Names I Have Called the Canberra Raiders This Year

I have called the Raiders many things this year. This is what happens when you have a very loosely edited blog serving as a dumping-ground for your unconscious. You liken your team, often unfavourably, to a great variety of… things. It’s okay though. I love them.  

They make me foam at the eyes. They make my face turn an unhealthy shade of puce. They make me snap phrases such as “do I look like I had a good weekend?” Basically, they are a team that throws up regular challenges to one’s faith, endurance and sanity. I love them for this*. As such, and in the interests of my emotional equilibrium, we share an understanding and open relationship that allows a free-flow of opinion and emotion. It’s a bit one-sided, our dialogue, but that’s okay too. They’re busy. Busy doing whatever the hell it is anyone does there in that capitalist wasteland Canberra. Busy BEING AWESOME.

Some of the things I have likened the Canberra Raiders to / called the Canberra Raiders this year:

A Russian novel

A country song

A broke down busted fairground

The foolish interlopers who while looking for gas or directions are set upon by marauding hillbillies and raped every which way in one of those seventies exploitation movies

Unsuccessful contestants in a game of Catch The Oily Pig

Refugees from a Dickens novel

Perpetrators of my regular and alarmingly violent tension headaches

A third-world country with third world hygiene standards

Boil-ridden degenerates (see above)

1980s Warsaw

Courtney Love at her messiest

Old men sucking Werthers Originals

Clam chowder

A busted arse

The best team to follow in the comp bar none

 I miss them already.

 *It’s like Seinfeld’s ya gotta see the bayyybee woman says while changing her ugly baby’s shitty nappy. “But because it comes out of your baby it smells good!”

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.

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.

Old Man

Earlier today an old geezer in the news agency said “you look bright and lively this morning!”

“Well, I don’t want to seize up” I told him.

I don’t know what the hell I meant. Was I flaunting my mobility? The elderly often make me come out with slightly off-kilter remarks. Sometimes they’re lewd, even. They love it, too, the filthy old cunts.

“You wouldn’t seize up” he said with an emphysemic wheeze.

Maybe not, I thought, but bright and lively? You are way off, Pops, WAY OFF.

When Anxiety Attacks

Ninety minutes of obliteration (mine – not about football)

I had an anxiety attack this morning. It lasted for an hour and a half. A light comedic movie should last this long, not a fucking anxiety attack. Ninety minutes is a really long time for the mind to hijack the body. Anyway, during that time I reached the view that the only sensible course of action is suicide. This is what happens. Then, you wind down and feel so, so tired. Just bone and meat and tissue tired, and you think perhaps you don’t want to kill yourself so much after all and you look at your desk all miraculously tidy and you don’t really recall doing it and you swoop on all that hair of yours laying around that you pulled all out of your head because you remember that, and did I switch from “I” to “you” there as some kind of dissociative distancing tactic? Is that what a psych doctor would say? IS THAT WHAT DR. DREW WOULD SAY?

I always try to listen to Dr. Drew Pinsky. It can be tricky because usually he is dealing with Teen Moms or hectic train wrecks like Michael Lohan and Dennis Rodman but he is more helpful than any of the Australian and non-celebrity doctors I have dealt with who have all been shonks and schmucks, limp wolves that stand well back from the void and tell you to take bubble baths.

P.S. I don't know who this woman is or what that thing is on her lap but I want to be her.

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.

Canberra: so help me god

This time last year.

Last year, Friday October 8 was moving day and I rode out of Canberra in a two car one truck convoy. This was significant because in Canberra I had run my ship up onto rocks, and after eight months of being beaten around by the tide the Hume Highway was like a rolling ribbon of light leading someplace...else. Canola fields were flowering in buttery waves, and everything I saw flashing by me seemed sharper than usual, more meaningful.

Now, a few memories are as clear as laser-cut crystal, but most are streaky and scrambled. Great gaping holes were ripped in my head. No air passed through the holes, but water seeped in, got stuck and stagnated. It swished around for many months. The sound filled my ears, some days it was all I heard.

I have to look back in my black notebooks from this time to remind myself of things, and tend to mostly only really remember the things I wrote down. It's different now, though. When I moved here a draining process began and the water started dripping out like sump oil.

Friday the 8th Oct 2010

-"It's like someone took a knife baby edgy and dull/and cut a six inch valley through the middle of my skull"

-Richie in the car at Hertz, excited: "I got myself a Police CD!" - 7:25am.

