Raiders v. Dugan - Judgment Day

Spending more time than is probably healthy suckled up to the Dugan tit? You’ve come to the right place.

The problem with Josh Dugan and Canberra was that the Raiders demand low maintenance superstars who hum along quietly. As Dugan developed from raw housing commission colt to sleek thoroughbred his self-regard developed along with him, healthily at first, then not so healthily, until, finally, it became toxic.

 

Basically the Raiders are chronic underperformers and need to conduct themselves accordingly. This means behaving in a humble and gracious manner, and keeping the ostentatious off-field flourishes to a minimum. Dugan’s spirited accommodation of all things ostentatious defied this and, as he tells it, led to him being very cruelly cast out of Canberra and onto some crude scrapheap.

Well, what of it? I mean he’s not the first sports star to suffer under the staggering weight of Australia’s idiotic dislike of grossly-disproportionate-to-talent egotism.

 

Anyway. Tomorrow the Raiders play the Dragons in what is without a trace of hyperbole THEIR GAME OF THE YEAR. Because who among us doesn’t want to see Josh Dugan pay and pay dearly never minding the fact that this desire is pretty much redundant I mean it’s been   months since he was driven out of Canberra and forced to seek asylum with the Dragons and it doesn’t seem to have cost him much at all other than the small matter of his reputation and any lingering shreds of likeability that his increasing abrasiveness hadn’t corroded in the last 12 or so months at the Raiders anyway?

Whatever. Raider fans take what they can goddamn get.   

And as it is I’ve been struggling with this whole sordid trajectory since back when Dugan’s name was first getting mentioned for Origin:

It may help to think of Dugan as an ex. You know how you don’t want to see them reduced to a quivering gelatinous mess without you, but you don’t want the bastard/bitch soaring to lofty new heights since being rid of you either? It’s a fine line and one which Dugan has already overstepped with crude insensitivity.

Before this, even, there was that incident during his first game for the Dragons that constituted an irreparable defilement and has squatted toadishly in a dark recess of my mind ever since – the moment where DAVE DUGAN filled the big screen at Kogarah, wearing a Dragons jersey, grinning and waving and looking as proud and florid as any father ever could. Galling! All those years at the Raiders and the most I ever saw of Daddy Dugan was in the god-awful tattoo of Mr. and Mrs. Dugan on their wedding day that roams across the lower half of one of his son’s legs and stretches even my elastic boundaries of taste.

Let’s not spend a lot of time on this. He is just an asterisk now, and I’ve already exceeded the limits of both my magnanimity and medication on the son of a bitch these last few months. Alls I hope for, aside from an emphatic Raiders victory, is that he comes out of tomorrow’s game ravaged and stripped of swag, like he’s just been worked over by a pack of wild dogs.

It would be nice if I could say this with even a shred of certainty, but of course I can’t what with the Raiders being an inherently untrustworthy outfit prone to fluctuations in mood and manner that make the Greek government look stable. In any case, it’s been real and it’s about to get realer.

 

 

Cameron Frye. I am him.

Having a birthday in a few weeks. Turning thirty.

Birthdays aren’t just ‘birthdays’, of course. Not for adults. They are corrosive mental ordeals; brutal philosophical examinations of the self, annual opportunities for taking inventory of all the time you waste on menial but terribly taxing tasks like standing in line at the post office collecting parcels containing things you don’t remember buying on eBay probably because you make many of your purchases in the dark pre-dawn gloom during dark nights of the soul of which there are evidently many.

This turning thirty business is a bitch any way you look at it. Collapsed youth and raw adult reality collide. A mess is made, a silent soul-stink that rises.   

I feel like a vacant block that’s been burned and left empty. I feel like Cameron Frye.

Here’s something that’s never really made very clear: there is a lot of maintenance work involved with mental health, a lot of up-keep. There’s no end point. It’s ongoing, eternal. It can be overwhelming. Insight is encouraged. You are supposed to closely monitor the way you feel, keeping on top of mood changes and paying close attention to fluctuations and such. This can be difficult if part of your problem is that you don’t much like to feel things, and what you do feel is based on control and denial.  

It can also be exhausting, boring, tedious, circular.  You get a grip, but then you have to maintain.

And you don’t want to talk to anyone about it because you know it will only unnerve them and make you feel even more misunderstood and awkward and neither of these outcomes hold any appeal whatsoever so you say “Oh, I’m alright, I’m okay” and hope you’re holding the soul-stink down. And hope that you don’t have to hear people’s voices shrink and go small with sympathy.

Cameron Frye understood this. It is why he wanted to remain in bed. He was lying in bed on his back genuinely mourning the fact that he was not dead.

Even when Ferris got Cameron out of bed and into the streets and he relaxed some and appeared to enjoy the fact that he was not dead it was clear that his emotional constitution and complex, fragile psyche may have been altogether too delicate to withstand the rigours and ravages of life beyond high school graduation.

He was a teenager but he already reeked of oblivion.  

 My favourite scene in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off:

Ferris: “I’m so disappointed in Cameron! Twenty bucks says he’s in his car right now debating on whether or not to go out.”

Cameron: [Cameron is in his car] “He’ll keep calling me; he’ll keep calling me until I come over. He’ll make me feel guilty. This is uh…This is ridiculous, ok I’ll go, I’ll go, I’ll go. I’ll go. What – I’LL GO. Shit.” [Turns the engine on then turns it off and hits the passenger seat.]

Cameron: “God Damnit!” [Turns the car on and revs it up.]

Cameron: “Ahhhhhhh! Shit!” [Gets out of the car.]

Cameron: “That’s it!” [Paces behind the car and jumps up and down in frustration.]

I like it ‘cos it’s me most days.

Phillip K Dick was this tweaked out science fiction author who wrote the stories that Blade Runner and Total Recall were based on and lived an astonishing ramshackle life and claimed, among other things (‘other things’ being that he was alive and everyone else was dead) that his car would only run between home and his psychiatrist’s office. Take it anywhere else, he said, and it would steer itself right into an accident.

Cameron: [Intoning] “When Cameron was in Egypt land LET MY CAMERON GO”.

Fade to black. Or beige, depending on your personal preference and the intensity level of your perpetual discomfort that annihilates all other thoughts and ambitions.

Like No Other