Digital Nomad

Perhaps you are a Digital Nomad too?

What singular quality defines a Digital Nomad? When you think of nomads, traditionally, it conjures up the image of sinewy, tanned people with a far-off stare and sand in their hair. Advertising companies have always capitalised on this image of an erstwhile freedom and used it extensively to sell us cars, holidays, and so on. "Feel the freedom in your kitchen with the new Bedouin Food processor! It slices, it dices, it makes you feel ALIVE!" Nonsense.

Then ... is a nomad a nonconformist or some sort of malcontent who not only insists that the grass is greener on the other side but is also adamant that the grass is far away and that one must put oneself through all manner of hell to get there? Perhaps so. Nomad wisdom suggests that nothing worthwhile is easy and that if something hurts then it’s probably worth it. The fact that nomads still exist today is a testament to that spirit of adventure.

Perhaps the nomad loves the journey more than the destination.

How then do we define the Digital Nomad? In today’s world, much like the traditional nomads, we find ourselves in veritable wasteland of content. Vast open cyberspaces, almost impossible to navigate, where words are just dust. Like the nomad’s camel, the Digital Nomad has many devices that allow for travel through this waste, and WiFi is as ubiquitous as air – however, the Digital Nomad still has to travel great distances, from oasis to oasis as it were, to find good, quality content. Thus, the Digital Nomad is a seeker. They seek experience. They seek wonder. They seek CONTENT.

To extend the metaphor, for the Digital Nomad – the journey IS the destination. Of course we can blog, tweet, and post to Facebook from the comfort of our own homes, but are our own homes actually that interesting? Surely the freedom we have to communicate with virtually anyone from virtually anywhere behooves us to make sure that our communication is worthwhile and meaningful? Consider the bandwidth that is wasted on endless uploads of toddlers waddling around the house, cats chasing lasers, and drunk people hurting themselves with lawn furniture. Ok, the last one does have a certain pedagogic and public service value – people need to be shown the danger on consuming tequila and leaping off roofs into swimming pools – but not ad nauseum.

The privations and hardships of the Digital Nomad are decidedly less than for our traditional nomads. Whereas the Bedouin or Tuareg has to seriously worry about where the next water hole is, which clan occupies the next expanse of sand, or if those clouds on yonder horizon are either a sandstorm or a formation of American tanks – the modern, Digital Nomad has to worry about things like network coverage, battery life, and dreadfully slow upload speeds. They hardly compare.

But how would our dessert nomad feel if there were an oasis everywhere, serving thin grey hamburgers with imitation sauce? Surely they would be horrified at the squandering of such resources and then seek to distance themselves from the hordes of youngsters doing belly-flops in the water beneath the faux palm trees, yelling “Duuuuude!” at each other. Do we not, as Digital Nomads, have an obligation to foray into new territory to find content that is not only interesting but nourishing to the soul?

The Digital Nomad has no traditional garb and is not readily identifiable in person, save for their nonconformist attitude, but then again - who said socks with sandals isn’t cool? The digital Nomad has no true geographical affiliation – his or her tribe of followers is scattered across the entire planet and, over time, the tribe increases in number as likeminded nomads gravitate toward each other in cyberspace. It is in these virtual tribal gatherings that the fruits of the journey are shared and savoured. Eschewing the mundane, they make it their mission to travel, either physically or intellectually, to places that provides us with something new, something thought provoking - something that moves us to action or emotion and that stirs something inside us something that would otherwise stay fast asleep.

So, in this vast expanse of content that is as bleak as any desert you may care to imagine – it falls to the Digital Nomad to explore new territories, to gather new experiences, and then share them in a meaningful way. If you take up the call and decide to roam, either in RL or on the Internets, I salute you. Guard yourself, however, for the Digital Desert is vast and full of nonsense.

Let high bandwidth be upon you and may your tribe increase!

Memories of high school - Words are silver but violence is golden

I was having a good chuckle reading over the whole "sadistic teachers and their pet canes" post again, but in all fairness - we were capable of some pretty brutal acts on each other as well!

