Paul Gallen and Violence

 

 

Fuck the impressionable soft-skulled children and their neurotic hovering parents.

(I’m proud of Paul Gallen. I’m proud of the fact that in a fortnight filled with nasty little incidents involving nasty little people he didn’t bow to the jungle blood-lust they call “public pressure” and offer up some excruciating contrition-speech as per current specifications.

I’m proud that he didn’t attempt to explain away the small matter of throwing a few punches in the general direction of some brute’s huge misshapen head as an unfortunate byproduct of being “tired”, or use some flaccid variation of the medically elusive brain fade/ brain snap excuse.

He stood staunch. Few do.)

TRUST NO ONE They could be on the sex-offender list, or Queenslanders

Ambition, betrayal, divided loyalties and frequent use of the word ‘filthy’ to describe an emotional state… no, it’s not the Australian Labor Party, it’s the Kangaroo team.

>>The overarching theme of this post is TRUST NO ONE   

In addition to trusting no one, it is useful to maintain a raging and uniform hatred of all human life, while reserving a particularly potent and highly personal loathing for Queenslanders. Sons of bitches.

That horrendous song of theirs that is too stupid for me to even attempt to reproduce here is irritating enough on an annual-for-the-last-seven-years basis.

BUT TO BREAK INTO THAT SAME SONG THAT SAME MAROON VICTORY SONG AFTER A WIN WITH THE KANGAROO TEAM WHICH FOR THE UNINITIATED OR THE IDIOTIC IS COMPRISED OF BOTH MAROON AND BLUES PLAYERS JESUS CHRIST IT’S ENOUGH TO MAKE ANYONE EXPLODE INTO AN ITALICISED OUTBURST!

Cameron Smith has disappointed me. In the grimly parental ‘I’m not angry I’m just disappointed’ vein. This is similar to the ‘Clint Eastwood addressing an empty chair at the Republican National Convention’ vein. Just when I started liking the bastard. You see! Drop your guard for two shakes and people destroy it and any tenuous faith you may have allowed yourself to have for humanity like fuckwits stomping down crowd barriers at a Limp Bizkit show. That’s right Smith, the truth is out asshole. Again!   

People, pretty much whoever the newspapers can reach for comment who isn’t spread-eagled across a sun lounge or hunched over a craps table in Vegas including but not limited to highly relevant sporting identities like Steve Waugh and Ricky Nixon as he exits court facing various charges of assault (he threw up a peace/V sign! Like the President Nixon!) have said that Cameron and Billy are good blokes and that this means breaking into their inane Queenslander song can’t have been premeditated, because as we all and particularly Ricky Nixon know, good blokes JUST DO DUMB SHIT OFF THE CUFF THEY DON’T PLAN IT ONLY BAD GUYS PLAN IT.

Really when I think about the Maroon mentality it doesn’t surprise me. The fuckers know how to win a game but have never shown any awareness of the spiritual and moral bankruptcy that stalks them. So thanks, Queensland, for further substantiating my theory.

Anyways, how boring was that game. God. It rendered my usual state of watchful intensity totally redundant, I was in a slack-jawed stupor from about the 12 minute mark and I barely noticed anything at all after that; whether this was because nothing actually happened remains unclear although I do recall Paul Gallen getting a flick pass away and finding that vaguely entertaining in a zany kind of a way.  

The only thing that could have redeemed and actually made the whole affair awesome would have been a brawl breaking out during the singing of said song. Oh, the buttoned-down traditionalists may have objected but many others would have applauded the audacity. In any event it would have been an incredible end to the 2012 season. It would have taken me to my happy place. But no. Alls that happened was “one of the Morris brothers – Josh or Brett” was seen covering Robbie Farah’s mouth with their hand, and various Blue Kangaroos were described as being “filthy”.

I know that feeling.

>>This incident is indicative of the general decay eating away at the fabric of the modern world. Discuss.

Dave Taylor is Dense - Part 1, of many

Last week was a big one. Heavy. Between Katie giving Tom the slip and Origin putting me through the wringer and then the Raiders upsetting the Storm in fabulous fashion and my baby lamb having her tail cut off and given to the farm dog to run around with in her mouth as a chew toy for the next two days the damage to my nerves has been considerable.

Regardless, the rat-wheel keeps on rolling.

It rolled out a rude truth about Queensland and the Maroons. I needed something to ease the pain of the Blues’ substandard performance in game three, so this is medicinal – it is balm, soothing and smooth, a cool hand on a hot fevered forehead.

Even so, these Queenslanders, they are trying my patience.

Research (vague, sullen rumination) revealed to me that the players who have migrated to the southern states for club football seem to have rounded themselves out, as players and as people. Publically, definitely, and probably privately too, although in a world where ET can be exposed as a sordid philanderer you never know for sure do you? Anyway, these migrated players have grown gracious and civilised. They are in possession of their wits. Sometimes they even use them. Think Darius Boyd, David Shillington and the Big Three.

