Deja Vu

By Dale Stone

Deja vu is primarily a recollection of travel experiences and events. Places, people and politics mingle and intersperse the seperate flow relating the disparate stories, views, commentaries and outright outbursts of disbelief of the state of politics, the turning on of the TV to see war and horror... and then to get back to the tricky thing that MIRROR LAKE is so beautiful it really defies description.
Sometimes the number of beers that it takes to get one's mind from one thing to another eventuates an entirely unrelated experience that then insists on being told...
Maybe DEJA VU will seem somewhat deja vu-ish to you...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: Feb 10, 2017
• ISBN: 9781490782843

Dale Stone

Dale Stone is not related to the Rolling Stones or any other famous Stones in any way whatsoever. His sense of humour is arguably more dry, wry, sly and malevolently twisted.

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Déjà Vu

Dale Stone

© Copyright 2017 Dale Stone.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author.

Print information available on the last page.

ISBN: 978-1-4251-0097-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4907-8284-3 (e)

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Cover by ddavi.

Trafford rev. 10/06/2017

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CONTENTS

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

PART ONE

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

PART TWO

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

PART THREE

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

PART FOUR

Chapter 29

CHAPTER 1

ENTRANCE

ENTRANCE

ENTRANCE

ENTRANCE

ENTRANCE

ENTRANCE

CHAPTER 2

A few weeks ago I was walking the short distance to the nearby shops when my friend Pierce came down the road in his car. We had not seen each other for some months, so we decided to go out for a drink.

I had recently sent him a second and third and maybe a final draft of my final final chapter in this book which took an awfully long time to write and then even longer to finalise.

As he had already e-mailed me about the final fucking final chapter we talked about things…

Although we talked about some other things there was an intense exchange in which we both unloaded about the news of the day and that of the last week or so. We are frequently in agreement that government and politicians can be somewhat more sensible, but it had been a particularly bad day and month for scandals, wrongdoings, incompetence, bungling and completely wrong-headed actions by the government.

Eventually we just laughed about it all and decided to enjoy the cosy little restaurant’s atmosphere which gently encompasses the patio-space where we were sitting. We greeted a friend of ours who had also arrived and his presence also helped to lift the desperate mood that had developed with the two of us dealing with the uncomfortable fact that we do not have the power to impeach the president YESTERDAY!

At some point the conversation turned to our writing, and as his magnum opus is very quietly proceeding in stops and starts and he, like me, dislikes discussing work-in-progress, he asked me if the final chapter is now really the final chapter. I was quite happy to assure him that I am finally, more than before, certain that the final chapter is finally the final chapter.

When Pierce suggested that he could write a review of this book I felt quite flattered. He had said earlier that he had really enjoyed the manuscript, but had asked for more time to properly comment on the manuscript as it had been when he had read it quite a number of months earlier.

He said that in his review he would insist that the reader should be aware that EVERY SINGLE PAGE OF THE BOOK DESERVES TO BE READ.

When he expostulated on the rest of his proposed review I felt as though we had just been transposed into an alternate reality… and he was Higgins and I was Thomas Magnum, but we weren’t in Hawaii though, as pleasant as the evening and the cosy little restaurant here in Nettlesbush was.

It was a real compliment that Pierce picked up on the literature reference in the final final chapter and assured me that he considered this book to be "literature", enunciated in that way, but then he proceeded to create a marketing strategy to appeal to the literati, and worse, particularly the cognoscenti.

It even felt as if he would pitch it only to the cognoscenti so it was difficult to keep myself from shouting out: "This book is supposed to be a BEST-SELLER!!! It is not supposed to be discussed by the literati and the cognoscenti as if the joys and excitement of life as it is particularly experienced with traveling experiences should be carefully analysed, dissected and pondered upon in the reading room of a Victorian mansion while smoking a pipe and drinking port on a miserable winter’s night!" I did not shout and we really enjoyed the warm spring night and the whisky.

What had been Chapter 1 in the manuscript is now Chapter 5, and I am really grateful that Pierce duBuisson obliquely reminded me that the way the Introduction and Foreword is written is like the steps to a cabin that stands out quite a bit above ground level.

CHAPTER 3

INTRODUCTION

I arrived at Auckland Airport in New Zealand at almost twelve o’clock Monday evening. On Tuesday morning I went for an early morning walk up Maungawhau. The flashing white lights atop Sky Tower in the city centre seemed to be trying to send a message to space, it flashes so brightly. The travelling time from Cape Town to Auckland had been twenty-four hours… give or take a couple of minutes, so I was tired.

