometimes I get confused by my own brain. Not a particularly flattering admission, but there it is.

Anyway, for once, I wasn't thinking of anything, but I was listening to Dan Mangan on the way home, and one of my favourite songs, Basket, happened to come on. I was singing along as one does, and somehow, out of the blue, with nothing in my mind as a result of the gym-induced emptiness, I thought about my grandfather. It may well have been the lyrics: I used to be so young / how did I get so old? / Won't you take my cane and hold my hand / you're holding on to all I have / just a basket full of memories / and I am losing more each day it seems.

For some reason, I just vividly pictured him, and all the time I spent with him as a young lad growing up. Since he passed away almost two years ago, I've thought about him maybe once or twice. The one occasion where I actually talked about him was on a game drive with some colleagues (I consider them friends though, as an aside) and somehow the topic got onto people who'd influenced us, and there are very few people in my life who've had as profound an influence him. I'm not sure why I felt like sharing that evening, perhaps it was the cold (for which I was woefully unprepared), or perhaps it was because there was very little game to see, or perhaps it was just the company. Either way, I shared some remembrances of him, and tonight, choked on the inexplicable suddenness of the emotions that came welling to the forefront out of nowhere, I felt compelled to share a few recollections of my grandfather.

I'll preface it by saying that I'm incredibly sentimental, often to my detriment. I compulsively collect souvenirs of people and places, little mementos that tie me to the most profound experiences in my life. My apartment is a mish-mash of trinkets and baubles, and each one has a story. It's all horribly soppy, but my most treasured memento is my grandfather's war photographs, which he left to me. My mom has them at the moment, as she's having them digitized, but they are one of my most cherished possessions. Having a piece of the past that's so real and so personal is a remarkable thing.

In my mind, I perceive time as a rope. A really thick rope that passes by overhead, just out of sight and out of mind. Mementos, trinkets, photographs and souvenirs are like pulling a single thread out of the rope of time, and anchoring that thread to the present. Any time you look at that item, hold it in your hand, think about it, it's like tracing that thread back to that rope and remembering that time. It's a reassuring mental image, at least for me.

Anyway, and as another side, thinking about my grandfather I couldn't help but notice that the people I most admire are the people who are the most flawed. Perhaps I'm just attracted to things that are broken, but I find that perfection is highly overrated in people - it's why Superman is flat, two-dimensional and boring and Batman is awesome and cool.

My grandfather was, as we all are, a flawed man, but him perhaps more than most. He was, by his own and others' admission, a very poor husband and father, and a deeply flawed man. I'll never understand the demons he went through, seeing men he considered brothers dying and fighting in the trenches, and he worked hard to hide those horrors from me, sheltering me from the harsh realities of death while indulging my insatiable appetite for war stories. I see that now - I lacked the cognitive and emotional intelligence as a youth to see sometimes how hard it was for him to talk about what he experienced in the war. It didn't matter to me then, because he was an awesome grandfather, and I think sometimes that part of it was a sense of regret that he spent so much of his earlier years drinking with his friends instead of spending time his family. His penance ultimately resulted in some of my fondest childhood memories. His eyes always lit up when I visited, and it was this memory of his face when he'd see me knocking at the door that struck me tonight while I was listening to the song.

He inspired so much in me, and nurtured so many of the character traits that shape my personality now. My love of English, of History, particularly the Second World War, which later expanded to a general appreciation for the vast tapestry that is the written and oral human experience. My love of literature, poetry and art all found their roots in the early trips he took me on to museums, art galleries and the time I spent literally at his feet as he recounted his war adventures, or extolled the virtues of Charles Dickens and his ability to construct marvelous tales, at times, quoting verbatim from his novels with an accuracy that I find uncanny to this day. We'd sit and debate for hours on the dichotomy of a particular phrase, or he'd lecture me on the etymology of some esoteric English term. As a bookish young lad, you could hardly ask for a more perfect mentor, teacher and companion.

I'm deeply rooted into my past, and the past of my parents and grandparents. I feel a strong sense of family, a strong sense of belonging to something grander than me. I can't really explain it, but it's reassuring sometimes to know, and I feel sorry for people who are so quick to throw off their familial bonds. To each his and her own, I guess.

We are young, we have years ahead.

So, blogging. It's been a while; let's hope it's like riding a bike. Actually, considering my only real serious accident was while riding a bike (I lost most of the skin on my back and had a nurse digging gravel out of my flesh for an entire evening), let's rather hope it goes somewhat better.

Why the compunction to start writing again? A fair question. I didn't really have any New Years resolutions - the only one I actually made was that I vowed to embrace my inner spirit of rugged hirsuteness, but having shaved my hair into a Mohawk and rocking a very manly beard a mere two weeks into January, I can pretty much tick that one off the list. The others are fairly pedestrian, and for the most part, are ones I've already accomplished. Lose weight? Cool, done. Eat better? Like a boss, for the last nine months. Go to gym? Yawn. Get ridiculously good looking? Tick (ooh, cocky, I know). Work really hard at working hard? Totally motivated to do so, soon at least, but not now.

A big part of it is that I've been spending a lot of time reading lately. Books, and blogs - a few in particular that are exceptionally good and have inspired me to write again. I did a lot of reading over December, and it was perhaps reading Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov that reminded me about why I love English so much, with all its twists and nonsensical rules, but also its sheer beauty, the poetry and grace of well-constructed prose. I could wax lyrical on how much I love good writing, but it'd be somewhat self-indulgent, don't you think? Anyway, I had a serious case of writing envy reading Lolita, and it carries its fair share of responsibility for my desire to jot my poorly constructed ramblings down somewhere. Oh, it really is an excellent read, and I highly recommend it.

There's something uniquely personal about reading though that I love - it makes me more introspective and reclusive. A lot of people find it hard to believe that I self-identify as an introvert, but I definitely am. Reading affords me the opportunity to be true to that, and as a result, I find myself becoming increasingly withdrawn, contemplative and generally chilled out while on a reading vibe, like I was over December. December was as a result entirely bourgeois and massively civilized; eating out with good friends (no raucous drinking), the occasional pool party, sitting in the garden reading, playing with the dog or training in the gym. And while I may not have a tan to show for it, it was easily the best December I've had.

So - the writing. I guess ultimately it's as a side effect of the copious amounts of reading I've been doing, the new music I've discovered of late (there'll be a blog about that as well, I'd wager), as well as the fact that I'm in a period of massive personal and professional change. Perhaps it's something of a coping mechanism as well.

Either way, expect a few more random thoughts in the weeks to come.