Things I thought I'd never do

When I was in primary school my mother would often take me and my older brother to the oriental plaza for the afternoon. In exchange for granting her the personal freedom of curtain shopping, we would be rewarded with some unidentified meat samoosas and an ice cream from Suzie the soft serve queen. It turned out Suzie also peddled LSD from her little ice cream van, but back then it was the ice cream I was interested in. Anyway, it was on one of those days I found myself standing in the main plaza under those huge coloured paper lamps, waiting for my turn to play Elevator Action, quite possibly the greatest arcade game of 84. I was hoping I wouldn't get a high score so I wouldn't have to type my initials (AWB) in, in front of all the black kids.

So while I'm dealing with this racial dilemma, my gaze wanders, then settles, quite horrifically, on the AC/DC 'Back in Black' poster outside the Heavy Metal/Curry n Rice shop. And I'm looking at Angus Young, horns protruding from his satanic cranium and eyes sunk deep as hell in his unholy head, and I'm thinking, 'Well theres something I'll never do..'And I wasn't thinking I was going to superglue some klipspringer antlers on my head or anything, I was just thinking I'd Never Ever Ever get within earshot of such wicked, and obviously dangerous music.

And like many other Things I thought I'd never do, I was proven wrong by Lee Darby my best mate in standard six. Lee moved to Boksburg in standard seven and smoked alot of pot, I used to visit him and it was fun, but my mum said it was too far to drive after a while. Also alot of his new friends scared me. They must have scared other people too because a few of them landed up in an asylum. This was quite consoling as I realised that listening to AC/DC wasn't bad or satanic. Boksburg was. AC/DC just liked scaring kids and kids love to be scared.

Now this is a blog, so I think I'm supposed to tie this into something alot more current in my life? Okay, so come last friday night I'm loving life, hanging with my best mates, one of whom has been away for a whole long time. We're at Cantaloop winning the rowdiest table contest by many a long island tea, and then we're in the car wailing along to Astrid's cd collection, and then.. uhh.. Then its saturday morning and I'm having flashbacks to highschool Guidance class, and Mr Epstein is putting the risks of alcohol abuse into perspective. He's saying if you start blacking out cos you just drank too much booze, then you're in big kak, and I'm sitting there thinking 'Ha! Thats one thing I'd never do!'

Epilogue:
There will always be Things I thought I'd never do, that I actually never will, (never be Liz Hurley's excercise bike seat for example..), but for the rest of my ill-fated assumptions I can only claim naivety and temporary humanity.
For it is better to be just a little human, than it is to live in Boksburg.
Fin.