At home in Shipwreck, where I have been staying for the last year or so, I had just finished typing out the first copy of this book on Saturday. Mandy helped me with the typing and was particularly helpful in finishing the work before I left for this visit to New Zealand. Hours before we left from Right Here, Casey’s home in Shipwreck where I have been staying, I printed out a complete unedited copy of Déjà vu, sans this introduction… and still lacking the second half of A Logician’s Fable, for Mandy. I hope she enjoys it.

Atop of Maungawhau, while contemplating the view of the city centre of Auckland with the illuminated spire of Sky City dominating the gloomy morning vista I was not really thinking about thanking Casey and Mandy, although I knew I would, but was amused with the feeling I had thinking about some award ceremonies where the various winners always try to find their way around thanking Mohm and Dahd and Gawd… , and how first time winners are those who find that they lack the nimble mindedness of dancing around the obvious and end up thanking Mohm and Dahd and Gawd… . As this is a first-time experience in doing the thanking thang I find myself unable to avoid thanking Mohm and Dahd and Gawd., indeed I find I would be urbanely dishonest if I avoided thanking Mohm and Dahd and Gawd… so I thank Mohm and Dahd and Gawd for making this book possible.

A New Day

Today the computer is resisting my attempts to continue with work on the Introduction to Déjà vu by selecting all text for deletion whenever I try to move the cursor. There must be some glitch in the system, for I am sure I used the cursors without problem in my last working session.

The fact that I had the mouse connected might have something to do with the functioning of the keyboard operations, but that seems illogical and contrary to the mind of a computer.

It is quite improbable that other instructions should be carried out quite correctly and yet for some reason the cursor movements insist on malfunctioning… I’ll have to connect up the mouse and see if it makes a difference to the functioning of the accursed cursors.

The mouse is connected and the cursor actions are functioning properly, but the mouse is not provided with a pointer on the screen and neither the left-click nor the right-click seems to have any effect at all. This is quite strange.

Perhaps the necessary refitting of a new battery will be with some outfit experienced enough to be able to fix this 60MB troglodyte of a lap-top… probably not.

Now that I have sorted out the cursor movement problem I might return to the Introduction I wanted to work on, but I think I’ll leave that till later as there is some shopping to be done and I do intend to enjoy my holiday here in Whakalongbeach.

The morning walk we had was really pleasant and I am sure that a couple of throat-lozenges will help me get rid of the cough I have so that I may go swimming soon enough. While I have the cough though I might as well get some little writing done as I am sure that relaxing on the beach will luxuriously dissipate the little focus I feel for finishing A Logicians Fable and working my way further into the Introduction which I hope to make strikingly funny and incisively compelling for a wide and almost unimaginable reading public out there… in the misty tomorrows which will be crisp and real as today and unreal as today will be to someone else’s tomorrow’s today.

A loud bird shut up as I put the full stop to the preceding sentence and in the while I was wondering whether to exit or continue I suddenly heard how many chirping twirping warbling and whistling bird-sounds there are here in this holiday park of Whakalongbeach.22 December 2002 10h15

6h45 23rd and again I am surrounded with bird sounds. Today the mouse cursor is working again, and I can swear I had connected the mouse with the computer off yesterday… so that it should have recognised the mouse when it rebooted on start-up… however; yesterday was and today is…

I am not even halfway through my morning cup of coffeee…

I should be returning to the Intro.

Introduction continued…

So now that I have finished thanking Mohm and Dahd and Gawd I’m wondering what the **** to write next; the treatise on crude rude ****ing foul language, or a short insert on an incident or two I feel I might add to the book retrospectively, seeing that the apologies I make for not writing everything down that happened in the five odd years it took to write this book does not excuse me from sketching an iconic event… though time alters the content of some moments of interaction in memory and arranges it into a shorthand which has me following the advice of my friend Big Red of the Blues Brews: Don’t let facts get in the way of a good story… , which he said one night at The Up the Down Stairs when I corrected him on a minor detail concerning an old story about me and some old friend driving an egregious distance, (Cher’s Anus to Bubbleville and back), for rotis one long ago summer holiday, at two in the morning.

