This is fine (please floss)

Sometimes things happen that definitely make me feel like the simulation we’re all living in is either a) running out of ideas, or b) decided to push the big red button marked “I dunno man, let’s just fuck around and find out.”

It’s the only plausible explanation for the existence of the Nissan Almera and the farcical gambit of Chuckles^®️ Whipped Chocolate Body Butter. (Seriously. Woolies. Are you okay? Listen, if you’re being held hostage by a global conglomerate of insane circus clowns, send out a press release announcing the relocation of your corporate headquarters to Boksburg, and we’ll send out whichever sports captain has some free time to come sort things out.)

These are abstract examples, things that happen at the corner of our eyes and that give you something to talk about with your Uber driver. Unless the Uber is a Nissan Almera – in which case, you’ll mostly just be suppressing the screams that are a natural part of being in one of those things. Like when you change lanes or very slowly pull out of a parking bay.

Every now and again, however, the universe decides to make its random weirdness a lot less abstract and stick it right up your nose. In my case, this was when a friend asked me what my dentist was like.

“Oh he’s great!” was my unhesitating reply. “You should totally use him.” It turned out I didn’t have the number saved in my phone, so I did a quick google to get the contact details for his practice.

What I found wasn’t a homepage or an address or the kind of Instagram page that seems to be the cornerstone of running any business these days. What I found was a photograph of my dentist in handcuffs and an article outlining his arrest.

For not being a dentist.

No lapsed certification. No expired license. Just straight-up … not a dentist.

And here’s the thing: he was great. Genuinely. A kind of “what if a good-natured tattooed boet from Fourways was a dentist” thought-experiment. A guy who called you “Mah Chaan” and didn’t bully you too much about flossing. It’s a wild experience to discover that someone you’ve had absolutely no reason to question isn’t remotely the thing they claim to be. It’s like finding out your beloved pet dog Rickles, who you’ve had for 13 years, is actually some guy called Reggie in a dachshund costume. It’s disorienting and makes you question how it came to be that something like this could even have happened in the first place.   

A few days later, on a chilly Saturday morning, I found myself at an Asian cooking class I had been gently strong-armed into by a friend. The class was run by a tiny, dynamite South Korean woman, whose main preoccupations were the multiple ways that you were cutting mushrooms wrong and getting you to try the many, many different home-made sauces that were the foundation of her burgeoning culinary empire. That Saturday our small group was there to learn how to make “stir-fry”.  

Among our number were a sweet lady from Singapore who had been brought along by her son, a couple of women who were private cooks looking to expand their repertoires, and a couple in their 50s, there for their second lesson because it feels like people are starting to get a bit desperate with things they’ll do to save a marriage these days. Of the two of them, Mr I-tuck-in-my-Polo-shirt-at-all-costs, greeted every tiny instruction like it was lost and holy knowledge – declaring everything he put in his mouth that day to be the best thing he’d ever eaten in his life. Even the vegan fish-sauce. Which was a dead giveaway that he’d probably never eaten anything more exotic than a salami-stick until this point.

The thing that struck me was the South Korean cooking teacher, and the guy cosplaying as my dentist were basically doing the same thing. Though being told to start with the proteins before adding the vegetables isn’t quite the same as recommending you get a root canal. 

Where rules don’t matter, but magic sometimes does

Our beloved weirdo country is a tangle of contradictions in that way. We go full-Karen about the tiniest bureaucratic rule on paper, and then when it comes time for enforcement, everyone goes on an indefinite lunch break. We queue round the block to dutifully supply three duplicates of a certified copy of our IDs, but give the actual keys to the entire mining industry to someone’s cousin. We are, in short, a nation that loves the idea of regulation and yet in some meaningful ways thrives in its absence.

And that’s the terrifying, brilliant part: when the rules collapse, the space they leave behind gets filled with energy. Sometimes that energy is corruption, incompetence, outright madness. But sometimes – sometimes – it’s invention. Improvisation. A kind of scrappy, jazz-hands approach to life that can only emerge in a place where no-one’s watching the gate.

And there’s a real tension in feeling a kind of gratitude for the “freewheeling spirit” (if you’re wanting to be generous about it) that is the spine of our day-to-day, and the dark flipside that is crumbling infrastructure, neglect and mismanagement. It’s the contradiction of a scrappy Korean lady hosting cooking classes out of her kitchen and selling “umami sauce”, and some guy with a drill and a dream deciding to put a plaque saying “Dentist” on his front door.

We are the Wild West in diamanté-studded stonewashed jeans with Whatever Works written across the bum. A country where “qualifications” are a sort of improv exercise. And while that makes for eye-wateringly uneven, sometimes venal, uninterested governance and things like a public transport system that may or may not be the world’s most deadly and elaborate prank, it also makes for extraordinary things. World-changing art and fashion. It’s why the whole world listens to Amapiano now. It’s 30-year-olds starting businesses out of Tupperware and viral TikTok videos. People who make up their own jobs because no-one ever hired them for the ones that already exist.

There is real danger here, of course. I don’t want a fake dentist pulling teeth on a child. I don’t want corrupt engineers building bridges that will fall down and kill people, or fake pharmacists prescribing heart medication or promising to Find My Lost Lover. But there’s also something thrilling – something alive – in a country that hasn’t felt like it’s quite agreed on the rules of the game yet. Incredible things grow on the margins in those circumstances.

And so yes, I will find a new dentist. One with degrees and receipts and who maybe bullies me about the right amount of flossing. But I’ll also fondly remember the outlaw who got it done, who never hurt me, who definitely had no business doing what he was doing – but who was maybe the most competent and reassuring medical professional I’ve ever encountered.

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