David Bullard denies impotence rumours

Excerpt from a recent telephone interview with the self-appointed Pot-Stirrer General of the local blogosphere:

“One of your gripes about the majority of blogs is that they are excruciatingly dull”
“Precisely. Mind-numbingly so”
“So what exactly is it about your life that makes it more interesting than – for example – your typical mommy blog?”
“Oh, you know – stuff”
“Such as?”
“Interesting stuff”
“I see. Well okay, now what’s the story behind your impotence?”
“W-what?”
“Didn’t you say you were the most impotent person on the SA blog scene at the moment?”
“No, you idiot! I said I was important, not impotent. Important”
“Sorry, my bad. Not impotent, then. It’s just that nasal twang of yours. Are you perhaps fond of doing a few ‘lines’ that don’t require a keyboard – if you know what I mean?”
“Certainly not!”
“Taking elocution lessons from Irene Bester, maybe? Hello? Hello…? He hung up”

No actual David Bullards were harmed in the making of this drivelly piece of drivel.

On-the-job training

I went over to Forgottenmachine’s new pad+ on Sunday. After examining his loft space++ (which would make any conspiracy theorist’s mouth water), we settled down for tea and a hushed conversation+++ on the physics of Kung Fu movies. Okay, no more footnotes. I promise.

I was trying really hard not to think about the unique difficulties that Kung Fu fighters have to face when visiting the water closet. For example, what happens when the Dark Matter strikes the water? Does it ricochet back up towards its orifice of origin, or does it explode into a thousand pieces, coating everything in a fine layer of that-which-once-was-food. Food for though, huh?

Fortunately, Mrs FM emerged from the south wing of Casa Máquina Olvidada and rescued me from my ruminations with a truly chilling story about a purveyor of teddy bears at the Kirstenbosch craft market. This, in turn, sparked a discussion about how people with certain personality types – or more to the point, dysfunctions – seem ideally suited to specific jobs:

• Thick skin; unable to take no for an answer; people want to smash their faces in = Telemarketer
• Anal-retentive; detail obsessed; no social skills or fashion sense = Engineer
• Vindictive; suffers various forms of OCD; social pariah = Auditor
• And so on…

It’s a variation on the old “Nature versus Nurture” theme. I can’t quite decide whether people pick a career path according to their predisposition for a particular kind of activity, or if it’s the work that brings out the necessary latent characteristics. Then again, maybe we’re all just part of a worldwide experiment that the alien lizard people from Robertson are conducting. It would go some way towards explaining this rat-in-a-maze feeling I get when I’m at the office.

+ Yes, I do use words like “pad”

++ No, that is not a euphemism

+++ Mrs Forgottenmachine was having an afternoon nap

Mmmm… donuts

I’ve always thought that when you are repeatedly exposed to something unpleasant, you become immune to it over time. At least, that was Rusputin’s strategy and it seemed to work – up to a point. Obviously, he needed a bit more practice with bullets, but the general principle was relatively sound.

However, in the case of all these sodding stakeholder meetings I’ve had to attend lately, it has the opposite effect. Sort of like radiation poisoning. Each subsequent exposure seems to accelerate the brain-into-cheese conversion process. Accelerated retardation. Now there’s a cool oxymoron, huh? Oxymoron… Ahahahahhahahahahaha. Ahem.

Although I still manage to remember to put on pants before I leave the flat, I have begun to exhibit several disturbing symptoms, such as mouth-breathing and drooling on my tie. This just in: it looks like I forgot to shave this morning.

Oh gods, I think I’m turning into Homer Simpson.

A shot in the light

First of all, I need to apologise for the previous entry. Public displays of introspection are invariably embarrassing. It does demonstrate one thing, though: audience participation can go a long way towards redeeming a shitty production.

Moving swiftly onwards – on Sunday I joined the happy+ throng++ at the second get-together of the Cape Town Flickr Meetup Group in Kalk Bay. There’s a convoluted story behind how I ended up there (when I had initially expected to be elsewhere), but I won’t bore you with the details. “Convoluted” doesn’t necessarily translate into “interesting”. I got to meet worthies such as Other-Duke, Betenoir and the venerable Coda. Okay, who wants to touch me?

Our group attracted many nervous glances from the passers-by, which is understandable. After all, random clusters of weird people milling around on street corners excitedly brandishing cameras is perhaps not an everyday occurrence… Hang on – what am I saying? This is Cape Town. Maybe we were just a little bit too scruffy and disreputable to pass as tourists? Before the authorities swooped in to arrest us on suspicion of being too scruffy and disreputable to be tourists, we scattered in various directions to boldly seek out new civilisations photo opportunities.

After reconvening at Cape to Cuba some time later for drinks and chilli poppers, topics of discussion ranged from photography+++ to new project ideas, including Stalkr and Vomitr. Good times.

+ Yes, yes, I suppose it’s possible that some of them were crying on the inside

++ about twelve people. I’m still not sure what the minimum entrance requirements are for official throngitude, but I live on the edge

+++ No, really – I swear!

…ay, there’s the rub;

The other day, a colleague approached me for advice on a “ahem – delicate” matter. He spent at least ten minutes behaving in a threatening manner towards a small shrub, before coming to the point. An unfortunate choice of words, perhaps, because it turns out that his eldest son is frequently bedevilled by nocturnal emissions+ and he’s been instructed by his wife to “sort it out”. A sticky situation, indeed.

I proposed that the obvious solution would be to buy his son a magazine with interesting articles and let him address the situation with a, shall we say, hands-on approach. Judging from the look of horror that contorted his features when I made the suggestion, it seems that he and my old man belong to the same school of thought on the subject of first-person-shooter games for boys.

When I was a lad, my father took me aside one afternoon to tell me about the birds and the bees++. Unfortunately, The Talk swiftly devolved into an extended rant on The Evils of Masturbation. According to him, it was crime so disgusting and heinous, it was roughly equivalent to smearing yourself with human excrement and going on a kitten-killing rampage. I will be forever grateful to my dear ol’ dad for turning what had previously been an innocent pleasure into a guilty one.

Now that takes some beating.

+ – or as Hamlet would have it, “wet dreams may come”

++ “Fascinating, Dad. Nature is wonderful, isn’t it? Now when are we gonna talk about fucking?”