Aside from the obligatory "flattie" for not tucking in your shirt, not walking on the left, or not greeting a prefect - I can also recall a few perfunctory shots to the gut, dead legs, "lameys" (punch in the arm), and a miscellany of other random violence that was just part of the day.

In 1986, our Form One group had about 160 kids - enough to make a 1 E (me) and 1 F. Kids were assigned according to academic merit and according to subjects taken in Primary School. Thus, 1 A had the brainy kids who took art, and 1 B had the brainy kids who took Zulu or French. If you were in 1 E or F, you were (a) pretty much a functioning retard, (b) this was your third crack at Standard Six, or (c) you just thought school and academia was a complete waste of time. I made 1 E because I was expelled shortly before Standard 5 exams and my primary school just 'doctored-up' a fake report.

Anyway, by Form Two, that number had almost halved - with about 80 or so kids 'fleeing' to 'fairy' schools like Northview (The School in the Clouds), King Daaaayvid, or - most shamefully - the Johannesburg School of Art, Ballet, Drama, and Music! They fled to escape the almost constant caning and the crazy shit the matrics would do to us. Here's two:

Space Invaders
This one was usually played during Cadets, on the lower fields, when no-one was looking. The Squad would form up in the usual rows of three and was then instructed to take three steps to the left and then six steps to the right. Take one step forward, then repeat. While doing this we had to hold our arms out to the side, with elbows akimbo, and then swivel our forearms up and down, all the while making "Bip! Bip! Bip!" sounds - exactly like the old 20c Arcade Game 'Space Invaders'.

The Corporals would usually arm themselves with (mercifully) a Slaz-ball and would then fling it at the 'armada' - if you were hit, you had to drop. I remember the Corporals putting a lot of thought into this and there were even a few variations. The best one was when the shortest member of the Squad was sent to the back line and had to sprint back and forth going, "Wheeeooooweeeoooweeeoooweeeoooweeeooo!" - He was the bonus ship!

Ten Pin Soccer
This one was intense. We Form Ones were lifted up and had to grab hold of the crossbar of the rugby post. If you fell, you got punched. If you looked back, you got punched. You had to hang there and not drop, with your back to the matrics. They would hang maybe 5 to 10 of us there, all staring at the embankment wondering what would happen next.

Suddenly I heard a distant 'punt!' sound followed immediately by a "Bop! - Huuuuuurrrrrrgh!", and the kid next to me (he fled in Form Two) dropped from the pole and crumpled on the floor below! The matrics were taking 'penalty' shots with a soccer ball from 11 metres away! And the ball had hit this kid square on the back, over the lungs, and knocked the wind out of him. A few of us took head-shots, some in the arm. I took one in the leg and dropped - of course I was immediately punched, called something nasty in Italian, and hung right back up.

Looking back, this is bloody hilarious, but at the time it was terrifying!

On attending an inquest while studying for LLB at RAU/UJ - Sometime in 2007 or so ...

I attended the inquest ‘field trip’ last year. I’m not entirely sure why I did - a mixture of phoney-tough and crazy-brave I guess… I do not have a morbid fascination with death or anything like that, I was just curious. At any rate, nothing could have prepared me for what I saw (and heard) that day…

It was a cold morning and I had deliberately skipped breakfast when we arrived at the state mortuary. There was quite a turn-out from what was then RAU and a few medical students from WITS. The dissecting room was quite crowded and I ended up sitting in the front row, in the corner, with half my butt hanging off the bench. It was uncomfortable, yes, but that was just the beginning.

After a brief introduction by the State Pathologist, the body of an elderly man was wheeled into the room and was positioned about two and a half metres away from me. “Contact gunshot to the left temporal region of the head” was the cause of death. There was blood. Quite a bit of it actually. The old man’s eyes were closed and, apart from the dried-brown blood on his face and neck, he looked quite peaceful.

(A note about the smell: dead human smells like any other dead mammal; dog, rat, what-have-you. The smell wasn’t the worst of it by far – the worst was still to come.)

