The best a man can get

Today I want to share something with you that has troubled me for nearly 25 years. It has periodically plucked at my conscious since 1989, and no matter how I've chewed the issue over, I've never been able to come to a reasonable explanation of how what came to be, came to be.

I refer, of course, to the happenings outlined in the third verse of Young MC's 'Bust A Move':

Your best friend Harry, has a brother Larry
In five days from now he's gonna marry
He's hoping you can make it there if you can
Cos in the ceremony you'll be the best man.

Mr MC goes on to detail:

You say neat-o, check your libido
And roll to the church in your new tuxedo.

I cannot fathom now as I found bewildering then, that this 'Larry' would take such a casual and profligate attitude to selecting the second most critical skill position of the entire wedding. OK, third behind the caterer. The bride kinda self-selects as first name on the team sheet. But the identity of your best man is crucial to the success of your wedding, and leaving it in the hands of some half-arsed rapper mate of your brother's who can't even be arsed confirming his attendance until the Monday before seems incredibly short-sighted.

The bust man

For the best man has indispensable roles to play in many key elements of a wedding. It's his job to sort the buck's event. Which, we have to assume, Young MC conspicuously failed to do, given he's only rocking up to the church on the day, in whatever tux he pulls off the rack, rather than the matching shiny penguin suits the bridal couple (i.e. the bride) will deign to have the groom's party clad in. It's his job to remember the ring, upon which point Mr MC is notably silent. And it's his job, once the groom is safely and securely squired away with his betrothed, to lead the festivities at the reception, make a suitably off-colour speech, and most importantly of all, cop off with one of the bridesmaids. Which, at least, Mr MC does manage to achieve, to his small credit. My brother, who was my best man (eight years ago yesterday, in fact) successfully ticked each of the boxes on that checklist. Particularly the last. About which, the less said the better, but stellar effort anyway mate.

I should note that the one and only time I have served as best man, I skipped the last KPI - largely because I'd BYO'd and was already under exclusive contract for service provision - but I'd like to think I served my duties out to the fullest extent otherwise. Under fairly fucking extenuating circumstances. I couldn't possibly share the detail of my best man adventures, but heavily fictionalised reconstructions found their way into In The Worst Possible Taste, as well as The Highway North, the NaNoWriMo novel I scratched out in 2010, where the following excerpt is taken from. Disclaimer: Though inspired by real events this is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons living or drunk is (a) on purpose or (b) me being lazy with characterization. Content warning, our narrator (the eponymous Ben North) thinks swearing is big and clever. 

...In truth, JC would have made a better brother-in-law than most. Like the one our man Munter was about to end up with at the end of this coming weekend. Chris and I knew the story, because we’d been there; we’d recounted it enough times in the interim, including on this trip, that JC and Jules knew it too. Basically it involved Munter’s bucks do up in Brisbane a month or two back - myself, Chris, a couple of Munter’s mates from UNE and work, the future BIL, and the future BIL’s bestie, the fucking retard. I say he was a fucking retard - he didn’t look the sharpest tool in the farmshed (he was the farmhand on the parents’ farm back home), been dropped on his head a few too many times at birth, but he was mainly known as ‘the fucking retard’ because that’s what BIL called him. Constantly. Like it was funny. If anyone was a fucking retard it was him, a braying Quoinslaaaaand cunt in a checked shirt tucked into his jeans, looking more belligerently out-of-place than a freshly-laid turd in a pair of Julius Marlows, drinking XXXX Gold and actually liking it. If he was a marker of what the rest of the family were like - and he was, then as now, the only member of said family any of us had met, even with me as intended best man and Chris as BIL’s fellow groomsman - you could understand my doubts re the likely potential for long-term win for the Munter.

