Breaking: I Feel Bad & Blame the NRL

My mum called and I told her I felt very bad, like shit, and she said she also felt very bad and like shit. She asked me are you keeping up with your blog and I said no. She asked me are you going to watch the grand final or not even bother and I said yeah, I’ll watch it, and she asked who are you going for, the Roosters and I said yeah, the Roosters and it’s hard to say but upon reflection maybe my reaction wasn’t quite in line with the spectacle and scope of the occasion. I don’t know. All I know is that I am adrift from my moorings and football is no longer my psychic anchor.

Are these two factors related? Whatever, it’s too late to find out. This is probably for the best. My frame of mind is in no way right for another long and maddening year of total involvement, total immersion. I cracked under the strain in June, things still aren’t right.

I understand that there are people who have maintained an abiding interest in the machinations of the NRL and that despite it being rendered a flaccid imitation of its former self they are still invested and interested in the cheap, second-rate product that’s been passed off to them.

I had a boyfriend and his mother was constantly disguising the cheap wine and cheap milk she’d buy by decanting it into superior bottles. She was Sicilian and overly concerned with appearances. She offered him $500 to cut off his dreadlocks and when he refused, with extreme prejudice, she took me aside and offered me $1000 to do it “while he sleep”.

The NRL is watered-down liquor in a flashy bottle. It’s also sort of a simulacrum of itself. Like how McDonalds sell you the picture of the burger, the burger as symbol, not the actual burger, so that what you’re buying is effectively the imitation of the idea? What we’re watching, or increasingly not watching as the case may be, is an imitation of the idea. I find it extremely difficult to concentrate on the cheap realities of the game under these conditions.
I’ve been forced to seek my exit from a world I find hostile and complicated elsewhere. In gentle narcotics, mostly.  

It’s probably a problem. I’m suffering, WNTTAT is suffering, we are all suffering. Except those who aren’t, of course. And good for them. I wouldn’t welcome them into my home or anything, but good for them, the McDonalds eating fucks.

 

 

 

PETS! WITHOUT MAKEUP!

Hello who wants to wade into dark waters and partake in a process rife with psychological implications ie. marvel at the passing of time through the prism of my farmyard pets to underscore a common humanity and the unavoidable fact that life is a too short misery alleviated by fleeting moments of self-deception and Orwellian dystopia awaits in very near future?

Just kidding. God, relax. But here are Babs and Claudia, then and now. Like how the magazines do it to show weight loss and weight gain, or Sophie Monk’s lips, or people just getting uglier as they age because it’s awesome to be reminded via magazine that whimpering ruin is imminent and don’t forget it you pig-jowled losers?

 

In Dugan's Defense

Poor Dugan. Poor Boy-Bambi.

He has become a human punch line.

So he’s run his ship up onto some rocks. Who hasn’t? I’ll tell you who hasn’t – the flat-pack fuckwits who don’t have the guts or sense to get down in it. Fuck them. Fuck their lame tweets; 140 characters or less of dull, putrid, limping nothingness.

There should be no shame in a bit of flailing around amid the deeply fallible seas of human social congress. Larry David made a career out of it.

It’s tough for the modern footballer. Their wits are inevitably already dulled from having their heads driven down into their necks and their necks driven down into their shoulders since they were young and soft of skull. Their brains probably slop around inside those misshapen skulls like crème caramels released from their ramekins too soon. It is unreasonable to expect their behaviour to be better than that of the average firm brained citizen. It is remarkable that they can even keep abreast of the tackle count or recognise their teammates if you ask me, which obviously no one does, frustratingly.  

Then, there’s the relentless tracking of personal lives, and invasive technology allowing everything to be conveyed within seconds to the wider world which, frankly, is an ugly and undignified place full of ugly and undignified people who fight like half-starved dogs over every scrap of information as it comes and clamber to post their small utterings of inanity which we now call comment.

They are poised now, haunches flexed and empty gazes narrowed, ready to fight and froth dog-like over the corpse of Josh Dugan’s career.

 

 N.B. - All the existentialism in the world will not make you question the universe so much as an idle scroll through a standard comment section or exchange in the online NRL community. The only thing that sets this little exchange apart from the ceaseless shit-stream is Dugan’s correct use of ‘too’, which no one seemed to notice or find cute, so caught up were they in the tedious indignation that passes for controversy. Whatever. I found it cute.   

Canberra Raider Fans - A Guide

Raider fans can be divided into two loose groups*.

You have your deluded fools – know them by their seemingly bright but actually dead-from-never-having-lived eyes - and you have your weary fatalists – jaundiced, hollow of eye, with a keen sense of the absurd and the tragic and a propensity for passing dark comments concerning the soul-crushing shuffle toward grim death that passes for life.

If you’ve ever trudged down the cycle way and through the tunnel in the bush out the back of Bruce stadium to return to your freely-parked car after a rude loss in what was most probably just one in a spirit-sapping string of rude losses you will know them, this second type. 