Those who have continued indulging in an alternative, soft-edged reality by staying in Queensland are charmless, devoid of grace. Their wits are slower, their vowels are flatter, and they play like dogs. Justin Hodges is a dog. Brent Tate, Ben Hannant, Sam Thaiday, Corey Parker: dogs! Mongrels, hurling themselves repeatedly against chainmail fencing and seeking to separate toddler’s faces from their skulls.    

The exception here is Dave Taylor. He went south, yes, but it didn’t exactly take, did it*?  As such, he will soon be returning to his shallow-end-of-the-gene-pool roots, having signed to play for Gold Coast next year. The rigours of polite Sydney society were obviously too much for this unreconstructed behemoth. This doesn’t surprise. He is a caveman. He looks like his concept of food storage does not extend beyond the hanging of a carcass within a cave. He also looks insufferably, unspeakably stupid. The fact that he signed a major deal with the Titans at the height of their much publicised financial meltdown, while they were reportedly struggling to pay their current players, is clear evidence of his dwindling cerebral resources. Here is some more:  

In the olden days, before the advent of emoticons, floriography was the go. People would exchange flowers to convey emotions. This went far beyond our unsubtle use of red roses, a tacky signifier of relationship-based guilt available to buy in well-stocked service stations. A tuberose, for example, signified voluptuousness, heather expressed admiration, and primrose said I can’t live without you.  

So, say I handed Dave Taylor scarlet geraniums. Scarlet geraniums indicate stupidity. He would probably eat them on sight but if he cared to respond he could hand me a daisy, saying “I share your sentiment” a general geranium, which would say “you are childish”, or a bay leaf: “I change but in death, bitch.”

Dave Taylor is so dense that he had to be told to take up a hobby. By a coach. He complied, because he is nothing if not dim and pliant, and bought a boat to catch fish from.

Dave Taylor is so dense that he fell out of bed at Origin training camp and sustained a semi-serious head injury. Or so the Maroons would have us believe. Even if he didn’t fall out of bed, even of this was an excuse that they invented to cover up evidence of mass team drunkenness, the fact that they allocated him an alibi involving falling out of a bed speaks volumes. Do you know what it says? It says ‘we believe that you will believe that this is a man too stupid to lie safely in a bed.’

Do you think they would have assigned the same excuse to Billy Slater, or Cameron Smith, or Cooper Cronk? Of course not. They would have said they strained their eyes in an all-night, three-way chess marathon or something.

Southerners will appreciate where I am going with this. Queenslanders will have snagged their slow-moving, sub-par minds on the mention of carcasses hanging in caves two paragraphs up. They will not make it this far.  Story of their lives.

*See also: Nate Myles. Combine a heavy team drinking session in Terrigal with unreconstructed ablution habits and what do you get?  An un-house-broken Queenslander taking a dump in a carpeted hotel corridor, that’s what.

- Johnathan Thurston is excluded from all of this for obvious reasons – these being that he is an unearthly being who transcends time, space, place and state lines.  He’s really good-looking, in other words. A stone-cold fox.  (Lillies, Calla – magnificent beauty)

NO TRY! - The Inglis Incident, Origin 1

Ridiculous referee decisions usually aren’t reason enough for me to turn crimson and need a defibrillator. Origin is different, though. It’s fast and tight and brutal and it causes people tremendous amounts of excitement. They roam at large and wear wigs and bellow inane catchphrases (“QUEENSLANDER”, for example) and foam at the mouth and appear crazed and rabid. Emotions run high. Referees are required to adhere as closely as possible to what most of us would consider reality. In short, it is not the game in which they should play fast and loose with logic. The consequences are too great, right? Wrong. During the fifth or sixth replay of Greg Inglis knocking that ball forward a general sense of doom swelled inside of me. By the seventh? I could feel the artery on one side of my temple pulsing furiously, moments away from bursting into an aneurysm.

-Pause for protracted ‘mental health’ break and an unclenching of teeth hands toes and buttocks-

It is a hollow loss. This makes it a hollow victory. It was looking like it was going to be a loss anyway, but a legitimate one – brought about by that bizarre choice to kick for 2 and Todd Carney suffering from the yips on his debut and whatever else – but awarding that Inglis incident as a TRY???? That’s when the bottom fell out.       

Imagine if the situation were reversed. Jesus Christ; there would be mass hysteria. Burning effigies! Parliamentary enquiries! Widespread disintegration and missions of vengeance! Bob Katter! Things, according to W.B. Yeats’ take on dodgy 19^th

Century refereeing decisions (or those deranged enough to await the Second Coming of Christ - same same, really), would fall apart, the centre would not hold, mere anarchy would be loosed upon the world.

But that sound you hear? That’s the Queenslanders, collectively scoffing CRY ME A RIVER or other, less astute words to that effect, and, yeah, cunts, if your attitude towards logic and justice is a laissez faire one, by all means deride the inevitable NSW-based outcry as we engage in a few weeks of light existential angst, finger-pointing and recrimination. We down here know ya’ll are too deep into your sun-baked delirium, too lacking in moral fibre, too misshapen of head and too wasted on Bundy to care.

Taking The Piss

Well, shit.

That didn't exactly go to plan, did it?
Not if your plan was for the Blues to win and rain all over the Maroon's parade, I mean.