Anyway. BIL made it very clear that he was your typical bigoted, homophobic, racist fuck from the arse end of nowhere. And that was well before we’d actually started drinking properly. We kicked off at the Doomben races, kicked on into the Valley - where BIL and his dozy offsider were kind enough to bellow their way through a very loud game of ‘Spotto’ awarding each other points for identifying fags, lezzos, dirty chinks and boat people who needed sending the fuck home - then on a train to Suncorp for the evening’s Main Event, the Reds vs Waratahs Super 15 rugger game. Where BIL decided it was time to start regaling us with stories of his sister’s younger days, in particular those she’d spent being anyone’s and everyone’s after two Stolis. “Fucken hell, even this fucken retarded cunt’s had a crack at her. Three fucken times!”

Anyway, the inevitable happened and Suncorp security tossed us for language - probably shouldn’t have got us the expensive seats up with the shiny people there Munter - which was just as well as I’d had a fucking gutful.

“We’re off into town,” Munter reported, as we filed out through the concrete canyon of the concourse. “Strip club o’clock.”

I shook my head. “Nah mate. Sorry. We’re done.”

“Too much piss?”

“Nah, too much cunt. That cunt.”

Munter nodded solemnly. He was disappointed, you could see, but he’d figured as much. Probably predicted it in advance.

“Where you off to?”

Chris shrugged. “We’re staying on Coro, so maybe the Regatta, or the RE… yeah probably the RE,” he said, on second thoughts. The ‘Gatta wasn’t what it’d once been. Shiny, superficial and obnoxious. And that was just the clientele.

“You fucken faggots joining us or what?” bellowed BIL, draping an arm around Munter. “Get a faceful of some dripping cunt…”

“Been staring at one of them all fucking day,” I observed.

“Sorry pal?” he said, close-talking all of a sudden. “I didn’t quite hear that.”

“I said, you’re a cunt,” I replied, with the sort of steel only a lot of piss can provide. “And you’ve singlehandedly manage to fuck up my oldest mate’s buck’s night. Fucken kudos to you champ. Now fuck off to your wank palace, we’re off to the pub.”

Needs to be said here and now that I can’t fight. I don’t fight. I talk a much better fight than I ever engage in. Munter knew that, Chris knew that. BIL didn’t. Yet.

“You are a fucking faggot,” he declared.

“I’m a fucking faggot?” I queried. “From the cunt who’s done nothing but spout scared homophobic bullshit all night. You are what you hate, bitch. Transparent as fuck. Your husband know what you think of your secret life together?”

There was a hand in my chest, but it was Munter’s, and his other was pressing against BIL’s. He was trying to keep us apart. Probably saw what was coming next. Me getting my arse kicked.

“What the fuck are you trying to say?”

“Jesus fuck... I’m saying YOU'RE GAY. And you’re doing a SHIT job of covering it up. Go deal with it. Fuck off down the Wickham, get yer fucken shirt off and make some friends. And get the FUCK out of my face.”

“Or what?” he sneered. “I’ll have you, faggot. You’ll be laid out with one hit.”

“Yeah, maybe,” I said. “You might. But then the thirty-five security guards within a twenty yard radius will be dragging you off to lockup to get arse-fucked by some six-eight Tongan bouncer. You’ll like that. Or they’ll just save you the trouble and cave your pretty face in out the back. Your Thai rentboy won’t hardly fucking recognise you any more…”

At which point security finally intervened, again, and we were sent on our separate ways. Munter grim-facedly dragged the two yokels, still slurring insults and abuse after us, towards the Caxton St cab rank in search of a Maxi-Taxi, glumly followed by most of the walking wounded from the Tour de Munter. Chris and I, plus a few other rebels from the Farmadale contingent of Munter’s mates, headed for the Milton train station. The RE it was. After which point the night improved dramatically. For one thing, we caught the end of the Super 15. BIL’s Reds got fucking annihilated.

