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It’s been a long December. So many moments I’ve stored, so many things I want to remember.  I don’t know what promise the year holds, but I strongly suspect that it is something of a blank canvass, waiting for us to paint it with anything we choose.

I expect that life will continue to present us with the opportunity to be happy, to be wealthy, to be free.  We are the instruments of our own fate.  We can either walk in the shadow of ourselves, or we can step into the light and experience the things that we have chosen to dream about.

Bob Kaufman wrote about it all already.  I am borrowing his words for this year, as an affirmation:

Remember, you naked agent of every nothing.

Forget to not

Remember, poet, while gallivanting across the sky,
Skylarking, shouting, calling names … Walk softly.

Your footprint on rain clouds is visible to naked eyes,
Lamps barnacled to your feet refract the mirrored air.

Exotic scents of your hidden vision fly in the face of time.

Remember not to forget the dying colors of yesterday
As you inhale tomorrow’s hot dream, blown from frozen lips.

Remember, you naked agent of every nothing.

- Bob Kaufman

And so, my naked agents of every nothing, this year, may your lives be everything you want them to be.

According to the Blue Pyramid, if I was a book I’d be Anarchy, State, and Utopia by Robert Nozick. Apparently if it was up to me, there would be no government at all.

My results say: "If it was up to you, there would probably be no government at all. But then you’d have to deal with there being no government, and nobody likes that. So you’ve decided that hiring a few security guards is okay. Getting rid of that nasty tax collector would sure be nice, though. He keeps getting in the way of you making the money you so richly deserve! Everyone who believes in you happens to be fairly well off."

You too can take this brief, pointless Book Quiz at the Blue Pyramid. Quite entertaining for people like me who find crap interesting.

I never spent very much time with her. I know that her birthday is around about now because I celebrated one with her a few years ago. I had travelled to the US for Thanksgiving. The leaves had almost left the trees and the sky was a sort of steel colour that day. It was 2003, and at that time my life felt alive with possibilities. I suspect that hers did too.

The next time I saw her, it was during another visit to the US in 2006. She had been diagnosed with cancer. When I left to return to South Africa, the expression on her face told me that it was our last goodbye. She died on a Friday two years later. Last Friday, actually.

This is for her:

I still can see you, glass in hand,
holding a bottle of Johannesberger.
Happy gambler, taking risks, sky
and moon within your grasp.
The turning of those Iowa windmills
secured to pages of smiling faces,
and cruise ships in your book of life.
Brave your eyes against the sharp
knife of cancer’s steely cunning
that stole your light so spitefully.
Long, the road you travelled,
stoic soldier hoping for peace.
And now you cast no shadow,
your gentle sun shines somewhere,
too far from here.

- for Sandy

Inside Candy is blog of the month at Jennifer Trinkle’s website, Writing to Survive. 

Thank you Jennifer.  You’re wonderful.  Seriously.

The results of the 24.com Speak Up! census of the South African blogosphere are now available. About 1,000 South African bloggers participated in the survey. To my surprise, mine was one of 6 blogs profiled by 24.com. You can read my interview on 24.com. If anything, it’s evidence that I write more fluently than I speak! My thanks to 24.com, Afrigator and Amatomu for the recognition.

"Join us on this day. Don’t wait to be asked. Talk to your family, workplace, school or organisation about [HIV / Aids and] what you are going to do. Spread the word to act now!" - SANAC

Today is World Aids Day. Two decades after the first World Aids Day was held in 1988, the virus continues to kill about 1,000 people every day in South Africa. According to the World Health Organisation about 5.7 million people in South Africa are HIV-positive; and an estimated 350,000 South Africans died of Aids related illnesses in 2007.

According to UNAIDS estimates, around the world there are 34.3 million people living with HIV, including 2.5 million children. During 2007 some 2.5 million people became newly infected with the virus. Around half of all people who become infected with HIV do so before they are 25 years old and are killed by Aids before they reach the age of 35.

With most of those infected being in developing countries like South Africa, a concerted effort to educate people about how to protect themselves from contracting the disease will assist with the containment of it.  But HIV / Aids is everyone’s problem, and South Africans not infected with the disease are most certainly affected by it.  Ignoring the facts will not make them disappear.  What is required is awareness and a unified commitment to action by government, the private sector and individuals.

In an effort to raise awareness about the gravity of the situation, the South African National Aids Council (SANAC) has called on the South African nation to stop everything for 15 minutes today at 12h00.

Church bells across the country will ring for a minute’s silence at noon. This will be followed by a television broadcast of a national address by the Deputy President and head of SANAC Baleka Mbete, the Minister of Health Ms Barbara Hogan, the Executive Director of the United Nations on AIDS Dr Peter Piot, and a well known person living with HIV. The speeches will be broadcast live from Durban’s Sahara stadium.

Leaders in government, business, unions and churches are calling on South Africans to watch the broadcast on SABC2, or to take part in any of the series of national events which will signify the launch a new united campaign to prevent new HIV infections and curb the staggering number of deaths linked to HIV and Aids.

These events, all around midday today (1 December 2008), will include:

• Church bells ringing at all Anglican and other churches throughout the country, and a call for special services
• A special sermon at all mosques and a special message to all Muslim schools and businesses
• A 15 minute break at all Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration (CCMA) hearings nationwide
• A minute’s silence in all banks through the Banking Association of South Africa
• 15 to 30 minute discussions at most workplaces, and
• Radio stations will observe 1 minute of silence. Radio DJs will test for HIV live on air, and discuss HIV / Aids.

Nationwide messages will include:

• A message from former president Nelson Mandela through his organisation 46664
• An endorsement from Prince Mangosuthu Buthelezi
• Phone service MXit will send a message to its 5 million (mainly) teenage users
• A circular from Business Unity South Africa (BUSA) to all member organisations calling them to action, and
• COSATU will distribute two million pamphlets calling on members to go for voluntary counselling and testing for HIV / Aids and advising on how to prevent mother to child transmission of HIV.

Others World Aids Day events include:

• South Africa’s national cricket team, the Proteas, will wear red ribbons in the test match with Bangladesh
• A visit from the United Kingdom development Minister, Ivan Lewis
• A statement from United Nations High Commissioner, Judge Navi Pillay
• A week long community mobilisation by SANAC in three districts in KwaZulu-Natal, and
• The Department of Health’s media arm, Khomanani, is distributing media to 29 million people, supported by SANAC and the National Economic Development and Labour Advisory Council (Nedlac).

Free testing facilities are set-up around the country. 

If you need help, please contact the South African HIV / Aids Helpline.

Sources: Government Communication (GCIS); SAPA; UNAIDS; and the World Health Organisation.

There is no trinket box large enough
to house conflicted memories.
It could be months before smiles surface,
until happiness is invited to dine.
You tolerate worms in me
as if they inhabit skin.
They will never die
while you feed their memory.

Like fractured bones, conversation
is splintered in its cast.
Your disappointment is enamel-
coated with instruction: drive safely.
Wood between us calcifies
while my regret is bubble-wrapped,
packed in boxes with Christmas cards
and notes left on Thursday’s pillow.

Forgiveness is the Cabernet
we keep in a cellar we don’t own.
Silence settles into flesh
like stinging nettles on a thigh.
Soup, a weary substitute for wasted
days that could be warmed by touch.
Instead we fill our bellies with meals
that smell like home, and seal emotion
inside cookie jars where it has come to this.

Emotion Jars first appeared in The Pedestal Magazine, issue seventeen: 2003