The Ancient Shark Of Despair's blog

Wednesday, November 12th 2008

So the landlord came but it wasn't first thing in the morning. It was actually more around lunchtime. I fell asleep a few time waiting for him. When he finally got here I was so tired and not thinking so quickly, but I had a plan.

He wasn't wearing his suit any more. He was back to his woolly sweater and his tracksuit pants, which is his 'everything's cool' uniform. Yeah, right. You could tell from the moment he came in that he looked like he'd lived a million lives back-to-back. I closed the door behind him and he began.

“We're still planning to sell the place. I'm sorry Sharky, but that's just how we feel.” He'd been rehearsing it. His brother had told him what to say and Celene had blessed it with her smile.
“I don't think you know how to feel,” I said quickly. I was not lying down or sitting. I was standing up. I am bigger than him. I'm pretty huge, actually. “You've never been trained up to do it the right way. You've never let me do that. That's why you're making mistakes.” He didn't like that even though it was true and helpful. I could see every part of him even though I was tired. I'd been watching for years.
“Don't be silly,' he said. “Look, I've felt like this for a long while. It's time for me to move on. I've got to get away from this,” he said. I looked around.
“From what?” said my face, though I didn't say it out loud. But I knew from what. He couldn't handle the emotions of this place. It's absorbed so much of me over the years. That's what happens when you have so many emotions. Everything around you gets jealous and tries to latch on. The landlord had all of that under control for a little while back there but then he got old and he just sort of lost his gip and his will imploded. That can't happen to me.
“From all of this!” he said, waving an arm across the room. “From this place, from this life, from every day... from you, Shark. I can't do it any more.”
“Why not?” I asked, though I was sure I knew why. I think I asked that because I was quite offended at that point. “I pay you.” I added to remind him.
“That's not it, Shark. It's – don't you know how much you affect the people around you? Whenever you do something – anything – now it's me who has to suffer it.”
“Like what?” I asked. I kept touching my face. I didn't want to be doing that but I kept noticing that it was happening.
“Like bringing kids up here and scaring the life out of Mr. Roberts and driving around outside! Whenever you get hungry or need to change a bulb or clean out your damn bottles or any little thing, it's my problem.”
I felt like things were getting away from me. I touched my face.

“It can't go on like this,” he said. “Things are changing, all around. The country's changing. Someone will find out about you and they'll find out I've been hiding you and then what, Shark? What happens then?” He was getting really out of breath. I had to do something. I wanted to stop touching my face. I think it was making me lose the argument. I walked closer to him.
“If you sell this place,” I said, “I will eat you.”
“What?” he said, suddenly calm again.
“I ate Monopoly. I tore him apart. I'll do it to you if you try -”
“Who's Monopoly?” he said, suddenly confused.
“He's Moe's cousin. You know, Monopoly. He used to come over and play TV games but he was gross, so I...”
“You mean Bradley?” he said.
“Is that his name?” I asked.
“Bradley lives on the bottom floor with his mother.” he said, shaking his head. I hadn't planned this far ahead. I was so tired.
“Please.” I said. “Please.” The landlord sat down on the bed and shook his head again. I was still standing. It felt awkward that way.
“The plan is that we'd keep Ma's little granny flat and you could live there for as long as you wanted.” he said. “We'll see what we can do about getting you an allowance. We'll put up an ad to get someone to look after you.” He didn't say anything for a while. I just stood there. I was trying to imagine what Monopoly's mother looked like. After a while, he stood up and made us some lunch. I'm running out of food again.

Friday, November 14th 2008

Sarah still sends me e-mails. She doesn't talk about sex so much anymore and she hasn't shown me any more pages of her diary. That's okay, I can still remember the ones she did show me. Mostly she talks about how stressed out she is about exams and how she's going to leave home straight after school and go live in a Kibbutz or pick hops and be a part of something real, like a community and not something you only even knew anything about because you happened to end up in one specific little time and place, like a family.

Yeah, I've been thinking about family a lot. Sarah says that she's going to feel so guilty when she leaves her mother to look after her broken old dad all by herself. I don't think that's true. Sarah's just saying that because she doesn't want me (or others) to think that she's being mean. She thinks that her guilt makes it okay for her to be mean. But Sarah – don't worry. I know how it is. I've lived a really long time. Families leave each other all the time. It's nature, you can't stop it. Sometimes they don't even say it to your face when they do it. They get lawyers involved and it becomes stressful. More stressful than exams. Exams are only stressful because everyone's trying to mke you excited about writing them so you'll do well. It's like the holidays. Everybody wants them to turn out nice so hard. They're pretty stressful too.

