by Das Messer
My older brother and I had a very strange relationship. We’d grown up in different homes, and the fact that mine was primarily founded on stiff-upper-lip principles seemed to account for our vastly different approaches to life. Perhaps I mistakenly attribute our initial chasm of temperaments to this, but it in retrospect it really does seem to me that he was the first who taught me to laugh. I was always very sentimental and severe in my thirst for truth; while he sought passion and wild abandon in every waking moment, probably leading to his eventual (and failed) rehabilitation. We did have some things in common at first: we both rollicked in love, wrestled with personal strength, worked hard for emotional independence, and clawed ferociously at/through life; but all through very different channels and on completely different terms.
When he went to rehab we’d write long letters to each other every week: I’d lament my frustrated attempts at figuring out the meaning of life while he’d recount tales of making potato beer in toilets, and the other frivolous antics of pubescent boys biding their time at the infamously militant rehabilitation center in the middle of the Karoo desert.
Dead set on saving his soul, I decided that he needed an amulet from his 14 year old sister to remind him to keep fighting. When he was released from rehab I handed him his gift, together with my ever cherished, earnestly inscribed copy of The Prophet and a desperate plea of love in my eyes. He returned the gesture by cooking dinner, spiking it with prime chronic, quietly giggling in anticipation of the impending fallout.
We’d gone out clubbing a few weekends later out in the white-trashiest corner of Jo’Burg, and after three shots of tequila he spewed projectile vomit across the bar onto some roid-monkey and his vapid girlfriend. I swiftly hopped between them in with the hopes of appealing with calm and serious reason to whatever rational sensibilities the Plank might have had, while my brother seized in fits of hysterical laughter behind me.
Our religious affiliations never really overlapped, by the time he was a reborn Christian I’d given up on faith altogether. This didn’t stop me from respecting the family’s evangelical inclinations, but he had no shame in donning a trucker cap which read ‘Jesus is my homeboy’ to Easter lunch at our grandfathers’ house. They gasped, he chuckled, I slunk away.
A few months down the line I found myself reeling from some or other crisis, and in my exhaustion I wanted to watch a film that would soothe my frazzled Existenz. At the video store he knocked Waking Life clean out of my hand and with sparkling eyes held up the latest Beavis and Butthead video.
We both loved music, but argued endlessly about appropriate soundtracks for any given day. Almost always he’d want some god awful funky-house, while I almost always begged for something rich with grungy angst. We found very few compromises in this arena but most of them have stuck with me: Anti-Flag, Nirvana (very few agreements there), Outkast, Meat Puppets, Wu-Tang, Violent Femmes, Ween, Butthole Surfers and Max Normal TV. Through this, I eventually figured out what he’d been trying to tell me all along: Not to take myself so seriously and to appreciate that moments of joy and love and pleasure are meant to be appreciated just for what they are sometimes.
For years after he died I’d relish in delicious misery through nostalgic music trips, spending nights on end attempting to locate meaning and answers in the limited music we shared, drunkenly scouring Youtube for the perfect tribute song for his birthday or the anniversary of his death.
Of course, life for the rest of us does continue. We live on, relentlessly gagging on tensions of tragicomedy. I haven’t changed much, I still coil in the face of existential confusion, but from time to time I’m reminded of his point: there seems to be a gold-mine of reprieve buried under the immediate surface of levity, and that that is pertinent – if not essential – to creating meaning. Occasionally I remember to lance swelling wounds of over-thought, relieve the urgency of analysis, drop my desperation for sincerity; and just indulge in decadent trifles of laughter and simple joy where they can be found.
He’d have probably ridiculed me for using such highfalutin vernacular to say all of that, and he might have argued about the irony of it – but fuck it, what’s he gonna do about it now?
