Breaking: I Feel Bad & Blame the NRL

My mum called and I told her I felt very bad, like shit, and she said she also felt very bad and like shit. She asked me are you keeping up with your blog and I said no. She asked me are you going to watch the grand final or not even bother and I said yeah, I’ll watch it, and she asked who are you going for, the Roosters and I said yeah, the Roosters and it’s hard to say but upon reflection maybe my reaction wasn’t quite in line with the spectacle and scope of the occasion. I don’t know. All I know is that I am adrift from my moorings and football is no longer my psychic anchor.

Are these two factors related? Whatever, it’s too late to find out. This is probably for the best. My frame of mind is in no way right for another long and maddening year of total involvement, total immersion. I cracked under the strain in June, things still aren’t right.

I understand that there are people who have maintained an abiding interest in the machinations of the NRL and that despite it being rendered a flaccid imitation of its former self they are still invested and interested in the cheap, second-rate product that’s been passed off to them.

I had a boyfriend and his mother was constantly disguising the cheap wine and cheap milk she’d buy by decanting it into superior bottles. She was Sicilian and overly concerned with appearances. She offered him $500 to cut off his dreadlocks and when he refused, with extreme prejudice, she took me aside and offered me $1000 to do it “while he sleep”.

The NRL is watered-down liquor in a flashy bottle. It’s also sort of a simulacrum of itself. Like how McDonalds sell you the picture of the burger, the burger as symbol, not the actual burger, so that what you’re buying is effectively the imitation of the idea? What we’re watching, or increasingly not watching as the case may be, is an imitation of the idea. I find it extremely difficult to concentrate on the cheap realities of the game under these conditions.
I’ve been forced to seek my exit from a world I find hostile and complicated elsewhere. In gentle narcotics, mostly.  

It’s probably a problem. I’m suffering, WNTTAT is suffering, we are all suffering. Except those who aren’t, of course. And good for them. I wouldn’t welcome them into my home or anything, but good for them, the McDonalds eating fucks.

 

 

 

Blake Ferguson & The Case For & Against Caging Footballers

 

Blake Ferguson went to court yesterday and entered a not guilty plea to an indecent assault charge.

Court documents allege Ferguson “touched vagina”.

The matter was adjourned until September, so it is for Blake, as it is for everyone, a matter of waiting.

We all wait, at all times, for everything. For doctors, for hospital beds, for transplants, for tradesmen, for Telstra, for elections, for planes, for your number to be called at the deli, for something to fucking change, for death.

Anyway, if you’re anything like me – and if you are congratulations – you will appreciate the high stakes aesthetics of his courthouse style. Internationally, Lindsay Lohan and Michael Jackson set the ‘arriving at court in style’ bar at lofty heights, well out of reach of the general population, to which, if you heed the damning reports, you would know these vagina touching NRL footballers do not believe they belong.

Many recent incidents seem to have confirmed the increasingly commonly held belief that footballers can no longer be trusted to perform ordinary individual acts in any unsupervised capacity. Maybe none more so than Russell Packer, who not five minutes after failing to utilise the unadulterated access to amenities that the dressing sheds presumably provide, stood on field and, hands on hips and before an audience of thousands, released down his leg a great stream of urine.

I’m sorry but whether public or private there’s something unseemly about a man who doesn’t hold his dick to do this. It’s animal.

Packer’s proof that performing basic ablutions are beyond the realm of what we can expect from footballers works very much in favour of the advocates moving to cage and quarantine players for all but the 80 minutes of game time required of them each week. As a movement, it’s gaining momentum.  

They say that based on the current climate very little seems to separate NRL players from the animal world already. They argue that random vagina touching and flagrant hands free urination are but two more threads that make up the ever-narrowing link between footballer and beast.

I don’t deny this. I did, after all, see that stream of piss, those stained shorts, and the sunglasses Blake Ferguson wore on his way to court to plead not guilty.

Still, I am fundamentally opposed to this movement. In actual fact I’m an advocate for footballers gaining recognition as a protected species and being awarded certain civic and civil liberties that allow them to roam among us drones free and unfettered.

 

This could be a platform from which either side could win this fucking election we’re waiting on. And wouldn’t that actually be something worth waiting for, aside from grim death of course.   

 

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.

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!”

Cameron Frye. I am him.

Having a birthday in a few weeks. Turning thirty.

Birthdays aren’t just ‘birthdays’, of course. Not for adults. They are corrosive mental ordeals; brutal philosophical examinations of the self, annual opportunities for taking inventory of all the time you waste on menial but terribly taxing tasks like standing in line at the post office collecting parcels containing things you don’t remember buying on eBay probably because you make many of your purchases in the dark pre-dawn gloom during dark nights of the soul of which there are evidently many.