Few who have stared into the void can resist the lure of anarchic, mounted-curb parking**. Something – or everything - about it attracts the jaundiced fan while the perky optimists who have never seen into the abyss or screamed into the sky hand five dollar notes to men in hi-vis vests for the privilege of parking in an orderly and easily accessible fashion.

If you don’t attend Raider home games, and quite frankly who can blame you, the delusionals are still easily identifiable. Just follow the Raiders on Facebook and scroll through the avalanche of comments that appear after every post. Like most breeds of idiot they are not shy about making their presence known.

I think this is the year for the Raiders. Go Raiders. Mack us proud boys. Goo the green machine! 2013 here we come. With Berrigan back we can’t loose!

I have nothing against delusions. Some of my best friends are delusional. But the reality writ large on a brightly lit screen can be jarring if your nerves are at all raw. It is for this reason that I suggested several Raider fans I know start filing their nerve endings in February. I did not know that Josh Dugan would run sharply afoul of coach Furner after only the first round and have his $650 000 a year contract most probably evapourate in a dramatic swirl of pre-mixed liquor and profanity.  I praise Jesus that I didn’t know either because no amount of nerve-filing could have prepared them for this and they would have rotted out with the weight of it.

So when the Raiders announce their round 1 team lineup on Facebook and they’re missing three of their four spine players and are without a goal kicker and several hundred people who are blind to weird and volatile realities post comments like GREAT SIDE and WE WILL CRUSH THOSE PANTHERS LIKE ANTS  -  there’s that one guy who writes “we’re fucked”. 

Well, guess what? He was right. We really are fucked.

And you know what else? We kind of like it that way.

*Please note that I am ONLY talking about Raider fans here. Do not assume that fans of other troubled clubs *coughCRONULLAcough* have the same or similar characteristics. For example, it is my understanding that fair portions of the Shire’s population have been inspired to go out and get commemorative Sharks neck tattoos this last week, rendering them eternally ridiculous. No, they are a team with their own unique problems and fans, and just as Germany is a country now forever stained in our collective consciousness by a string of poorly-received 20^th century wars and related unpleasantness, so too are the poor Sharks. It’s all very unfortunate but then show me something in this world that isn’t.

**Because everybody knows that the way you park provides clues about your essential character. Like when George Costanza compares parking garages to going to a prostitute: why should he pay for it when, if he applies himself, he can eventually get it for free? Yes.

The Shoulder Charge

I tend to be too lazy and depressed to work myself into a froth of indignation and in any case I need to save my energy to expend on anxiety attacks but I appreciate the indignant people who froth and foam. Especially the ones who flesh out my half-baked and unsubstantiated theories. While they are busy doing that I usually just emit a sustained groan and descend deeper into an unseen void.

I understand that the outlawing of the shoulder charge has upset many people, including but not limited to Sonny Bill Williams, who tweeted about it. He also went to see a movie. He had a large popcorn, a Coke, and the clear eyes and smooth visage of one who sleeps soundly at night. Quade Cooper was with him. He didn’t look too good but that’s probably because he’s not, I don’t know. Anyway, the entity behind veritable website thepublicapology.net understood where my concerns rested and tweeted me this picture pointing out the sizes of the Cokes concerned while everyone else was in a shoulder charge related frenzy. It’s nice to be understood.

I myself see nothing much wrong and plenty right with any action that renders men 1. Concussed and lying prone like huge sweating hams, or 2. Reeling around like drunken Irish villagers.

Rugby league is a methodically brutal game punctuated by stylish explosions of violence. The shoulder charge is the very quintessence of the game.

Some are so good that if ever asked to present a solitary work for admittance to a higher realm, the perpetrators would surely consider submitting their finest and most destructive shoulder charge.

But now “people”; brain surgeons and former players, I don’t know, have decided the shoulder charge is a pestilence for all concerned. Dreary repetitive assembly-line mediocrity hangs in the air like the stink of beef tallow out the back at McDonalds. Where is the spirit in this life? The fervor in these times?

Their argument seems to be that it dulls footballer’s brains and wits. 

Footballers are not a people one normally associates with sharp practices. Most of them are already on the brink of incoherence at the start of their playing careers. They seem very nice but they do exhibit an almost effortless idiocy and can seldom maintain a satisfactory level of intellectual discourse as it is; what difference does it make if their brains start to crackle and smoke and sometimes shoot sparks like faulty wall sockets later in their lives, condemning them to a future of witless dereliction and semi-demented poverty? It’s more than most of us are promised.        

 Anyway, there are many things that can disorder and scramble a brain. Youthful pharmaceutical adventures, epilepsy, aneurysms, the heat, the horrors, being brought up from the bottom of the ocean too fast and of course the creeping ineradicable awareness of the decay eating away at the fabric of the world.   

Life is nothing if not a series of traumas big and small.

How to Rear a Well-Adjusted Lamb

Life’s tough, and the world is a cold cruel place. I understand this. Does my little lamb Baby Cakes understand this? I don’t know. But I look into Babby’s eye when she rests her chin in my cupped hand and I think ‘the whole world is here, the whole world is in this eye’.

