Canberra - Feel the Burn.

A chemical fire in Canberra is sending a toxic plume of black smoke over the city.
There is no city better suited to a Toxic Airborne Event. There is also no city better suited to a good razing.
Burn. Burn like the eyes of a vengeful god.
TAKE IT TO GROUND.

Wild Colonial Carney: SADDLE UP

Football, god love it, is a morality tale without the morality.

Just as the unnerving thought that Todd Carney may not be playing rugby league AT ALL next year was beginning to take hold there came the news this morning that the Cronulla Sharks are circling him. This is fantastic. The news excited me so much that I can't remember how I got to work. I assume I drove, but such was my elation that I have no recollection whatsoever. Goddamn you Toddy, see the hold you have over me? I told you, it's over. Release me from your kung fu grip!

Nobody is better (or worse, depending on how you choose to view it) suited to the Shire than Toddy. If he can't be in Canberra, shit, why not Cronulla? My entire family - ON BOTH SIDES - come from the Shire - most notably my renegade mother and her "Rules are for fools" father. He dropped dead of a heart attack upon exiting the water after smashing out a vigourous set of laps in one of Cronulla's sea baths right there on the beach, how's that for living and breathing the Shire?

I was having a hard time believing the line that the NRL were not fighting like dogs over the carcass of Carney's career. As it turns out, they are. Just, y'know, behind closed doors, which is where everything worthwhile and important takes place (except for Toddy's drinking and the machinations of Manly's board, apparently).

Anyway. Cronulla. This is a great fit for Toddy, great fit. Say what you will about them, those Eastern suburbs really do require a certain proclivity for pretension. This is a fundamental truth that even Greg Inglis recognised, and he's a knob from way back - he drove Choc Mundine's hummer home to Kempsey for Christmas last year for chrissakes! Even so, G.I. grasped this truth and moved away from Bondi as soon as he could - and if this was a strategic move to almost make me like him all I can say is well played G.I., well played. For extra points, get this: He moved into some kind of estate filled with cretinous people who know nothing of league and quickly became the neighbourhood go-to man for carrying out all minor household repairs for the weak, the elderly, the inept and the lazy. Way to expose and destabilise my increasingly irrational dislike for you G.I...prick.

Now. Paul Gallan as mentor, let's talk about that. He's lovely, isn't he? Hasn't he come into his own beautifully? Other than that small matter of stomping on someone's head a few months ago, which we will put down to him still being tired and emotional in the Origin aftermath and never speak of again, he has been a model of stolid, bovine obedience this season. Putting his meaty paw in the air (coz you just know that's how it went down at Sharks HQ) and offering to mentor Toddy just ices the cake in terms of his inherent awesomeness. Wait, is that last sentence too wimpy? I think so. Gal doesn't ice the cake; he puts his fist through the cake, he takes his clothes off and he shits on the cake, BITCH. Better?

It is for this reason (directly above) that I think Toddy will flourish under Gal's leadership. If anyone is going to be able to reign in the Wild Colonial Boy Carney while still allowing him to retain the semi-wild glint in his eye it's Gal. And there's something strangely affecting about Gal offering to shine a light into Toddy's dimmer parts. Gal gives me an inexplicably serene, tranquil feeling. I imagine he'd smell like fabric softener. In short, this is a man Toddy needs in his life.

Also, Toddy; pale blue, black and white will be way better against your complexion. You was way too ruddy for that red and navy, even when you weren't on the sauce. 

Saddle up, Toddy. Get 'em.

My Mother: Who's He? I like Him. Me: Lil Wayne.

My mother looked at ToddBlog and told me that she likes the look of Lil Wayne. This struck me as absurd for a minute because her taste in men runs more toward the Jeremy Irons end of the spectrum but then I remembered that my mum is the original rebel. She is, like, a fucking rebel in the truest and purest sense of the word. There's no posing, no posturing, and no Ramones t-shirts. Just an instinctive intolerance for rules and enough nerve to act upon her intolerance. Daily. Every.Fucking.Day. Rules? She cares not for rules.


She inherited it from her father. I never met him. One of his favourite expressions was "rules are for fools - wisemen follow guidelines", and he used to employ this phrase when people would pull him up for breaking rules - overtaking slow drivers on the shoulders of roads, for example. Apparently he used to do that a lot.


