Josh Dugan What The Fuck Has Happened

That's enough with the tattoos now Josh you used to be cute I'm sad

                                       

The Raw Obscenity of Tom Waterhouse & Associated Social Decays

This stinking age we live in, Christ. A return to the age of the cave looks more and more appealing. This, and I’m not even depressed. Fun Fact: I’m too bone-tired to feel depressed over the summer months because I’m busy working like a goddamned Aesop grasshopper so as I can spend the autumn and early winter months idle and unhinged, fully immersed in neuroses, woe and NRL.

And still -  through this brutal summer landscape -  blasts a drugs in sports scandal. I was very shook up and wretched for the first week following the announcement, braced for turbulence, calling and haranguing my mother spluttering IT’S NOT JUST THE RANK ILLEGALITY THAT OFFENDS -  -  and then getting rolling and shouting overwrought things like THE CLUBS HAVE FAILED IN THEIR DUTY OF CARE THOSE FUCKERS HAVE FAILED THEIR LEAGUES THEIR PLAYERS THEIR FANS -  -  spouting vicious theories regarding lax administration, festering corruption and Machiavellian plotting and then rounding it all off with some rude references to Tom Waterhouse.  

Well, why not? Waterhouse’s high visibility and shit-licker visage make him an obvious poster-boy for the unease surrounding the morphing of sport into the entertainment industry and the unprecedented extent to which it has been seduced and subverted by gambling interests and oriental fish tattoos.

And then the Raiders were named. The Raiders?? The Raiders!! They of the hapless fadeouts and injuries in endemic proportions? Is there no decency at all remaining in this heinous fucking age? These are dark waters.

But three weeks later and the whole thing has become a tremulous melodrama with unsavory political associations and the consistency of your mother’s Christmas trifle. You know, wobbly.  And here, the murk descends.

Because Australian sport is about much more than sport.

For most of us, our first and most powerful response is emotional. My earliest memory of rugby league is my big brother crawling under his bed in the manner of a dying dog after Penrith beat Canberra in the grand final and not coming out for quite some time.

And because sport is essentially human drama. I suspected this deeply at the time of that grand final loss, and adult hindsight confirms the impression.

And now, twenty two years after that Raiders Panthers game, the totally unsurprising revelation that the brutal, pigs-at-the-trough commercialisation of sporting codes has correspondingly commercialised the market for performance enhancing drugs. Professionalism gives winning an obscenely greater value than merely competing. And a win at all costs culture cultivates fertile soil for corruption. All of this is a rank affront ; the shadow, the murk, the stupidity, the limping bullshit, the lies. We are all under our beds now.

Bernard Tomic's Grim Odyssey

If I had a dollar for every time someone has told me that they can’t stand Bernard Tomic I’d have,like, 30 dollars.

It totally annoys me. I have long been of the opinion that only myself and Belinda Neal are authorised to express unfettered disdain toward total strangers. Who are all these other under-informed and over-opinionated imposters and why do they remind me of nothing so much as those dogs that bring discredit to their entire species by standing and barking witlessly at people and/or inanimate objects?   

Women handing me change from cash registers tell me they don’t like him. “Why can’t he just keep his mouth shut?’ they say.  They shift uneasily on their swollen ankles as my avian, specifically seagull stare penetrates their stinking souls. Their disapproval is without context, and they have ham-hock cankles. I reject their reality.

My mother tells me she doesn’t like him. ‘Why doesn’t he smile?’ she says. I do not tell her to look forward to being strapped upright and unattended in an unforgiving chair while pureed corn beef dribbles down her chin later in life because she’s heard it many times now and the threat is in danger of losing its potency so I just bark “HE DOES FUCKING SMILE: AFTER HE WINS MATCHES ON WITS AND GRIT AND WHILE HE IS BEING INTERVIEWED BY JIM COURIER AND JIM COURIER’S SPECTACULAR SWOOSH OF STRAWBERRY SHORTCAKE HAIR HE FUCKING SMILES. BESIDES, HE’S OF EASTERN EUROPEAN DESCENT – THEY HAVE POOR DIETS MADE UP OF TERRIBLE CLAGGY FOODS AND WHILE OUR PEOPLE WERE CLEARING BUSH AND RELEASING CRATE LOADS OF RABBITS INTO WHAT WAS LEFT OF IT HIS PEOPLE WERE BEING ETHNICALLY CLEANSED AND RAPED BY COSSACKS WITH A GIDDY LUST FOR ATROCITIES, OR SUCH IS THE COMBINED TOTAL OF MY UNDERSTANDING OF AUSTRALIAN AND BALTIC HISTORY.”

Anyway, no matter. Now he lives the Kanye West version of The Good Life, splitting his time between the Gold Coast and Monte Carlo; but don’t worry, Old-Worlders, because his grim odyssey is not over yet - he supports the Titans in what is an obvious nod to ancient ancestral hardships and struggle, and long may it flourish.