So yeah, we were most surprised when not only was it confirmed by Munter that Chris and I were still invited to the wedding, but we were starting front-row selections as best man and groomsman respectively, along with Luke, one of his other UNE mates who’d fucked off to the pub with us, and the inevitable BIL. Got the impression that there’d been fearsome diplomatic (and possibly undiplomatic) pressure, sanctions and threats from Bridezilla trying to have our candidacies rescinded and her brother installed as puppet best-man for life, but Munter had held firm. God bless the stubborn bastard. For his part, BIL had sheepishly claimed to anyone who’d listen next day that he’d remembered nothing of any of anything, up to the point of ending up in the watchhouse at the Valley cop shop for groping a transvestite at a club then assaulting them for not being what it said on the tin, as far as he could read - which at 3.40am wasn’t very far.

Yeah, good times. And interesting times to come on the weekend, when we were to be reunited with BIL - and introduced to Munter’s betrothed - at the wedding.

Doubts, I had a few.

Show us your ring

The story continues via In The Worst Possible Taste, from the wedding of notorious bogan engineer Super Dave to... well, let's let Angus tell it. Disclaimer: The following is a true story, only the names have been changed to protect the guilty:

The worst wedding I ever heard of I didn’t actually get to go to, but McCarthy did; it was Super Dave’s first wedding, to a lawyer from an allegedly aristocratic horse-breeding family from south-western NSW. She was a former president of the Young Nats which should have warned him; if not, the fact that his future father in law was (a) the sitting Nats member and (b) a total, utter, irrevocable cunting arse of a cockburglar should have done likewise. 

Anyway, for his sins, McCarthy was made Best Man, in a hefty wedding entourage that included the bride’s cunting arse of a cockburglar brother in the groom’s party, by order of the family; the gent himself was kind enough to regale the bucks’ night celebrations, of which I was a part, with tales of how his Super Dave’s future bride used to, and probably still would, fuck anything rigid which would stand still long enough to buy her more than one drink, including the astonishingly inbred farm help. At which point I kindly suggested that if he wanted to continue his observations, he could consider the probability that we might be forced to beat the living cunting-arsed cockburgling shite out of him. McCarthy held similar views (as did the remainder of the room), but I was louder in expressing them, apparently. Equally apparently, I wasn’t going to the wedding.

Anyway McCarthy put some considerable effort into being charming and debonair on the night, taking his Best Man responsibilities seriously, and penning a thoughtful and elegant speech about how David had once been slightly rough about the edges, but how Beatrice (even the name sounded nasty) had changed him for the better and how they had so much to look forward to together. It was intended as a hands-across-the-water exercise, a conciliatory gesture on behalf of the grooms’ side of the room (heavily outnumbered, given that her side was paying) given the undercurrents of unrest between the two families. Immediately after McCarthy’s speech had played out, her father got up, cleared his throat and declared he’d never liked Dave, probably never would, but since his daughter apparently saw something in him, he and the rest of the family would just have to put up with it and learn to tolerate him.

“You’re fucking joking,” I said.

“Nup,” McCarthy had reported. “The cunt had given pretty much the same speech at their engagement party too…”

And yet, despite all that, seven and a half years later, the couple whose wedding 'inspired' most of the above are still together, with two beautiful kids, a house, careers, everything. Love was the winner on the day, and for most of the years that followed. And for that, there is only one person who can claim absolute credit: the best man. Job done. You're welcome.

The Doctor is OUT.

The ex factor

Saw one of my exes in the street this morning. It's funny how we react to that. Some people, I'm sure, get angry; some get a chill; some, like me, find a slow nostalgic smile spreading across their face at the memory of good times shared in the dim and distant past. It's just good to know they're still out there, still doing alright. That they found someone else to care for them, even if you and they had to go their separate ways.

The ex in question was a '97 Subaru Impreza wagon. Grey import, green paint, two litre boxer four, no turbo but all-wheel-drive. Cost me about four grand on TradeMe, back when I was a postdoc. We had some good times. Snow, mud, flood, highways, byways, dirt tracks and firetrails. One night long ago, 3am, Colin McRae-ing up a steep farm track rendered near-impassable by a torrential thunderstorm, more sideways than forwards. Long story why and how we came to be there, which I won't go into, but we all got out and made it home to sleep in our own beds. Sold it, in the end, for three-something to a fella who was going to do it up (you what? There's nowt wrong with that thing lad) for a friend who was moving to town.