What I'm saying is that you can always count on families breaking up and making a big mess of things and threatening all the systems that people have very carefully been building up for years and years. Your dad or your mom would have to be pretty silly and not getting it to not have known this all along and not to have had some kind of plan in place. Plans are what a good system is all about.

I've got a plan to stop my family turning on me. My plan is Love. But that's not all because Love wouldn't work on its own. My plan is Moe.

Sunday, November 16th 2008

I spent all day yesterday watching my sitcom tapes. They're not really funny any more, but I getting into their rhythym. I did this to relax. I'm still a bit stressed out from all that stuff last week.

I haven't talked about it with the landlord since. He's been leaving his messages and coming round and everything, but it's never really come up again. He talks about Celene a lot more than he used to. Apparently she's doing fine.I guess that since the power shifted her way he's been a lot more comofortable / proud of the face that they're an item. I don't think it's got much to with the fact they met through me. I've always been cool with the whole thing.

The landlord was about ten or fifteen when they met. He was definitely still in school because I remember him with his cap and suitcase and uniform on. He wasn't the landlord back then either, obviously. A little kid couldn't do that job. Actually there was no landlord at all back then. I lived in a big house and so did he. The houses were next door to each other.

The landlord was pretty cool as a kid. He was always making funny remarks about people and getting into trouble. He'd get caned at school all the time but that would only make him more mischievous. Anyway, he used to come round with his brother after school even though I'm pretty sure he wasn't allowed to until later. As I said, pretty cool. I don't know why he stopped being cool like that. I guess going to the Navy really kind of knocked all the life out of him. I think you're allowed to be cool and be in the Navy / Army these days but when he was there it just was not possible.

So here's the first time he met Celene. He came and knocked on my door.
“Hello little boy! Isn't it nice that you are keeping nice company with me to-day!” I would have said this kind of old-timey, and in Afrikaans too. I was never very good at Afrikaans. I was learning English pretty fast because of movies (I knew a projectionist kid who could sneak me into the cinema and I'd go there quite often, even though it was all the way out in town) but I was still kind of surprised that there were other languages apart from Japanese. Having lots of languages is something that's never really appealed to me as a cultural thing. I stick to English these days, of course. The landlord was forced to learn it at school because it's better than Afrikaans in most ways. Once he got trained up in it, I hardly spoke Afrikaans again. So much for that!

So I let him in and he told me about his day, probably, and he would swear a lot while he did because I was the only person he could swear around without getting in trouble. I remember I wanted to show him something cool all of a sudden. I smiled a smile that reminded him that I was full of wonders.
“Do you want to look at a baby?” I said. I thought my son was pretty cool. I hadn't seen any babies that weren't him. I thought that maybe they were rare. But the landlord wasn't really very interested. Lots of people had babies, he told me. He thought that mine looked weird and ugly, too. I wasn't sure how they were supposed to look so I didn't say anything about that. Though I'm pretty sure he was lying to look cool or maybe just being racist. It was the big thing to be back then. I thought about showing him some other things because I wanted to see if he thought they were ugly too. Problem was that I didn't have a lot of stuff in those days. He'd seen my house and he'd seen the baby. That didn't leave much else.
“I've got a cleaning lady,” I said. It wasn't really a lie because she did clean the house. Besides, it would have been weird to say 'wife' out loud. It would have felt too much like one minute I was one of the guys and breeding and having a great time but then all of a sudden I'm married and everything's gone. “She's really hot,” I probably didn't say 'hot' because no one talked like that back then. I must have said something old-timey like 'she's a real flousie' “She's about your age, too.” I went on. She's not, actually, she's quite a bit older than him but I didn't know that at the time. Besides, I wanted to sell it right.

“That kid is here,” I told Celene. I was standing in our room. I had this grin all over. She was sitting on our bed. She hadn't been doing anything when I came in. She smiled automatically as soon as she saw me and asked me if I wanted something to eat. That's when I told her that the landlord wanted to meet her.
“I told him you were pretty and that you were always asking about him and now he's really excited and you have to meet him and you can't let him down.” I'm extrapolating here. I know that I was quite enthusiastic. It was a pretty exciting thing for me to be doing. I was introducting people. I was building a community. I was giving them no choice but to be friends with each other. She didn't want to go downstairs, but I was thinking too quick for her and could beat all of her reasons for not going by using my own, better reasons. So she came with me and she got all shy and sat in the kitchen with the landlord who was also getting all shy.
“Good afternoon, Ms ... “ he said. He didn't know what to call her. He wasn't mischievous or cool any more. Celene looked at me. She didn't know what he was saying. She didn't understand Afrikaans. She smiled at me. I smiled back.

