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Nothing. Boredom. It’s a studied thing.
And it gets intense as summer and the festive season approaches, signalling the end of year.
We were mostly outraged at the spectacle on Friday at 4pm when as many as 33 Jeeps tore up Glen Eden beach, even parking in a row while the next yahoo took the stage and tore up the beach or took a dive racing the shallows, spray sheeting the sky.
It looked like a statement of rich-people hedonism and salacious law breaking — but there was something else at play.
One of the environmentalist friends put their finger on it: imagine the incredible footage these bad asses were getting online. It was like a garish, screw-the-environment moment of homage to Insta popularity.
Drinks raised to toast the yolky sun streaming down Bulura river, the beach a bizarre tattoo of circles in the shredded sand.
We don’t know how much wildlife habitat was wrecked and how many critters were crushed, or sent fleeing in terror, but we do know that residents shrank back from the eruption of the holiday-at-any-cost nihilism.
Comeuppance was on the way though, and the community rose up like a swarm of African bees kicked in the chops by a top-brand outdoor-designer boot and took to social media.
The state also gathered in serried ranks, met, discussed the law and raided those rich ous and women from Gauteng at their private lodge nearby.
The favourite snippet was the public relations person for the Jeep drivers who tried to claim that they had a permit to be on the beach, only to be told bluntly by the environmental official who deals with permits that there was no such thing.
There were video shots of the colourful cavalcade apparently under escort en route to being formally charged and that added more sous to the story.
The reporter who filed for the Dispatch online, whose Insta posting rate is about 10 posts in as many years, was suddenly being “followed” by some Jeep club close to all the bad-ass action.
The point about it all is that this was how the Jeepers Creepers mense were finding meaning in life — grunty, fashionable 4x4s, fast driving, revving, flickering lights, dops, trendy beats, lots of larfs and leaping up and down for selfies, and, of course, they ****** up the beach as if to say, I love you, I destroy you.
Very weird but not pinned only on this crew. There is a dark side to the SA psyche which plays to this sort of wild, exuberant, destructive mayhem, where meaningless is celebrated as meaning.
All of this flashy, noisy, posturing on the hunt for a good time — boorism not tourism — was in radical contrast to my experience earlier that Saturday where MC and I sat up in Shelly’s looking at a truly awful ocean glittering under the pump of a beasterly easterly, the Gonubie grassy walkways devoid of people but for a hardy angler or two.
It was utterly bleak, and totally enjoyable.
Earlier, we had walked up Gonubie estuary to Pops Cabin, four of us, entered the river ever so slowly and swam away, into the wild, up against a strong outflowing current. The wind was mostly off the river, though it was still corrugated.
I occasionally floated on my back, hoping to spot the fish or crowned eagles that soar on the micro thermals.
There were whimbrels and Egyptian geese, and so much waving foliage. We drifted past across Wayne and Heath parked off under a little tree on an acrylic grassy green bank, absolute bumpkins of nature.
It was not easy going; it was cold and deep, where bull sharks roam, and we had to keep moving to keep our heart rate up to prevent chest bones from chilling.
We are philosophically exposed. There was nothing else but our souls naked in the cosmos, so tiny I am never quite sure we actually exist. It’s a crazy space. You hate it, you relish it.
It was that thing of nothingness, boredom, known technically as brain default mode.
Later, as MC and I enjoyed coffee and toasties up in Wuthering Heights, top floor of Shelly’s, the feeling of nothingness returned.
Turns out there is actually a space in your brain for these feelings of conflicted nihilism — there is no meaning or reason to exist, but why the hell does it feel so exquisite?
It’s the same when you walk away from a Bok Test where we fall apart feeling drained, absolutely empty. Is this such a bad thing?
In the rhythm of life and the quest for meaning, I turn to my witches on Insta.
Yes, I have found incredible insights on this Tech Bro platform, and though I know it spies on every aspect of my comparative roach life, I am prepared to take the risk. It’s because the information and learning available is quite astounding.
OK, let’s pull it back a notch. Everything online needs to be fact checked, and that’s why I have a very long-suffering editor.
Among my Wiccans — wise women healers smeared as evil, manipulative witches by men in power who feel threatened by the truth — there is a wonderful maths boffin and popular scientist, Prof Hannah Fry.
She explains, with a real naughty smile, how scientists dived in to study “rawdogging” — where people put themselves in situations without comforts or aides — for example taking a seven-hour flight with no headphones, movies, even no water (which sounds silly), but the point was they had nothing but the power of their mind to keep them entertained.
Science calls this state “default mode processing” which is what your brain does when nothing is going on, you have no distractions at all.
In nine studies where people were left alone in a room with four walls, a ceiling and their own thoughts for 15 minutes, many spoke of how they did not like it at all.
The 10th study took it further and put individuals in a room with a red button which, when pressed, would deliver an unpleasant but not injurious electric shock. Only 25% of the women chose to push it, but 67% of the men opted to hit it rather than sit with the silence of their minds.
Not sure about the electric shocks, but we definitely need to exercise our default brains or humanity will be trumped by inanity. The default mode also creates conditions for changing lives; we are forced to find creative solutions, with whatever we have at hand.
It’s primal but also a sublime nod to the power of our brains.
Bob Dylan’s character in Martin Scorsese’s Rolling Thunder Revue film states: “Life isn’t about finding yourself or finding anything. Life is about creating yourself and creating things.”
In a coming-of-age film shown for free by the Japanese Flim Festival Africa, a teen involved in the underground student press, which exposes corruption in the headmaster’s office, says “Katsumi Maejima” — a paraphrase of global Japanese literary giant Haruki Murakami — meaning: “What drives me is not the desire to be in the spotlight, but my curiosity to know everything about the world.”
Nou, ja, what a weekend of Bok amazingness. I am celebrating the arrival of Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu on the world rugby stage and getting ready to fall to my knees to deep-clean my humble abode ahead of the arrival of the grand, gorgeous galz.
I am full of meaning!
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