This turning thirty business is a bitch any way you look at it. Collapsed youth and raw adult reality collide. A mess is made, a silent soul-stink that rises.   

I feel like a vacant block that’s been burned and left empty. I feel like Cameron Frye.

Here’s something that’s never really made very clear: there is a lot of maintenance work involved with mental health, a lot of up-keep. There’s no end point. It’s ongoing, eternal. It can be overwhelming. Insight is encouraged. You are supposed to closely monitor the way you feel, keeping on top of mood changes and paying close attention to fluctuations and such. This can be difficult if part of your problem is that you don’t much like to feel things, and what you do feel is based on control and denial.  

It can also be exhausting, boring, tedious, circular.  You get a grip, but then you have to maintain.

And you don’t want to talk to anyone about it because you know it will only unnerve them and make you feel even more misunderstood and awkward and neither of these outcomes hold any appeal whatsoever so you say “Oh, I’m alright, I’m okay” and hope you’re holding the soul-stink down. And hope that you don’t have to hear people’s voices shrink and go small with sympathy.

Cameron Frye understood this. It is why he wanted to remain in bed. He was lying in bed on his back genuinely mourning the fact that he was not dead.

Even when Ferris got Cameron out of bed and into the streets and he relaxed some and appeared to enjoy the fact that he was not dead it was clear that his emotional constitution and complex, fragile psyche may have been altogether too delicate to withstand the rigours and ravages of life beyond high school graduation.

He was a teenager but he already reeked of oblivion.  

 My favourite scene in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off:

Ferris: “I’m so disappointed in Cameron! Twenty bucks says he’s in his car right now debating on whether or not to go out.”

Cameron: [Cameron is in his car] “He’ll keep calling me; he’ll keep calling me until I come over. He’ll make me feel guilty. This is uh…This is ridiculous, ok I’ll go, I’ll go, I’ll go. I’ll go. What – I’LL GO. Shit.” [Turns the engine on then turns it off and hits the passenger seat.]

Cameron: “God Damnit!” [Turns the car on and revs it up.]

Cameron: “Ahhhhhhh! Shit!” [Gets out of the car.]

Cameron: “That’s it!” [Paces behind the car and jumps up and down in frustration.]

I like it ‘cos it’s me most days.

Phillip K Dick was this tweaked out science fiction author who wrote the stories that Blade Runner and Total Recall were based on and lived an astonishing ramshackle life and claimed, among other things (‘other things’ being that he was alive and everyone else was dead) that his car would only run between home and his psychiatrist’s office. Take it anywhere else, he said, and it would steer itself right into an accident.

Cameron: [Intoning] “When Cameron was in Egypt land LET MY CAMERON GO”.

Fade to black. Or beige, depending on your personal preference and the intensity level of your perpetual discomfort that annihilates all other thoughts and ambitions.

Round 23 - The Thinning of the Herd

Hello reader!

Has the endlessly optimistic drip drip drip talk of the top eight so unstabilised your judgement that you actually began to believe those poxy teams who have played poorly all year would burst through the ladder’s log jam and assume their rightful spot in the eight?

Ho! I suppose you thought Mark Latham could be prime minister back in 2004, too, DIDN’T YOU? I don’t blame you. I can’t. I believed in Latham too. What can I say; it’s easy to get caught up.

You get caught up, you get let down. This is the way the world works. It’s physics, or such is my understanding of physics. Of course, getting caught up inevitably leads to heartbreak. Oh well. What doesn’t? You follow a team. You feel their struggle. Know their pain. Invest in their future. Watch them fall. Tough shit to you.            

Life is a series of vile disappointments and injustices. Supporters of middling to terrible teams understand this instinctively. Raider fans, for example, do not need explained to them the annual slow dawning of disappointment that descends with a slow blackness and makes you feel hollow, bereft.

Well reader, perhaps this weekend has cleared up any questions you may have had, snuffed out any lingering, candle-in-the-wind hopes you may have held? Let’s hope so.

For the Roosters, the Warriors and the Dragons, certain rude truths have become crashingly apparent. The Panthers and the Eels are engaged in a titillating ‘avoid the wooden spoon’ dance down in the bottom-of-the-ladder bin-juice. The Titans and the Tigers and the Raiders and the Knights are tussling for the top eight. It feels futile, but the same futility must scratch at the heart of every malcontent every morning and more on Mondays the world over, what can you do? You go on. You go on, you beat on, boats against the current.

I don’t know what Jay Gatsby would have made of rugby league but he believed in that green light at the end of Daisy’s dock and so must we all.

You may be sad so here is a baby elephant running across a road

Look at the baby elephant. LOOK AT IT RUN!

sometimes you're ok, world.