During the war he cut off a man's leg underwater. The man was trapped in the sea, his leg was stuck. There was a doctor but he couldn't swim so it fell on him to amputate it. The doctor gave him some rudimentary instructions and he had to dive down under the water and hack off the leg. He freed the man but he died anyway. After all the wars he became a barrister. He used his wig case to carry fruit to and from court. Pears were his favourite.


Anyway, with this in my mother's genes is it any wonder that photo of Lil Wayne leaving prison wearing a huge grin and sucking on a cigar struck her as pretty awesome? No, no it is not.

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Ayn Rand & Bain Maries

Bain-maries. I love them for what they are and I love them for what they house. I also love the word and try to insinuate it into my conversations and writing whenever I can. Same goes for lazy Susans, although they are more of a challenge. I don't eat Chinese because it's all pork and duck or other things that had parents so my life is strangely devoid of anecdotes involving me spinning a lazy Susan too fast and strewing dumplings about at the Sporties. So if you hear me recounting one you'll know that I'm lying like a rug. Or like Ricky Nixon whenever he opens his ugly mouth.

However. Yesterday I stopped in at this strange truckstop to get gas. It was a bonanza of retro. A girl came rushing over to PUMP MY GAS FOR ME - IMAGINE!! So unprepared was I for this that I eyed her approach with outright suspicion. (But I'm not paranoid. Who said I was paranoid?)

When I went inside to pay - because the girl had wandered off to flirt with a boy in a Skyline who looked like Jesse Pinkman circa season 1 of Breaking Bad - I was asked how much I had. "What, like in litres?" I asked, brow furrowed like a field. No, not in litres. Turned out I was expected to come in with the exact amount I owed on the tip of my tongue. I know. I thought this practice went out with the Whitlam government. Anyway, it gave me the opportunity, while trotting out to check the pump, to notice a bain-marie squatting in the corner. I don't know how I missed it, since it weilded a sweaty, salty and altogether holy command over the room.

It's hard to believe but I know a lot of people who don't actually like bain-maries or bain-marie food. Weird. On the other hand I have a friend who sees bain-marie foodstuffs as one of God's singular greatest gifts to man. "Mmmmmmm...deep fried treats..." is pretty much his catch phrase, and when he says it a glazed, reverential look comes into his eye. Also, he drools.

So I saw the Bain-marie, stopped short, and said "give me two of those potato scallops there Flo" because a) she looked like a Flo and b) because we had struck up something of a rapport due to what she perceived to be my inherent idiocy what with not knowing the correct payment proceedure and all. I also told her to add plenty of salt, which is my standard request, and that was where it all went awry and deviated dramatically from the script, because she gestured to the top of the Bain-marie and said "help yourself". HELP YOURSELF!!! What the shit, Flo?!!

Empires have fallen for less.

You get so used to being all coddled and swaddled and treated like a fucking incompetent and untrustworthy pin-number possessing piece of meat that experiences like this are just jarring.

I've just finished reading The Fountainhead, too, so the whole 'help yourself' notion resonated in my Ayn Rand- filled head like one of those Oriental gongs ringing out really, really loudly in the pre-dawn air of a still and sleeping valley.

So I mean, honestly, what the shit? Today helping yourself to salt, tomorrow the implementation of individualism and the triumph of Howard Roarks the world over?

The Fountainhead looks at the chronic, unconfessed fear in which we all live and is basically a rollicking, 700 page manifesto outlining just how repulsive Ayn Rand finds the concept of servility of the spirit. Fair play, too, at least theoretically. Definitely fair play in the practice of allowing me to administer my own salt and such. The abolition of the entire welfare system and every other economic and social safety net in existence? Not so much. In any case this was not my concern yesterday.

Ten years ago I found a broken up paperback copy of The Fountainhead lying in three pieces around the communal campsite (I believe the correct word for it in this instance is 'slum', but you say tomato etc etc) I was living in on the outskirts of a North Queensland town. I had no job and there was a hammock strung between two tamarind trees and once I found The Fountainhead my unemployment, the hammock and the book collided and synergised and I spent four or five days installed in said hammock stoned beyond all comprehension and just fucking gripped by this audacious book. My friends would start trickling home from their jobs around two each day and they would nod and say things like "still at it, eh?" as they eased themselves into the ripped out car seats that were sprawled around the place like gutted hogs and I would grunt and hang my foot out of the hammock to nudge the bowl across the ground toward them without missing a beat of the book. I was a bum yes, although in my defense its also a really, really good book, okay?!!

