If I am to take several missives I’ve come across this year at their word, I might as well swap these new year’s resolutions for toilet paper. Toss them to the trash or fire because, trust me, you don’t need them. It comes with the territory, these pundits wax lyrical, to feel invigorated and inspired – to think that you can do it all this year. You’ll take out the gym membership, run the marathon, get the girl, and finally afford that vacation to some tropical paradise, quaffing cocktails and dancing into the slow hours. But, they caution, hold your houses cowboy! This isn’t a movie and you’re definitely no Wolf of Wall Street. If you’re one of those wisecracks who believes that only facts tell the true story, the data should square you up. The first few days of the year (trends show) the gym will be teeming only for the numbers to dwindle as people gradually –and inevitably – gravitate back to old habits. So to spare yourself the sense of defeat and shame, best wrap it all up while you can still save face.
They had point, convincingly driven home with strong language and substantive anecdotes. For a moment, they won me over, especially when I started turning over my own new year’s resolutions in my head. Get back on the wagon. Do something I had never done this year, basically (to quote myself) to ‘move until you sweat, push until it aches and don’t stop until you die.’ In my beer-addled mind when I thought that up in mid-December, when everything was a stupor and there would be more where that came from at the end of the year, it sounded epic. In hindsight, those were the words of a drunken clown. A clown with a bag of excuses and too many dreams. What he needed was to climb down from cloud 9 and smell the coffee, as in pronto! Wake up in the morning, CV in hand and go knocking on every store, restaurant, every informal construction gig, everywhere, and go asking for a gig, any gig.
Isn’t that man’s virtuous calling? To honour an honest day’s work – no matter how modest – for the rest of his days? To keep knocking until a door is opened even just a crack? Such were the philosophies that were playing over on a loop in my mind and they were spot-on, but they were also a little off. The whole waiter thing I could probably do with my eyes closed. ‘How about a fine bottle of that Meerlust Cabernet-Sauvignon to wash down your steak, sir? 2020 vintage from one of the most enduring estates this side of the Equator.’ In my days as a kitchen hand such woeful exaggerations would always bag a sale, a pat on the back from the boss and a tip that made me happily accompany the patron out the door. Thankless work, long hours, but still not without a sense that you were out there doing something worth doing.
But working, let’s say, a till, might feel a little stifling to a man who is most productive when he’s moving around. Mixing concrete will require someone breathing over your shoulder for a while. Hauling the cement will no doubt offer a superb form of exercise but getting the mixture just right will take some getting used to. And I doubt the employer I had in mind, a diminutive Mozambican with the bursts of strength of a Bulgarian powerlifter and the bottomless energy levels of a badger, is in the business of hiring know-nothings. So there I was prepared to do it all but essentially right back where I’d started. And being back where you started is not entirely a bad place to be if you’ve gone right around to get there. And, yes, there were plenty of sleepless nights to complete the full slog. Even going as far back as my earliest memories would take me.
Like, in her day, my late grandmother was a knowledgeable well in the hustling game. If she could dream it, it seemed from there it was simply a matter of when. In the 80’s I remember kids from as far as eZantsi, Colesberg’s so-called Old Location trekking some 3km to get their hands on her ‘amandongomane’ – fried, salted peanuts that were a hit for a while. Sometimes they came for the Marie biscuits which she’d lather with flavoured icing sugar, or sweets, chips and this or that. The takings were never anything to buy you a car but there was not a day without paraffin for the heater or a snack for the cats in the Mayaba household.
It seems she took that entrepreneurial spirit to the grave as none of her kids or grandchildren ever thought to follow in the oulady’s example. Her daughter once tried a money-lending scheme but quit in disgust when she realised that you have to develop something of a threatening – and often vulgar – vocabulary when dealing with certain customers. She neither had the scowl nor the obscenities, so that endeavour ended before it’d even started. And, there is of course the more immediate – but often bypassed, especially in the township – impediment of registering as a financial service provider. The idea of running an Airbnb also crossed my mind but fell flat for reasons so pitiful I’d rather not get into.
By now I was starting to lose hope. It is said that one can never go wrong with a food gig because there’ll always be someone hungry somewhere. So whether you’re peddling basted chicken wings outside the local, or pushing vetkoeks and pilchards outside a school, or for that matter, baking cookies for the neighbourhood kids or the church mothers, they say, there’s hope for you yet. But until I’ve polished up on those culinary chops, best steer clear from the kitchen.
Then suddenly I remembered the words of one Janco Piek, our tech guy here at eParkeni and Toverview who once mentioned something I didn’t really take to heart. ‘The internet,’ he’d exclaimed, ‘that, my man, is that future we’ve always seen in movies now at our doorstep.’ My interest was hardly piqued more so because around tech, I’m as spectacular as an arsonist with no flint. Besides, I’m hardly the sort of guy with a thing for the spoken word. Buy me enough beer and see me weep about the woman who once snoozed through my amorous declarations over a home-cooked dinner. The oral presentation back at school that had the teacher pulling at her hair. The numerous times where I’d been interrupted mid-sentence because I was droning on, clearly with no point to make at a debating contest. (Don’t ask me how I made the team in the first place).
But with social media, whoever said that you needed the million views or the 100k following? Who said you had to be good at it? Or a household name in it? If there’s one thing that social media has done, it’s to open up the playing field to everyone. Unlike traditional mainstream, here, everybody – even the utterly hopeless – are allowed in. A cyber equal opportunity employer of sorts. Of course, there’ll always be disparities in as far as acquiring resources and capital are concerned but nobody said life was fair. Decent equipment is expensive and the world is full of poor people. A mediocre microphone will set you back a couple of grand and the telecommunications companies are clearly set on making the ridiculous data costs count for as long as they can milk the cow. But will that always be your cop-out?
Writing for these publications has brought me up-close with unemployed, but hopeful people, with plenty to say and way too much time on their hands. Most of them could mimic my example, drinking copious amounts of lager to numb the despondency. They could sit there feeling sorry for themselves, blaming the world and hating everything in it. Instead I see them everyday, stoic and tenacious, hanging in there and not asking for handouts. It was always disheartening to discover that those who appear to be still ‘in it’ most fervently are adults and the elderly. The youth don’t seem so upbeat about things. And more than anybody, they are exactly the ones this technology had in mind. The optimistic adherent to new year’s resolutions in me sees them, especially the ones from our alcohol-ridden enclaves quitting the binge league and signing up to the teetotaler ranks. Or maybe they just need a nudge from us, the old bones; to get on these platforms and show that sucking at something does not obfuscate that you were courageous enough to give it a go. I can see the YouTube channel now – a boring guy with a lisp and a limp making a dufus of himself in front of anybody stupid enough to view his content. But in my preemptive defence, I will counter that the Karoo is a big, vast monstrosity of beauty in all its facets and if nobody is dumb enough to let the world know of it, I don’t mind being amongst the first idiots.
Well, that was my new year’s resolution: To kick the bottle on January 5th. Not sure why that date only that it’s one I’ve been meditating on for reasons I’m not sure of myself. The pundits may well be correct about relapsing back to old habits but all I know for now is that the naked beams at my house are my gym and as soon as I’m able to decide on the sort of content I’d like to create, I hope you’ll be there to check it out. No matter how much it makes you cringe, it might just influence an entire generation down here in the boondocks who are yet to appreciate the opportunities lying waiting at their fingertips. For now, though, may you bear hug those new year’s resolutions and a happy 2025.