-Susu came round to Eric Northman, as I knew she would. We slept on the mattress in the lounge room and watched episodes 8, 9 and 10 til late and I dreamed about Brett Morris and that I was in confined quarters with like the entire NRL and was too shy to talk to any of them except B.Moz and he was so adorable and sweet that I became paralysed with shy awe all over again. Which sounds about right.

-Hurry up Richie where the truck at already - 7:45am.

-Maybe this time next week I'll be sitting in a wicker chair on my new front verandah. Without this freight train running through the middle of my head.

Saturday the 9th.

-Back in Canberra to clean the house.

-Whippersnippering is boss - venegance is mine. It was like I was cutting down Canberra cockheads with every swipe - i.e. the young couple in matching brand new yellow hi-vis vests and round scout hats doing their mowing and gardening in tandem at the bottom of Waller. I WANTED TO FUCKING KILL THEM. I really really wished I'd had a gun. I would have fucking utilised it without hesitation. Instead I drove to Dickson for fuel and credit and freaked the fuck out in the supermarket and spilt coins in my panic. Everyone, all fucking pigs. I didn't want to come back here today. Grey horror.

-The fucking flesh is in danger of sliding off my fucking arm because I splashed fucking Ezy Off Bam oven cleaner up it. Bitch is bubbling and blistering. William texted and made me laugh: 'another night in the Kings X, another stretch hummer...", and then Richie, who said, in all seriousness,
-"maybe I should open a pie shop..."
-"have you ever made a pie?"
-"no..."
-"so why the pie shop?"
-"well, a lot of people seem to like driving to pie shops to... eat pies"

-The cashier at Tarcutta servo: "Oh a panel van! I haven't seen one of them for years! The truckie standing chatting to her: "What, the inside of one?"

-I stopped at Yarrawonga and shit was real. Saturday afternoon. Stoners in loose trackies and slides, and hooligans in tiny obscene white footy shorts. Good people. Racing down the Hume spooning warm yoghurt from a tub gripped between my legs was pretty real too.

Sunday the 10th.

-Ok hey. My new home. Finished up with the lasts/started in on the firsts.



Among the many things about Canberra I failed to understand while living there was why the majority of the pouplation hadn't experienced mental collapse. How had they as a people held it together and not just flat-out fallen apart and become incapacitated en masse? Were they drawing from some deep well of ancient knowledge, these native Canberrans? Did I just miss some kind of essential, psychic memo? There was a fucking ocean breaking inside my brain the entire time I lived there and yet - and yet - tens of thousands of people were managing to go about their dreadful daily business unencumbered and apparently untroubled. This seemed impossible, far beyond the realm of possibility, but then these kinds of things always do to both the chronically maladjusted and the very clear-eyed.

Two quotes - exchanges between a man and his small daughter - from a beautiful Bukowski story:

1.

-"There are many people who pretend that they are happy"
-"Why?"
-"Because they are ashamed and frightened and don't have the guts to admit it."

2.

-"Because if I do I might get caught and put in jail"
-"What's jail?"
-"Everything's jail."

Well anyway, who really knows what's happening with anyone? We're all in airplanes, we're all just flying over. This is the reason that we so commonly hear words to the effect of "they kept to themselves" and "they seemed like nice people" and "I never thought anything like this would happen in our street" from shattered neighbours speking to news crews after some kind of savagery has torn apart the fabric of their suburb. This inevitably encourages a series of unhealthy comparisons pertaining to questions of 'could that have been me?' and 'how did I not know?' that are probably best avoided. Our present social structure is in no way equipped to deal with questions of this kind, best to keep the eyes ahead and the blinds drawn and the great wash of humanity at bay.

Canberra is a city with a firm grasp of this concept. The streets are always empty, and it's obscenely clean and orderly. It has no dark, squalid heart, no filthy corners, and, crucially, no central rail service. The impact of the absence of trains and train stations is arresting and immediately obvious - no graffiti and no hobos. No city, no city at all.

My neighbour; a criminal lawyer named Mark, told me that the lawyers he dealt with in Sydney sounded spectacularly relaxed over the phone: "they even call me mate!" This comment put me into rapid shift and tilt. The place had me. I didn't stand a chance. My girl Susu drove down from Byron to bundle me out of there. This is one of the greatest things friends can do for each other. Another is to shout a booking for a colonic irrigation across a crowded room full of swivelling, scandalised eyes, and she's done that on my behalf too. She solid.