I have a notebook, the one I was using to record the absurdities of that particular time and place - of which there were an abundance - and for years afterwards, leafing through it, I would be struck by this one sentence above all the others - "I came here to say that I do not recognise anyone's right to one minute of my life". I would marvel at the way that it summed up my entire, until then unarticulated ethos, and would wonder where it came from and how something could so perfectly capture such a slippery and elusive concept.

Ten years later I'm reading the final pages of The Fountainhead under a thatched roof on an Indonesian island and Howard Roark is at his trial telling the court that he is a man who does not exist for others and there's that sentence, there it is in black and white and there it is in my veins and sinew and cells singing at me from within and without: from the page and from my being; the realisation of something that was out-of-reach intangible but ever present and it's a reunion and a resurrection and the closest thing I have had to a holy or spiritual experience and it is better than my whole life because it is my whole life.

All of this went through my head like a great silver streak of light as I looked at the self-serve salt and sauce in that service station, and culminated in me half-filling the paper bag containing my unidentifiable battered items with salt, because I could. It's not exactly freedom but I'm no Howard Roark so it may be the closest I get to it.

Major Todd To Ground Control

It's a funny thing. Toddy getting the sack kind of feels like I got the sack too. Is this my narcissistic personality disorder rearing it's golden head? Probably. Anyway, It's been terribly destabilising for me, all this business. I can only imagine Toddy's turmoil - is it any wonder he's fratenising with Lara Bingle? HOWEVER. Soon as he's spotted mixing it with Kyle Sandilands we will know that rock bottom has been reached and from there the only thing to be done is to call his mother - for the love of all that is good and holy won't somebody CALL LEANNE!

In the interim, I just feel terrible for Toddy. My anguish is not even eased by the obvious and kind of awesome assumption that someone, somewhere, throughout the course of all this slowly unraveling unpleasantness, uttered the words "we need to talk about Todd". Word, bitches, word.

Toddy, you is my favourite rebel, second only to Lil Wayne. Sorry, but he's got you beat. Anyone who leaves jail looking like this (y'know, as opposed to looking like Johnny Spit or a version thereof - see below)

and rolls up to court looking like this (see below) is okay with me. And by 'okay' I mean 'god', obviously.

The renegade attitude can take a person a long way. To court and to jail, yes, and all the way to France, even. Maybe.

Do most people still think he needs a punch in the dick? I'm a trifle out of touch down here in Victoria. People philosophise about the Pies and the Cats round these parts and have only the vaguest of understanding of NRL. This understanding extends to the loose acknowledgement that league players are very big, very violent and very stupid. The first two are givens, and the latter I can only assume is due to the relentless forward motion of the line in NRL, which I guess can appear a touch simplistic to the typically dim witted AFL afficionado. I mean, there can't be any other reason why they'd think league players are damned fools, so...

It has also come to my attention that the rural AFL fans around here think NRL is kind of ,well, gay. It's the scrum thing. They can't get past it. It captures their imaginations like nothing else. Time and time again I have found myself defending the scrum as a legitimate way of restarting the game to some semi-demented, homophobic hayseed - and I don't even entirely understand the purpose of the scrum myself, other than appearing to provide a convienient platform for refs to rouse on players who are getting under their skin over the course of the game.

Anyways. Precisely what constitutes a failure is a nebulous and elusive thing - unless of course you're Matt Orford, in which case shit is crystal - but even going down in flames Toddy is just as boss as ever, isn't he?

I just find him sweetly absurd and endlessly endearing. I can't understand people who huff and froth in self-righteous indignation about his various misdemeanors and indiscretions. Don't they remember when they too found out everything they had learnt about life thus far made them totally unsuited to cope with it? Have they forgotten their own dark nights of the soul?

Life can be terribly unkind. People too. 

Where's a merciful, forgiving God when you need one? No, not Nick Politis - he's busy taking sun in Mykonos. Not Noyce, either, he's busy being a dumbshit. And Gallop? He's too tied up with engineering the Stewart brothers' downfall (according to the Stewart brothers) to fulfil any duty of care toward our wayward Toddy.

With a mind like his, were the Roosters a good club for Toddy? He appears not to have been too happy there - but he appears not to have been too happy anywhere. I know the feeling. It comes from pain, damnation and the impossible. It gnaws and eats and you shove against it if you can. And when you can't? You go to ground, you ride it out. Alternatively, you follow up a trip to a tattoo parlour with a night of dedicated public drinking with two teammates during an alcohol-ban. Hey, whatever it takes. Pity about the photograhers, though.

