Anzac Day Unease

Every year things tilt further off balance and it’s causing a grinding, an unease, a wearing away of the parts. I feel like it’s just me and only half of me hopes it isn’t. The other half hopes that it is. Self-generated psychic pain I can deal with. The external gnawings, they take endurance of a special kind, and extract a special price.

Well, we’ll see. Meanwhile the smell of something rotten hangs lower and heavier in the air. It’s like our national neurosis has taken the form of a kind of shit-mist - a dumb ether of confusion and insecurity. Today it hangs at its lowest and heaviest. Next year it will be heavier still – 2014 will start a four-year-long centenary commemoration to cover the years of Australian involvement in WW1. Jesus Mother.  

Australia is still being historicised. We are a fledgling nation, so young that the newly nationalistic clamour surrounding Anzac Day would just be mildly embarrassing and endearing were it not so insidious. The whole thing is unnerving. The pageantry of it is unnerving. The cheap Australian flags, the 4^th of July American style ceremonials, the entire tourist industry built around Gallipoli. But beneath all that shit it’s really the constructs and clichés underpinning the pageantry that are rotting out my nerves and making me want to draw down and bolt shut the shades.

Because  basically it’s all myth. National identity, mateship, the egalitarian, fair go for all idea – all myth. This would be okay were it not for the way that our memorial culture takes collective memory as historical certainty and national truth.

Memory is just a prism through which we negotiate the past, and collective memory by its fucking nature contains constant renegotiations and appropriations over time in accordance with external circumstances, generational shifts and *coughJohnHowardYouCuntcough* political ideologies and agendas.

Yes. Well. It may be Anzac Day for the general pop but for me it is the one day of the year when I mourn for my incomplete national-identity-and-mateship themed thesis. I think about war every other day of the goddamn year alright, on all the days when hams on morning television aren’t providing the fucking narrative.

List of Things That Get On My Nerves

List of Things That Get On My Nerves  

Unsalted food

People who refer to magazines as ‘books’

Grey Nomads

Grey Nomads who call their caravan arrangements ‘rigs’

People with food sensitivities

People who wax lyrical about Shantaram

Shantaram

Olive oil

People who use the terms ‘bucket list’, ‘me time’, ‘retail therapy’ and ‘flick me an email’

Police procedural TV shows

Police

Baz Luhrmann’s ultra-modern soundtracks

Baz Luhrmann movies

Coffee table books

Brunch

The self-help industry

The vitamin industry

South Australia

Women who fan their faces with their hands when crying/trying not to cry

Those inane configurations of ornamental letters people have in their homes spelling out words like Eat, Peace, Love, Family, etc

The words “I’m on a detox”

Rapid fire TV dialogue as popularised by Aaron Sorkin

Instagram food photos

Q&A audience questions, Q&A tweeters, politicians on Q&A, Q&A generally

Animated movies

People who still morally denounce Woody Allen’s choice of wife and use this as a reason for not watching his movies

People, pretty much

Seasons greetings and jingle bells. It’s been real.

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.

What My Boss Barked at Me in Regards to the AFL Grand Final

I thought I was going to be subjected to all manner of talk about the goddamn AFL grand final today at work. I wasn’t. Life can be surprising.

There was only the one mention of it and it was short and surreal and featured my unorthodox and acerbic boss screaming up beside me in his shitbox Brumby. The thing was smoking. You know that bogan slogan, ‘black smoke don’t mean it’s broke’?  It does not apply here. That Brumby is busted. He leaned out the window to enquire how I was going and denied me any opportunity to respond by barking “Christ I was happy the Swans got up – I don’t go for them but JesusGod no fucken way was I gonna sit there and watch that Franklin bastard win anything!”, immediately throwing the Brumby into gear with a great lurch, planting his foot and departing in a spray of sand and topsoil. I didn’t have anything to say in response anyway, it probably worked out for the best. Much like the game itself. From what I understand. Given that I understand absolutely nothing and am AFL agnostic.

