James Graham Grinding on an Old Lady

There is nothing more terrible than the NRL season yielding to another filthy and relentless Australian summer. Well, some things maybe. Being tasered to death by fucking cops when you’re just a Brazilian boy on acid.  And cops in general, the cunts. Tussling with the Kafkaesque qualities of Telstra. The faces of people in food courts. A guy I work with who I blather to about what cars I see myself owning in the future telling me he’s started pissing blood. Watching my littlest cat Gepeto crying and writhing on the carpet after an apparent but unfounded snake bite and thinking he was about to die right while I was watching Intervention (Michael, meth addict) last night. These things are terrible too.

Anyway. Summer is a horizon-less wasteland. People seem to enjoy it. I don’t understand this but I have also never understood people in fact I pretty much hate them uniformly.

Wanda – I can’t stand people. I hate them. Do you hate them?

Henry – No. But I seem to feel better when they’re not around.

-Barfly

Still, it’s not like there’s nothing going on. Just yesterday I say photos of the Kangaroos. In training shirts. With necks and shoulders spilling out of every outlet. JT, and Billy. Good stuff, this. But insubstantial. Not enough.

I also saw photos of a gathering Tigers  Sharks coach Shane Flanagan had orchestrated; a meet, greet and get elegantly soused in the yacht club event to welcome the entire Tigers team minus Robbie Benji and Lote all the incoming recruits. And Todd Carney and Luke Lewis were seated together looking fucking lewd and generally bringing credit to their entire species just by sitting there. They can’t help it. They just have a seedy air of salaciousness about them that renders them automatically awesome.

(My brother took a long range punt on a Sharks Bulldogs grand final next year, with Bulldogs for the win. If they make it to the grand final it will totally inspire me to go out and get a commemorative neck tattoo. I don’t go for them or anything but they’re that kind of team. A team to, I don’t know; bring you to your happy place just by having a go.)     

And naturally the Bulldogs Mad Monday fallout bullshit continues. I say ‘continues’ but I mean ‘is now being perpetuated by radio stations and the like who in admirable attempts to really get to the crux of the sensitive and contentious issues at hand have started asking highly qualified media commentators and social analysts LIKE LAURYN EAGLE to comment on said issues and then immediately reporting on her comments and having others pass comment on her comments and reporting dutifully on that and so on and so forth seemingly forevermore until suck me off you dumb dog becomes, like, this decade’s Carpe Diem or whatever’. I don’t know. It’s cannibalistic and unseemly. I love it. (Not really, though.)

Probably what really happened at Belmore version #1

& #2

Things have strayed into Woodward and Bernstein territory what with talk of tapes and recordings and allegations of highly sophisticated spy equipment and meticulously researched revelations like did you know there is a 91 second YouTube video of that fiend James Graham grinding on a very old woman in the lounge area of a northern English pub that culminates in the very old woman putting her hands down his pants and going the grope and that the Bulldogs are attempting to argue that the whole Mad Monday incident was a misunderstanding stemming from this video whereby a player who is recounted as  saying “There are some ladies here to stick their heads in your pants” actually said “There’s no old ladies here to stick their hands in your pants”???

I didn’t know this. Did Channel 9 know this? Did it really happen like that or are the Bulldogs attempting to create an entirely new version of reality? Does it even matter now?

I do not have the answers to these questions but I too grapple with the underlying issues of truth and reality on a daily basis and understand the elusive nature of both. For example, today I finished one squeeze-bottle of sauce and opened a fresh one and the old one was labelled 40% lower in sugar and salt but I hadn’t know that when I bought it otherwise I never would have bought it because I love sugar and think very highly of salt too I mean for much of human history the pursuit of salt drove men to every edge of the world and anyway I hadn’t thought the reduced sugar and salt sauce tasted particularly different or particularly offensive until I opened the regular sauce and holy fuck it tasted amazing it was sweet it was salty it was altogether delicious and in that moment I knew that the sugar and salt reduced sauce had been a lie and  that I had lived that lie but hadn’t known it was a lie until I tasted the truth. 

Anyway. I don’t see the sense in asking Todd Carney’s girlfriend (Lauryn Eagle that is) what she thinks about women’s role in society, even if she is an ex-waterski champion. Personally, I would have approached Kochie’s Angels for comment long before asking for Eagle’s opinion. You know, step off Catherine Lumby and Eva Cox.    