It doesn't surprise me now that I found it impossible to maintain mental and emotional equilibrium there; what with the heavy nothingness that hung in the air, but at the time it was confusing and confronting and cast a very long dark shadow.

One year on and even though walls still surround me and I still have an oily high-water mark inside my head I have that wicker chair I sit in on my front verandah and I can't even begin to tell you what a satisfaction it is to be able to say that I no longer live in Canberra.

Canberra: part I >you met me at a very strange time in my life

Is the German reputation for reserving and hogging sun lounges while holidaying abroad warranted? I lack conclusive firsthand evidence, but everyone says they really do do it - spread their Teutonic towels over every sun lounge within a 1 kilometre radius of the pool, ignoring all strongly worded signs (ACHTUNG!!)  advising against this for the sake of resort harmony and international diplomacy - before waddling off to fuel up for a long day of perfectly positioned sun bathing by way of a leisurely buffet breaskfast. Well, whatever. I think, as long as you avoid refernces to hostile territorial takeovers and the like, that it's an excellent national stereotype. Charming, even. Especially for the Germans, who, let's face it; have long been saddled with what I will disceetly label a 'problematic, less than flattering' image.

An exchange, last year.

Sweet-faced German boy, cheerfully exasperated at my line of questioning:

"Oh you Australians, all are wanting to know about zee autobarns! It is zee most famous thing about us!"

>Protracted, increasingly pointed pause, during which I shuffle my feet, bite my tongue, stifle my smirk and bide my time.

Sweet-faced German boy, sensing which way the wind was blowing:

"Well, maybe zee second most famous thing?"

>Small smile of resignation from him, rich chortle from me.

End scene.

I have an intense interest in this business of national identities, so much so that I spent last year in Canberra, at ANU, attempting to do an honours degree on the subject. Well, that was the plan. I did half of the degree before unraveling and spending the next six months when I should have been ironing out and, uh, writing my thesis focused exclusively and obsessively on rugby league. If I'd had a firmer hold on myself and the situation at the time I probably could have parlayed my propensity for league into my thesis. It actually wasn't too far removed from the area I was working in, which was looking at the notion of mateship in representations of Australia's national identity. I could have got gangbangs and team bonding and such forth in there no worries; had I been in full possession of my faculties. As it turned out, I wasn't, so I didn't.

Also, for reasons I could not begin to understand or appreciate, my supervisor was adamant that I change direction entirely and look at John Howard's divisive immigration policies (bitch PLEASE) or something relating to the rise of Bed and Breakfasts as vehicles for urban imagining and new, rural masculinities. To this day I don't know why I didn't think of that myself.

She sketched out a big sprawling plan for me featuring the words 'men in aprons baking scones'. Nonsensical. When I left her office I dropped it straight into a bin outside the building and hoped she would see it. I think that's what they call passive aggression, right? In any case, after that I couldn't summon the enthusiasm to return or the energy to drop out so I did neither and after a few months her 'is everything alright/I demand an explaination' emails dropped off.

It was around this time that a fragment of a Kanye West song began insinuating itself among the dead leaves blowing in my brain with soothing regularity, making me nod in acquiesce and approval:

"Now even though I went to college and dropped out of school quick I always had a PhD; a Pretty huge Dick."

Ahh Kanye.
Ditto Canberra (because obviously I am too preoccupied with the disturbing thoughts that this brief consideration of Canberra has called up to give Germany any further consideration). If I was completely self absorbed I'd say that Canberra was intentionally - intentionally - conceived and designed to flood my life with unhappiness.

So, umm *clears throat self-importantly*; I think Canberra was intentionally conceived and designed to flood my life with unhappiness.  

Seven or eight months out from leaving and I still can't make sense of the place beyond possessing a basic understanding of it as a city almost entirely devoid of life and soul and spirit, and almost entirely made up of pale, depleted public servant drones. Canberra made me understand exactly how boarding school and New York and I guess adolescence in general felt for Holden Caulfield in A Catcher In The Rye. Complete alienation and quiet incredulity and a creeping, cold fingered dread, basically. Red hunting hat optional.