Lara Bingle

There seems to be three types of people in this world: those who dislike Lara Bingle, those who are Lara Bingle, and those who bang Lara Bingle - which includes every professional athlete and elite sportsman who lives in, visits, or will ever visit Sydney, as well as random international r&b singers, and, probably, your boyfriend.

I fall into the first category. Lara Bingle shits me. Well, so what. Who doesn't? If all the people who agitate or irritate me were to get their own blog post I would have to become one of those people who are sooooo fucking busy that they feel it necessary - -essential even - to eat and walk at the same time, and thus saunter about the streets choking down hand held food in a grotesque and unseemly manner. No, Lara Bingle gets a post not because she shits me but because she rattles me. More specifically, the flat, crystal emptiness of her eyes rattle me.

I have a strong stomach and steely eye but I cannot - I CANNOT - look into those terrible eyes. They're vacant and clear and they creep me the fuck out. The rest of her face troubles me too, but it's those eyes - devoid of anything one might think of as human - that do strange things to me.

I have a vague theory that Lara Bingle may be Laura Palmer. If Laura Palmer lived in Sydney, in this century, and was a real person and not a father-fucking, coke-whore, prom queen creation from David Lynch's surreal and sick imagination, I mean. Details, details.

Lara Bingle could do well in taking a leaf out of Laura Palmer's book and cultivating an air of seedy intrigue and flesh-creeping mystery. It would make things much more interesting for us: her public. And for her too, I imagine. She could well be carousing in log cabins under the eyes of watchful owls and in One Eyed Jacks type establishments already, of course. This is not beyond the realm of possibility. I imagine Lara Bingle might crackle with sex and its associated psycho-drama; that it might even hang in the air around her to the same degree that Subway stinks up entire streets. And doesn't Brendan Fevola have something of the Leo Johnson about him, only a little less menacing, truck-driving redneck and a little more mouth-breathing jock goon? It's just that Lara Bingle hasn't been murdered so no safety deposit boxes have been posthumously opened and Dr Jacobi-style shrink-tapes have been played so nothing much of a debauched and fabulous nature has been brought to light. This is a shame.




Laura Palmer was Twin Peaks’ sweetheart, she did all that thoughtful stuff for all those weird people – she visited that creepy shut-in Harold and she read to Audrey’s Horn’s wigged-out little brother and as it turned out after she showed up dead “wrapped in plastic!” she also GANGBANGED REDNECKS IN SHACKS FOR KICKS. This is the true definition of ‘it’s complicated’; Lara Bingle, if you’re reading*, none of this trivial ‘how many points do I have left on my license?’ bullshit.

What I'm saying is that Laura Palmer was all complex and tragic and beautiful and doomed, whereas Lara Bingle is about as spoiled and vacant as a Persian cat, with unsettlingly empty eyes and a face that makes me think of nothing so much as Ellsworth Toohey from The Fountainhead barking "Shut your face, kewpie-doll." at some poor bitch. What I'm also saying is that I warned you from the outset that my theory was 'vague', okay?

It doesn't have to be this way, Lara Bingle. Look at Sophie Monk. She's another half-wit blonde hell-bent on some half-baked notion of making it without an end point in sight but instead of arousing animosity or derision she manages to be endlessly endearing. What a difference a personality makes! Sophie Monk is a walking, talking, massive-lipped exploration of frustration and ambition, or frustrated ambition, if you will. The key here is that, in addition to the personality, Sophie Monk seems to posess a degree or two of self-awareness. She also has a charmingly bawdy, Mae West-style sense of humour. I mean, she probably weeps extravagantly while driving in her car some days - don't we all - but she seems to have things in perspective. Not only does Lara Bingle's persepective look to be shot to shit, she also has no discernable sense of humour. This is a fundamental failing from which there really is no recovery. Or none of which I am personally aware, at least. Also, she can't drive for shit. Seriously. She loses her license continuously.

