When are you finally grown up? When you learn to drive, lose your virginity or sell your soul to ABSA bank for a faux Tuscan style terrazzo luxury loft apartment (bachelor flat) in Roodepoort? Maybe it's that moment when you realise that you're probably okay and it's the guy with the set of golf clubs who's a dick.
And when are you first aware that you're on the downhill slope to Happy Autumn Retirement Villas and subsequent processing into a Soylent Green happy meal? I think it's when you wake up one afternoon with a hangover that would stun a buffalo and howl,
"Fuck this for a dog show! Even if staying sober means giving up all hope of a personality... Even if strangers never want to join me for a soiree in my faux Tuscan style terrazzo luxury loft apartment with added distressed stucco wall effects (rising damp)... Dis 'orrait! Nothing is worth feeling like this!"
That step of trading in the foolishly pleasurable for the fatalistically sensible is the first step you take in Green Cross shoes.
The next time I went shopping I paused uncomfortably, halfway through the door of the bottle shop, wavered slightly as my liver and libido tried to go separate ways, and eventually decided to buy groceries instead. I quickly discovered that I'd made the wrong choice. Whereas booze and drugs are available in easily identifiable food groups, (malt, barley, hops, grapes, hemp, coca), everything in Pick 'n Pay just lies around looking all raw and mysterious. A simple set of instructions telling you how to cook this bewildering variety of veggies is unavailable, but hovering nearby is a sales-bastard who'll sell you a five grand microwave oven that'll do it automatically. It's the opposite of the old "Teach a man to fish..." proverb. These days, "Make a man dependent on nuked broccoli one day and you can sell him expensive shit for life."
The next few years of my life could be called my "toasted cheese and tomato" period. It ended abruptly when meeting my wife initiated my "get your shit together, because she likes you, but she could do better" period.
These days we eat better, because Jule is generally the more health conscious, except maybe for her lapse in reading the warning label on me. She keeps us both minimally irradiated and only fractionally hormonally force-fed by reading all the right books on nutrition. I get to track and trap the organic, reduced fat yoghurt. I walk into the health food shop and immediately the assistant approaches. His hairstyle that's Hugh Grant circa Four Weddings fights a rearguard action against Yul Brynner circa... every movie I ever saw him in:
"Namaste. Can I help you?"
"I'm looking for organic, reduced fat yoghurt."
"I don't eat dairy."
I don't smack people in the face with a punnet of bean curd, but in his case, I dearly want to make an exception...
(To be continued next week... No, really!)
What a cliff-hanger ending! Surely you're not going to leave us there, Al?
Sorry, okes. I have to go to a year-end corporate function... clean jokes, regurgitated prawn in breadcrumbs and excellent Chateau Throwyournameaway. Yum!
More adventures in health-food land if I survive this.
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