Phone Conversation With My Mother

Cast of characters:

Richie – stepfather

Jasper - dog

Narrator – mother

 “Richie opened a can of water chestnuts 18 months past their used by date and fed some to Jasper and put the rest in his fried rice and when I told him later that you could get botchalism from eating spoiled canned goods and said ‘oh it’ll probably be alright as long as the can wasn’t bulging’ he said ‘the can was bulging’. And so then I said ‘well botchalism has about an 80 to 90 percent fatality rate’ and he got quite upset – not about himself but about Jasper, he was saying ‘Oh if Jasper dies of botchalism I’d have to die too – and I’d want to be buried in the same coffin with him, in the same grave.’”

My Brother is a Self-Hating Raider Fan

The Raiders.

Maddening.

They madden no one more than my brother.

It pains him to follow them, yet he does so forensically.

They drive him to aggressive distraction, yet he cannot stop with them.

It’s a deeply complicated business. To cope, he does what we do when those we love but wish to Christ we didn’t love disappoint and pain us – he treats them with obsessive cruelty and holds them in serious contempt.

And while he claims to wish he could quit them, somewhere, in the dark recesses of his brain and bone marrow, there is great love and tenderness for the Raiders.  The conflict this creates  - great and abiding loyalty overlaid with everyday weariness and woe – is essentially what makes him a self-hating Raider fan.

My phone reception was down all night so we didn’t get to exchange the usual stream of profound and brutal texts. He doesn’t have Foxtel so he goes out in public to watch them and this probably magnifies his pain when they lose but he seems to like sitting among down-and-outs and listening to their unique commentary and some of the things he hears we immediately incorporate into our own commentary, like a few years ago, when Daniel Vidot made a break, and an old man stiffened, sat up ramrod straight and screamed “RUN YOU PIECE OF SHIT!” We use that one a lot.

In the early hours of the morning my sleep was ruptured by my phone barring up and receiving texts, including the mysterious question from my best friend: “Are you the feminist environmental league????” but mostly coming from my brother.

They are looking alright but no better than the Warriors. What happened to Shillo? Is Earl down too?

William called. No voicemail message was left.

God Croker is a ball hog – pass it to your winger you fool IT’S A TEAM SPORT.

William called. No voicemail was left.

This is turning into rot.

William called. No voicemail was left.

Total rot.

William called. No voicemail was left.

This is the worst set I have ever seen.

William called. No voicemail was left.

This is killing me.

 

Apparently it didn’t kill him because after he’d left (“the place went OFF after that last Lee try!”) and returned home he had the wherewithal to call my old broke-down phone, which I had had the wherewithal to switch on, and after raving excitedly about the mystifying nature of the Raiders, which is what we do following 90% of their wins and most of their losses too when I think about it, he said “Alright I have to go – my Kiev’s will be overdone – I slipped home at halftime to put them in the oven – but I tell you, if they’d lost I would have come home and thrown them against the wall!”

He would have, too, and the thing is it requires almost no imagination to envision the circumstances in which this could have occurred. Maddening.

The Raw Obscenity of Tom Waterhouse & Associated Social Decays

This stinking age we live in, Christ. A return to the age of the cave looks more and more appealing. This, and I’m not even depressed. Fun Fact: I’m too bone-tired to feel depressed over the summer months because I’m busy working like a goddamned Aesop grasshopper so as I can spend the autumn and early winter months idle and unhinged, fully immersed in neuroses, woe and NRL.

And still -  through this brutal summer landscape -  blasts a drugs in sports scandal. I was very shook up and wretched for the first week following the announcement, braced for turbulence, calling and haranguing my mother spluttering IT’S NOT JUST THE RANK ILLEGALITY THAT OFFENDS -  -  and then getting rolling and shouting overwrought things like THE CLUBS HAVE FAILED IN THEIR DUTY OF CARE THOSE FUCKERS HAVE FAILED THEIR LEAGUES THEIR PLAYERS THEIR FANS -  -  spouting vicious theories regarding lax administration, festering corruption and Machiavellian plotting and then rounding it all off with some rude references to Tom Waterhouse.  

