[Image: Pickpik]
Doesn’t the lady sitting next to me at the Hans & Lloyds Coffee Shop in Newlands Village realise that this is my office?
She talks louder than a combination of the jackhammer currently thundering away for ten hours a day outside my home office, and the cheerleader of the roadworkers who sees to it that she can be heard above the cacophony of the jackhammer. The WIFI at the office is on the blink which is why this is my only option to get some work done.
This woman’s conversation about her son’s water polo game against SACS with her two besties doesn’t justify amplification across the entire room in her private school speech and drama-trained elocution. I wish these noise-cancelling earphones did a better job.
She looks like she may have slept three times as much as my three hours last night, in between one child’s nightly nightmares and my anxiety about how to pay the bills in a world where the price of everything keeps going up. Even the price of Zoloft has increased. And they have raised taxes on wine. They also tell us that Trump’s tariffs will increase inflation even further. Are you kidding Donald? Give me a freakin’ break.
Now they want to ban marijuana again. Or is it just the sale of edibles? How will Noordhoek cope? More importantly, how will I cope? My husband may come to his senses without the ganja. And I prefer him anaesthetised – he is easier to manipulate.
Back to the coffee shop, hasn’t this lady heard about the perils of peri-menopause or the modern consequences of losing your looks? Why does she sound so goddamned happy?
My day began tearfully and has degenerated. Three Ubers flew at me from a bewildering variety of vectors in the town traffic. Another two stopped in front of me suddenly and without bothering to put on their hazard lights. And then I was cut off by a taxi on hospital bend which was rounding the corner at high speed on two wheels while the driver lit his joint and turned up the thumping beat simultaneously whilst steering with his knees. But when I miss renewing my license by one day, a cop with swirling lights pulls me over on the highway, strides up to my window in his aviators, tight trousers with a threatening bulge in the groin, and informs me that his AI-driven-in car-bot has determined that I am unlicensed, and shall pay a large fine immediately or face incarceration.
What about the Ubers and the freakin’ Taxis, Poncherello? Or is your bot only designed to fine people who are likely to pay?
Why is half the coffee shop still dressed in their cycling or running kit sprayed with mud, without having showered after burning 1000 calories and sweating for at least 60 minutes? Also, why is everyone else dressed in derivatives of cycling pants, even if they haven’t been cycling, with their genitals on display?
Call me a prude but isn’t that a bit vulgar? Some of the packages seem to require extra ballast. Are cod pieces still a thing, or did they remain in the 17th century?
All of this is down to the same reason. It is why American politics looks like George Orwell may have seen the future in Animal Farm. And helpfully simplified the message into an allegory so that most of the electorate can understand. Napoleon the pig is fully incarnated in his pink glory.
The reason is that Western society is so obsessed with disobeying Moses’s deadly sin of praying to the Golden Calf, that we have forgotten our manners, any sense of common decency, and what it is that civilised society should place value on.
People only voted for Donald, and they only put up with his disturbing acolytes because they are rich and white, and the electorate believes these freaks will make them richer or at least preserve their wealth. Whatever happened to the protestant virtues of inconspicuous consumption?
It appears that the opposite is currently in place, particularly in certain sections of parliament if the coverage of SONA is anything to go by. And while a certain amount of money is necessary to feed the kids, and to survive in any capitalist democracy without a socialist safety net, it doesn’t make you happy.
Why are we allowing our children to become accountants, influencers or mind-numbing data sorters rather than finding happiness and purpose in their work by doing something meaningful that will give them joy?
No one aspires to achieve anything useful these days other than accumulating lucre. It’s all about making money so that you can appear as if you have more than everyone else or at least as much as the Joneses.
While I am mounted on the soap box, we need to remain vigilant about keeping the misogynists at bay. I have read some awful trash lately from the likes of the farcically named Norman D. Plume which suggests that these brutes are on the rise and gaining confidence from Donald’s success.
Perhaps I should move across the road to Café du Cap for a glass of bubbly and a light lunch? If I am reading the tea leaves correctly, Moses is about to descend from the mountain again, and all hell is going to break loose. I may as well be a bit tipsy when that happens.