The streets were always empty. I'm not sure what they are but this has profoundly unhealthy implications. My mind was malfunctioning at the time so I took it to be a sure sign of the coming apocolypse and all I hoped was that it would be fiery.
I still do, actually.

Let's Get Physical.

It occured to me I may have dropped the ball a bit on this blogging business and I think I know the reason why. My recent 'fash ho' post -  a sepia-toned ode to girlhood and cold weather undergarments -  inspired some uptight man to heap 140 characters or less worth of abuse on me over on the Twitter. Obviously this is the high point of my life thus far. I'm pretty much Hillary on Everest's summit right now, and my natural response to such an acheivement is to kick back with a jumbo bag of party mix lollies and the collected works of John Safran. To recede happily into voluntary redundancy and obscurity, in other words. Also, watching John Safran (see also: Louis Threoux) stirs up unwelcome emotions (mine) relating to failed plans, wasted potential and lack of ambition (also mine). AND I have a substantial crush on the guy too. Whiny bitches are where it's at. Neuroses-ridden Woody Allen/Larry David types? Hot. 

Anyway, speaking of jobs and loose hotpants and the like, I start working again on Monday. I found out this morning by way of a phonecall and a voice roaring down the line asking me, without so much as a hello,

-"YOU READY TO GET PHYSICAL?"
-"Mal! Totally!"
-"ROIGHT! MONDAY! BRING YOUR GLOVES, IT'LL BE BLOODY COLD!" *hangs up*. 

This is how Mal really speaks - explosively, economically, and ALWAYS! IN! CAPS! A few years ago he made a comment about the arctic wind chill on a particularly cold day and I told him that he just needed to get off his tractor and get physical and it tickled him so much that it became our shorthand for any type of work or activity ever since. He is idiomatically and awesomely Australian and as such warrants heritage protection at a grassroots level, basically.

So. Only one more weekend of wallowing in the rancid bain-marie of idle unemployment for me.
Two days. Is that enough time for my shingles to heal? My bed sores will defnitely be in need of an airing by then, anyhow.

There's nothing like getting on the righteous path of good hard physical work to make that sinking feeling that's always chasing me down back the fuck off a few paces and stop breathing its hot, dog-like breath down the back of my neck. Also, I get to wear Blundstones and work socks legitimately.This pleases me immeasurably, as does the prospect of being occupied by a job that will fill up my day but not my heart, and that will give me calloused palms and weary limbs without undue anxiety or unnecessary angst. What can I say? I like it in neurotic men; myself, not so much.

Now, one last thing.
And by one last thing I mean let's all revel for a moment in a photo of Mick Ennis pulling down both Todd Carney AND Todd Carney's shorts. And they say men can't multi-task.

Anyway, I feel like I haven't mentioned my muse Toddy in at least a week, maybe two, and it's important to remember where we come from. Remember your roots, you know? This goes for you too, Toddy. You're probably strolling down Campbell Parade like Bondi's number one Baller right now, all tatts, mouth and swagger, bless, but remember, one can't always be on fire. Straight on, baby.

Oh yeah. I still want to wear your skin as a dress, by the way..*strolls off whistling happily*..

Bukowski Prescription, 1st Repeat.

Two days ago I felt like I had been defoliated by napalm. Or acid rain. And instead of giving me a sensation of stripped back, fire engine-like sleekness like I imagine that naked and fleeing Vietnamese girl experienced moments before her charred flesh slid from her bones I just felt unclean. And a little loose-ended, like my edges were drooping.

This was what cashiers who fuck up your grocery total and then scatter your change across the conveyer belt eye-rollingly and faux self-deprecatingly refer to as "one of those days", insinuating all the while that it is you, fool-customer, who is the bane of their lowly-employed existence. Bitches. *Ahem*, where was I? Oh yes. Dogshit days. Downlow days.


The most sensible thing to do on days like these is to turn to Bukowski. I like to open a volume of his letters at random and run my fingers over the page like I imagine believers do with their Bibles in holy reverence. The page I opened to had two short letters written in 1985 that were dark and grim and searing with lurid truth and beauty. Funny, too. Because Bukowski is always blazingly funny, in a terrible, up-against-the-blade way.


A few months ago I was at a swap meet in Castlemaine looking through a pile of DVDs alongside two women. Raw-boned, salt-of-the-earth women. You know the type.

