The Need for Speed.

16.

27/03/2009

Pigorilla Power!

I’d like to say thank you to all my fellow Pigorillians that have sent me warm greetings and gratitude for my daily update and also encouragement that they think they have finally seen something that I can do half decently. Many think I should consider writing a book. More often than not, those that have been part of the journey which include horrific accidents, death, debauchery, excess, hedonism, gunfire, love, wild sex in public places, police and a genuine effort to excel with absolutely no direction in which to head, think I should consider a book about my life. Indeed, it appears to have all the markings of a great novel. It should make a good story and while it’s not a story that is planning on culminating in anything particular, it would be barely believable and largely considered to be fictitious, but for me it would just be “A life”. Before you all rush out to the book shops to see if it’s there, give me a few moments to get my head around the brevity necessary to portray everything concisely and to get into context the gravity of a lot of the situations portraying the tragedy and my compassion for the friends and people that have become casualties of life along the way. In any event....it is good to know that I am not just a blithering idiot....muttering into cyberspace, waiting for the delivery of my new rocket ship to get me out  when all I have to look forward to is the men in white coats coming to slip on my custom designed straitjacket.

I’d like to deliver a beaming blessing of wonderful wishes to my very good and one of my oldest friends, Nicholas Slack. Not only does he have half his stomach ripped out by surgery to fight pancreatic cancer, but then it spreads to his lungs and yet he still goes to run in the 100m race at father’s day at his sons school and comes second! “What the.....Goony Goo Goo!” to steal one of Slacks terms plagiarised from Eddy Murphy describing a couple of “Flat Feet”. Slack...it’s not the longest race I’ve seen so far....but boy, you can sure run it, my friend. You have my eternal love and constant thoughts and act as a magnificent balance for me when I am strong enough to fight for the need to work out the point of it all. One of my hardest things to cope with here is that I am not there to see you. I miss our chats around the open fire at the farm and the racing across the Hartebeesport dam wall. Super-Bike against Super-Car is never normally a race in a straight line from stationary, but you took it like a good sport and consistently kept changing your cars to shave more time off the clock, while always accepting defeat with a smile. It took a lot of fun to get me over the feelings that dam instilled in me every time I saw it....not to mention the memories, like strobe lights flashing in my head....blood, bone, flapping skin, screams, tears, ambulance lights, severed lungs, propellers.....they’re all still there....just not so vivid. Thanks for that!

 As for the other fathers in the race, assuming, of course, that there were more than two to start with......don’t worry.......natural selection will take care of them. If ever we’ve got a Sabre-Toothed Tiger after us, we’re gonna need as many dads like them as we can find.

It is a brilliant day outside as I monitor the calm sea swishing past my port-hole at twenty knots. The intensity of my splitting head-ache has not allowed me to venture outside, nor for that matter, eat, but I have managed a glass of lime juice and with my classes finished and only an hour of paperwork to get through, I am going to continue to lie on my bed, read my brilliant Roman escapism novel, The Gods of War, and perhaps have a little rest..........