Life is just a bumper sticker

Ben Trovato had it against social media’s “words of wisdom” hardly a week ago. I took stock and decided: my life is just one big bumper sticker – and it’s not saying “smile and wave”, like my friend tells me every day – through gritted teeth.

My personal one is – I think now while I’m enjoying a red – stop the world I want to get off. That same friend so kindly reminded me that particular bumper sticker comes from Around the World in 80 Days. I couldn’t have been alive then.

I only find The Monkeys singing a silly ditty. But I really want to get off. I will buy into the South African psyche of smile at the braai, cry on the cold shoulder much later. Because I don’t know how people make it these days. I don’t. And before my psychiatrist friend floods me with a happy pill prescription and the Sadag helpline: I am not suicidal; just hopeless. Like most South Africans, I believe.

Unlike Isaac Mashaba saying trust, like everything in life, is not free, I want to ask: why not? I trust, implicitly. Is the price we pay too high? And, unlike Trovato, I see friends posting “clever” bumper stickers: they explain why whatever is too high. But I know, deep in my despairing self, intellect won’t fix a thing.

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Literacy, being illiterate; it’s all the same. It won’t help. We are a nation beyond redemption; a nation living quotes… So, unlike them, I just want to say – again – it is no mistake that man’s best friend can’t talk (wonderful bumper sticker, ain’t it?) Maybe it’s the noise. Too much; too loud. We sing, dance and clap to keep “our people” happy.

I won’t argue, people-pleaser that I am. It’s just a noise I’ve never heard before in my bumper-sticker life. This kind of life I really don’t want to have on society’s terms. Maybe we should, as a nation, just… watch rugby – and be divided in any case.

But here’s a secret: I do have a bumper sticker I never tell anyone about. And it sticks to me: Jesus is coming. Look busy… Sigh. Deep sigh. People are hard work. I want to spend my life with my cat.