Speaking of ancient struggles, over in Hollywood Dax Shepard is unhappy that Justin Beiber has moved into the mansion next to him - “The music and the parties and the paparazzi,” Dax reveals. “I mean, it’s like living in Lebanon now.”

A provocative claim, but perception is a curious thing. What might represent ‘reality’ to Dax Shepard (he dates Veronica Mars you know) is outright unrecognisable to, like, the less obnoxious and those of us who have the misfortune of not being, like, American.

I don’t know. Maybe Tomic’s various neighbours think the same thing, what with the 5:30am spa-bath based brawlings and the revving of high performance luxury cars and the crunch of jack-boots on gravel as police try to gain racially-motivated entry and the assumed explosions of Old Man Tomic because if there’s one thing years of tennis history has shown it is that it really helps to have a paranoid, delusional or manic father in your corner, and that it is best to hang fast to their principles, even to the detriment of your career.

Anyway, what a fucking baller -  I mean have you ever tried to even clamber out of a spa-bath when you’re out of your mind messy? Remember the attorney in the White Rabbit “I want a rising sound” bathtub scene in Fear and Loathing? It’s not easy, even for the lithe and spry, which you, reader, are probably not. Look at you, right now, wincing even as you shift in your ergonomic executive swivel chair, regretting that attempt at blow-drying your balls in the gym locker room earlier. Don’t you feel stupid!

The Dirtiest, The Hardest, The Best

The whole rotten edifice of Lance Armstrong’s dream world comes crashing down and I’m so busy fangirling over Bernard Tomic I barely have time to enjoy the full reveal of the cold, calculated glory of Armstrong’s sociopathic nature. What can I say. It’s a rich life. It’s also one full of extremely flawed men. Some of them are the greatest sportspeople of our age; the rest of them are my ex-boyfriends.

I love Tomic and I kind of like Lance Armstrong too, or at least I did until yesterday. The more strident his lies the more I liked him. The chilling demeanour, the callous disregard for others, the brutal denials, the cancerous balls, calling that female accuser a fat prostitute… I also recognised the ‘if something’s worth doing it’s worth doing right’ ethos inherent in his diabolical master-plan – my favourite ethos, as it were.  

Jonathan Horn in The Age criticised the people who have come after Armstrong wielding flame-throwers:

“All sense of proportion has been lost. Lance Armstrong isn’t Jimmy Savile. He isn’t the subject of a royal commission. In an ethically bereft sport, he was the dirtiest, the hardest and the best.”

Goddamn right.  He doped hard he rode hard and he lied hard.

It’s been real.

List of Things That Get On My Nerves

List of Things That Get On My Nerves  

Unsalted food

People who refer to magazines as ‘books’

Grey Nomads

Grey Nomads who call their caravan arrangements ‘rigs’

People with food sensitivities

People who wax lyrical about Shantaram

Shantaram

Olive oil

People who use the terms ‘bucket list’, ‘me time’, ‘retail therapy’ and ‘flick me an email’

Police procedural TV shows

Police

Baz Luhrmann’s ultra-modern soundtracks

Baz Luhrmann movies

Coffee table books

Brunch

The self-help industry

The vitamin industry

South Australia

Women who fan their faces with their hands when crying/trying not to cry

Those inane configurations of ornamental letters people have in their homes spelling out words like Eat, Peace, Love, Family, etc

The words “I’m on a detox”

Rapid fire TV dialogue as popularised by Aaron Sorkin

Instagram food photos

Q&A audience questions, Q&A tweeters, politicians on Q&A, Q&A generally

Animated movies

People who still morally denounce Woody Allen’s choice of wife and use this as a reason for not watching his movies

People, pretty much

Seasons greetings and jingle bells. It’s been real.

Coping With Canberra - A Raiders Progress Report

For the football fan, summer is the soul’s winter.

For the footballers themselves, summer is the season in which to comfortingly return to character.  As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly: Proverbs 26, 11.

In Canberra, the Raiders are busily engaging in vivid and unrestrained off-field activities which cast an impression of quality living.

>>Quality living by Canberra standards I mean. Some other, non-geographically specific things which cast impressions of quality living: STD’s, rural road signs all shot up with bullet holes, getting bit by an animal while trying to get it stoned, ever using the word ‘repo’d’, seafood extender, painting unventilated rooms, ugly dogs hurling themselves against chain-link fences, trawling YouTube for footage of Flynn from Australian Idol’s rendition of Push Up! in morning’s earliest hours, tobacco-stained ceilings, managing to have both long hair and a sunburned scalp, throwing up in potted plants and any type of heaving be it dry or otherwise, threatening loved ones with shoes, staple guns or other unconventional weapons, having part of an eyebrow missing, petrol station pies, Lowes.  

It’s grim there you know. Faded, and with a weird melancholy. So while Bernard Tomic is brawling with his friend in a spa at 5:30am on the Gold Coast, which sounds hedonistic and hot, the Raiders are making the most of things in their own ways. Recent efforts have achieved some solid results, and ACT police have netted several Raiders in their wily civic web.

