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.netunderstood 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.