Later on, after the landlord had gone back home, Celene came by as she was putting the baby away. If it had been Modern Day, I've have been watching TV. I don't know what I was actually doing.
“That boy seems very polite. He is well-mannered.” she said. I laughed. If only she knew how much he swore!
“Hey,” I said, “You know what would be funny?” she shifted the baby from one arm to the other. She wanted to know. “It would be so funny if you guys got together.”
“I don't understand, sir.”
“It would be so weird! Your personalities would merge together into one big super-personality!” I smiled. My smile knew the future.

So I'm not trying to claim credit for calling it first or anything, but I think that, after a while, Celene couldn't quite tell the difference between my joke and reality. I think maybe she turned it into a recommendation in her head. As soon as I broke up with her, she started hanging out with the landlord at his house and when he got back from the Navy they got married. I was cool with it the whole time. I had my own thing going on. I just wish that they had been thinking a bit more clearly and rationally and not have let a joke turn into the real thing in their heads. I think the same thing is happening with this whole 'selling my house' situation. I don't think those guys have a very strong grip on reality.

Monday, November 17th 2008

I went outside to put the garbage out early this morning and there was a bird in the hallway. This has never happened before. For a lot of good reasons.

Most of the windows in the building are welded shut. The landlord did this himself because he was worried about people getting in. They are alarmed too. Whenever there is a new person in the building (this doesn't happen very often) they always try to open the windows and the alarm goes off and everyone knows that there's a new guy and they haven't learned about the windows yet.

The only way the bird could have got in would be through the attic. Nobody lives in my attic. It's mostly there for pipes and boxes and stuff. I hear it's very, very dusty. I've never been up there myself. You have to go up a ladder.

Point is that the trapdoor that goes up to the attic is really far away from my room. The bird must have come through the trapdoor because if there were any other holes in the roof, the landlord would have told me about them by now. Also, the trapdoor isn't left open because that would cause a draught and people would complain. But even if the trapdoor to the attic was left open, the bird would have had to walk all the way from the other side of the building, round a corner, which wouldn't be a sensible thing for a bird to do because they like to be high up and flying, not walking around whole corners and being on the ground. Not only that, but it was outside my door at exactly the time I opened it. There's a huge amount of time where I'm here but my door is closed. To put it in perspective, I'd say that my door is only open about 0.01% of the time. Less, maybe. Those are huge odds.

The bird didn't do anything weird. It just stood there then walked around a bit. Then I went and did the garbage quickly because I was outside without my towels. When I came back it was gone. I mean, it wasn't anywhere. There's no way it could have got back into the attic in the time it took for me to do the garbage. Birds walk slow. I'd have seen it on my way back up the stairs.

Look, I'm not saying that the bird was magical or anything. I'm just saying that I think what happened was important. I think that I'm doing the right thing.

Wednesday, Wednesday 19th 2008

The great thing about blogging on the internet is that it gives you this whole new perspective on the way you think. Before, whenever I had a cool or interesting thought it was nothing special because they came along all the time. If I had one in the middle of a conversation I might casually bring it up, but someone like the grocery kid or Celene might not have understood me. I think this whole process was pretty wasteful. But now, whenever one of those cool or interesting thoughts comes by, I grab it with my whole body because it could be good for my blog. This blog. And if one guy doesn't 'get' it, that's fine. There are probably an unlimited number of people out there.

Anyway, sometimes when I'm lying on my bed or just sitting at the computer, I imagine my belly becoming really swollen and fat. I guess I'm kinda fat already, but I'm talking about localised fat. Pregnant fat. As I get fatter and fatter, I start to think about all the stuff I'd have to buy in order have a baby properly. They have so much of that stuff now!
I'd have to buy a pram and a constant stream of baby clothes (babies grow) and those cardboard books and everything. The baby would need a whole room to itself. And I'd have to make sure that the baby watched all the right TV shows and didn't swear and went to school every day. It would be so tiring, the whole thing. I think I might lose my identity. I wouldn't be able to invest in it any more. Because having a baby isn't like it was back in the day when Celene had the kid and the whole process was so much more organic and fine.

And then I imagine this baby getting older and, yeah, it's cute for a while, but then it just starts disappointing me in every possible way. Like, what if it did badly in school and listened to the wrong music and fell into all the traps that everyone falls into unless they're special and with it? What if it hung around bars all night and dated bouncers and the bar staff? What if all that training and money I used on it just counted for nothing? Think of how sad parents get.

So all this is happening in my imagination and I'm hearing the landlord's voice telling me how expensive this big swollen belly is going to be and I haven't moved a single muscle or changed the expression on my face the whole time since I started getting pregnant but then I smile and open my mouth and I “RARRRR!” and then – fwoosh – a big geyser of fat and grease shoots out of the hole that Ric shot in me. Turns out there wasn't a baby in there at all. I was just being silly. Thanks Ric!