Canberra Raiders 2014: Die Harder

My friend supports the Broncos. This automatically renders him incapable of understanding the slaughterhouse of the soul struggle of supporting a second-tier team. He is also a Queenslander. Frankly, seeing these sentiments strung together on a screen like this is making me question how we are friends at all. Thin ice!

Anyways, because no discussion of the Raiders is complete without reference to the astonishingly innovative ways in which they hemorrhage young talent, and because I still look back on said hemorrhaged talent with a honey-glazed glow I guess I was moaning some wretched sentiment regarding Carney or Monaghan or Ferguson or possibly, depending on the extent to which he had already inflamed me with his airy upper-echelon assuredness, Travis Waddell. I can’t remember the details exactly. It was only two days ago but my mind has a tendency to slip a gear when it comes to the Raiders. Mental health experts would have me believe that this, much like my night terrors, is a side effect from suffering under the sustained weight of terminal failure and disappointment.

 ‘Oh,’ he said, with the inane breeziness common to breakfast TV presenters, ‘you should be used to it by now.’ Of course, this is exactly the type of innately annoying and unsympathetic thing a Bronco supporter would say. Storm fans too, tenfold. The Gina Reinharts of the NRL. Totally out of touch.

Anyway. I told him it never stops hurting. Because it doesn’t. But I enjoyed the sound and sensation of saying something as arresting as this so I added an apocalyptic, cinema-trailer-narrator-type element to my delivery – IT NEVER. STOPS. HURTING.  

Because just like life in general, there is always another punishment, another casual outrage, another loss.
Well, so what. We die harder.