Sophie Monk stands for something; she is a public embodiment of the existential angst we feel as we (I say 'we', I mean 'I') near the end of our twenties and realise all the things we will never be and - this part can be just as if not more troubling - all the things we are.

Here, Sophie Monk emantes a soothing air of 'what-can-you-do' resignation. Her youth gone, style beyond her grasp, she spends her time, which she seems to have plenty of, playing the lead in her own private and frequently, reasurringly public melodrama, yet she still remains someone I would like to know, and even though I don't, feel a great fondness for anyway.

Also, Sophie Monk says some really wack stuff. Like that time earlier this year when she was doorstopped by Hollywood reporters in LA? REMEMBER?? How she told them that Australian Aborigines just “lie around outside and start fires and go to the bathroom wherever they want, but they wear Adidas, which is cool”??? Which led to pap website TMZ.com popinig that "it sounded like the coolest life ever"?? Yeh. Well, compared to life on the D-list, maybe. Still, somebody should really hook her up with the Australian tourism board because Sophie Monk is down with the SHIT.  

One of the keys to happiness, I find, is keeping your expectations low. Another is taking some care to align your ambitions with you talents. This, I feel, is one of the areas where Lara Bingle seems to have strayed from the path of reason and reality. Modest talents – in any field or sense - call for modest ambitions. Balance. Everyone bangs on about balance. The balancing of talents and ambition is a big one. You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, y'know? Nor can you polish a turd. Beauty is a talent, yes, and definitely a currency, but undiminished self-absorption and a relentless drive to stay relevant is not a sustainable ambition. Also, even though many of us seem to have an enormous appetite for celebrity, we tend to tire of vacuous bullshit fairly quickly, so unless Lara Bingle is willing to run her train completely off its tracks in the wildly entertaining style of Britney circa 2008 then we really have a limited amount of time and energy and empathy for her. Listen for the bell, Lara Bingle, because it tolls for thee.  

I think what happened with Lara Bingle is that her looks distorted her perspective. That face enabled her to envisage a perfect, blessed future for herself, but ultimately left her unequipped for this drift towards a confused and irrelevant adulthood that is now well underway. I’m all for personal idiosyncrasies but can’t help but feel that this bitch’s problems have become more substantial as ahe seeks to invest herself with some sort of earthly significance. You can see it in her face – just faintly, because it’s a face as impassive and still as the surface of a pond in a pleasure garden – but it’s there; confusion and a dull, dim-witted unease. Terminal overexposure has seen the slow sink into obscurity begin. 
You could say that the culture of celebrity and the fairytale fame narrative have a lot to answer for due to the unrealistic expectations they engender. Alternatively, you could just say that Lara Bingle is the latest but not the last in a long line of girls who fail to realise that while good looks can take them a long way, an over-reliance on those same looks may leave them stranded, without a map and with no direction home.

*Lara was unfortunately unavailable for comment for this story.

IT'S ALRIGHT, MA (I'm Only Bleeding)

Most people think their mum is the best one going. It's all the rage now, have you noticed? Todd Carney, for example. He seems to think very highly of the long-suffering Leanne.
Well, mine really is the best. Here's why:

We were doing an overnight bushwalk in Tasmania. Some background: I am pretty much incapable of appreciating bushwalking. An argument can be had about whether it represents the sixth or seventh circle of hell, and this is indeed an argument I have had. More than once. Every aspect of it except the actual walking gets on my nerves in a big way, and my nerves, you may have noticed, are shot to shit as it is. I can handle it, but I'd rather not have to, basically. My mother, however, loves it - along with food - more than any rational and moderate person could begin to imagine.

Occasionally the extent to which I find it a complete fucking iritation slips my mind - every few years or so - and I concede to undertaking something with her. What happens is that I just tend to show up, having left everything to her. She is, after all, a professional.