-"...And 'The Cable Guy'...that's a black comedy, that one"
-"Is it a black movie? Black people?"
-"No NO, a black comedy...you know, where you don't know whether to laugh or not?"
-"Oh. No. Definitely not"
-"Yes. Bit disturbing"

And yesterday I was in Savers, looking through the books. Two more raw-boned women. Victoria is lousy with them.

-"Plenty here"
-"Yes but we need to find our kind.."
-"Yes. We don't want dark"

Black, dark, and me eavesdropping while rifling through second-hand goods; yes, there's a pattern here, well spotted.

So. Bukowski burning; blazing, black:

 Got into a giant speed duel with some asshole on the Pasadena Freeway, this morning, the three bottle of Gamay Beaujolais hangover rising from my balls and out of the top of my Vilon head, I got it up to 85 on the Devil's Curve where meat and bone are often separated in a flash of flaming nothingness and he fell back gasping, shifting down from 5th to 4th and flashing his front headlights in surrender. That'll teach 'em to fuck with a suicide.

&:

Sometimes I wish I were this old guy sitting on the mountaintop subsisting on berries, grasshoppers or whatever. I wouldn't have to deal with the glazed eyes and lying dullness of my fellows, but I've got to admit I'm a sucker for modern plumbing and the racetrack. Well, I've built my own little dungheap and here I sit flinging the shit about. There are minor and major regrets. And it's a hell of a thing to say but - I never met another man I'd rather be. And if that's a delusion, it's a lucky one.

It's a marvellous and mysterious thing, this business of arranging words, and reading Bukowski's rattles the loose wires in my brain and makes my heart hum with the horror and the impossibility of being human in these weird times.

Also, he said this:

"Sometimes I feel like a lamppost with a dog pissing on it."

So do I, Buk, so do I.
Either that or the Vietnamese napalm girl. Depends on the day, really.

Well, fuck. She lived? Who knew.
Talk about the trembling of the lightning.

Uno Momento Por Favor

I can't put my finger on when exactly but sometime between Friday afternoon and Saturday morning my mood plunged lower than the Greek economy.

If I can't pinpoint when this happened I obviously have no hope of discerning the reasons why. Alls I know is that, all of a sudden, a gear grinds and I'm instantly out of step with the world.

Again.
As in; rack 'em up, let's play again.

Essentially, what happens is that the blood and squalor of life becomes more pronounced. A slightly crazed, nervous energy infiltrates my mise en scene; just the edges at first; before it seeps its way into the centre, by which point I am in the curious position of being both tightly wound and too tired for life.

I think less about football and more about Dick and Perry in the cornfields of Kansas, or unmarked vans and the words "It puts the lotion in the basket".

It is also times such as these that I start thinking in earnest about shopping centres, and blame them for many of the ills of society.When I start in on the shopping centre stuff I know my veneer of sanity may be slipping somewhat. Let the record show that I spent a significant portion of the night wrapped in a quilt and banging out a stream-of-consciousness diatribe about the Tyranny of the Mall.

Still, life goes on. I mean, I still take notice of what the footballers are up to, and who's bumped the Raiders back in to fifteenth spot on the ladder. I'm human, for chrissakes. I write down things like

"Ennis sees Thurston his grade-two media tear and raises him a bleeding lung",
"Gardiner has a tramp stamp",
"Fergz's SharkPark reception colder than a witch's tit", and
"Well, who wants to watch a high completion-rate game anyway? Zzzzzzzzzzz.... 12 from 21 in the first half from the fumble-happy Raiders -  Are you not entertained??", so I'm still lucid enough. Just.... unsettled. Uneasy.

And of course, I am infinitely indebted to football for insulating me, even a little, from the full force of the foul rag and bone shop of the heart. If there is a greater reason for being grateful to live in the 21th Century than football and the relief from real-life that it provides then I can't think of it.

A few years ago Australian novelist David Malouf wrote an essay examining our modern unease that caught hold of me in the way that interesting things do. He talked about our way of seeing the world: that we see it as too large, and the forces within it that govern our lives as too remote and too complex to grapple with. This hooked me, but it was when he went on to point out that this wasn't always so that he really reeled me in.

"For most of human history, the world as we had direct experience of it extended little further than an hour's walk would take us in any direction from where we lived, which was also, in most cases, where we were born.

For the majority, the world beyond their immediate view barely existed for them.

Soil, local weather patterns, seasonal fruits and harvests, the time for shooting birds or hunting wild boar, for gathering mushrooms or kindling - these were the conditions that made space, but also time, available.

