Bear Hunting Season 10.03.2012

There was this girl I once loved. Jessica was her name. She was a real peach you know. She was so hot she could turn you to blister and though id met her, I felt it most difficult to make first contact. For if I called her, I anticipated she’d say, ‘dan, who?’ and if I messaged her, id figured she’d hit ‘delete’.  So I master minded that I’d send her a postcard expressing my deep love for her, expressing how we could act as mall rats on a Sunday, licking two scoops and holding hands, expressing how we could sit on a park bench and watch as the burning sun dipped below the horizon like a dunked Marie biscuit, or how we could lie in waiting at the airport to watch giant jumbos fly over head sipping ice cold coca colas. I heave a massive sigh.
Time passed, and finally the SA postal services delivered. Pre- polyphonic ringtones I received a text message on my black on white Nokia 5610. She’d received it, loved it and had placed it on her ceiling so she could read it each night before she went to bed. Radical rim shot. I’d nailed a double word score with all 7 letters.
Fast forward on the ol’ VHS machine.
We did one date night. I stared into her eyes to see me reflected in them. Mesmerizing.
It wasn’t all about me, i tell you, but I did let her in on my massive vinyl record collection, and that I was off to Cape Town to a wedding. “you have to visit my uncle’s record store while you’re there’, she said. ‘It’s called Mabu Vinyl’. Odd name I thought but to score some pointage with her and to grab me some super slick black gold, I vouched to visit.

My choina Steff was in the Cape as I was and a day out in Long street sipping overly, unnecessarily expensive craft beer was a sure thing. After rehydration we together stepped into Mabu Vinyl.
The search for a new record was an Indiana Jone-sian experience, with nothing licking my fancy.
The one owner with his long range locks and hipster t-shirt offered me a viewing of ‘the good sh*t’ at Stephen’s house. Who the F is Stephen? Anyways Steff and I, in his yellow-banana-coloured jam jar 2^nd geared it up the hills of Oranjezicht to Stephens house where we were met with a calmly casual guy in his khaki threads, short sleeve button shirt and flip flops. ‘be careful of the stairs, they’re slippery’ he cautioned, as the Cape rain splattered down like a Delhi’d belly.
Under the house was the musty mildew-ey dungeon with walls that had breathed, seeped and stained every part per million of THC they could absorb. Bending our heads we entered through the wooden stable door to be greeted by plumes of bellowing smoke and heaps of records. Records in blue trunks, records along shelving, records on the floor. I wanted some record. With my Led Zepp Code paper-bag wrapped record in hand we bolted.

6 months later in 2012. Cruising down the freeway in an Infinity down to Atlantic City outside of New York for a weekend rendezvous, my cousin reminded me of the legendary Album Cold Fact, of the weathered Rodrigues and this new mega hit, Searching for Sugarman. The world stopped. I sat for a moment in silence, the hairs on my arms stiffened as a teen in a popsicle store. My eyes watching the other 5 lanes of the highway zip by in slow motion, and a cotton-balled silence blanketed the cockpit. Noooo frikkin waaaay, i bellowed

I tried my darndest, the hardest effort id ever given to one chuckle berry (cherry) but sadly my dreams of being with this dear girl faded like the print on a well worn tee shirt, my spirit shot down plummeting like a lead zeppelin. The journey did though lead me to the now famed record store and to the wonderfully mellowed Stephen ‘Sugarman’ Seger man-The man that sought Sixto

Knees, Bees and Honey Trees 03.10.2016

An Ennio Morricone-composed soundtrack would have been far more fitting an interlude to my medical experience. When the doc said I’d need an MRI, that seemed a bit more than having an ingrown hair removed. I met my radiologist in the swampy holy city Benoni.
Waiting nervously for my slot, I read already-thumbed magazines and watched the off-the-shelf clock tick tack till my appointed time.
The nurse arrived motioning me to the MRI room. Emptying my pockets and unchecking the box that said ‘have you any metal plates in your head?’, i was led to stand alongside this gargantuan off-yellow barrel-like machine. Laying in the coffin-like capsule, my arms tucked in, a pair of ear phones hooked around my head, the missus covered my head in this hockey mask like grill. She then pushed ‘on’ and the machine clunked me inwards to the bowels of the ‘cave’. The nurse had told me they’d need to inject me with a dye in order that the machine could pick up colour hot spots. The thought of a robotic needle puncturing my neck plagued me and i awaited that science-fiction movie moment. It didn’t arrive after she gently took my hand and needled me to have the aforementioned dye race rapidly through my blood system.
For a machine as sophisticated as an MRI it sounded pretty agrarian. The John Deere sounding engine barrelled around my head. And then she hit play. And none other than Josh Groban came over the ear phones. My hands clawed into my stomach and my eyeballs rolled around my sockets like a ball on roulette table in absolute distaste. No-where to run, no-where to control the volume, i endured the Guantanamous Grobian torture.
After about 30 minutes I was all MRI’d but riddled with the songs and sounds of the curly Josh Groban.
The x-men had one looksee at the x-rays to find nothing but everything normal.
It’s lekker being regular. So go on and order Regular.