The Dugan Saga

Fucking Josh Dugan. Ever since he left the Raiders he’s been a source of renewable energy as far as irritation is concerned.

I didn’t overly mind him going to another club at first. I didn’t want to go down the ‘if we can’t have him no one should’ pathway because it is an ugly way of thinking and one best left for the family court systems and dissatisfied fathers who kill their partners or children and then themselves. And just quickly while I’m here has Dugan’s stinking shitbag of a spawn been born yet? Because if any stinking shitbag is worthy of commemorative crockery this year surely it is Dugan’s and not, as general frenzy would have us believe, Prince William and his cardboard-cutout-gyro-reticulate-eyed wife’s Royal one?

Now though he’s just getting on my nerves. Everything gets on my nerves of course. Because they’re shot, mainly, but also because everything is fucking annoying, one vile task after another in a vile horizonless tapestry, so much so that my mother has developed a catchphrase out of my neuroses so that every time I say something is getting on my nerves including and often referring specifically to her she just says “you and your nerves”.

Yeah. Me and my nerves.

In any case, I hear he has said some derogatory things about the Raiders. I say ‘hear’ because I have not bothered to ‘read’ these things because I am ‘lazy’. And also because I like to adhere to that great and proud tradition of writing slanderous things about somebody without bothering to avail myself of the information on which I’m largely basing my slander. Yeah, cunts, welcome to the internet.

 

 

Whatever it was he said, it’s safe to say he doesn’t seem to have a sophisticated grasp, if any, of the delicate circumstances surrounding him, and really why would he what with moving fairly seamlessly from the Raiders to the Dragons to Origin?

As upward trajectories go it is fine and faultless, but rude post-Raider realities have forced me to concede that what he needed was an injunction, ala Todd Carney, in which to turn a few tight transgressive loops of a downward spiral.

 

This didn’t happen. Those stupid photos of him laboring manually on a building site while wearing a pristine white hoodie don’t count and neither do any of the other small indignities he has heaped upon himself recently and now the Dragons play the Raiders this Saturday and I guess as grudge matches go this will be a good one even though there is no justice because were there any justice my personal preference for Dugan’s punishment would surely have been implemented post haste and instead of playing football he would be spending his weekends  tonging sausages on a hotplate outside of Bunnings because this far more than football is a test of the deep and involuntary stuff of a man and quite frankly who wouldn’t want to see that?  

 

 

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.

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!”

Things No Daughter Wants To Hear Her Mother Say

Something bad has happened

I’ve had an accident

I had to run

It was this close

I didn’t make it

Have you got a plastic bag I can put these in?

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

Des Hasler is Good. So was pre-Waterloo Napoleon.

Here is an astute and insightful observation: The Raiders must beat the Bulldogs tonight. The Raiders must succeed. I refer here to Gore Vidal’s version of success: It’s not enough to succeed. Others must fail.

Des is good. This is a fundamental truth. Napoleon was good too. Remember what happened to him? Despite his knowledge of the harsh Russian winter, Napoleon attacked during the cold months and his troops were decimated. Just something for Des to bear in mind.  

Other key points for us the viewers to bear in mind: 

-One of the Bulldogs looks like a Sasquatch. Which I understand are offensively hairy, ogre-like creatures. His name eludes me but whoever it is he has totally disproved the evolution theory.

-One of the Bulldogs looks like this guy who came to look at the Tarago I was selling and took a noisy dump in my toilet.

- One of the Bulldogs is Josh Reynolds: excitement machine. He has a motley mongrel vibe and a sociopathic glint to the eye. I like how he is making a name as the game’s new, up-and-coming super-grub under the aggressive tutelage of Michael Ennis. I like it how he is always at pains to point out that he’s “not the most naturally gifted player” and that he has had to work very hard, none of this teenage prodigy* shit for him. If you listened to him without seeing him play you would naturally conclude that he is some kind of genetically feeble loser with a club-foot and a harelip. And, not, you know, extravagantly awesome.  See also: Matty Johns dishing out the high praise and calling him “a real hound-dog”.  

*(A teenage Scrabble prodigy was last week ejected from the US Scrabble Championship after he was caught stealing the two blank tiles before a game. Also, 41% of Americans think that preparing for doomsday is more important than saving for retirement. These are two totally unrelated points from which I encourage you to configure your own baseless conclusions. You sick fucks!!)

So. The Raiders must win.

If they don’t I won’t be mad at them though.

I say I’m on my last nerve with them all the time but never really am. I have an endless supply of fresh nerves specially bred to be shredded.

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.

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.

Home. Sweet Nothings.

The best thing about going away is coming back.

Leaving Australia is nice, but it's returning to Australia that unleashes a hot streak of happiness in me. It crinkles the corners of my every mundane movement for days afterward, sometimes weeks. Small acts of casually liberated abandon such as stepping with certain feet onto my own bathmat or stepping out into my yard in my underwear of a night to look at the stars fill me with a sense of golden gratitude and gratefulness. Yes. Home is the place. Home is where it's at.

Also, I find there are far less legitimate opportunities to work myself into a froth of indignation and irritation when overseas. This occupies a fair to large portion of my time at home in Australia so I tend to find myself with quite a bit of vacant mental real-estate when away. This makes me slightly uneasy. I'm not entirely at home with the inside of my head resembling a place of golden splendour and serenity. I mean, you've read the rest of this blog, right? Exactly.

