Wasted youth

On the Champs Elysée, Paris October 2008.

Karin Schimke


Almost Teetotal


It starts off well enough.
Even,
I'd venture,
fun. A kind of warmth
softens my sinews,
I laugh more easily,
things muddy become clear,
conversation flows
doesn't cease
to flow, so that
things clear become muddy,
muscles become flaccid.
I discover then,
too late,
that a bit of control
is a good thing, but
continue to exercise
unedited stupidity:
Say pointless things
that confuse me;
dance on higher things
because the floor feels
suddenly limited;
turn up the volume
because turning it down
        - or just leaving it -


are not options;
skidding
slipping
tripping
falling
to the final resting place
on cool white tiles
with a view
to the underside of things,
from where I can propel the solid
pain that us my head upwards
only
by the sincere belief that
one
more
sour choking gagging effort
over the exhausted bowl might
       this time -


bring release from the
persistent
myth
that getting pissed
is fun.


So,
If it's all the same to you,
I'd rather not.


In Difficult to explain


The first remembrance of alcohol is when I was in Grade 8. My sister's class had to host the Matric ( that's 12th Grade, last year at school here) Ball and my mom was there as well to help. A big bunch of my friends ( all girls, please) had a sleepover at my house and some of them had stolen a bottle of altar wine from church. I can't remember how exactly, since I was not there. We proceeded to drink the wine but WHAMBAM my mom returned home to bust us with glasses of wine in our hands. I must admit, we did not think the whole drinking thing through properly. Should have thought about when she would get home.. Or at least we should have drunk ( drank?) in my room and not in the kitchen, since it is the first room one walks into when entering our house.

My mother proceeded to give us a lengthy speech and then as punishment I was not allowed my cellphone ( Nokia 3310 bitches) or access to the TV for a month. It is the only punishment I can remember ever having gotten. I can't even remember being hit one time.

So after this first flirtation we once got hold of a small bottle of Amarula and drank that between the four of us, but that's about it.

Grade 10 is when alcohol begins playing a role in my social excursions. I would borrow my sister's driver's licence or Id or student card and go out with her or with friends who were either of age or had their sibling's IDs or had fake student cards. It was all very illegal.

It is not like the group of us got wasted very weekend or like we were completely irresponsible, but I look back now ( as if it has been that long) and would never act as carelessly. We would go out and then walk back to a friends house, which in SA is not the best idea as girls, alone, in the dead of night. Sometimes her brother would walk with us with his baseball bat, or we would just ask strangers for lifts. Now I could never do the same thing.

Now I think: "Ah, driving tonight. Where did you park the car? Will someone be able to hijack you from there and stuff you in the trunk? Is someone driving with you? Oh, this is your second Hunter's Dry, better order some water next. "

It is not like I don't want to drink any more at all, it is just that my sense of responsibility outweighs my desire to drink too much. Perhaps we drink to forget, we drink to have more courage, we drink to be more sociable, we drink to be more likeable, we drink because we don't want to be in our right mind. And  by drink I don't mean the occasional glass of wine or a beer here and there. I mean getting wasted, losing your house-keys, waking up in strange places, having no money left in your wallet, and a general "feeling-like-shit" the next day.

Ultimately, I am glad to have wasted my weekends when we were still at school, to have gotten drunk in relatively safe environments and to never have done too stupid things. Many people who get to university and taste individual freedom for the first time get lost in the partying and drinking of the first year and fail academically. I am only 23 and already feel too old to be doing that.

A few weeks ago the debate here was if the legal drinking age should be pushed up to 21. I don't know. Will it change anything? By the time one is 21, you are in your last year at university. Hmm. How many people would just continue drinking illegally? How has it affected countries like the US? Apparently two-thirds of South Africans support a drinking age of 21.

