Oh she know’s she doin’ baaaad. There is remorse and regret seeping down that lovely face. She’s addicted to the noxious weed Tabaccy, and she’s sippin’ herself through life and strife and sunshine. And her poor innocent babe… In a sac of tarswill and rotgut.

An Observatory mom informed Mr Blobz recently amidst a guff of smoke that her doc told her it was fine if she only smoked ten a day during pregancy. And that the baby was already 13cm!

Mmm. Let us not judge, sistren and brethren. Let us not demonise and chasten. For the woman in the pic above is taking the piss with some mates, ya.

Footnote: Hello Sailor

Fuck-off great food + Ryan’s easy demeanour and wide shoulders + open early to late, 7 days a week + people you like + food prices + insane tots and shots ( tequila bolognese, and something with pickle juice, eg.)

The crowds are there. Many of whom have tats but you don’t need them to get in. And the media are coming, sure as God is a lesbian. You heard it from Mr Blobz hisself.

Remember the old days? When Obz Cafe served decent food (and better comedy) and hadn’t expanded into what used to be Dominion Hardware (which had anything you needed – with twice the courtesy – and at half the price of Hawkes and Findlay)? When Munro’s spanned both sides of the street, before Diva’s moved in and suffered a deserved demise – such was the quality of their pizza? When there was a butchery where the new Spar ‘Tops’ bottle store is about to open – before one of the owner-brothers allegedly squandered the takings? (The pavement grill across the road is all that remains of this enterprise…)

And on the subject of bottle stores… Well, remember when there were two entrances at almost every bottle store in the country? One white, one black? Ostensibly, black people had to bring their empties back ‘through the back/black door’ – where all the booze is locked down and out of reach – while whitey’s had the privilege of strolling around the alcoholic cornucopia. Darkies needed the cash from those empties dammit!

Now things have changed… or not. The Observatory Bottle Store – extremely well-stocked as Mr Blobz can attest – has not removed this relic of the past, the separate entrance. Why not? Well, lacking the courage to ask the venerable proprietor himself the reason for this, we can assume that the large local indigent population that we have in our ‘hood are deemed second-class citizens, undesirables that should remain unseen, unheard, unsmelt.

Mr Blobz would love your thoughts…

Why do gangs of sexually ruthless female predators prowl the streets of Observatory? Over the past few months, several members of the public – all of whom wish to remain anonymous for fear of reprisal – have approached the Observatory Improvement District’s security council about a serious menace that seems to threaten our peace-loving community. One witness has even enlisted the support of social services after his trauma, which occured on an innocent stroll to the laundromat. “I was just walking past the Queen of Tarts – where they often congregate, I’ve noticed – and there was this whoop inside and this horned woman in a pink bodice started snarling at me through the window. They then stampeded for the door and I ran down Lower Main Rd and was lucky enough to get away. I lost my laundry in the process and when I got back later in the day obscene messages had been written on my undies and they had been flung onto the electricity wires. I now change my route daily, especially on weekends.”

Queen of Tarts proprietess Tina Bester is adamant that the women – such as those pictured above, taken by Mr Blobz in a moment of folly before a high-speed getaway on his scooter – mean no harm. When grilled about the strange sequence of ’score marks ‘ etched into the wall of her shop – each resembling a male member with a large pink tick over it – Bester changed tone and said she had no further comment, before threatening our reporter with stale chocolate cupcakes.

Do not to approach these women under any circumstances.

This be the pine throne of the street king

The seat of local gangster learning -

This be the legless resting place to contemplate

The streets daily offering.

These be the scrawls of the courtiers

The murals of magnificence and power

These be the markings of belonging

The local language of righting and wronging

These be the steps of approach and supplication

The concrete path to royal gain and lineage

This is the sky-full palace of light

Mind your manners and value your life.

Begone is you have no business here.

The

The plight of the urban elephant, the soul-rememberer. This giant was felled by development adjacent to the old Bromwell Hotel in Salt River, now home to a ’boutique mall’ and a deli with an atrocious baguette, puffy and pale.