I understand though, all of this inanity. It’s the off season, after all. The Daily Tele sports section seems to be experiencing a slump similar to the one currently over/underwhelming me. This is why they did a full page article on balls. Nuts, I mean. Not, like, Steedens and Sherrins and the teeny tiny child fingers that stitch them in unlit and unregulated hives of exploitative labour all over India in an appalling but all too common example of fat first world manufacturing industry’s reliance on and exploitation of developing nations and their heinous role in perpetuating global inequality and repression.

No.

“League star proves he’s one tough nut.”

Well, shit. You don’t buy a meat pie for the meat. Nor do you buy the Daily Tele for the (metaphoric) meat.

As it happens I think balls are great in both a general and specific sense so an entire and alarmingly graphic article all about them and the injuries they are evidently able to withstand was and remains very pleasing. Some of my favourite phrases and sentiments are as follows:

 “When trainers performed an X-ray on Livers, they found his testicle had ‘shattered like a light bulb’”

“…had his scrotum ripped open”

 “…had his scrotum torn”

“…leaving one testicle hanging free”

“…after being rucked viciously by a Frenchman”

“…had the physio stitch up his scrotum, then returned to the field before he was concussed by a blow to the head. Shelford does not recall any of that game”

“…was struck by a knee to his groin and his testicle exploded”

 “Surgery was performed to remove his right testicle”

“He returned to the rink two days later to the chant of ‘Balls of Steel’’  

“…his scrotum swelled up so badly he could not run properly”

“Livers recovered to father two children”

Fuck You Dad

Thinking about going to a cat show today. You know, participating in what is known as “real life”. This in itself is an uninviting concept, but, CATS. Fuck yeh, CATS! And cat shows are supposed to attract extremely odd and idiosyncratic individuals. Fuck yeh, WEIRDOS!

People occasionally make obnoxious comments of the ‘crazy cat lady’ variety. I don’t mind. I don’t think I’m quite there yet but I do aspire to achieve certified, crazy cat lady status in the future. There was one time I did mind though, and it was a couple of months ago, during a conversation with my father, who I have been estranged from for more than fifteen years. Sixteen, seventeen, something like that. He’s okay, I guess, but he’s one of those men who shows no courage when it counts. At the end of 2010, when I saw him after all that time, he was just this small stranger standing on my doorstep who I was taller than. He was moving to Canberra at the exact time that I was preparing to leave Canberra. I had several dozen reasons to be leaving already but that one was a solid late entry because seeing him totally unsettled me, all he did was cry and ask me irritating questions about my mental health. Like had I ever considered suicide? We spoke on the phone a few times since then and the last time we did he asked me if I still had four cats and when I said yeh he started, like, cackling, weirdly, for a long time, like he was laying an egg, it was terrible. When he’d stopped and composed himself he said into the stony stretched silence something like” wow, you really are a crazy cat lady aren’t you”. I wish I could have said what I wanted to at the time, I wish I could have suggested that perhaps the reason I find cats preferable to people may have something to do with him turning out to be a turncoat and a terrible father who fucked with my soft bird-bone early-adolescent head and sent sadness and suspicion to settle into my hardening bones.

I didn’t say that though, and, as is the way when you don’t say what you should have said and needed to say, I taste metal in my throat when I think about it now.

Anyway, whatever the reasons, I have an ever-intensifying infatuation with cats and just imagine the fun of moving among other, more motivated enthusiasts who not only find cats to be creatures of unparalleled excellence but believe they necessitate rigorous exhibition.

“They get stretched out so they can be judged on their structure, but if they bite the judge it’s a big disgrace.”  That’s the line that attracted me in the article announcing the show. Also, the special mention that one of the judges was coming “all the way from Minneapolis, United States.”

-I’ve compiled a list of things that could have made this story better – Camaros, corsetry, hills carpeted with flowers, David Koresh, seafood extender, being sprayed by a skunk……… But, you know, then I remembered that Charles Bukowski and William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac were all huge fans of the cat, Bukowski in particular made constant references in his later-in-life letters to the way his bunch of adopted strays lifted his soup-stain suicide moods just by the way they crossed a rug or sat in sunshine and slept. Nothing can get better than that.

Des Hasler's Hair - The Mane Event.

"Given Des's age and position, I'd probably suggest he's look better with the short back and sides"

 - Celebrity hair dresser Joh Bailey: 'Joh Distressed by Des's Tresses, Daily Telegraph, Wednesday. 

Is this the low point of the grand final coverage? Hardly. That rasping sound you hear, though? That's the Tele scraping the bottom of the barrel.

