Oh Blog It All

She was driving, I was content to be a passenger.

“Why do you do it, keep taking him back I mean?” I asked.

She didn’t answer me, not right away. Then we stopped at a robot and she pointed to a man sitting on the pavement, hunched over, his rags-as-clothes barely covering his skeletal frame. Though the sun was shining the day was cold. I pulled my jacket closer around me.

“See that man”, she said, “that could be my boy one day if I don’t take care of him”.

“He’s an addict, Sally, a drug addict, you’ve had him in rehab four times and every single time he comes out he goes straight back to the drugs”.

“I don’t want my boy to become that man sitting over there” she said pointing again to the man on the pavement.

The light changed to green and we pulled off.

“Has it ever occurred to you that maybe that is the path your son is meant to walk”.

The car screeched to a halt and I was very glad that I was wearing my seat belt.

“If he walks that path then it means that I have failed, I’m his mother, I can’t fail, not now, not ever!”

“But one day you won’t be here anymore Sally, one day you’re coming home, to us. One day your boy will be on his own, walking his own path. I can’t change that and neither can you”

“Well as long as I have breath in my body I’ll keep protecting my boy, taking care of him, not failing him”

We were still stopped in the middle of the road and so you really could not blame the truck driver for what happened. He came round a bend and there was this car and he braked as hard as he could.

Mere moments and a crowd had formed around the ugly scene. Then the emergency services were there. I watched, just another face in the crowd, as the fire brigade worked their jaws of life to extract what was left of Sally’s body.

Long after the wrecked car had been removed and traffic was flowing again I was still standing there, waiting. I didn’t see her arrive but felt her hand touch my arm.

“Who will take care of my boy now?”she asked.

“He takes care of all of us. He will take care of your boy. Come Sally, let’s go home. He’s waiting”.

So, let me get this straight - It’s my lucky day because you’re calling me..

… from Avbob?

Alrighty then

Hoobastank brought you “The Reason” so now I, Geek’s Girl, bring you “The Question” but without the rhyming verse or the great tune.

I received an e-mail recently from someone I don’t know. This in itself is not all that unusual. One Richard K Lee is forever e-mailing me about the great bargains he has going should I wish to purchase Viagra in bulk. Mostly I just dump Richard’s e-mail in the junk folder and think nothing more of it. Richard though is determined that I purchase my Viagra from him, and him alone, so he sends me mail from every single e-mail address he has. And Richard, if you’re reading this please know that it’s nothing personal, it’s not like I buy Viagra from anyone let alone one of your competitors - who by the way has been e-mailing me also. It’s just that in the Geek house Viagra is not needed, not at all, certainly not by me (seeing as how I don’t have a penis) and sure as hell not by my Geek. We’re all happy on that front but in the unlikely event that hell freezes over and hence things change in this house I’ll e-mail you pronto, promise.

Now where was I? Oh yeah, an e-mail from someone I don’t know yet it wasn’t spam. The person who sent me the mail asked me to do something for them. It is a small and trifling thing and saying yes and doing what they ask would probably not condemn me to an eternity in Hell. And even if it did at least I’d get to hang out with some pretty interesting people. But I’m not comfortable in saying yes and it has nothing to do with the fact that I don’t know the person doing the asking.

What I fear is that if I say No,then I’m going to be asked Why? And I’d have to answer with “it’s nothing personal”, “it’s not you it’s me” and the all encompassing “just because” when really the reason is that they asked in the first place.

So what am I going to do about it? Well I just did something, I blogged about it.

I was driving to work this morning, like I do most mornings, and the traffic was just a leetle bit slow. My first thought was that maybe traffic was being delayed because there was a car on fire somewhere*. For a moment I was tempted to tune into a radio station and hopefully catch a traffic report but quite some time ago I made a conscious decision to not listen to the radio on my drive to and from work.

I used to listen but it just got to the point that I had to give it up. What I wanted was an easy listening station with a bit of news, weather and traffic but mostly music because it’s early, I really don’t want to be going to work but hearing a good song on the radio could ease the pain a lot.

