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

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

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

Billy Slater's Neck&Thighs: "thick all round"

Things are looking up down here in Victoria. Maybe it really will one day be “the place to be” like the inane number plates announce. My newsagent Carl was eager and very excited to tell me recently that my specially ordered Daily Telegraph is now delivered ON THE DAY, as opposed to a day later, and that he had been working tirelessly since Christmas to achieve this. “How many do you actually sell?” I asked him. “Oh, four or five…” “Yeh well maybe the suits in charge of programming at WIN will fall into line with you and acknowledge the existence of NRL – you could be a pioneer, Carl – you’re Burke and Wills right now!” This was met with an unblinking silence, a softly furrowed brow, and, finally, a low nervous laugh. AFL dimbulbs, what can you do? Actually, on second thoughts, Victoria still has a ways to go.

When the ray of light that is the All Stars game shone upon us and signaled the thawing of the off-season frost and the passing of the soul’s winter those fuckers at WIN showed Big Momma’s House. Astonishing. I actually watched the opening scenes wondering where Josh Dugan was and if he was possibly playing off the bench…

Well. Several weeks later, and who knew my shaken disgruntled fists and muttered voodoo curses could be laid to rest (transferred elsewhere, whatever) now that WIN has started showing Friday Night Footy on its digital sister channel?? Sometimes, life, you’re only seemingly sub-par. Let’s never fight again.

NRL on free to air television sparked the interest of my best friend, hence:  

WHAT CHANNEL I CANT FIND IT

-Got it

-And I thought I was the only one person to have shorts ride up in my crotch. These boys and their big thighs

Me - Note the Storms heritage collared jerseys, fabulous neck extension. Every team should bring them back. Need all the neck help they can get.

-Thick all round

Before I move on, I should point out that it took years of evolution for the human race to get to the point where our chins reside in lofty isolation, elevated from our shoulders by a vertical expanse widely known as “the neck”. Now to be fair, not every “neck” resembles the graceful nodding stem of a daffodil (see above). Tyra Banks understands this, which is why she is forever critiquing contestant’s photos on America’s Next Top Model with words to the effect of “YOU NEED MORE NECK”. The Morris twins understand this. Billy Slater understands this. NRL jersey designers do not understand this. To my mind this is the greatest flaw in the modern game. It is also the most easily rectified. Who gives a fuck about chicken wings, rolling pins, chin straps and crusher tackles, JUST MODIFY THE FUCKING JERSEYS ALREADY.

Apparently, teams are always looking for “the edge”, and despite the unfortunate current situation whereby the Storm have said edge over every team in the competition (but only just over the Raiders – GO RAIDERS) there is no doubt in my mind that their V-necked and collared jerseys provided additional ‘edge’ last night. The Knights looked second-rate in their collarless jerseys and they played second-rate football. Do the math. Kurt Gidley did the math, worked himself into a towering lather and eventually lost his shit entirely. He claimed he was screaming abuse at himself – “I CAN SAY WHAT I LIKE TO ME’SELF” – but the ref disagreed and penalised him for dissent. Of course, Gidley is one of the players who would benefit most from a collared jersey.  

It was a night for all the senses. Aside from the Storm’s elegant appearance I got to listen to Rabs and Gus commentating. Ok, so neither of them possesses the honeyed tones of Jeremy Irons. We have Brad Fittler on the sideline for that.  What they can do is emote. Goddamn are they emotive. Rabs is excitable and astute and Gus is full of bluster and hyperbole and they bitch and bicker at each other like a cantankerous old married couple and it’s the most awesome and entertaining thing ever and may they both live on eternally.

Gus was in good form last night; he said “wow” (Billy Slater, who else..), which is one of life’s great aural pleasures, and he also suffered some mental slippage and got stuck on the idea that the Storm were more soldier crab than human. I mean, who hasn’t?? He returned to the theme continuously over the course of the game, dreamily droning sentences such as “Like little soldier crabs, aren’t they – just marching up the field, marching marching…”  He also cast his gimlet eye over a Knights player, Zeb somebody, who knocked on for no apparent reason and under no apparent pressure, and ran right over Rabs’ sympathetic murmurings with the words “I KNOW, I FEEL SORRY FOR HIM TOO – BUT HE DOES PLAY THIS GAME FOR A LIVING!” Brilliant. Leave it to Gus to bring down the cold boot of truth.

Other stuff happened, like Cameron Smith berating his players lustily and at length after the final siren, despite them winning, and there was another game, featuring the fucking Broncos, as per, and they won, also as per, and the whole thing was very rewarding. You watch Friday Night Footy and feel the world disappearing. People say they experience the same sensation when a big gun goes off in their hands. I don’t know about that but I did have vague face-ache at the end of it all. Viva Victoria.

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.

Des Hasler's Hair - The Mane Event.

