At Least We Have Good Weather: A Life of Love and Loss

Chapter 41

I hated being at home. Always did. For me, it was always more tense to sit at home and deal with the reality of my life, and as I never took holidays just to stay at home; this self-imposed sabbatical was starting to take its toll on me. In October 2011, I once again pretended my birthday never happened, and just continued to grow my beard and mope around.

I've never considered my house my home. I always saw it as a place I was just killing time at, but three decades later; I'm still there.

As if in some sort of twisted episode of the Twilight Zone, I'm stuck there in a loop, never able to get out. And just when I do think I'm about to get out...the universe pulls me right back in.

So much has happened in that house, that I've often thought it to be cursed. From my dad dying in the bathroom and my brother taking his own life in his bedroom, to always seeming to be the house in the street targeted by criminals, there has just been a cursed vibe to it. Incidents happened on a near-weekly basis.

When I was much younger, for many years, we had a painting of a crying boy in the passageway. I'd always assumed it was a painting of me as a child as it bore an uncanny resemblance to me, but as I grew older I found out it was a fairly common painting that had done the rounds, and if you knew your urban legends, you knew this was supposed to be a cursed painting.

According to Wikipedia:

The Crying Boy is a mass-produced print of a painting by Italian painter Bruno Amadio, also known as Giovanni Bragolin. It was widely distributed from the 1950s onwards. There are numerous alternative versions, all portraits of tearful young boys or girls.

On September 4, 1985, the British tabloid newspaper, The Sun, reported that a firefighter from Yorkshire was claiming that undamaged copies of the painting were frequently found amidst the ruins of burned houses. He stated that no firefighter would allow a copy of the painting into his own house. Over the next few months, The Sun and other tabloids ran several articles on house fires suffered by people who had owned the painting.

By the end of November, belief in the painting's curse was widespread enough that The Sun was organising mass bonfires of the paintings, sent in by readers.

Steve Punt, a British writer and comedian, investigated the curse of the Crying Boy in a BBC

Radio Four production called Punt PI. Although the programme is comic in nature, Punt researched the history of the Crying Boy painting. The conclusion reached by the programme, following testing at the Building Research Establishment, is that the prints were treated with some varnish containing fire repellent, and that the string holding the painting to the wall would be the first to perish, resulting in the painting landing face down on the floor and thus being protected, although no explanation was given as to why no other paintings were turning up unscathed.

And even though we got rid of the painting due to the sadness it brought to the house, it always played in the back of my mind as a reason that so much misfortune continued to strike me down.

I'd always been somewhat superstitious throughout my life, but I'm much better now than I used to be. Now it's more a case of not wearing my favourite team's shirt on game day will result in a loss. Yes, I am that powerful

I still get freaked out by Friday the 13th, and refuse to venture out on that day. I don't walk under ladders, and I believe I must have broken at last a hundred mirrors in a former life.

Perhaps the quirkiest trait I have, is my obsession with the number 11 and more specifically the time of 11:11.

In fact, I became so obsessed with it, that I truly believed that the day I would die, would be the 11th of November, 2011.

And now that everything in my life had seemingly come to a halt, at exactly the right time, I sat at home waiting for the date to strike me down.

For every day, without fail for at least six years, I looked at the clock at exactly 11:11. It was more than coincidence; it became a phenomenon in my life. I began to do more research into the stories behind the number that just wouldn't leave me alone, and what I found out both fascinated me and freaked me out.

And because I like a good controversy as much as the next guy, I'd like to share what I found out about it. Of course, you will find a number of different interpretations of the explanation behind the activation of "light workers", but this is the one that made the most sense to me.

Essentially, the legend has it that a group of souls were recruited whilst on another spiritual plane and given the mission of being sent to Earth, helping, protecting and guiding those who would form part of their life path. Once you became aware of the 11:11 phenomenon, you were essentially "activated". These were normally a highly elite group of people, equated to the spiritual green berets, who could hold a substantial amount of light in order to show others the way, and help them get through significant moments in their troubled lives, and then move on. Basically, if you continue to see 11:11, you're a warrior of light meant to help other people in life. Sounded about right to me.

Sure, a creepy cult-like deal, but I always found a bit of peace in that story. That maybe, everything I was going through, was some sort of mission of good. Although as Akira once told me, I had a white knight complex; it could just be that.

What I didn't like about this whole deal however, was the punishment I received every time I tried to put my happiness first.

I didn't die on 11th November 2011, (and I still see 11:11 on a daily basis by the way), but by the close of the year, I knew that the money wouldn't last forever, and quite frankly, neither would my sanity. I wasn't sure what I was going to do, but I slowly began to emerge back into the land of the living. The online response to my return was overwhelmingly positive as for the last 4 months, nobody had a heard a word from me. I had turned off my phone and not checked email. Some people feared the worst and began posting public comments asking if anyone had come to my house to make sure I was ok. By proxy I had someone comment that I was fine and there was no need to come to my house.

Slowly, I began submitting my CV to jobs just to see what the response would be.

For almost a decade I had changed jobs with relative ease, but now, I was starting from the bottom again. I convinced myself my experience, across so many different industries would speak for itself, and while I never expected job hunting to be so easy, I never thought it would be so difficult.

With a bruised ego and a chip on my shoulder, I arrogantly felt that I deserved better, simply because the universe owed me. It was a horrible combination that made me ridiculously fussy in what I applied for.

I tried applying for overseas jobs, jobs in Cape Town and only jobs that paid well. I was specific; I couldn't do the Joburg grind again. I was so tense I couldn't even drive in traffic anymore without losing my cool and chasing down lawbreakers who cut me off. I was essentially a ticking time bomb of rage and hurt.

After a few weeks of zero response, I started 2012 frustrated and angry; things between my mom and me were growing exceptionally fragile again and the responsibility was firmly on my shoulders to once again fix the situation. I didn't have the luxury of only thinking about myself. However, just went things were about to break, I suddenly got three interviews lined up in the space of a week.

One was with a Social Media branding house, another with a Casino software company, and one with a travel agency...