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• Or: Prayer of the Solylent Boys
• Or: Elysium Dreams

Is this a love letter? Certainly. Is it a 'Dear John' letter? I don't know; I doubt it. As I said in a recent Piexlfed post "Jozi, I wish I knew how to quit you..."

A letter to Jozi

Jozi made me laugh deeply, nearly every day I was with her. She also made me cry more than one time in the five months we spent together. She has filled me with joy, inflamed me with rage, befuddled me with confusion, and terrified me into not leaving my apartment for days at a time.

I've experienced the warmest hospitality with Jozi. I've been welcomed and accepted with open arms. I've been loved. I've been grifted. I've had it made clear that I don't belong. I've fitted in and felt like a local. I've been gifted beautiful experiences and delicious foods, I've been ripped off and worked over by the authorities and the cops.

Jozi has forced me to expeience the world in ways I never anticipated, and she has transformed my perception of my position in the universe. Ms Jozi, in her inimitable way, threw off her robes and ground the cleft of her wealth divide into my face, ignoring the trivialities of consent and desire. One day I sat drinking precious water--collected in old soda bottles at a roving water tanker--from a friend's best drinking glass in their shared single room, in the middle of a water crisis in Soweto. The next day, I drank lemon verbeena tea from the private herb garden of a billionarie, from what was probably their cheapest china, on their sprawling suburban estate.

Who is Jozi? Jozi makes me swoon. She has a beautiful heart, and wears the latest designer fashions. Her face is done up in the the most exclusive makeups by Chanel and Christian Dior, her nails a beautiful burgandy and gold ombre, burnished by the best cosmeticians. Her veneers are the latest ceramic tech (although rumour has it they may be fabricated in China or Russia). But her breath can be sour, and her bones brittle. Last year's fashions are strewn through the twists and turns of her bowels, along with last year's phone and the bones of last week's chicken cordon bleu. Her children crawl through her excrement looking for a scrap to eat or someone's cast-offs to flip.

She gives audience to guests in exclusive Rand Lord houses and at trendy rooftop bars, fluent in both intimate classical piano concertos and rump-shaking Amapiano and Gqom DJ sets. She serves exquisite finger food and a decent Cape Merlot. Jozi will dance with you until she swoops you into a daring dip--or it could be a delerious death roll. You'll enjoy that. It tastes at least as good as the exquisite steak dinner she fed to you for the price of a Big Mac in Scandanavia.

Often Jozi parties raucuously in overflowing bars on cratered roads, and at secret backstreet hangout joints wrapped in corrugated iron and crumbling plaster board. You're not allowed to go there, but her secret places will reverberate with the revelry. It will sound like you're missing out. If you approach, she glares at you from the smoke-kholed eye sockets of derelict art deco apartment blocks, emiting gutteral growls between the staccato peal of illegal fireworks--and sometimes gunfire.

When it's time to wash off the revelry, Jozi will tell you that the water's off, and the power too--if the cell towers and fibre networks are still suffficiently intact to get the message to you. If not, you'll find out soon enough. She'll announce a nebulous plan to get her shit in order, then offer you a line of whatever shit it is that she's on this week. She'll never tell you where she is on the path through her latest bender. You'll just have to guess where she's at as she breezes by, screaming semi-coherently about her status as a worldly, classy chick. Her dress will be torn and her makeup running. Her wig might turn up in a week. But it might not. (That's okay, she can alway grab another one, just like her next plan to get her shit in order). You'll let her get away with it; she's charming that way.

Jozi is a post-apartheid girl and she is a discriminatory bitch. She is a traditionalist with strong family values, and a whore to capitalism. She'll put on stillettos and a viny dress, and she'll whip you unil you vomit Kruger Rands. Then she'll run you a bath, because the water's back on, and she's a nice girl. For now.

..

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