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!”

Just Like George Costanza

"Do you ever yearn?"
"Yearn? Do I yearn?
"I yearn."
"You yearn?"
"Oh yes, yes, I yearn. Often I, I sit and yearn. Have you yearned?"
"No, not recently.."

- Kramer & George, Seinfeld, The Keys.

"I don't want much, fuck I drove every car -
Some nice cooked food, some nice clean drawers"

-Jay Z, Heart of The City.

I don't want much either. Two things, really.
One is to go to America, and the other is to have my own place, with space for a horse. Some other animals, too. Goats. Maybe peacocks.

I feel like having a horse would ease some of my irregularities. I drive down a dirt road to get to work. There is a white horse that stands by a fence that has a 'Strawberries for Sale' sign nailed to it, gazing. Everyday; standing, gazing.

Last week I watched someone ride their horse into the Murray. The horse went way out deep until only its head showed above the water. Something went pop in the middle of my chest and I pulled my car over and welled up watching. Things like this lessen the psychic strain of being alive in these weird times.

Thimking about America seems to have the same effect.

The greatest thing about my job is that it occupies my hands but leaves my mind free to wander. This allows me to think about America a lot. Like a lot a lot.

One day might be taken up by ruminating on the unique relationship Americans seem to have with pie. Or wondering about Walmart, and whether it's as godawful as people who claim not to shop there say it is. I obsess over the state names; in my head they are the most magical words in the world. Ohio. Alabama. Arizona. Kansas. Utah. Tennessee. They make me want to take a knife and carve them into soft skin.

Most of all, though, I think about the South. Not the moonlight and magnolias and mint-julep myth, but real Southern culture. It makes my mind rise up like boiling milk about to spill from a saucepan. Henry James called Southern culture a "great melancholy void", and I think "my God, the things I don't know, the places I haven't been. My God."