Singing Wii are the World in 2012

2012-01-09 11:55 by Koos Kombuis Happy New Year to you all! And welcome back to un-virtual reality!

After the madness of the festive season, the time of painful reconstruction of normal daily routines have finally begun. It is a time of despondency and mayhem. It is the era of broken dreams and discarded resolutions. It is the annual cycle of disillusionment, disenchantment, and furious headaches. It is the best of times and worst of times. It is the time when the best of us lack all conviction and the rest of us are full of passionate intensity, especially after weighing ourselves on the VirginActive scales which, unlike the scales in our bathrooms, are fiendishly accurate up to one hundredth of a kilogram. By the way, there is a famous quote hidden somewhere in this paragraph, but I’m not sure where.

In fact, I'm not sure of anything anymore. After ending our month-long official vacation last night with a nine-hour-long dinner party at a friend's house, I woke up this morning with a moustache. Where did it come from? I have not had a moustache since the year Peter Frampton released his first and only good album!

'We are the world'

Not only did I have a moustache, but there was a song going through my head. Fortunately, it wasn’t a Peter Frampton song. It was actually worse. It was that very ancient, very boring, very commercial, once very over-rated anthem called We are the World.

I don’t know about you, but I just knew, on some deep instinctive level, that waking up with a moustache, and humming We are the World, couldn’t possibly be a good sign. If anything, it proved to me that last night's dinner party was perhaps one final step in the wrong direction. It also proved to me that the holidays are finally over.

When you wake up in the morning with a moustache, singing We are the World, it’s time to get back to work. It's time to start taking life seriously again. It’s time to get a grip on yourself. Go to Rehab or something.

Anyway, so now I’m sitting here, trembling cup of coffee in the hand, typing on my PC, and, slowly, bit by awful bit, last night’s dinner party is coming back to me. I remember people plunging into a pool fully clothed, and, later, not quite fully clothed. I also recall part of a braai that went wrong somehow, but I can’t recall exactly what went wrong. The last thing I remember is our host unveiling our dessert – a bottle of twenty-year-old KWV brandy – which was, for some reason or other, followed by several hours of drunkenly playing fake table-tennis in front of a Wii screen.

Loaded date

Though I still don’t know where my moustache came from, I have finally connected some of the dots. That’s how that song got into my head. It’s not We are the World. It’s Wii are the World!

And, come to think of it, if there's one song we'll probably need in 2012 – the most loaded of all dates since 1066 (I'm not sure what happened in 1066 but I know it was something equally disastrous), the year the world's supposed to end, the year when at least half of Nostradamus' grimmest prophecies are supposed to come true, the year of tumultuous happenings on the world stage, the year of further economic disasters, more earthquakes and tsunamis and hurricanes, the year of impending doom predicted thousands of centuries ago by the Mayans – it would be something like Wii are the World.

Welcome to 2012! This is the year in which we will all finally come together in unity, all seven billion of us on this troubled planet! Or, failing that, this is the year for each one of you to hide out in the privacy of your house, try to avoid Armageddon, and lose yourself in virtual reality for as long as possible, or at least until Koeberg goes up in a mushroom cloud! Ouch.   

So, at the risk of unnecessarily repeating myself: happy New Year, everybody! And PLEASE say you like my moustache!