Unfortunately we no longer have DJs on the radio - we have radio personalities. It might not have been so bad if we had charming radio personalities but no, we have Nigel Pierce from Goodhope FM. What an aptly named fellow. It may not be immediately apparent but wait until he laughs, and he will, at his own cleverness, and then hope your ears don’t bleed. We also have his sidekick Sandra who has to be the doffest woman on radio - and she has a Degree for crying out loud. Maybe live radio doesn’t quite showcase Sandra’s strengths, I don’t know, I’m just saying.

Next there’s KFM and their breakfast team. You have the team leader Nick “Oh God I am sooo Funny” Marais and the trusty sidekick Melanie. I really feel for Melanie because I’m pretty sure it’s chiseled into the ‘cast in stone’ part of her contract that she HAS to laugh at Nick’s lame attempts at humour.

There used to be 5FM and Mark Gillman but Gillman is just, there is no easy way to say this, Gillman is just getting old.

That left Fine Music Radio which is, well, fine I guess. Just a pity their newsreader sounds so uptight I’m sure he has not a carrot but an entire farm shoved up his nether regions.

So I did what I always do now, put a tape in ** and listen to the kind of music that I like, without the interruption of annoying ads or maniacal laughter. I didn’t hear any sirens nor did I pass the burned out husk of a BMW so I’m guessing it was just one of those days where people decided to take it easy and enjoy the fact that it’s no longer pitch dark on the daily drive to work.

What do you know, you can see The Mountain Doll!

* when we first moved here it seemed like every other day a traffic obstruction was caused by some car that was on fire.
** NO, I do not have a CD / MP3 player in my car, I only drive a Golf. Besides which, why waste money on a decent sound system when I don’t have the space for the gazillion watt speakers, nor do I have the gold mags, the purple paint job nor the spoilers - don’t forget the spoilers!

The first blog I ever read was that of Wil Wheaton. It was cool and exciting in a -I-get-a-look-see-into-the-daily-life-of-someone-famous kind of way. Almost like a voyeur. Of course Wil Wheaton doesn’t live the typical “Hollywood” lifestyle but he comes across as a genuinely nice guy and reading about his struggles and successes made me actually just like him.

I moved on to reading other blogs. There is Shawn Allison’s blog, the first blog I ever dared to comment on. She had written about something in her life and I had been in exactly the same place she was emotionally. I understood where she was coming from and I wanted, needed for her to know that. Then there was Stef Zucconi, was and is still one of my favourite bloggers. His writing makes me smile and makes me think. And who doesn’t read Dooce?

My blog reading grew and grew and I thought if all the other kids are doing it, I could too. I read the terms and conditions of Blogger and Blogspot very, very carefully and then clicked my way into cyber self-publishing heaven.

See deep down I fancy myself a bit of a writer, but I had no outlet. Blogging was and is a perfect outlet and though I didn’t make money from it, I didn’t have to deal with censorship, space restrictions or bitchy editors either. But one small snag, it’s nice to have an outlet and even a reader or three but putting some writing out is a whole other story.

I know this sounds pretentious but I do strive for quality. Right now I have Robbie Williams’ “Let me entertain you” going through my head and that is really what I want to do with my writing, entertain. It might make you laugh, cry or freak the fuck out but when you’re done you should not regret spending your time reading my blog.

Looking at my own stuff I know there are times when I’ve often missed the mark. Not in a totally sucked kind of way but not quite all the “let me entertain you” way either. I know this so I try harder, take longer to post things and when I look again its been weeks since I last posted anything. Which creates even more pressure to come back with something really great but of course I feel like it’s never good enough so I don’t post and it then it’s even more weeks since I last posted and….

Well, I’ve given up caffeine and alcohol for the foreseeable future so I resort to reading other people’s blogs and pretending that I don’t have my own.

But I still love writing and want to keep doing it, even if it is just here on my own piece of cyberspace. I aim to entertain and if I don’t quite make the mark, it’s okay, there is always the next post.

I don’t blog often enough, isn’t it?