Well, why not? Waterhouse’s high visibility and shit-licker visage make him an obvious poster-boy for the unease surrounding the morphing of sport into the entertainment industry and the unprecedented extent to which it has been seduced and subverted by gambling interests and oriental fish tattoos.

And then the Raiders were named. The Raiders?? The Raiders!! They of the hapless fadeouts and injuries in endemic proportions? Is there no decency at all remaining in this heinous fucking age? These are dark waters.

But three weeks later and the whole thing has become a tremulous melodrama with unsavory political associations and the consistency of your mother’s Christmas trifle. You know, wobbly.  And here, the murk descends.

Because Australian sport is about much more than sport.

For most of us, our first and most powerful response is emotional. My earliest memory of rugby league is my big brother crawling under his bed in the manner of a dying dog after Penrith beat Canberra in the grand final and not coming out for quite some time.

And because sport is essentially human drama. I suspected this deeply at the time of that grand final loss, and adult hindsight confirms the impression.

And now, twenty two years after that Raiders Panthers game, the totally unsurprising revelation that the brutal, pigs-at-the-trough commercialisation of sporting codes has correspondingly commercialised the market for performance enhancing drugs. Professionalism gives winning an obscenely greater value than merely competing. And a win at all costs culture cultivates fertile soil for corruption. All of this is a rank affront ; the shadow, the murk, the stupidity, the limping bullshit, the lies. We are all under our beds now.

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”

This is Pretty Much All I've Done With My Life So Far

OhMama MY MIND. I’m going out of it.

I thought last weekend was bad. This is worse. But by worse I really mean better. Because obviously it’s fucking awesome and exciting and this week I have been as happy as I ever expect to be.

The tension, though, it takes a toll. I have an edgy nature and a diagnosed anxiety disorder and have carefully assembled my life in such a way so as to remove or negate as many extraneously stressful or disruptive elements as possible. Friends, for example.

Finals football is taking me right to the edge and I’ve also ramped up my coffee intake which has in turn ramped up the strength and duration of my facial twitches and people have been confined to their beds with leather straps for less or so I’m told but anyway it’s been great it’s been real.

((I’m just kidding about the facial twitching business. The majority of my twitching occurs when I eat big green feta-stuffed olives at Christmas time and it’s usually confined to one eye.))

After taking Monday off and giving serious consideration to not going in all week I showed up on Tuesday but warned my boss not to expect much too much as “It’s a big week for me.” He is used to my nonsense and he doesn’t ask questions, aside from the rhetorical ones he barks continuously (see several posts back). Like yesterday, noticing that I was extremely early “WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE YOU SHIT THE BED DID YOU” at a volume that suggested he was communicating from the midst of a roaring blizzard and not, you know, leaning into my car window and about fifteen centimetres away from my face.  

All week I have been slightly obsessed with Josh Young Bull Papalii. His fiery exchanges with Paul Gal took me completely by surprise. They also seemed to surprise and unnerve Gallen. Here is what The Young Bull said: “Furnsey just told me to look after Gallen out there, it was a big ask and I still can’t believe I finished it off. He’s real experienced and a real scary guy, too.”

Here is what the Old Bull said: “I don’t really care about Papalii, he hit a dog shot with a swinging arm, and once in the back without the ball. He was coming from the blindside a lot. He got me high and from the back, he did well the boy.”

I feel terrible for Gal and wish the Sharks could have made it through too so I can’t go to town on this too much. I’ve tried. What happens is I think of Gal giving the Origin losers speech this year and last, and Gal being interviewed after the Raiders knocked them out, and Gal finishing his eighth double scotch of the evening at home in Cronulla every night since Saturday like a character out of a Raymond Carver story, blankly staring into the middle distance and considering the irrevocable march toward middle age, early-onset arthritis, death, and the very real possibility that the Sharks may not win a premiership on his watch and perhaps anybody else’s watch either during his lifetime which is rapidly ticking down tick tick tick jesus christ it’s enough to make you sick it’s enough to make any man take to drink hmmm that reminds me look at that mine’s empty again ANN?? ANN!!!!!  