"Given Des's age and position, I'd probably suggest he's look better with the short back and sides"

 - Celebrity hair dresser Joh Bailey: 'Joh Distressed by Des's Tresses, Daily Telegraph, Wednesday. 

Is this the low point of the grand final coverage? Hardly. That rasping sound you hear, though? That's the Tele scraping the bottom of the barrel.

I didn't know Joh Bailey was still *ahem*, relevant, but since he so obviously is I feel I have to give pause to the fact that I instinctively dislike anyone with a deliberately misspelt 'distinguishing' name. Jodhi Packer/Mears? BITCH PLEASE! Sixty-five percent of those born since 1995? WE GET IT, YOU'RE A UNIQUE AND GIFTED INDIVIDUAL BOUND FOR THE WORLD STAGE. Or a shelf-stacking job at Big W. If i were a cat I would arch my back and hiss and stalk away from the offending name / bearer of name with my tail in the air and my asshole exposed. As a human, however, it is all I can do to roll my eyes and smirk, which is far less effective and yet another sad reminder of how much happier I would be if I were a cat and thus able to indulge my bitchiest instincts on a permanent and consequence-free basis. There's always old age to look forward to, but the oppurtunity is wasted somewhat, isn't it, when no one cares enough to listen / change your incontinence pad?

As it stands, I have no problem ridiculing and reprinting Bailey's searing, saucer-of-milk insights, and no problem with the knowledge that this makes me even more squalid and base and parasitic than those I deride. Make no mistake; I have a healthy grasp of the food chain and my place in it. The unpleasant realisation that I am - we are - on the edge of the off-season abyss is too terrible to bear thinking about right now so I am committed to keeping my snout buried in the tabloid's trough for as long as I possibly can. Still, let's pause a moment and reflect on Ellsworth Toohey - from The Fountainhead?

" 'You're a maggot, Elsie', she told him once. 'You feed on sores.' 'Then I'll never starve,' he answered."

This is a perfect piece of dialogue. He is a tabloid maggot, and what a wonderfully grotesque and familiar image. Tabloid hacks take note -  we may gobble your swill but we know which way the wind blows. Remember this.

Joh Bailey says that Des's hair looks genuinely unkempt and uncared for. Quelle Horreur!

"It's not as bad as a mullet, but it's getting there".

Huh? A mullet? Whatever, dick. But then, just as Bailey's inane comments grip me with the wincing pain of a miagrane, the next line offers redemption; swift and sweet:

"As for his thoughts on Warriors coach Ivan Cleary's do, Bailey said it was pretty bland and 'neither good nor bad' "

Wow. Way to nail Cleary's neither-here-nor-there 'personality' in just a few short words, Bailey. Is it possible I had you all wrong? Probably not, no, but props all the same.

On Cleary; and upon further inspection and several hours of not particularly restful reflection, it's come to mind that the man has that look about him most commonly seen in people who find themselves with something nasty in their mouth, in polite company, which excludes them from spitting it out with instinctive, explosive immediacy. Doesn't he look for all the world like he's - with glacial subtlety - using his tongue to roll a slightly rancid oyster from cheek to cheek? He just always looks.....faintly repulsed. Not that there's anything wrong with that, as Jerry and George would hasten to stress, it's just very unsettling, is all. Inscrutable people usually are though - and don't they fucking know it. Scrutinise this! *grabs handful of crotch*

So. Today the AFL, Sunday the NRL. My boss asked me who did I reckon for this weekend -

"who'd reckon for this weekend?"

 and when I asked him his code or mine -

"your code or mine?"

he said Ohh, right, you watch that other game don't you?, and flailed both his arms in the air as if he were summoning some higher power; a rain god perhaps, or Peter Garrett. This struck me as strange because I would think that between the two codes, surely AFL would be better represented, visually I mean, by a sudden, epileptic-esque arm waving interpretive dance move than NRL. Right? They do all that leaping and twirling and prancing already, it's really not that much of a stretch. What the fuck arm-waving do they do in league? NONE. Yet another reason why it is a far superior game, just quietly.

Anyway, mere trifles. I told him I thought the Cats might have it -

"I think the Cats might have it"

 and he said by-god he thought I might be right -

"by-god I think you might be right!" 

and we went on to have a lucid and reciprocal conversation about why we thought this was so and afterwards I was lightly troubled and strangely pleased, in equal parts, by the realisation that I had never sounded so Victorian in all my life. More so because we also talked about the Deni Ute Muster and I sort of, uh, enthused over it.

Plus, earlier, we had also shared this exchange:

- "Creeping Jesus isn't here yet - I fucken told him to come."
-"Who?"
- "Creeping Jesus."
- "WHO?"
- "CREEPING JESUS!"
- "Yeh that's what I thought you said."

The fuck??!