Look, I don't buy the whole 'he's out of control' school of thought. I'm more down with the 'he's doing what every young Aussie guy does - he just happens to have a media profile' angle. He's young and handsome-hot, he has plenty of money and he lives in the city - he is the very quintessence of your typical early twenties type guy. In fact, I wager that he has a more wholesome sway than most. He's country, ya'll. (Remember that was Britney's defense when she was caught driving in LA with her baby on her lap - "I'm from Louisiana - I'm country, ya'll"? I mean, no further questions, your honour.)

What the fuck are your early twenties for if not lurching from crisis to crisis and reeling around in Hungry Jacks outlets at 5am?

Okay, so he may have something of a vacuum where his conscience ought to be but this is a trifling matter between him, his conscience and his Roosters teammates. Braith Anasta wanting to horsewhip him? By all means.

But the screeds of rage and invective insult from much of the media? It upsets me. I meet it with a short, sharp and succinct "get fucked". And Toddy? I welcome him back to the sweet milky bosom of an uncertain future with weary fatalism, rum, and rohypnol.

Josh Dugan: he be a DeLorean, he be a Datsun

I don't much care for the phone's ring. It puts an icy invasive shudder through me most times. At the very least it releases a burst of bile in my gut; a sensation which I believe is known as 'fear and loathing'. Or deep-seated paranoia.

I hear my psychedelic ringtone (Nokia Venture, for the enthusiasts out there) and automatically mutter words to the effect of "man the guns, they're coming" through gritted teeth. I'm not a snob or a psychopath, just a loner. Always have been. Other people's lives stink of ugliness. I mean, mine does too but I can handle my own stink better than most others. And people have a habit of pulling at the strings that hold my emotional baggage together. I don't go in for that.

Anyways, the phone still rings and I still answer most of the time because, y'know, I'm living in a society and all and I choose life choose a career choose a job choose a family choose a fucking big television choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers..

Cynacism aside, yesterday I recieved a fabulous phone call.

I would love to say that my gentleman caller regaled me with a short tale of high-stakes lust, betrayal and totalitarian seduction in the nation's capital and since it's my blog I think I will.

So, my gentleman caller regaled me with a short tale of lust, betrayal and totalitarian seduction in the nation's capital. In addition, and perhaps not suprisingly, there was mention of a rat's tail in there too. Fuck yeh!! This takes us dangerously close to over-egging-the-pudding-with-awesome territory.

Here's how it went down - bearing in mind that, for my part, I was radiating waves of slack-jawed and pie-eyed enthusiasm and may or may not have scrambled/forgotten key details...


-Nell-Belle!I had to ring you andtell you that I just taught a class that had Josh Dugan's ex-girlfriend in it!

-What the shit? The what now!!? Tell!!

-Well, we were talking about the Raiders and I said how shit they were and this girl goes lucky I'm not going out with Josh anymore and I said which Josh and she said Dugan and I said holy shit I have a friend who fucking lovvvvvvvvves Duges....

-*strangled noise from my end*

-Did you grill the shit out of her - WHAT'S THE STORY?? - bearing in mind that I asked this knowing full well how guys in such situations are notoriously bad at getting 'the story' and the requisite depth of detail and so forth - we don't want bare bones, boys, we want meat and juice and robust, muscular fact and conjecture and we want it by the kilogram thanks very much....

-Well they went to school together and he had a mad thing for her and was always after her and she had a boyfriend who she ended up breaking up with to be with Duges, and then she ended up leaving Duges and going back to her boyfriend - and it was at this point that I thought who the fuck is this boyfriend that's what I want to know - HE MUST BE SOME GUY - I mean, surely getting left for Josh Dugan would have to be one of the more emasculating and dispiriting experiences of a young man's life, because to paraphrase Kanye West THAT AINT NO NEIGHBOURGHOOD DICK if you catch my drift...

-So did you tell her that you screamed the words DUGES I WANNA HAVE YOUR BABY at him one time? Because I'm sure she'd like to know that....

-No, I was too busy telling her how much you were into him....and as we were walking out someone was like Yeh he's pretty good looking but I just can't cope with that rat's tail...