But, Papalii. He really did do well. Every item written about him mentions his soft voice, his shy nature, his gentle soul and his enormous appetite. All viable topics. But - and I can scarcely believe it myself - no one has addressed the enormity of his thighs. I don’t know. Perhaps – just a hunch - my priorities differ from other people’s. Someone complained that this blog had become increasingly “unnecessarily homoerotik (sic)” to which I said a. no homoerotika (sic) is unnecessary and b. are you familiar with rugby league at all hello?

I don’t think it matters what I write about the thighs. If your world view is anything like mine and you see the chilling dystopian landscape through a graphic, luridly perverted lens you will be mesmerised by the comically muscular thighs and the unfortunate cut of short from which said thighs burst forth from volcanically in the above photo and will find your eyes swiveling back there because you find the sight so attractively appalling.

His head is also hilarious. My brother says it reminds him of a totem pole. I say it looks like something you would see on Easter Island. Either way, it too is enormous, and awesome, obviously.  - *Automatic eyeball swivel* -  But sweet jesus those are some truly thick thighs!! Thicker than molasses. Thicker than thieves. Thicker than Trent Barrett. Not as thick as Mark Gasnier.

Raised Fist, Foaming Hysteria

Certain things leave an indelible impression. Imprinted once, impossible to unremember. Things happen; things are said and from then on and for forever you don’t just remember how you felt but where you were and what you were doing when you felt it.

Now, New Norfolk Tasmania will forever fire my core and stir in me an evocative emotional response. I will remember where I was walking and how the sky looked and that the man with the rats-tail and the Willie Loman posture was coming quite close to me jesus god why is he coming so close to me?...

Just prior I had said we need to stop in this town this town is extremely inbred and these people have many problems let’s mingle among them and flaunt our robust genetics and revel in the fact that we have roofs furnishing our mouths and let’s also buy some cream to spoon over the top of those strawberries we got…  

I couldn’t see a supermarket I stopped to ask the old ladies “five dollars forty nine for ONE CAULIFLOWER” “oh you’re JOKING Shirl” in Vinnie’s they directed me towards Woolworths and on the way my phone surged into service and started hemorrhaging messages.

The last three were from GavSpaz and unopened made my heart seize up and scrunch down into a fist inside my chest so that I was only able to wheeze words to the effect of I CAN’T OPEN THESE I CANNOT DEAL WITH WHAT WILL BE IN THESE MESSAGES I’M NOT READY

As I was summoning the courage to open them and face whatever realities lay within the phone rang in my hand a blast from the angel Gabriel’s trumpet it was a private number I just assumed it to be my brother and answered it by barking “YES, WELL WHAT WAS THE RESULT??!”

“What” he said, “didn’t you read your messages?”*

                                                                               --------

I can’t really say what happened from there. I think there was a fist raised in the air, I think it was my fist but it could have belonged to Mussolini on the balcony, or Stanley Kowalski or Lleyton Hewitt or any of the Jersey Shore cast on the dance floor or anyone who has ever raised their fist held it aloft in the air and pumped it in a heightened/unhinged emotional state…

*These were his messages:

1.    Raiders look absolutely shithouse

2.    I hope you haven’t bothered driving somewhere to watch this, they fucking stink

3.    Dane Tilse kicking on the 6^th tackle sums up the day

4.    Coming good in the second half though….

5.    And Croker got a critical kick – there is something new!

6.    Ferguson having a blinder. He thinks this is fun!

7.    Great comeback. Huge! Down 22 to 6 halftime but came back and gave em a floggin, scored 36 unanswered points in 2^nd half to win 42 to 22

BUDDHA WAS RIGHT

Football Fatigue.
The giddying early-season flush of Austen-esque Raider romance has reformulated itself into steely-eyed irritation and associated urges to head out on weekly stabbing sprees.

What is particularly galling about this is that the person who should be crumbling, sobbing, into a ball of recrimination and self-loathing (coach Furner) is not. He continues to sail along blithely, with no regard for my shredded nerves and the unpleasant gloom that has taken root like fungus on my soul.

