guns, arms and heartache...

This morning I realised this blogs gone a wondering...it's supposed to be a about places and instead its about head spaces. On my coffee table here in Slaap Stad, I didn't have one in Joburg, lies a copy of the Design Indaba Mag. In it are 10 pages of Jozi worship. I loved it. I nearly cried. Perhaps I will share some with you.

At the same time I'm loving Sleep Town. It's the combined spinning of new work and new places that make it a little hard to settle but that's what I came here looking for. A space for thoughts and perspective, and those are here in spades too.

For my head there's the realization that even as the city and orgs like mine scramble to make things better we're losing the battle, nothing new. Only now I'm starting to get my head back around the bigger picture...

Here's a quote that's fitting: (It's from a paper by a CT resident about theories of change from a cool as hell community development resource centre)

“My eyes already touch the sunny hill,
going far ahead of the road I have begun.
So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;
it has its inner light, even from a distance.

and changes us, even if we do not reach it,
into something else, which, hardly sensing it,
we already are;
a gesture waves us on, answering our own wave...
but what we feel is the wind in our faces.”
Rainer Maria Rilke

Dude.

There's heartache but its of the longing that I like. The kind that tugs you forward. Before I puke there's been development of another kind.
My.Fat.Ass.

I've been lugging it to the rough gym in our office block. Yesterday's 90 minute storm looked like this:

1. Wedged into the little change room between Wesley Snipes, senior and junior, I lace up. Looking hard.

2. I punish the cross trainer thing its setting on stupid high for twenty minutes sweating like Sly in the forest while trying to casually watch Super Sport three. Sports fishing in Limpopo some place. Three huge over weight men, one skinny presenter/poplap and a dam of terrified fish. Not entertaining.

3. Crawl across to the treadmill. Casually key in my weight. 90. The
program. Random Pain. The speed. Blade Runner. And hit it for 20
minutes. The first 10 minutes of incline shifting and mat pounding flew
by cause I was trying to outrun the girl next to me. Turns out she was
a guy.

4. Free weights. There's me in my Rwandan soccer shirt nestled between the four biggest francophone Africans on the PLANET. I powered, strained, swore through exercises with dumbbells that made them chuckle while they threw around weights heavier than me. See 3. Messy.

2 more months of this and I'll be Jean Claude Van Stupid. But younger. And lank more witty and intellectual like...