So in Tasmania I wore her clothes and boots, carried a pack she had procured and filled for me and bitched lustily, for, roughly, the day's duration. My bitching bore almost immediate but only maginally gratifying results when we stopped and transferred items - many items - from my backpack to hers.

Later when we - I say 'we', I mean 'she' - were preparing dinner it came to light that the pre-cooked pouch of Indian curry she'd packed fo the two of us was skimpy and would only feed one. She insisted that I be that one. She boiled water and reconstituted it fo me and wouldn't even take a taste, prefering to turn her attention to the only extra, unallocated food she'd packed; a handful of quick-cook oats in a zip-lock baggie. She combined these with water to assemble what can only be accurately descibed as gruel. Gruseome, Oliver Twist-type stuff, devoid of milk, sugar or salt and made with far too much water so that it's only real feature was an unappetising grey slick. She ate it without complaint while wearing a thermal tracksuit set so old it deserves its own heritage listing while I sat on a rock surveying the scene and laughing. A mother, hunched over in a hideous thermal suit in horribly cold conditions, conveying sad grey gruel from saucepan to stomach and a laughing succubus daughter, fed, warmed and full-up on her mother's sacrifice.

Still, I think, as I laughed, that she made a series of gestures that I believe I interpreted correctly as invitations to fuck off. Oh well. Apparently even Thomas Jefferson kept a black slave to help him handle his sexual frustrations -  no paragon of virtue is perfect*, in other words.

*My brother would do well to bear this in mind. Haranguing her and ranting like King Lear on the heath is not working out for him, for her, or for me and without meaning to seem macabre, the words 'sorry', 'when', 'she's' and 'dead' seem sadly fitting.  (As do 'get', 'over', 'your' and 'self', just quietly...)



Track 10



Off Season:Off Rocker - join the dots.

Greetings, friends. Welcome to the abyss. That certain haunted quality you see in the eyes around you and, worse, the two reflected in the mirror? This is what comes of looking into the face of something horrible - THIS IS WHAT THE OFF-SEASON LOOKS LIKE. Don't be alarmed. Stick with me, and together we will familiarise ourselves with some of the symptoms and sensations you are likely to experience. For those of you who already know not of what I speak of, I hate you. I also demand that you leave and go be functional someplace else. ToddBlog is no place for the well-adjusted.

Okay. Lets proceed.

You may now be recognising the grinding monotony of life without football, i.e. life devoid of weekly displays of heaving, unbridled masculinity punctuated by explosions of violence - and finding it completely unacceptable. I know you are, honey, I know you are.

You may be finding yourself bereft of a sense of purpose. Aimless, loose-ended, potentially lethal. You're not alone. We will know each other by the yellows of our eyes and the whites of our knuckles.

You may be reflecting retrospectively on your team's season with a roughly 70/30 ratio of artery-swelling, throat-gulping pride and simmering dissatisfaction and resentment - bearing in mind that this is a sliding scale that very much takes into account ladder position, off-field and back-room shenanigans, coaching ineptitude (hey Furner, whatup fool?) season-spanning injuries (Terry Campese, word) and the like. Brace yourself. This can be a long and complicated process spanning the entire summer. Fortify your rage - because there will be rage - with a series of stiff drinks. This will allow you to take charge of your grievances as they arise; then master them, lay them to rest and move on. Ideally. Individual results may vary.

You may be shuffling around saying "bum a light?" to strangers in the streets and you don't even smoke. You may still be subject to unannounced and aneurism-inducing flashbacks of Paul Gallan's Origin heroics at the most unlikely and inappropriate of times - and if you're not then your behaviour troubles me, frankly. You may be contemplating the long run of gloom known as the off-season and thinking that perhaps a boyfriend could be a good way to fill the next few months. You may be feeling very fragmented and irritable and when people call you out on this you may be liable to bark "LOOK I'M GOING THROUGH A PERIOD OF SERIOUS MENTAL READJUSTMENT OKAY?!" into their faces from very close range.