Speaking of fungus and unpleasantness, a hygiene related boil virus is going through the Raiders camp right now. My brother tells me this is the second outbreak to sweep the club in the last several years. He also tells me with a good deal of severity that this is a sign of a fundamentally unprofessional and deeply flawed club.

He’s right. The club has an image problem, a coach problem, an injury-rate problem, a recruitment problem, a completing-sets problem and a hygiene problem.

Once I discovered this mysterious, sinister lesion on one of my butt cheeks. I was in a third world country; I thought it was Japanese impetigo. I thought if the government got wind of my dangerous and contagious lesion I would be seized upon re-entry to Australia and quarantined like a dog. None of this happened, and after ten or twelve weeks the lesion eventually stopped festering and faded out. My point is that certain things – unsanitary behaviours and viruses and such, are permissible and even expected in far flung places where running water is scarce and goiters are many. I know it’s a nowhere place full of nowhere people that feels for all the world like it’s in the middle of fucking nowhere, but Canberra’s entire existence is based on its proximity to Melbourne and Sydney: IT IS NOT FAR FLUNG.

Anyway. I’m fatigued. The third-world hygiene problems sweeping the Raiders only add to my funk. I am burning out, sailing on exhausted, mid-season seas.

Occasionally I am seized with an irritable envy for the excitement that Storm or Bronco or Bulldog supporters must be feeling as their teams put down roots at the top of the ladder. Or for the enchantment of possibility that Cowboy or Shark supporters must be experiencing, even as their teams are inevitably ground down by the wheels of the world in the coming months.

But then… My friend sent a text during that Cowboys Raiders rubbish last weekend that perfectly encapsulates the existential angst underpinning the very act of supporting the Raiders:  “I try to be a good person…what have I done to deserve this? Buddha was right – life is suffering. Especially if you’re a Faders fan…..” … and this reminds me that my suffering allows me feelings of lofty, martyr-like superiority.

My God, this must be how religious zealots feel. I find this realisation a trifle unsettling.

Speaking of suffering, Josh Dugan busted his ankle at the end of the Cowboys match. It put a macabre flourish on the whole sorry evening. It was tropical Townsville but it was as grim as late 80s Warsaw.

Sad.

Josh Dugan Where You At

Furner, Just Admit It.

The Raiders are deeply entrenched – languishing, even - in the hog-wallow at the bottom of the ladder. They have lost their grip. Watching them play requires a great, marrow-taxing exertion of patience and stamina. It leaves me wrung-out, and with a filthy feeling that lingers for a long time. Who needs this? Not fucking me.

At the very least, their work-rates and demeanors are not living up to that of their namesakes.  The Vikings were manly and drank out of skulls and didn’t take any crap from anybody. I can’t help feeling like the Raiders have moved far, far away from these roots. Victor the Viking’s pre-game dancing is more menacing than the entire current Raiders playing team combined. I’m no marketing expert, but I think this means brand Raider has an image problem.

Of course, the Raiders also have injury problems. This is convenient, as it allows David Furner to maintain his veneer of delusion and lies when confronted with suggestions that things may not be going so well for him as coach.  News of inane and bizarre injuries do not help. In fact, it is fucking distracting. For example:

Jack-Boom Wighton is out for the season after a freak accident sustained WHILE BOUNCING ON A TRAMPOLINE AT HIS HOME which did terrible damage TO HIS LITTLE TOE. (My brother, spluttering and very near speechless – “A trampoline??? Does he have kids??? Who bounces on a trampoline??? Who even has a trampoline???)

What can you say? He lives in Canberra. It’s a full life.

((“Just twelve months ago, young Jack Wighton was working as an office trainee packing envelopes at Raiders headquarters in Canberra.”)) 

Anyway. Watching that god-awful 40-0 affair on the weekend I was struck afresh by their irredeemable badness.

Still, I felt cheered because I thought for sure that the fact that coach Furner is grooming the corpse of a dramatically dead football team had been demonstrated perfectly over an entire 80 minute period. And, y’know, I was hoping that this would lead to his termination and expulsion. Effective immediately.

Yeah, no. Not only did this not happen, he also said he took a variety of positives from the game. Astonishing! The man is committing numberless offences against my sensibilities; he’s turning me into a mouth-frothing hell-cat, I’m losing my fucking grip here and he thinks things look positive?? Fuck you, Furner!