And not if your plan was to end the game on your feet rather than slumped tearfully in a wheelchair, either. I know I predicted JT's tears in my last post but I didn't mean like that, GOD! Wheeling him out afterwards to be amongst the mobile? That was arrestingly awful. Poor JT. Still, his downfall allows me the oppurtunity to avoid posting victory photos of the Maroons. Harrowing photos convey so much more in terms of raw emotion anyway, right? It's the same as how no-one in their right mind wants to hear happy songs - and not just because happy songs tend to be universally shit. We want tragedy and suffering, dammit, and we want lots of it. Anyway, I digress.

I am a graduate of the 'Let's Never Speak of This Again' school of thought, so I had no intention of making a post today, or of mentioning Origin at all in the forseeable future.

My plan was to clam-up and lie low until the Maroon coloured shit-mist had settled some. For the inherently rational and circumspect New South Wales folk, a grace period of a few days here is suffice. We have other fish to fry, and many irons in the fire. We're good like that.

For Queenslanders, though, it's different. I get the feeling that most things are.  Mental retardation caused by generations of inbreeding has made them not only hytserically parochial but also spectacularly single-minded. This means that I won't be discussing or even mentioning Origin in the presence of any Queenslander until May next year.

And any Queenslander who tries to draw me into Origin discussion - by which I mean when they bail me up and pin me against pub walls with their ham-hock arms forming a cage while braying incoherently about Locky and Lewis and JT and Slater (because that counts as civilised and sophisticated discussion in Queensland, you know) - will be shut down like a bad ferris wheel. Failing that they'll be subjected to a 45-minute rendition of The Lion Sleeps Tonight.

This was the plan. But plans awry; for better, for worse, or, in this case, for fucking awesome. Sometimes good things just happen. You find unaccounted-for money in your pants pocket, or you find money blowing free in the street, or you find a youtube video of a filthy Queenslander confirming -AGAIN, and with a particular potency this time - all your basest suspicions.

It is in this spirit that I upload this video.

BEHOLD:  Irrefutable evidence of the feral Queenslander doing what the feral Queenslander does best: i.e. Being.Fucking.Feral. Pissing in a seat in the hallowed and apparently sacred Suncorp stadium, to be exact.

You could call it passion, I suppose; and I daresay Queenslanders will because they seem to have taken a stupidly singular shine to the word, but to my mind the footage demands free employ of words like depraved and uncivilised and backwards, all to the tune, in my head, of frenziedly duelling banjos.


Shi-yaarrtt. The time it took me to bang out that post? The time it took Youtube to remove the video due to it violating their policy on "Shocking or Disgusting Content".

Damn. Well, thanks for the memories, random and feral woman bereft of self AND bladder control pissing all over yourself, your seat the people around you AND YOUR STATE at Suncorp last night just so you didn't have to miss a moment of the action. May they never fade.

Origin: Die Harder. Josh Dugan Represent.

There's nothing quite like State of Origin for bringing out qualities in people that are normally associated with the chronically insane. Of course, the quietly maniacal, everyday behaviour of Queenslanders already leans toward the insane side of the scale, so you have to make certain allowances for them, but us Southerners are used to this. After all, we've only been doing it since federation.

Seeing huge heaving crowds of hysterical people draped in maroon or blue and foaming at the mouth in excitement and anger and adoration and abject misery all at the same time is something that makes me feel hand-on-my-heart and lump-in-my-throat proud to be Australian. Just watching the whole spectacle of state against state play out in the stands alone makes me well up with pride and love for the place. I assume how I feel at Origin time about Australia is the way Americans feel about America ALL the time. Phew. It's a nice enough sensation, you understand, but I imagine it would get a little mindless. Not to mention exhausting. I know after the whole Origin Extravaganza is over for me I'll be in dire need of a few days respite unwinding in a canvas chair.

...or a hammock

You know how grand finals these days invariably end up being between two teams that you either barely tolerate (the Eels, the Dragons), or flat-out loathe (the Storm, Manly), and just watching them requires moody, excessive drinking to stave off the inevitable feelings of hostility (for the teams that are there) and loneliness (for your team that isn't there)? For all the fanfare, they can be a special kind of hell, made all the more potent by the fact that the colourless void that is the off-season lies right on the other side of the siren. No, you can keep grand finals as far as I'm concerned.

Origin, however, is the real deal. Origin is where it's at.

State versus state. Mate versus mate. These six words alone should be enough to induce chills, or boners, or both, in anyone even remotely interested in league. For the true believers, Australia's most divisive sporting rivalry is just a fucking awesome fiesta of fierce, from go to whoa.

In the bizarre event that this isn't enough to set your excitement-o-meter to shudder, there's also the very real promise of fuck-off-fantastic brawls. Not your average, garden variety bar-room punch up either. No. Origin delivers the very best in all-in-brawl entertainment, live and (largely) unregulated. At any given moment the loosely leashed forces of any given player could (and most probably will) flame into violent action. Basically, there will be blood.

Listen for the Origin bell people, it tolls for thee. Defy it at your peril.



If this doesn't trigger a rush of blood to the head and a swelling of the heart then you may need to take a good hard look at yourself. For real.