Todd Carney vs The Whole Horse-Meat World

"Terry, you keep fucking up. You can't drink when you are medicated, you know that. It would also be nice if you showed some remorse for those you brutalise. Including your mother."

- extract from a Bukowski letter, July 2, 1992*.

Toddy, honey, we need to talk. It's about the hat. That....flat cap....thing. It's not working for me. It's not working for you, either. I just saw some photos of you wearing it last week and I required a cold compress on my head for 45 minutes afterwards. Never mind the nocturnal pursuits that lure you into the streets, to my mind it is this diabolical cap that is your greatest fuck-up thus far. Here is a piece of sartorial advice that I urge all men to heed: unless you are in a Guy Richie film, or are Guy Richie himself, you should not be wearing a flat cap.

Moving on. That expression: "a loose cannon"? I believe Todd Carney is the literal, human embodiment of this term right now. Without a club to play for next season he has minimal earthly significance, no responsibilities and no one to tell him to pull his fool head in. Of course, the records show that Toddy hasn't done so well with the pesky 'responsibility' part of being in a team in the past. This is a problem, I suppose. Haywire brilliance is all well and good but team sports require a near total suppression of rebellious natures and acts. The NRL is no place for a lone wolf, and the world in general is a terribly cruel place for the chronically maladjusted. More specifically; Sydney's Eastern suburbs? Sweet Jesus, bitch is up against the blade - and for those of us up against the blade there's no winning - it's just a grim and trembling onward shove.

Richocheting around Sydney like a rogue, renegade cannon is a bad look, then. This much is clear. What club is going to hear about him getting into a fight in Double Bay on Wednesday or kicking the crap out of an apartment complex's garbage bins after a session in the Cross on Sunday and think "Fuck yeh, train wrecks are GO - we want someone who is singularly committed to blazing a drunken and destructive path - SIGN THAT SHIT UP." No. Not even teams with train wreck boards themselves ('sup Parra! Hola Dogs!) will want a piece of this particular brand of carnage. It's seen as unseemly, unfortunately. Wrong era, rah rah rah... Toddy, I'm trapped in the 21st Century too you know. The walls surround us both. We just gotta hold. Hold, hold, hold.

See what I've done here - insinuated myself squarely into Toddy's psychic strain? Like, it's Toddy and me holding steady versus the whole shifting tilting hostile horse-meat world??  Well, what the hell. Don't we spend our whole lives trying to recruit others to our version of reality? Existential angst shared is existential angst halved, or some such shit. Right? Right, Toddy?..... Toddy? I think I lost him at the hat. Did I ever even have him? So many questions, no easy answers...

*Now. Turning back to Buk. Later in his letter to Terry he says 

"I shouldn't lecture you. I don't particularly believe in morals but I do believe in kindness. It's a good thing."

This is a lovely and gentle thing to say, considering that in the following letter in the volume he writes to someone else

"Just wrote a friend at the violent ward of a Texas mental hospital. His latest is that he pulled the hair off of a blonde girl. But he writes asking if it is proper to use a comma after a parentheses. Says Norman Mailer does. I told him that it all depens upon the construction of the sentence. I hope that calms him somewhat."