I didn't know Joh Bailey was still *ahem*, relevant, but since he so obviously is I feel I have to give pause to the fact that I instinctively dislike anyone with a deliberately misspelt 'distinguishing' name. Jodhi Packer/Mears? BITCH PLEASE! Sixty-five percent of those born since 1995? WE GET IT, YOU'RE A UNIQUE AND GIFTED INDIVIDUAL BOUND FOR THE WORLD STAGE. Or a shelf-stacking job at Big W. If i were a cat I would arch my back and hiss and stalk away from the offending name / bearer of name with my tail in the air and my asshole exposed. As a human, however, it is all I can do to roll my eyes and smirk, which is far less effective and yet another sad reminder of how much happier I would be if I were a cat and thus able to indulge my bitchiest instincts on a permanent and consequence-free basis. There's always old age to look forward to, but the oppurtunity is wasted somewhat, isn't it, when no one cares enough to listen / change your incontinence pad?

As it stands, I have no problem ridiculing and reprinting Bailey's searing, saucer-of-milk insights, and no problem with the knowledge that this makes me even more squalid and base and parasitic than those I deride. Make no mistake; I have a healthy grasp of the food chain and my place in it. The unpleasant realisation that I am - we are - on the edge of the off-season abyss is too terrible to bear thinking about right now so I am committed to keeping my snout buried in the tabloid's trough for as long as I possibly can. Still, let's pause a moment and reflect on Ellsworth Toohey - from The Fountainhead?

" 'You're a maggot, Elsie', she told him once. 'You feed on sores.' 'Then I'll never starve,' he answered."

This is a perfect piece of dialogue. He is a tabloid maggot, and what a wonderfully grotesque and familiar image. Tabloid hacks take note -  we may gobble your swill but we know which way the wind blows. Remember this.

Joh Bailey says that Des's hair looks genuinely unkempt and uncared for. Quelle Horreur!

"It's not as bad as a mullet, but it's getting there".

Huh? A mullet? Whatever, dick. But then, just as Bailey's inane comments grip me with the wincing pain of a miagrane, the next line offers redemption; swift and sweet:

"As for his thoughts on Warriors coach Ivan Cleary's do, Bailey said it was pretty bland and 'neither good nor bad' "

Wow. Way to nail Cleary's neither-here-nor-there 'personality' in just a few short words, Bailey. Is it possible I had you all wrong? Probably not, no, but props all the same.

On Cleary; and upon further inspection and several hours of not particularly restful reflection, it's come to mind that the man has that look about him most commonly seen in people who find themselves with something nasty in their mouth, in polite company, which excludes them from spitting it out with instinctive, explosive immediacy. Doesn't he look for all the world like he's - with glacial subtlety - using his tongue to roll a slightly rancid oyster from cheek to cheek? He just always looks.....faintly repulsed. Not that there's anything wrong with that, as Jerry and George would hasten to stress, it's just very unsettling, is all. Inscrutable people usually are though - and don't they fucking know it. Scrutinise this! *grabs handful of crotch*

So. Today the AFL, Sunday the NRL. My boss asked me who did I reckon for this weekend -

"who'd reckon for this weekend?"

 and when I asked him his code or mine -

"your code or mine?"

he said Ohh, right, you watch that other game don't you?, and flailed both his arms in the air as if he were summoning some higher power; a rain god perhaps, or Peter Garrett. This struck me as strange because I would think that between the two codes, surely AFL would be better represented, visually I mean, by a sudden, epileptic-esque arm waving interpretive dance move than NRL. Right? They do all that leaping and twirling and prancing already, it's really not that much of a stretch. What the fuck arm-waving do they do in league? NONE. Yet another reason why it is a far superior game, just quietly.

Anyway, mere trifles. I told him I thought the Cats might have it -

"I think the Cats might have it"

 and he said by-god he thought I might be right -

"by-god I think you might be right!" 

and we went on to have a lucid and reciprocal conversation about why we thought this was so and afterwards I was lightly troubled and strangely pleased, in equal parts, by the realisation that I had never sounded so Victorian in all my life. More so because we also talked about the Deni Ute Muster and I sort of, uh, enthused over it.

Plus, earlier, we had also shared this exchange:

- "Creeping Jesus isn't here yet - I fucken told him to come."
-"Who?"
- "Creeping Jesus."
- "WHO?"
- "CREEPING JESUS!"
- "Yeh that's what I thought you said."

The fuck??!