In fact, here is a direct, horse's mouth quote (in which I am the horse), indicating the extent to which my cranial chambers have been troubled only by the occasional rolling tumbleweed these last few weeks:

"My mind's relaxed too......it feels like a field full of wheat with the wind blowing through it.......whoooossshhhka"

I actually spoke these words after receiving a massage. This is significant in itself as I have historically had some trouble receiving massages. I don't know, I'm just not that into dropping my trousers for people when there's new age music wafting in the air - even when there's a well-established pretext and financial framework in place. Especially when there's that, actually. I'm funny like that.

Anyway, I was indicating that I felt loose of both body and mind. Or something. I guess something about it (AND I CAN'T IMAGINE WHAT) struck Susu - the lucky recipient of 17 days worth of my preposterous waffling - as absurd and she dissolved into giggles. As in, she kicked her legs in the air and squealed and everything. Hummmmph.

And that massage? It was something else. My flesh yielded to it as it would to the advances of a mouth-breathing football player. I was fluid, liquid, mercurial. You know, as opposed to feeling like a marbled slab of meat, or a greasy chunk of tuna laid out on a table, head installed in a hole, vaguely troubled by the knowledge that the masseuse's inviting smile belies her internal dread at having to lay her lovely hands on the knotted, bed-sore ridden back of another dishevelled and decadent western wayfarer? Anybody? No, massages are not for me. Of course, this attitude doesn't stop me from having them, no. It just causes me to seize up somewhat and become rigid, so the inevitable outcome is that I lie there like a partially defrosted leg of lamb for the massage's duration. I'd probably be more relaxed being chained to a rock and torn by vultures. It would be less neurosis-inducing, and I imagine I could at least keep my pants on for the most part.

.....smells like..victory

Whiskey Oscar Whiskey! (wow)

                                                  Raiders going into aami park

WOW. There was an upset that was, oh, ELEVEN years in the making.
Talk about a boil over. That shit was VOLCANIC.

Also, way to make Cam Smith pissy, Raiders! He is spectacularly ungracious in defeat, and aside from seeing Billy Slater making costly mistakes and/or getting drilled in violent tackles, nothing pleases the hater in me more than seeing Smith sulky in defeat and forced to rake over the wreckage of his game in a post-match press conference. No one mumbles surly mono-syllables into their chest and avoids eye-contact and radiates purple waves of poor sportsmanship quite like him.

It's truly a sight to behold, and it's one that I really revel in, ok? Ok.




                                             How the Raiders rode him. More or less.


Basically, I have nothing coherent to say about this game because as soon as Canberra got out of the blocks early I lost my shit completely. I think this is totally justified, by the way, especially coming on the back of last week when, y'know, they failed to get out of the blocks AT ALL.

I know that Cooma's greatest export since Brett White ie. Sam Williams, threw a tidy cut-out via Croker to send Reece Robinson over in the fourth minute, this much is clear, though nothing much else is.

So. My expectations regarding this game were at an all-time low. In a weird way, then, I was looking forward to being able to watch it in a relatively relaxed state, as opposed to ending up a jangled wreck with fingernail marks in my palms and the possibilty of an aneurism very real by the 11th or 12th minute.

Which is my natural Raiders-watching state, really.

During the post-try celebrations, amid the back-slapping and wot not, all my mind could manage, on repeat and with extreme feeling, was

                                                      "fuck Duges is fierce"

Which is totally my natural Dugan-watching state, now that I think of it (right Gav?!)

His fierceness is very distracting, but, honestly, what's the boy to do, hide his hot under a bushel? I think not.

Anyway, 15 minutes in and it was glaringly, awesomely obvious that the Sprawled-Slack-Jawed-Across-the-Sofa mode of viewing I'd anticipated was not to be.

It was 12-0 to the Raiders by way of Dugan setting up Josh McCrone for four points and Croker converting in his usual tidy fashion and all I have written down from this period, which can really be seen to sum up my feelings until the 79th minute, when I began to quietly cry, is this:

                                               terrible tension, TERRIBLE tension.

Other miscellaneous recollections involve the Storm being all up in every bitch with the ball's business and holding them in tackles for way too long, and Brett White making a courageous try-saving tackle on one of his ex-teammates, which I guess in civilian terms is akin to making out with your new beau in front of your ex, in extremely public surrounds. Shazam!

Brett-said I loved you but I lied-White

Then I have disjointed memories of it getting to 12-12, and endless sets of six being traded, and the Raiders holding super steady in defense and, after 20 or so minutes, the Raiders starting to get on top. Astonishing.

There was a 2 point penalty kick in there somewhere, 14-12.

There was Dane Tilse putting an absolute bell-ringer on some debutant Storm kid that caused one of the commentators, Belcher I think, to holler:

                    "welcome to first grade, son, my name's Dane Tilse!"

as a kind of comic-strip thought bubble to accompany the multiple and gratuitous replaysof the massive hit.

Then, somewhere in the final 10 minutes, Blake Ferguson's awesome tippy-toe skills came into play and he stayed in the field of play by one whisker and that beautiful thing that is Benefit of the Doubt to score a freaky runaway try and put them 8 ahead.

I have no idea what happens after this but I assume the Green Machine manage to maintain their composure and confidence because they go on to get the win, and I go on to emote, and the Raiders go on to gather together in an adorable post-win Victory Huddle and Cam Smith goes on to be a sulky bitch.

All is as it should be, basically.