I have enough yawning-void and looming-ruin type stuff in my daily life. Plus there’s winter to contend with. Winter brings a whole raft of problems. How to source a bulk load of the goose fat I like to coat myself in, for example.  It also requires a substantial rearranging of my fragmented psyche. So, you know, I really do not need an additional motive for agitation here.   

I could do without the Raiders sucking this badly, basically.

Jarrod Croker.  Jesus-mother, we need to talk about Jarrod.

(("This counts as a tackle, right??"))

Croker doesn’t look like he is even playing football anymore. Croker looks like he is playing a game of Catch the Oily Pig, and not actually catching any oily pigs.  

Is it neurological wherewithal he lacks? Is anemia or neuralgia or something causing him to be a slow flaccid mess? He hasn’t always missed this many tackles has he? Surely he hasn’t always been so absurdly, cartoonishly bad? Why is no one talking about him? Is it because he already looks like a refugee from a Dickens tale who is prone to suicidal despair? Why is no one talking about the Raiders in general? Why does Travis Waddell still have a contract? Why hasn’t anyone keyed Furner’s car/face/person? Why does Furner still have a contract??

Am I the only one asking these questions?

Here are the texts my brother sent me during and after the game. He too feels this hurt very deeply.

I just walked in to see the try from a scrum knock on. Great work

Furner can’t read

Marshmallow

Jasper would be able to tackle better than that   (Jasper is our mother’s foolish crippled whippet.)

That is about as good as Croker can do – tackle a man who is already down

Did he let in another?

What are the commentators saying?

Titans aren’t going to finish last and I can see the Panthers and Eels springing a few more upsets, so you know where that leaves us…

I’m long gone   (he left – fled, you could say)

Dugan looked uncomfortable from what I saw of him – will he be wearing 6 next week?

Wouldn’t matter how bad he went, with Furner in charge and Croker still in 3, Dugan could let in 50 points a game and still be 6 in 2015.

Not that I blame Dugan of course

Furner….

Were there comments about Furner or the future of the club?

Jesus… But the club will not ever change anything will it… Keep the coach and keep re-signing shit players. In HQ they must think that everyone else is wrong and their time will come. The 3^rd Reich will be back before the Raiders.

Aside from all the obvious issues, they are not going to win games without a real captain who can talk at the players. Campo wasn’t much of a captain but he was still the best man for the job. They really need to consider buying a senior marquee player. Like Orford….

God damn, just kick them out of the comp so no one has to care anymore. And let Furner carry the drinks and the oranges at halftime.

Watching Footy Show highlights of Tiger tries and Croker was involved in all tries (apart from one)!!!

--------

“They” “say” a little failure is good. Gives your face some texture.

“They” also “say” drinking your morning urine is a useful and healthful habit.

“It” is all “relative”, but, really, enough already.  

Dad

My estranged father moved from Bermagui to Canberra. Or: from coastal hamlet to capitalist wasteland.  He used to spend his weekends hallucinating inside sweat lodges. By unhappy association my brother and I did too.

Our family was fractured, fraught.  There were strictly enforced drop-off and pick-up systems in place, there were insecure new step-parents trying to establish dominance, there was terrible tension, tightly clenched jaws and always an awful sense of things unsaid, of hostilities unspoken, of rupture.  

My chest always felt tight; clenched, like it had a huge hand around it, like it was being squeezed inside the fist of a huge, idle ogre.  

Amid all this upheaval I think my father may have made some subtle appeals to our childlike desires to please to get us into those sweat-lodges.

They would spend days building them – hacking down wattle saplings and digging holes and heating rocks and draping tarps and smearing themselves with ochre, and the only sensation I can recall during this lead-up is one of deep, fatalistic foreboding.

Inside they were crowded and dark and terrifying. We were urged to withstand the searing heat and distinct sensation of suffocation for as long as possible.

The child who could stay in longest was often given something afterwards as reward, perhaps a packet of Rizlas, or a fossilised piece of dog-shit, or a shriveled length of umbilical cord of uncertain origins.