Maybe the ****ing treatise on crude rude offensive foul ****ing language… Let me keep it short: there is no ****ing substitute for the word fuck in its various permutations if you want to describe a ****ing tiring, ****ing steep ****ing mountain climb… nor can you describe the ****ing antics of ****ing lying murdering politicians that make you ****ing angry, ****ing sad, ****ing despondent and ****ing depressed when you watch the ****ing news on TV without recourse to the ****ing fuck word.

I hope you ****ing puritans are now ****ing inoculated, inured and ****ing desensitized for the rest of this fucking amazing book you have before you.

Before I get to the story that will illuminate a dark corner of reality I inadvertently lost sight of in the writing of this book, I have to sketch a picture of how seriously I am aware of the fact that reality presents itself forcefully differently to consciousnesses, (how the hell does one pronounce the plural of consciousness?), and that I try to be conscious of the fact that other people consequently might tell me important views I have not considered…

Cognac’s dog Paragon, a sleek black bitch of dubious lineage, was quite fond of me and would sometimes follow at my heels even when I went to the toilets so I had to shoo her away, but one day I went to an outside room on the grounds of the place I was staying and went into a room where the ****ing daggakop Yorts had locked up a dog for two whole ****ing days one daggadof weekend and the dog must have thought it was going to die, for Paragon would not come within ten feet of the door of the room where the other dog had been left locked up more than two years before… even when I called her. She did not like that fucking room one fucking bit and wasn’t about to get close to it at all.

I was sitting in the pub where Dio and Dio (see p142) was on duty and it was quite early on a really quiet evening. Llulu walked in and sat herself on the barstool next to me and looked at me with an arresting intense black look and I swear Dio said to Dio, Poor Dale, LLulu is definitely in one of her lloony moods again. I had had the experience of Lloony Llulu’s marathon monologues - which she recalls as conversations - a couple of times before and as it happened I was not in a mood for her pilgrim-returned-from-a-holy-shrine-and-will-now-die-for-my-faith fanaticism on that particular laid back lazy quiet evening in the pub. She started off about having thought about America’s politics and how she loved Bill Clinton as a president and really was terribly disappointed that Al Gore had not won the presidential elections and how she thought the Illuminati and the CIA had rigged the elections and how it was all a fraud… Then she said: I think George W Bush and his father George Bush and that brother of his ‘Biff’, (I was quietly laughing already), "are completely metabolical…", and she gave me such a black pilgrim-returned-from-a-holy-shrine-and-will-now-die-for-my-faith look as to brook no dissent or opposition. I almost spilled my beer laughing and she got up in such a huff that I doubt she figured out why I was laughing. When I told Dio and Dio why I laughed and why Llulu left they nearly cried with laughter*; it was the funniest of LLulu’s lulus they had ever heard, and although she frequently makes these lulus it was the only one that they knew of to ever stop her from carrying on once she was on one of her crusades. They laughed so much the whole night that when it got busy they forgot to hustle customers for tips that night, at which they are past masters, and even refer to that evening as the evening in which they made no tips due to Lloony Llulu’s most memorable lulu…

7h06 23/12/2001

I went for a walk to the nearest bar earlier today and found that the nearest bar is very far and I should have gone by car, but the observations I made along the way made the walk worth the while. It also occurred to me that I wanted to give a more detailed description of my meditations atop Maungawhao on my first morning in Auckland. I stood there looking over the city and tried to see my parents’ home nestled at the foot of Maungawhao, but it was obscured by trees, and the quiet comfort they have found made me think about what it would be like to have Auckland as a home. There is a directional plaque atop Maungawhao with the names of various cities around the world engraved in the outer ring and it took me a while to find Cape Town 11771 km at an angle so far removed from Johannesburg that it chilled me to think about the implications shortest-distance calculations produce on a ball. It did not seem like Cape Town and Johannesburg could be in the same country at all… and somehow I did not feel some twelve thousand odd kilometres from home, thinking about Shipwreck. I was feeling pretty much at home where I was and that felt good, but I know New Zealand cannot just suddenly feel like home on a whim… and something elusive was hovering at the edge of my consciousness as to why I have been stubbornly lukewarm about my parents proposal that I settle here in Kiwiland.

On the way out here to Whakalongbeach I discovered where the peculiar feeling of discomfort with New Zealand was rooted; many places looks much too much like Vietnam as it came across in the disturbing and compelling movie Apocalypse Now, (shot in the Philippines…), and I suppose I might just have had some unremembered nightmares from my first visit here, (chapters 5, 6 & 7), in which all hell erupted from the lush green limp hillsides… as in the movie which I saw a couple of times, but so long ago that I had not immediately made the connection between the beautiful lush green limp hillsides and the unexplained knot of tension forming in my tummy.