The pachyderm – unnamed – caught the pity of Mr. Blobz almost a year ago, as she lay, felled beyond the weedy grass that had overtaken this site, a squalid compaction of old plastic and oil fronting a rotten corrugation of assorted materials.  Now, scaffolding ensnares the fading corpse. When Mr Blobz paid a belated visit the puffy Congolesienne security man wanted to call the avarocious owner – No Photo! – even of a dead elephant.

Mr Blobz senses they know what they’re building on. An elephant graveyard.

My dear neighbour owns the boat and the car and the beautiful building behind (another story – this is where the Lower Main Road Xmas Party takes place every year.) In a secret workshop behind the wall, a smaller wooden canoe is being constructed by loving hands, for a son. Strips of rare wood bent to shape, brass screws holding wooden kisses together. Placing life in the stream. And, like the parent that he is, watching life grow up and inevitably away, around a bend in the river.

]]> http://www.mrblobz.com/street/the-boating-life/feed/ 2 http://www.mrblobz.com/street/bucket/ http://www.mrblobz.com/street/bucket/#comments Fri, 26 Mar 2010 18:51:54 +0000 Mr Blobz http://www.mrblobz.com/?p=180

This… bucket has been perched on the pavement, untouched, unviolated, for about twenty one days. Innocent as fuck, corrupt plastic, resolute, politician-like, smeared with viscous violence and a stain of ghastly probability.

I pass it often enough to ponder a possible Satanic connection? Could it be a portal to the netherworld? In the UK, for example, these are well documented – see http://www.entrances2hell.co.uk/,  but here in SA, there is a paucity of data on such supernatural avenues. Please, dear readers, don’t lift the lid without wearing a silver cross and holding a clove of Kate’s Moss…

Aaah, to be at play. To forget. To be honest – for play, reckons Mr Blobz, is a place where we are really ourselves, as we have forgotten to be.

Play is such a blissful state of being – a mindset, a heartset. A tennis set! A cherished state we enter with the forgotten passport of childhood, that we inhabit when we’re free of the muck of daily life, the mood-sediment and undertow of our emotional tides… Yet how often we don’t even think to play, or refuse the idea, feeling like we simply can’t: or worse, that play is stupid, childish, retrogressive.

How good to see these dominoes plastered on the wall in some arbitrary Observatory back street.

They have such texture. While Mr Blobz enjoys the odd spot of online tennis, he prefers the thwock of a tennis ball on the backside in a game of stingers, or the joy of throwing a stone into a bucket. The simpler, the better.
So come and play, where we can leave things behind, where a ball or a card or a bow and arrow sing you back to yourself. Now it’s your turn.

No. 56 Lower Wrensch was formerly inhabited by the regal combination of Kate, Robyn, Stove and Dogs (no relation to the four-footed kind.) Mr Blobz moved in back in the summer of 1990, a mere twenty years ago, buying the carpet Stove left behind, which was soon home to one of the most renowned flea colonies in the southern hemisphere. Dogs also left for better things at this stage, leaving Mr Blobz with Kate and Robyn for company. Even with the addition of Nicky, this proved an unsteady foursome.

One of Mr Blobz’s repressed memories from this time, when his sanity was as erratic as the pinball scores in Mr Fuckit’s corner cafe, was of a sardine lasagne prepared by a housemate who shall remain nameless.

Another memory was of the Dogshit Marathon, a unique event humbly invented by Mr Blobz himself, where, barefoot, the peron who ran around the block in a combination of the fastest time (s), subtracting the mass of dogshit (g) scraped away from his or her naked heels in grams (with g=s in value), was the winner.

Sadly, the event was never held, and, judging by the mother grundy who has forbidden canines to deposit the remnants of their torried diets on this particualr pavement, never shall be.

Black on brown, malevolent sprites of crime, school of intent and line, wondering to the skyline, shapes of black fish-spine, cut in a wall, following all.