If a higher age lessens the amount of alcohol-related accidents and deaths, I say do it. But if there is no significant difference, I think parents should rather focus on instilling in their children moral values where each is responsible for the self. As a society we cannot still have some sort of following for people like Jub-Jub who kill children by drunkenly drag-racing through the streets in the morning. It is all very strange: a man is found guilty of assault for almost spilling whiskey on President Zuma, but more serious accusations like rape or murder somehow fall though the cracks. I don't understand it.



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Giving

My friend needed some extras in a silent/black-and-white short-film she is doing, so I spent the day at Church Square drinking Oom Paul's coffee and talking to interesting people. There is nothing like a discussion on the merits of pornography and its audience as background noise to a silent film... However, while walking the 20 metres from Capital Theatre to the Café, my friend's cellphone was stolen.

I don't think people who do not live in a society riddled with crime will understand this, but when we go out, we keep our handbags in the boot of the car, we lock everything ten times, we are hyper-alert at traffic lights and we have all been robbed. Or at least we all know someone. And it pisses me off. There are so many anti-crime associations and organizations aimed at helping whomever needs it. One would think that every person would want to do honourable work, would want to contribute meaningfully to their community. And yet, we have become nonchalant about crime, it is just part of our lives, like corn flakes for breakfast or the Gautrain not coming to Pretoria yet even though they advertise it on TV.

On my way home from the shoot, the radio-presenter was recounting how the day before, he was out with his girlfriend when a car with two respectable-looking young women stopped next to them and the driver asked if she could quickly borrow one of their cellphones because both their batteries were flat and they needed to reach someone. So the guy's girlfriend lent the girl her phone, and while she was still typing an sms, they sped off in the car with the phone.

Unbelievable, isn't it?!

One tries to be helpful, but the accumulation of bad stories really does make one mistrust everyone. I don't stop to help someone with car trouble out of fear that it might be a ruse to kidnap me. I don't give people rides if I don't know them, again out of fear. I think there exists a contradiction in the communal South African character: one the one hand, we are an incredibly friendly and open people, but on the other hand this aspect is reserved for foreigners and we are excessively mistrusting of our fellow citizens. Now don't go saying it is a racist thing, and that this mistrust is based on our history of racial segregation. It is not a case of "us" and "them" in terms of race, but in terms of class. The rich do not trust the poor, but I assume this is a universal phenomenon. Perhaps here the discrepancy between rich and poor is just too huge a chasm and that if one lives in poverty, one does not know how to get out of it.

I also don't know. I mean, my cellphone and money was stolen out of my handbag at a house party with only 20 guests. My sister was burgled in front of our door. Last year October four men broke two gates and a wooden door in a matter of seconds in order to get into our house. Constantly someone is being robbed of some possession.

I can understand if one steals out of a true need, say, for want of food or water or shelter. But it seems to me that crime in South Africa has become increasingly violent for the most meaningless things: people being killed for a cellphone, young schoolgirls raped on their way back from school, someone being smash-and-grabbed while stuck in a traffic jam. It is all just so stupid, and I don't know really what one can do. How can we react?

Already, most people in the big cities live in gated communities, neighbourhoods organize neighbourhood patrols and most citizens want to work with the police. But there is also a sense of helplessness, as the police force appears to be the most corrupt of all and they never solve a case. There is the idea that if no one died, it wasn't serious.

I think we as a country need to change drastically: we need to focus extensively on the education and integration of the lowest classes, re-teaching a value system and moral code that underlies every respectable society. There needs to exist a communal sense of what is wrong and right, and in everyone's mind the desire to do good must outweigh the desire for objects and status by any means possible. Also, the government needs to commit to a complete eradication of corruption.

Naturally this is an ideal that will take generations to achieve. But I believe that we need to instil in our generation this sense of morality that somehow has been lost after the atrocities of previous ages. There are two options for each individual: choose to see humanity as too flawed to do good, or choose to see humanity as having an essentially optimistic and embracing character. After all, each community reflects the collective choices of individuals, and at the moment it seems that South Africans are choosing indifference to their environment as opposed to wanting to change it for the better.


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