Only at rare moments in history, when a city-state or nation acquired colonies - Rome after 100BC, Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, Holland in modern times - did ordinary men and women have a sense of being connected to something more than the few streets of the town or village they had grown up in: through a son who was serving overseas, a neighbour who had emigrated or a business connection....

All of this is very different from the world as we see it now. The bit of it we deal with at first hand and move in daily (unless we are commuters) may be no larger than it ever was; but our consciousness of where we stand has enormously expanded."

Malouf goes on to talk about how we now see ourselves as inhabiting 'the planet', and of seeing ourselves as being part of, and in a small way responsible for it, and, on an even larger scale, 'the Environment' - a word that just fifty years ago would have been, in it's present state, puzzling or even meaningless.

There's something mystical and wonderous in all this for me. I am constantly struck, amid the various interactions and transactions that make up daily existence, with the flashing thought that I really was born in the wrong time. I know that sounds like I have Narcicissistic delusions of granduer but I'm not saying I was meant to be Cleopatra or something, only that I feel fundamentally out of step with almost every aspect of the world around me. It is for this very reason that the line "I - Wish I - Was born a thousand years ago" in Lou Reed's Heroin clenches my heart into a fist and squeezes my throat every damn time I hear it.

I love the notion of experiencing 'the world' only in so far as an hour's walk in any direction from where I lived would take me. This makes the whole 50km radius rule for local, seasonal produce trend gripping towns like Mogo and Maldon look very silly, too, which I enjoy. You can keep your 'citizen of the world' moniker; to me that is nothing more than  neurosis-generating nothing-speak. Now that our consciousness has extended further and further beyond the body's physical grasp and further and further from our geographical surrounds - now that we have gone global, in effect - we are more isolated than ever before.

I would like the certainty of living all my life in the village where I was born, where only the occassional peddlar or pilgim would pass through. I might die young of the plague, sure, but there would be no source of anxiety beyond my most immediate of concerns, and none of the anxious uncertainty of these times. When you have only one path set before you, you can generally feel confident that it is the correct path to take, if it even bears thinking about at all.

I mean, do you think these ducklings suffer nights darkened by existential questions, violent yearnings and inevitable miseries? The irony is that there's probably entire research facilities dedicated to answering this and even more foolish questions in the name of  man's progress.

Yuhhp. Rack 'em up.

Med Free!

Things have shifted gears for me. Incredibly, I lost the clanks a day or two back. All that remains on that front is some insomnia and, when sleep does come, lavish night-sweats which cause me to wake up in abrupt, unpleasant circumstances - tangled in wet flannalette and wild of hair, eye and mind - earlier and earlier each morning. Six...five-thirty...five - do you have any idea how unwelcomingly cold and dark and foggy the world appears in those first few minutes having woken up in a toxic lather at five a.m. in June? No, I don't suppose you do, because I imagine you have your sanity and wits about you. However, you're reading this blog, so who really knows? Even my cats, who are almost eternally up in my face with reminders to deliver them their next meal and to make it snappy don't much care for the new hours I'm keeping. I'm actually enjoying the irriation they experience at these early hours when I sweep them off the bed with one savage shake of my fetid bedding and send them flying around the room; it's retributive, and who among us doesn't love dishing out a little gentle retribution? Incredibly, given the hour and all, they mostly manage to land elegantly and on their feet, after they slide down off the walls and ceiling.

Anyways, I think after a week of being dangerously adrift my head has returned to its moorings. I felt to be in control of my faculties enough to drive my car this morning and had considerable success keeping it out of ditches, shrubbery and the path of oncoming traffic. This gave me a sense of great satisfaction and over-all well being and I came home and immediately lapsed into a disembodied kind of auto-piloting state that saw me undertake a series of strange, fiddly domestic tasks in an altogether speedy and euphoric frame of mind. Several hours later I've wound down a little and am still now walking into different rooms in my house wondering who reconfigured the furniture, how the heating vents have become so free of dust and debris and why the fuck my bookshelves have been emptied, pine-o-cleaned and rearranged in a complicated system combining, as far as I can make out, the alphabetic and the thematic.

I feel lethal and feisty and lucid of soul, spirit and demeanor all at the same time and if that makes minimal sense I believe another way of putting it is I think I feel a bit better..

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...