To this day I have quite a bit of trouble with confined and close spaces. If there’s heat involved I become additionally distressed. Wild of eye and wanting to tear strips of flesh from my face and neck, that kind of thing.

Along with the heat and the steam and the suffocating terror that we were forced to suppress the sweat-lodges were filled with naked and hallucinating hippies. This included my father. I have residual issues here too, with naked and hallucinating hippies in general, and with my father more specifically*.  

Moral of story: none.

*Not really in regards to the sweat-lodges per se. It was the Far South Coast in the late eighties, they were Sanyasins, Osho** was big back then, whatever.

**Osho was the holy man, the Bhagwan, the head of the Orange People. Naturally he had a very long beard. Osho is probably most famous for the large collection of Rolls Royce cars he amassed, reported to be 93 at final count. This didn’t sit well with some. Some Sanyasins saw the cars as unrivalled tools for obtaining publicity, others as a good business investment or as a kind of spiritual test, others as an expression of Osho’s scorn for middle-class aspirations and yet others as an indication of the love of his disciples. Someone called James S. Gordon opines that what Osho loved most about the Rolls Royces, apart from their comfort, was “the anger and envy that his possession of so many – so absurdly, unnecessarily, outrageously many – of them aroused.” Well, yeh. I can see that.  

It was a worldwide movement. I had no concept of it back then. When I was nineteen and living in a caravan park in North Queensland I read an entire book written by Osho without knowing who he was, without knowing that he was the fucking Bhagwan, the man whose death in 1990 had all those hippy Orange People wailing and flailing and chanting back when I was small and confused and clenched.   

Osho discouraged marrying and having children. since he saw families as inherently prone to dysfunction and destructiveness. He encouraged sterilisation and abortion.

Kearney is a Country Song, Furner is a Fuckwit.

My brother texted me. You know how you can see the first line of text before you open it? Well the first line was ‘Furner has stood down’ –  four words that exude an undeniable romance, no? The rest of the text, not so much - ‘Dugan and Ferguson from Friday for being drunk. Another great decision’ – By ‘great decision’ I think he means to say that it was an act of startling originality and initiative that has left everyone gaping in admiration; acts which are typical of Furner.  

Fucking Furner. The man is a deadest moron. His contract should be terminated, effective immediately. Not only does he lack the moral fiber and intellectual rigour to be a first grade coach, he doesn’t even have the courtesy to conduct himself in the manner expected of struggling coaches. Stephen Kearney does this very, very well. He doesn’t just wear that look of burnt-out weariness, of sad exasperation, he fucking owns it. He looks like a man who is saddled with a losing team and all the woes of a country music song – behind in his rent, no health insurance, a car that won’t run, walks with a limp from a workplace injury, can’t afford to pay his therapist… He also always looks as if he wants a cigarette. This is all very effective. Acknowledging the looming voids elicits respect and sympathy. Matt Elliot pretended to hang himself via his tie in a Panthers press conference and we not only ate it up, we understood. Furner just becomes flintier of eye and sharper of tone as the pressure and criticism mounts. It’s all wrong.  Additionally, awfully, he looks like a cop. A tightly wound, head-kicking cop.  

Of course, Kearney doesn’t have the reassuring presence of his similarly blockheaded brother in the boardroom safeguarding his job. This means that he comes across as genuinely distressed and apologetic and frustrated. Furner just looks stupid, stubborn, smug and despotic.   

Has he confused the gurglings of his unconscious with the voice of God? It’s a common mistake.  The same thing happened to Saint Paul on the road to Damascus, to Silvio Berlusconi (BUNGA BUNGA!) and may have occurred inside the mind of Greg Inglis for a while there when he was referring to himself in the third person and flip-flopping on the Broncos and being fat and such. It happens. To wit: that pop-up weather guy from Prime, Daniel Gibson. He says the most random and bizarre things, in such an erratic fashion, and only ever fleetingly refers to either the weather or to what most of us would consider reality. He seems unhinged, but who cares? He’s a two-bit regional weatherman. Furner is a fucking coach. His idiocy and incompetence upsets a great deal of people. It’s not right.  