I actually have to consciously relax right now as I think/see/feel Vietnam instead of Kiwiland when I look over my shoulder to the view behind me… considering that the view in front of me is the sea and stubbornly refuses to be entirely appropriated by anyone anywhere…

So on my way to the bar I was considering how attractive this place really is and although there is a most attractive home for sale in i’Ruini Avenue there are not too many reminders of lost causes here to get depressed over.

There are plenty of new huge neat and attractive homes here and somehow it looks almost too good to be true, but then I came across a house that would look shabby even in Gomtor Valley back in South Africa, and the three caravans parked in the yard did not exude any particular charm either. The next moment a bakkie (light pick-up truck) with a German Shepherd standing guard over six very sick sheep stopped right in front of me. The German Shepherd looked very worried and clearly did not want to go the way of the six very sick sheep, lying on their backs, no skin, no feet, no guts and no heads… Kiwiland is real enough.

19h46 23/12/2001

The computer seems to be telling me that it is time for a holiday now that I have virtually finished writing the introduction, but I still have to see if I can clear the glitch which has the cursors malfunctioning again.19/11/15 5:13

I think I have discovered another glitch in the system!!!

But now that the system has been rebooted after I incidentally corrected the time/date from June 2000 to today’s date and time the cursors are working again whereas they had been printing out 2,4,6 & 8 for the four different cursors ten minutes ago…

Boxing Day

I had two dreams in the night; in one I had a Mary Christmas, in the other I had a confusing train ride after a confusing day of studies at an university campus which may have been UCT or may have been some other place, and there I had problems with figuring out which classes I was supposed to attend and problems with a drama student girlfriend who was jealous of how I was befriending the Japanese political studies student who was jealous of my drama student girlfriend though she, the Japanese student, had only got to know me that day as we were assigned to team up on a project… and before there was any resolution or denouement of the situation I was on the train with no idea where I was going or what was going on and the drama student ex-girlfriend of mine telling me that I was lucky to be on this train, even though the carriage behind us had become detached from the rest of the train and was careening off on an adjacent track quite obviously out of control and… I woke up before the train properly pulled into a station…

The train ride dream reminds me of quite another train ride, and although I intended to mention this particular incident later in the introduction I might as well mention it now… how I was mugged the last time I took the train from Shipwreck to Squirrelbush a little more than a year ago. I was going through to Squirrelbush quite regularly once a week for art classes, (my lack of mastery of colour detracts from my fluency of line and other sketching skills which has me producing better artworks in sketching the beginnings of a painting than the artwork I end up with once I have painted over the sketch…), and then I got mugged. The train ride passes through wine farms and there are impressive mountains in the distance, so it is quite a joy for an artist to do that train ride. Suddenly there was a guy with a knife standing in front of me, a youngster, and someone else was spraying pepper-spray into my face half blinding me. I got so angry that I resisted, grabbing the youngster with the knife by his wrists, but I did not have a spare hand to wrest the knife from him, and now I understand the sense of the self-defence techniques I have seen on TV where the defender grabs the weapon-bearing hand with both hands… So after some inconclusive struggle it became apparent that I was not going to disarm the youngster and he and the sour-faced cowardly old shit with the pepper-spray - all sprayed out - were not strong enough to kill me they took my watch, my wallet and the manuscript pocketbook I had with me, but the youngster returned the manuscript pocketbook when I said it was very valuable to me and entirely worthless to him… With all of the time taken up in the struggling the train pulled into the next station before they could wrest my jacket from me, which I defended equally for itself and for the safety it provided in potentially deflecting any further attempt to stab me… and I felt I would be particularly vulnerable to them stabbing me if my arms were immobilised for the time it took to take the jacket off. They jumped out of the window away from the platform and were gone across the railway yard before I could summon any help.

I find that it is extremely difficult to get my mind back to the focus it requires to delve the details of some memories out of the past, so the young gentleman-mugger deserves a thanks for returning my quite invaluable manuscript pocket-book to me… and I thought at the time that he would not have been a mugger teaming up with a sour-faced old loser if there had been cricketing facilities in his township to occupy him on such a nice early-summer’s day.

(The sour-faced old loser’s contribution to the struggle, apart from emptying his can of pepper-spray into my face, was to shout Bite him! Bite him! to