The Durban Dolls and Louis' Braai.

I like Afrikaans girls. I like it better when Afrikaans girls have birthday parties on the beach.

I went to a birthday party of an Afrikaans girl and yes-sir-ee indeed it was on the beach. This summer has by far been one of the best yet. My usual experience has been to come home from Cape Town and be so overwhelmed at sheer abnormality of having a television with DSTV that i sit in it's bluish glow for days on end in reaction to its prowess and my laziness. Make no mistake, i venture out of my house on weekends, but during the weeks i spend quality time with familiarizing myself with all the latest movies that DSTV have purchased the rights to. A sad existence that is indeed. It's not that i had any sort of visionary purpose this year, rather it appears that things have magnetically been falling into place, as things from time to time do. I have had the privilege of spending time up in Ballito, down in Umhlanga, across in Westville and nearly all the way up to Johannesburg. I have fraternized with Australians and Americans, have ridden my bicycle until i nearly fainted or vomited - it was hard to tell what my body was reacting to - and i have attained for myself a very literal red neck.

Summer, however was encapsulated in this one day on this one beach. I think my memory stacks are piled high with senses of what i saw and who i saw it with. Yesterday i saw some old friends and saw things that i have not seen in the longest time. It was Leandi's birthday and she decided to spend the day on a beach, two down from Thompson's Bay. This is only important to take note of when you and Louis are assigned to carry the cooler box stacked with liquids, that was designed by sadists. Basically there was no way, bar tele-porting the cooler box, that you could carry the blinking thing without crushing your knuckles against the royal blue sides of the royal pain in my neck. And my knuckles too. After circumventing (I'm almost positive that that word does not mean what i want it to mean there) two incredibly large molehills which Louis and I both feel we have the right to inaugurate into mountain status, we arrived at a fairly secluded spot on the North Coast map of all things beautiful. Every now and then a group of people would cross our little hole cut out of the mountain - but for the most part it was all ours. The rocks out front made this ridiculously cool tidal pool and the rocks out back gave us enough shade to shelter in after. I would say the day was perfect. I would love to carry on and describe the awesomeness of this day with all the adjectives that I can muster up but if a picture is worth a thousand words then indeed a touch is worth them all.




My logic of perfection however, I will take a moment to deliberate on. I have come to the belief that heaven can and will and is achievable on earth. Maybe it is also somewhere up in the sky, but its hard to imagine what else we could have described yesterday as being. My understanding of heaven however must always include people. Other people mostly. The whole ubuntu deal, you know - I am a person because of other people and if that is true then I ought to be doing my upmost in making the humanity of my brothers and sisters and indeed enemies as meaningful as possible.

But yesterday we did not go to the beach to help other people, I suppose in a sense we went to the beach to help ourselves which in turn I am not completely convinced is utterly evil. You see someone much cleverer than I, with a lot more insight than I into this subject pioneered and explored this subject of useless beauty. If I have understood the theory correctly, basically it surmises to say that there exists a ton (not literal) of beauty out there that might never be witnessed by any human eye or heart. The question then arises - well what is the point of all the useless beauty - because surely this multi-verse and the earth sustained within is functional. Everything that exists must have a purpose, or according to Charles and his friends, will face extinction at the hands or feelers of a fitter species. What is the point of all that ridiculous beauty out there just off to the side of Thompson's Bay? Sure it's not entirely wasted on the human heart or eye, but on a cosmic scale - it pales into insignificance. I am not out to suggest either, that God made that beach for that one day and for Leandi and her friends. I wouldn't be that presumptuous or arrogant, I am however out to suggest that I can't help but be in love with the Being that can and does create absurdly beautiful days that mark as specks on the timeline of history. I will gladly look past obvious wonder of what met my eyes yesterday and look full, with my heart to the sustainer and giver and yet in all it's complexity - the taker of life, and in the compoundment of that all - the renewer of life.

I think we got a little bit of heaven yesterday. But the great thing about that whole experience was not that we were by any means a perfect little community of people. I mean, the conversations had weren't incredibly profound or anything like that. In fact Between Louis, Zac and myself we couldn't even provide a Braai for the girls to cook their food on. But mostly it was Louis who couldn't keep the fire going. Even we, as sturdy and proud as we are, needed a little rescuing by the hand of Leandi's Dad.



Mr. Leandi's Dad, ons sal vir altyd, so baie gelukkig wees op daai wonderlikke smaaklikke boerewors rolletjies. Honger is nie die beste kok nie, U is.