Daniel Gibson. Don't be fooled, he's fucking nuts.

The obvious validity of my grievances will be available for everyone to see tonight, when the rest of the Raiders (minus Dugan and Ferguson) play the Rabbitohs – who I look upon with a loathing that is slightly below bottomless. On free-to-air. In prime time. The Horror.

The Raiders are a Russian Novel

Last Sunday, my god.

That Raiders Roosters game was full of abominations too monstrous to describe or even name.

A week has passed. The immediate, astonished horror has worn off, but everyday objects still have the sharp angry edges they took on shortly after kick-off. I mean, MY GOD. I legit started thinking some kind of extraterrestrial invasion was underway. If I hadn’t been so transfixed by the suffocatingly slow unfolding of scenes on my television screen I would have been down on my hands and knees searching for hidden microphones in the kitty litter or something.   

As it happened, part way through the diabolical second half a tiny muscle under my right eye leaped and began to twitch and for the rest of the game the erratic behaviour of my face perfectly reflected the erratic behaviour of both teams. Once the rotten stinking curtain was rung down on the game my face stopped jerking but a kind of soupy, confused mist seethed into my brain and settled over things. Everything pretty much as usual for the week that followed, then, except for the grimmer than usual drive of blood in my skull and a great sense of foreboding – perversely gripping -  regarding Monday night’s Raiders Tigers game.  Football. Jesus God.

The thing about the Raiders is that they’re so unpredictable, so unknowable. And not in a good way. I believe, generally speaking, that if you can’t do it well then it’s not worth doing. Clearly not everyone agrees. As the damage to my nerves mount there are many alarming signs that the Raiders may not be entirely on top of matters. This is all very familiar.

Last week, before we both went cold on the entire organisation my brother and I decided that the Raiders need to buy someone, since every other club seems to be buying people in a frenzy of spending (whatup Titans) and signing. But who? I suggested Willie Mason, and my brother unexpectedly became very excited. Who knew?  

1.“I like him. We should go for it. ! Can’t see him moving to Canberra though, he would hate it worse than you!”  

2. “Going cheap isn’t he? I heard he might end up playing for the Toowoomba Pythons and work in the tomato factory there during the week!”

I looked into this and the offer, as reported back in December 2011, was actually to play for the Guyra (population 2500) Superspuds, who have won four of the past nine Group 19 grand finals and pay $250 per game.  Club official Terry Vidler said “We’d take him. He would cause a lot of interest in our town. We’ve got a tomato farm out here, it’s a big deal. He could work there.”  As rustic and charming and fuckoff-hilarious as this all sounds, I much prefer the idea of Willie getting an NRL start. If the skeleton of Matt Orford’s soul can be resurrected and made to dance and sing and drop balls and bungle kicks then Mason more than deserves the same opportunity. Also, he’s got mad game! He’s awesome! So what if he talks a lot of smack? It’s “refreshing”. I heard Daly Cherry Evans interviewed the other day and every line uttered was flat and robotic and entirely devoid of humanity and humour. It was horrible. I want boorish hooligans rearing up through the mist and blurting out robust and original opinions of the “everyone’s entitled to have one” variety. Decorum and decency are terribly over-rated.

Anyway. On the Raiders, I plan on rounding the corner and fully overcoming my crippling sense of resentment sometime today, in preparation for what will probably be more of the same tomorrow evening. This, people, is the way of the world.

One of the worst parts of the whole thing last week was that I got so goddamn excited after their win over the Titans. I convinced myself that some kind of seismic shift had occurred; that it was different to their first win of last season, when they annihilated the hapless Sharks in that unseemly opening match. There wasn’t much element of skill involved then and absolutely no pretense of two equally matched teams. The whole thing resembled hyenas tearing open a gazelle much more than it did a traditional game. It was terrific. God it was a good time. Really great.  What wasn’t so great was the fact that it was pretty much the only joy Raiders fans got to experience. For the season. That’s, like, months. Long, bleak months. Russian novel months.

After last week, the implications are profound and distressing:  Perhaps we are standing on that same threshold. Perhaps we have always been there.