Justin Nurse is the founder of Laugh It Off, South Africa’s first and finest satirical t-shirt company (you may remember their Constitutional Court victory over SABMiller in 2005), and a long-time 2oceansviber.

Below, he shares some of his recent thoughts…

Dear Seth,

I am writing this in response to your Airbnb article titled “The Special Pain of Airbnb guests complaining at 4PM on a Friday”, and the moron that recently visited my Airbnb. I just wanted to say “I feel you.” But while I’m here, let me say a few things more.

I just got my first bad review for our spot McBains, and it’s grinding me big time. The “guest”  – let’s call him Sourpuss – wrote that “the rooms and the general grounds leave a lot to be desired”. He said this publicly after sending smiley emojis and all that polite crap to my private digital face.

I mean come on! If you want to be constructive, bang it in a private message. If you want to be a dick and let your legacy of being a dick live on in perpetuity online, where it may or may not hurt the host’s business, then go ahead and make it public.

Who are you Sourpuss, the Derek Wilson of Airbnb? Do you remember Derek Wilson, Seth? He was that cranky art and movie critic. He died in 2017.

Anyways, I can’t quite fathom how someone’s self-entitlement gives them so much self-empowerment that they feel that they’re saving mankind by letting everyone know that your vibe left “a lot to be desired”. And now I have a deluge of Airbnb emails to deal with to address my rating problem. Which is a hassle really: more technology.

That is not why I moved to the mountains of Bainskloof. Something jars me with the way this whole Airbnb jol plays itself out, where our phone numbers remain hidden and I can’t just send a prospective guest to our website to see more photos of our place so that they can get a better idea of what we’re about.

To potentially spare myself from the Sourpusses of the world. The same people that think Cape Town works at 4PM on a Friday, and who don’t know how to enjoy a good day on the beach.

I’m drowning here, Seth. SMSs to say that I’ve got emails. Emails that say that someone is thinking about maybe possibly making a booking. And all this technology that is forcing me to have an awkward conversation with someone while a timer starts counting down the hours until my offer expires on a rad place to stay, where I remain at the mercy of sourpusses like Sourpuss until he’s rated and reviewed his stay. It’s gruelling and I’m a bitch.

Technology feels like it’s weighing me down more than it is liberating me. I can’t listen to music like I used to. I can’t remember how I used to listen to music but it feels like it was easier a while back. Burnt CDs that we called mixtapes to be cool? I threw my iPhone away in exasperation the other day when someone sent me a long-winded voice note that I just didn’t have the patience to listen to. Voice notes are socially acceptable, but checking your voicemail is a no-no?

I don’t know when that became OK … to send people voice notes and expect a reply. Probably around the time I couldn’t tell whether people were laughing out loud at me or sending me lots of love. So now it’s aubergine emojis that are actually dicks and … I just don’t know anymore. I use full stops in my text messages because I was taught that punctuation matters.

I’m still a sucker, though: I’m listening to Spotify, giving that a try, and everything’s a playlist now. It seems way too time-consuming: to curate a playlist of songs that I need to like first, then download, then add to a playlist, and then add to a queue… so I’m hitting and missing it with playlists like ‘This is Alternative 90s’. Gloria Estefan was right: the algorithm is gonna get you.

I thought it might’ve been Belinda Carlisle who sung that song – Rhythm is gonna get you – but technology hooked me up quick sticks when I Googled it just now; and now I’ll have Gloria Estefan videos appearing as recommendations on YouTube for weeks to come. My memory is failing me so I need Google, sure; but I can do without the creepy ads and recommendations that follow. Are they listening to our conversations? I think they might be listening to our conversations.

Freud has this story about memory in a book called ‘Forgetting Things’, where he forgets where he dropped off his watch to be fixed in town in Vienna. Don’t think town like we think about town, where you go to for First Thursdays. Think about small, side-winding cobbled streets. And so, anyway, Freud, for the life of himself can’t remember where he dropped off his watch and is lost, wandering down tiny Viennese side alleys.

Then he finally remembers that he had had a bad run-in with a dentist that had his practice around the corner from the watchmaker a few years before, and that’s why he can’t find the place: his emotional distress truncated his memory.

Or maybe he was trying to find a dentist and had a falling out with a Viennese watchmaker. Maybe it was that. I don’t remember. And that’s the point: live in the now, for your memory will fail you.

If Freud is saying that he couldn’t get shit done because his memory was fritzing out on him because of his suppressed trauma from his beefing with the dentist with the really great watch, then what hope do the rest of us have? The guy is Sigmund-screwing-your-mommy-Freud.

I just got back from the Eastern Cape where a lot of my trauma and triumphs are housed. I drove in one shot from J-Bay, with all these towns, these places of memory swilling up to my throat like some bad reflux, like that cheesy pizza dough burp taste that reminds you that you overindulged last night. Every night. Every night with the excess. What is up with that? And this elbow that was hurting like hell against the windscreen while my fingertips were resting on the steering wheel. What did I do to hurt myself like this? What did I bump into so obliviously? No! It’s not. It can’t be. Gout!

I also drove through Plett. Through all the speeding traps, up the hill, and casting a glance over to Keurbooms River and Lookout Beach to see what sort of sorry state that beach is in now. My memory of a teenage youth pre-global warming – when Hootie and the Blowfish at Central Beach on Smirnoff Ice was undoubtedly a better jol than whatever tropical house DJ will be playing to my cousin and his mate on Clites and Ritalin this coming Matric Rage. Things were better in our day. That’s what memory makes you believe over time.

Driving past where The Cave was, remembering, with scratches on the sinew of my brain, my Matric Rage. Rocking up in a borrowed Aca Joe polar neck to chat to my first cut and the girl I lost my cherry to, only to see her pulling into a douchebag of an ex-Wynberg boy who was already out of school and shouldn’t have even been there.

Remembering how four of us slept in Jimbo’s Golf after we got thrown out of the Beacon Isle hotel room that Pete’s gran had cashed in her RCI International timeshare for so that we could stay there. How the sprinklers had come on in the room while we were having a skottel at 2AM. Me shitting out Jimbo for not cooking nearer the window and the four of us laughing, pissed as only enthusiastic Matric Ragers can get pissed, laughing as these pathetic sprinklers started wetting the bed and the carpets.

And how, just a few hours later, we were out on our ear with three days of Matric Rage left and nowhere to go. And then taking mushrooms for the first time at The Gap beach there by the far side of Robberg that afternoon, and nothing much mattering anymore after that. Not even reliving seeing her kiss that guy. Almost.

I can still see it, though, 23 years later.  She vomited and then he pulled her. Or he vomited and then pulled her. Again, memory. The force that broke my heart. The force that sunk a thousand ships – ruining many a relationship for me for years after that – determined as I was to break her heart before she or anyone else got the chance to break mine.

But my heart is broken, Seth. And still it breaks, although now it can be because of something like a troll who doesn’t appreciate my valiant DIY. Because I mistake a broken heart for damaged pride, probably.

And my memory is fading, Seth. And still it fades.

But I will rise tomorrow and read your Morning Spice. I may check my e-mail and I will probably exit a WhatsApp Group. I will screen a call from a +100 number, and I will refresh my Instagram feed for likes.

And when the sun sets over Cabine du Cap, I will see you there.