A tragic comedy

Perhaps it is as Charlie Chaplin said that life is a tragedy in close up, but a comedy in long shot. Here I lie weeping because a man I truly loved has lied, betrayed and left me. I run out of toilet paper. I get an electricity  bill from the Greater Tzaneen Municipality for R 1 546 426.80.  Then there is a power failure. 

Edison, Edison give me the medicine.

I head for the local bottle store. It’s the fulcrum of the village in which I live, it's a daily news source, informal bush telegraph and modern confessional booth all rolled into one. Obviously very little is secret. Not for us hushed voices and delicate sips of communion wine, this is Jagermeister bomb country, plus brandy and coke; tequila, shooters if you must.  

The bottle store can tell by the nature of my purchases not only that I am having one moerse pity party but which friends I am rallying to my side. She likes a Springfield, she only drinks a Cab Sauv; he prefers that brand of Scotch. Don’t even think about dooswyn for that one! 

In exchange for baring my soul-pain and vulnerability, I get to hear all the local news and cross paths with couleur locale. On Monday, I heard about a young man who died after being beaten up at our local pub a few weeks ago. By cage fighters from Polokwane whose fathers are apparently lawyers and make dockets and hospital files disappear. On Tuesday I chatted to a local Alzheimer’s resident about her former love of breeding Beagles. On Wednesday I heard that a rich old man who was recently robbed and beaten by a gang, is recovering well. Yesterday I heard that the local schizophrenic, a beautiful woman of 47, blew her brains out with a gun. Today I got the number for a guy who delivers firewood at good prices.

You can read two things into this. Either I am visiting the bottle store too much as I dance on the hell-coals of heartbreak. Or that the country is caught in a bad magic and we are all going crazy from apartheid’s sequelae - the aftereffect of the disease, or we're going crazy at the sheer disbelief that things have gotten so Zumalarly fucked up. Or maybe it's just cold and wintry and as the country loadsheds and dims its lights, we all stare down our own darkness. Perhaps it is as Robert Ardrey said: It is not in our powers but in our paradox that we should search for the essence of man.