-So you could have called the papers but you called me instead? That's very flattering. Wait, what, you're in Canberra?

-Yeh, I know, commiserations, right?

-Yes. Deepest sympathies.


This is a guy who understands that Canberra was a petri dish of despair for me last year. This is also a guy who fully grasps the degree to which I dig Duges.

Last year he heard Dugan was doing a signing session at a Belconnen pub and called me, with another cracking opening line, all calm delivery and cool-headed aplomb: "Do you wanna go meet Duges, I know where he is".  They are some sweet sweet words right there - up there with 'it puts the lotion in the basket' and 'let's get you out of those pants'.

This is obviously also a guy whose classes you want to take. Enrol now, people! Don't let my unbridled distaste for the Nash Cap put you off, go sign up at the University of Canberra toot sweet and then hustle right on back here to ToddBlog. I would love to take some lectures and tutes where the guy up front drifts into footy-team talk from time to time - if my lecturers had done that once or twice at ANU my nervous breakdown may well have been averted altogether. It's called community spirit, you ANU-dwelling FUCKS. It's not all fucking Foucault and Manning Clarke, OKAY?? Jeez. See Below.

Actually, when I was at uni in Tasmania doing a bunch of gender studies units we had a whole series of lectures on Ian Roberts and his coming out and the heavy academic side of it was nicely balanced by a series of  very large slides that stayed up on the projector the whole week depicting the spreads he did for Black and White magazine and, even better, Blue. And a guest lecturer called Dean Durber; this lispy twerp from Western Australia who was new to the pleasures of the Eastern seaboard, regaled us with a charming anecdote about sharing pills with Roberts at seven in the morning on Oxford Street in the aftermath of a Mardi Gras. Karen Fox from the history department at ANU? TAKE NOTE, BITCH. Or die. Either or.

Anyway, now that I write this down I see that I have very few arresting details regarding this phonecall, and that this story appears to have no actual traction at all outside of the slightly unhinged smirk on my face. No matter. This is only the beginning. I'm sure it'll start to snowball soon, right? Bueller??....

The key point here (*gropes feebly for 'point' amid 'muck'*) is that Josh Dugan has something for everybody. He is a DeLorean, he is a Datsun. My gentleman caller wants to have his baby, I wanna build a house made out of his bones and the Roosters want to shower him with dollars and turn him into a morally-bankrupt but infinitely adorable scandal-rat like they do all their other players. Horses for courses, and Dugan eternal.

Holy Nothingness: Bukowski, 2nd Repeat.

You go places, you wonder why. You go places, you hope you make it back. You see terrible eyes, hear the babbling of the crowd, shudder at their gnawing little niceties and boring scraps of nothingness, you wonder why you leave home at all.

You see terrible truths, they don't interest you but they ingest you all the same and when you look at your face in somebody else's mirror in somebody else's home you know they have you too. You have an unclean feeling, it eats at you inside and out in dull whispers. You show up at a departure terminal with every edge drooping and look like every other person there and realise that you are on keel; that this is what they call living, and that you don't stand a chance.

You take your flight toward your home and sit with a hollow head and an unread newspaper on your knee. Your mind is awash with uncomfortable new truths that you did not ask to receive; you try to dispatch them to the backwoods of your mind, to regard them as a giant nowhere, to forget you ever saw and felt them.

Your eyes in the airplane bathroom mirror are touched with a wash of watercolour horror, the kind that causes a wearing away of the parts if you let it gnaw. You step down out of the plane onto a rain-slicked tarmac and tasks like negotiating your way into a toilet cubicle all hung about with luggage and feeding notes into a parking pay station tighten up your loose edges and help you to hold against the tide, help you to hold.


You feel appalled, you are appalled. Obviously there has never been a better time for some Bukowski.

"And what hurts is the steadily diminishing humanity of those fighting to hold jobs they don't want but fear the alternative worse. People simply empty out. They are bodies with fearful and obedient minds. The colour leaves the eye. The voice becomes ugly. And the body. The hair. The fingernails. The shoes. Everything does.

As a young man I could not believe that people could give their lives over to these conditions. As an old man, I still can't believe it. What do they do it for? Sex? TV? An automobile on monthly payments? Or children? Children who are just going to do the same thing that they did?"

You fell out with your fucking brother. You saw it develop into nightmare proportions. You don't think about making it back, you don't want to wonder if you will. You just need to make it home. You just need holy nothingness.