You should be thinking of all the exotic and unknowable promise that next season holds, and reveling in the romance of the slight rushes of blood to the head and heart that this inevitably triggers. When it gets especially grim you should roll a little reel in your head of Johnathan Thurston laughing that remarkable, full-faced laugh of his, or go one better and remind yourself of his eyes and the bad things they do to you. You may find yourself investing heavily in the Australian Open. This is perfectly acceptable. Fact: Male tennis players are really, really good looking nowadays. Embrace it.

You may now find yourself unwittingly taking your problems back to their actual source, and consequently finding that the source is usually yourself. After spending many months blaming, say, Matt Orford for all the ills of the world this can be distressingly confronting. Ride it out. The off-season has long been the time when our weaknesses and deprivations are starkly revealed. To what end is entirely up to you.

Of course, there is also the very real possibility that you may not be going through any of this. I've heard rumours that well-balanced individuals whose highly capable and rational minds don't snag on and then give themselves over entirely to certain thoughts or things or themes actually do exist. Well, good for them. And by 'good for them' obviously I mean 'those bastards will get theirs soon enough'.

Ultimately, know that the football-shaped void within cannot be filled. Paper over it as best you can - barbeques, party drugs, summer fruits, the cricket, whatever works - and I'll see you on the Other Side. In other words, if anyone needs me prior to March 2012 I'll be in my bedroom, rocking.

Steady as She Goes

I want to write a coherent and lucid post, really I do, but I think it may be beyond me today. Nevermind. If what follows is at all jarring, it's because I've got the clanks. If you don't know what that is, interpret it to mean that I resent you, your existence and your rude good health right now.

According to the American Food and Drug Administration's list of withdrawal symptoms for this particular bitch drug, it also means that dizziness, nausea, vertigo, vomiting, headaches, tingling in the extremities, irritability, nightmares, anxiety, insomnia and excessive sweating are par for my course. There's a further, more cautionary warning that basically confirms what I have long suspected, ie. that I really am, for good or ill, a 1 percent-er, because  "In extreme cases, abruptly discontinued use results in confusion, a severe, constant irritable mood, and seizures." Well, two outta three 'aint bad, although I want to amend the list to include shaking legs and hands, pins and needles of the scalp, muscular pain, sensitivity to noise, light and sudden movement, and extreme eyeball pain. Seriously.  It hurts to do anything other than look straight ahead right now. Not good. Wimbledon's on.

A little context. Take the worst and most debilitating hangover you've ever had, combine it with the most toxic and potent chemical comedown you've ever had (if you've ever spent time at Rainbow Serpent, just count the 4 or 5 day long aftermath as your benchmark of suffering here), multiply it by ten or twelve, throw in some randomly occuring tremors, night terrors and a desire to rip the hair and scalp clean off your head and you get the general idea.

The thing is, I already find a huge proportion of life to be almost unbearably irritating as it is. There are annoyances at every turn, and if it's not one fucking thing it's another. Space does not permit a comprehensive survey of the singular grievances that get under my skin, but here's one just off the top of my head: salespeople in service stations who over the last few years have apparently been programmed to try and sell you things - king sized Cherry Ripes and the like - that you don't want and haven't asked for. I know it must hardly seems possible that I may wish to purchase petrol and petrol only, given the fact that I'm patronising a PETROL STATION and all, but, astonishingly, it is so. Anyway, I can't think about such things at the moment without getting a headache and homicidal urges so let's move along. 

To counter-balance the strong bitch, bitch, bitch elememt of this post, I should point out that, make no mistake, some things fill me with gratitude and wonder. Roadside produce stalls, those wind-sock men that sometimes blow around in front of car yards, horses rolling on their backs and kicking their legs in the air, lambs and polar bears, old ladies selling slice on trestle tables in the street, dogs on utes, blimps, daily newspapers, the Ganges, Bukowski, football - obviously......