Lesson: Do transfer your existential angst onto your lamb. They’re orphaned, so they’re vulnerable and will absorb your emotional instability readily. Enjoy creating your legacy.

Babby’s whole life this far has been a series of “What fresh hell is this?” episodes. Her mother died, she and her twin brother were found crying over her cold carcass. Her brother died, I found her crying over his cold carcass.

Then her tail was banded but her distress and discomfort was so great that she ended up having the whole thing sawed off with a cold knife. Lots of blood flowed from her hind quarters. Two days later maggots were found occupying the stump. This is strange; given that it is mid-winter and there are seemingly no flies, but Babby was a problem lamb from the get go.

Lesson: Do worry if you see your tail-less lamb rubbing her junk all over spiky shrubbery in an unusually agitated manner. It may mean maggots have moved in. Don’t worry about blood splatter stains, though. In fact, adopt a laisser-faire attitude toward all excretions and emulsions. They will be plentiful. Your gag reflex will adapt.

Babby was terribly lonely without her brother Boo Boo. She cried. She didn’t want to be alone in what was their yard anymore. I put her there and she panicked. She raced the length of it and then she jumped the fence and came crying to the kitchen door. After this scene repeated itself ten or twelve times I relented and let her roam free. Her idea of roaming free consisted of loitering on the front veranda. This is now her home base. By day she denudes overhanging shrubbery and destroys potted plants, by night she sleeps under my bedroom window and snores gently.

Lesson: Brothers make lives better.

Sheep are burdened with a reputation for being brainless. This is entirely unwarranted. Sheep are furnished with sufficient brains to suit their lifestyles. How much mental exertion does it take to stroll through pastures grazing and socialising and cultivating fine fleece and once a year yielding to a muscular shearer for the entire term of your life? Not a great deal. 

Any more than what they have would be wasteful. Any more would turn them into pigs. We don’t want that. We know what happens with pigs – they loll like crocodiles in their own stinking slop waiting for their caretakers to trip and fall, or suffer a stroke in their presence, AND THEN THEY EAT THEM.

Pigs are sinister and cannot be trusted. Also, their eyes are beady and grotesque. There is no whole world in their eyes. There are appetites in their eyes. Also, Orwell was right. There is every chance that, given the opportunity, pigs will rise up onto two legs and morph into totalitarian tyrants.  

Lesson: Piglets are sweet but pigs are scary. Given half a chance they WILL attempt to take over your farmyard. Keep pigs at your own peril. 

I have many anecdotes about pigs, and most of them are alarming.  Some are unsavoury enough to render them unfit for publication, even in a two-bit blog such as this. Growing up in the Bega Valley, our nearest neighbor was a pig farmer. As a side-project, he captured deadly snakes. The area was rife with death adders. They are a particularly lethal and grotesque snake. He was highly paranoid and heavily bearded, and he lived in dilapidated hermetic squalor. At one time, he had a prize sow. He had named her Lady Diana and she was the jewel in his crown. He treasured her so much that we speculated he installed her in his ramshackle house of a night to provide her with the comfort befitting a treasured and royal pig. He can’t have, though, because one night wild dogs came down from the bush and killed Lady Diana.

Things got a bit strange after that. Eventually, neighbourly relations broke down entirely. 

There are lessons here too numerous to count.

I watched some trashy reality show once; I don’t remember which but it was about repo men in West Virginia or some hick place so obviously it was excellent, and in it there was this large and amorous woman called Big Juicy and she said “I’m gonna lay his ass down and whomp on him like a damn hog on slop”.  

There is a peripheral lesson here and it is this: Don’t ever question whether you watch too much television. There is no such thing as too much television. If anyone else ever questions you, do as I do. Say “I read good books and I watch bad television.” Keep a few additional derogatory and patronizing comments about what you assume (rightly or wrongly, it doesn’t matter) the accuser reads up your elitist sleeve in case an argument ensues. Colleen McCulloch, Ken Follett, Bryce Courtenay and Dan Brown are always reliable vehicles for discrediting a person’s intelligence entirely. 

Anyways, sheep are very underrated. My favourite feature is their hair-trigger twitchiness. They are always prepared to bolt; they keep themselves in a state of cat-like readiness. And don’t let their boxy, bony-legged appearance fool you. They are fit. I drove my car at speed through a flock of sheep the other day and one tripped, at full tilt, lost its footing, rolled, flipped and resumed its footing all in a split second. It was as athletic a maneuver as any NRL winger could manage IF HE WAS LUCKY. I was so impressed I tooted my horn.

Lesson: Sheep appreciate positive feedback as much as the next animal.

For a while there Babby was my lamb of the various sorrows. Lambs are supposed to be international symbols of youth, innocence, sweetness, and all those nice things. Babby was young, yes, but she was sad and scared, lonely as a cloud. Things changed when I got a calf.  I called her Claudia. Babby thinks she is the sun and the stars. The whole thing is like a love story out of a Nicholas Sparks novel.  

Lesson: Occasionally, things actually get better. Shocking, I know.