Rather unceremoniously, one of the Pathologist’s ‘dissectors’ jabbed a blade into the body’s groin (Think of it as a body, just a body, the person that it used to be is long gone. Keep telling yourself: it’s just a body). Blood was drawn from the periphery of the body to be sent off for analysis. Then came the incision from the super-sternal notch down to just below the navel. The smell became much worse as the dissector began to haul out the man’s bowels. I never knew human fat was that yellow, exactly like butter but also like jelly. At this stage we students suffered our first casualty, a young lady sprinted out of the room clutching her mouth, her throat visibly convulsing as she held back the vomit. Nobody laughed.

The Pathologist then proceeded to take us on a tour of the digestive system, opening the stomach, showing us the viscera while her assistant dissector opened up the man's rib cage with a pair of long-handled, garden pruning shears! Snip snip snip and the sternum was off. At this stage it dawned on me that I was not in an episode of CSI – there were no electrical instruments, no bright lights or spotlessly clean, stainless steel tables. Hell, the pathologist wasn’t even using scalpels, she was using the same thin, boning knives you’ll see a butcher use.

The dissector then deftly sliced from one ear to the other, over the top of the head, and pulled the man’s scalp down over his face exposing the skull. The gunshot was much more visible now. The dissector left the room for a moment only to return with an ordinary hack-saw and a pair of Tullen-Snips™, and then proceeded to saw through the top of the man’s skull. The sound that hacksaw made as it cut through the bone is something I will never, ever forget and so far, it rates as the second worst sound I’ve ever heard. The worst sound I’ve ever heard is that of someone prying off the top of a human head using Tullen-Snips™. It sounds just like someone tearing apart a fresh lettuce …

The brain was cut out of the skull and the pathologist tracked the path of the bullet, not with a neon pink rod designed specifically for that purpose, but with her fingers: one in the entry hole, one in the exit hole. Brains are much smaller and far more flaccid than I had expected …

Meanwhile, through glass doors, in the cold room adjacent to the dissecting room another horror was unfolding. The day before, four men had been trapped and suffocated when a trench they were working in collapsed. I’d seen the report on the news the previous night and now here they were… very dead. One of them had been dug out using a pneumatic excavator and had arrived ‘unassembled’. Similarly, the dissectors laid into them with their garden tools, slicing and cutting and pruning and sawing.

Finally, the inquest was nearing its end when the Pathologist suddenly remembered something in the bowels that she wanted to show us. She put the brain down on the table and leaned over to pick up the guts, as she did so all the blood and bits of gore that had accumulated wooshed out of the drain at the end of the table. The drain was not connected to anything (!) and the guts had blocked it while she irrigated the brain with the little flexible shower-head thingy - so there was a fair amount of blood that splattered the ground and about four or five students in the front row.

I was fortunately not splashed. However, because I was sitting in the corner, the only way for me to get out was to either walk through the puddle of blood and guts at the foot of the table or through the brains and bits of bone at the head of the table. 

The body was then stuffed with packaging material and sown up with a carpet needle and some twine. A few times the skin snapped as the dissector yanked on the twine a bit too hard and he had to do the stitch again. The top of the skull was replaced, the scalp was put back in its proper place and the cut was sewn up with twine. It was over.

I decided to leave the room through the guts – it just didn’t feel right walking through bits of someone’s brain. Then, as I passed the glass doors of the cold room I saw something truly horrible: An eight year old boy who’d died in a car crash, a tiny baby only a few days old, and a dead toddler in a nappy: pink bunnies, blue birdies, and yellow duckies.

That finished me.

I wanted to pull my teeth out, to howl, to scream, to rail against the Universe. I don’t think my friends saw but I was crying by the time I got outside.

The experience preyed heavily on my mind. I’d known from Death before, but I had never gone out of my way to see it. It was brutal, final and ugly. It took about three weeks for me to get back to (what for me is) normal, however, I have developed an aversion to handling raw meat - mince is fine but don’t ask me to cut up a leg of lamb!