See? It''s not all 'stop the world I want to get off'.

Also, I love more than anything when people split their pants. Nothing is funnier than that.


I suspect that if I ever make it to Leichardt Oval and get to stand on that hill under those Moreton Bay fig trees screaming and spraying beer around that the experience will make it straight onto my list of things of mystery and wonder as well. Nevermind the fact that I imagine I'll be there in my lime green, in all likelihood watching the Raiders being carved up like a Christmas ham by the Tigers, which is how their meetings tend to play out, let's be honest. No, nevermind that, because it will be incredible, and besides, you have to respect a good hoodoo.

I think it was the prospect of the Storm playing at Leichardt on Sunday afternoon that saw me momentarily lose focus - by which I mean I started watching 'Harry Loves Lisa' on the Lifestyle channel and missed the start of the game. For the uninitiated, Lisa is Lisa Rinna, she of the grotesquely over-inflated lips, and Harry is her hot silver fox husband Harry Hamlin, who played the evil Aaron Eccles in Veronica Mars. To great aplomb, I might add.

The episode's arc saw Harry, who as far as I can tell is what is commonly referred to in showbiz circles as 'washed up', reading for a part in an audition, thinking he nailed it and then receiving alarming feedback letting him know he not only missed out on the part but also "gave a bizarre reading and freaked everybody in the room out". His acting coach suggested he may be a touch too intense, which saw Harry decide to lighten up with a little stand-up comedy, and one of his proposed jokes went like this:

       "You ever tried to fuck on a waterbed - it's like fucking on a wave - YOU CAN'T DO IT!"

BoomTISH, right? As for Lisa, she is, aside from the monstrous lips, exactly the same as Kris Kardashian and until I see them in the same room together I will consider them to be the same person.

Anyway, I only watched a few minutes before I came to my senses and remembered that Austar will replay the episode every four or five hours over the course of the coming week and possibly for all of eternity too, should I wish to revisit it.


So. Switching over to the Tigers/Storm game the first thing that struck me was that every Storm player and their dog were carring head or face injuries and were not only wearing but fucking rocking an assortment of headbands and facial bandages. Except Billy Slater, who had no headband and was merely wearing his usual expression which - for the ignorant or the blind - can only be described as a shit-eating smirk. And Cameron Smith, he too was unadorned, lounging on the interchange bench and looking hairy as hell.

Meanwhile, Cooper Cronk was rushing around nailing multiple 40/20s and competing on every play and herding players around like a frenzied kelpie and just being his usual over-achieving self. Cronk is fierce. There is no denying this fact. Also, he is unintentionally halarious, and kind of awesome too. I'd elaborate but I really can't bring myself to say nice things about Storm players so we'll leave it well alone and I'll just post some pictures of his pretty self instead.

The interesting thing of it is that Cronk's intensity doesn't grate on me in the way that, say, Cameron Smith's does. Sometimes Smith's eyes burn like I imagine an angry God's eyes would and I physically flinch, that's how intense he can get.

On the other hand, Michael Ennis is one of the fiercest competitors in the game; he allegedly researches players' lives, gleans personal information and uses it against them during games via volleys of expletive-laden sprays and I have nothing but love for the guy. He also wears head-tape with rakish panache, so to me he's pretty much god's gift.

Did y'all see in Origin II when Sam Thaiday dropped the ball, I think early in the second half, and Ennis charged over, got right up in his grill and bellowed what I can only imagine was a string of choice, A-grade sledges into Thaiday's startled face? Sadly I'll never have the details of what was said, but I have a fertile imagination and, also, I have a thing or two I wouldn't mind screaming into Thaiday's face given half a chance, so I think I can fill the blanks.

So, yes, steady as she goes. Steady as Peter Garrett's dancing, or, say, Brett Stewart after an NRL season launch...