-         Jack Boom was thrown out of the Foreshore festival and into the drunk-tank for several hours. I read this in the Tele and then never heard a thing about it ever again but I totally buy it the boy is clearly a fiend anyone with a face as sweet as his is a certified fiend.

-         Blake Ferguson was ejected from the same festival for allegedly “spitting” “on” “several patrons”.

-         Joel Thompson has been interviewed about a bottle being thrown at a cyclist during a post-Foreshore party at his apartment. And there are non-existent reports that coach Furner was caught throwing a car battery through a senior player’s car windscreen.   

Well, shit. We liked Brando as Stanley Kowalski didn’t we, all mute surly attitude and explosions of raw seething brutality? What’s the goddamn difference?

Just as the game itself is an acquired taste, the occasionally unwholesome extracurricular activities of the most abhorrent members of society ie. football players are seen to be unpalatable by many also.  These are probably the same flat-pack people who have never slept with a second cousin more than once, never had a dark and savage night of the soul, and never sawed the roof off their car.      

So, whatever. Football is an acquired taste. My best friend told me her boyfriend regards with distaste footballers and the women who love them. He takes it to mean they’re rough or whatever.

But, Canberra. It’s weird there. As anyone who has lived there for any stretch of time will appreciate, the urge to throw bottles from balconies at cyclists is a powerful one which is not easily denied. I myself had to consciously keep two hands positioned on the steering wheel at all times when driving such was my urge to run cyclists down in my car. Nothing personal, you understand, it’s just that they somehow became a very visual and ever-present reminder of my culturally bankrupt and capitalist wasteland surrounds. This created an uneasy atmosphere of foreboding and also made driving something of an ordeal.

So I understand and sympathise with any bottle-throwing, spitting, heavy drinking, drug use, destruction of property and homicidal rampaging that goes on in Canberra. I actually endorse it. Distractions and delay tactics employed by those seeking to avoid the inevitable incursion of real life are a necessary component to coping with Canberra. If I wasn’t so burnt-out and unambitious I would run for office and seek subsidisation for it from Medicare myself.

((*not talking about J-Bo, Gav or Terry Campese anytime I talk about how fucked Canberra is. They all come from Queanbeyan, anyways, and besides which they are three of the best and most well-bred things – animal mineral vegetable or other - to come out of this stinking age we live in.))

The Shoulder Charge

I tend to be too lazy and depressed to work myself into a froth of indignation and in any case I need to save my energy to expend on anxiety attacks but I appreciate the indignant people who froth and foam. Especially the ones who flesh out my half-baked and unsubstantiated theories. While they are busy doing that I usually just emit a sustained groan and descend deeper into an unseen void.

I understand that the outlawing of the shoulder charge has upset many people, including but not limited to Sonny Bill Williams, who tweeted about it. He also went to see a movie. He had a large popcorn, a Coke, and the clear eyes and smooth visage of one who sleeps soundly at night. Quade Cooper was with him. He didn’t look too good but that’s probably because he’s not, I don’t know. Anyway, the entity behind veritable website thepublicapology.net understood where my concerns rested and tweeted me this picture pointing out the sizes of the Cokes concerned while everyone else was in a shoulder charge related frenzy. It’s nice to be understood.

I myself see nothing much wrong and plenty right with any action that renders men 1. Concussed and lying prone like huge sweating hams, or 2. Reeling around like drunken Irish villagers.

Rugby league is a methodically brutal game punctuated by stylish explosions of violence. The shoulder charge is the very quintessence of the game.

Some are so good that if ever asked to present a solitary work for admittance to a higher realm, the perpetrators would surely consider submitting their finest and most destructive shoulder charge.

But now “people”; brain surgeons and former players, I don’t know, have decided the shoulder charge is a pestilence for all concerned. Dreary repetitive assembly-line mediocrity hangs in the air like the stink of beef tallow out the back at McDonalds. Where is the spirit in this life? The fervor in these times?

Their argument seems to be that it dulls footballer’s brains and wits. 

Footballers are not a people one normally associates with sharp practices. Most of them are already on the brink of incoherence at the start of their playing careers. They seem very nice but they do exhibit an almost effortless idiocy and can seldom maintain a satisfactory level of intellectual discourse as it is; what difference does it make if their brains start to crackle and smoke and sometimes shoot sparks like faulty wall sockets later in their lives, condemning them to a future of witless dereliction and semi-demented poverty? It’s more than most of us are promised.        

 Anyway, there are many things that can disorder and scramble a brain. Youthful pharmaceutical adventures, epilepsy, aneurysms, the heat, the horrors, being brought up from the bottom of the ocean too fast and of course the creeping ineradicable awareness of the decay eating away at the fabric of the world.   

Life is nothing if not a series of traumas big and small.