I WANT TO GO PLAY IN THE SNOW

It still lives. This makes me happy. As it does whenever I see my old Audi kicking around town. Or when we spotted our old Legacy 250T - which we'd traded in for disposal money basically - on a trailer being towed behind some grey nomads' camper-bus. Off to be part of someone else's adventures.

Near mist

And yes, it's juvenile and immature to buy shitty second hand Subarus and rag the shit out of them up muddy forestry trails and drive them too fast through water splashes. So now I've stopped doing that, and am doing it in a brand new X-Trail instead.

No, it's definitely a Nissan

Yes, I am a child.

Carn, you can ford that. It's barely ankle deep. Carn.

I blame the old man. When I was a kid, about the same age as my youngest, he had a 253 V8 Holden ute, and the road to the local national park beach went through a very large mud puddle. Which, apparently, could only be traversed (a) at speed and (b) while going WAAAHHOOOO.


Genetics, eh.

Always use Nissan Genuine Parts. Or, when their crappy little retaining tabs break after trying to cross too many alpine-fed watercourses, use Nissan Genuine Pink Pegs

The Doctor is OUT to Karcher the mud off the 4WD before the missus finds out.

Cancer? Bollocks to that

Cancer. As Andrew Denton observed, it's the big C. Followed by a small 'ancer', of which there is none. Yes that works better phonetically than written down thanks I realise that. It's killed people you and I like, and it even had a crack at Your Correspondent. It's a fucker of a thing, readers. Cancer is no laughing matter.
This, however, very much fucking IS.

Yes folks, it's Brazilian testicular cancer mascot 'Senhor Testiculo', a.k.a. Mr Balls. No relation of Ed. Mr Balls' reason for being is to bounce around warning the youth of Brazil of the dangers of cancer of the man-spuds, while simultaneously serving as a terrifying reminder of the dangers of elephantitis of said organs. Encouraging young men and the women who love them to have a good old rummage around in one's Y-Fronts looking for stealth walnuts masquerading as man-orchids is, it appears, very much Mr Balls' bag. Needless to say this campaign is bollocks and whoever came up with this should get the sack. Still, at least it's something different on the cancer awareness front from the ubiquitous Pink Steamroller.

And perhaps if it catches on we can look forward to seeing Mr Balls' message augmenting, if not replacing, that of other cancer awareness campaigns. Rather than football teams sheepishly adopting pink-tinged uniforms in a hamfisted grab for female demographic attention and affection (sorry, in the pursuit of Creating Awareness™), target your own players and fans with jerseys with the look and feel of excess elbow skin. Yes, it's Ball Cancer Awareness Month, coming to a footy team away-strip near you. It's Scrote-Tastic! And it'll still look better than most AFL clash jerseys.

...No?

Yeah, fair enough. Still, could be worse...

Awareness successfully created. Congratulations.

The Doctor is OUT.

Klopped out

Jurgen Klopp is a German football manager with a beard, a university degree and a pair of black-framed spectacles apparently nicked from Michael Caine sometime in the late 1960s. He's 'for' good things like team unity, tactical intelligence and individual expression and 'against' bad things like spending stupid money on flouncing FIFO fuckwits and sending the club busted-arse-broke and back to Division Fuck-Off-Nowhere inside three seasons. He also wins a bunch of stuff - notably taking Borussia Dortmund to two German league titles, a German cup and the finals of the Champions League, up against the dreaded might of the Bayern Munich evil empire - so naturally he's become a big favourite amongst Dortmund fans, as well as a teachers' pet amongst Guardian football writers and SBS pundits for being a right-on uber-hipster zen-master cool-und-groovy-dude. Sort-of the Arsene Wenger of the Bundesliga as this piece in (where else) the Guardian discusses.

The success of the Klopp approach seems to flow on from his policy of creating an environment in which his players can grow, develop their own playing identity and express themselves within the Dortmund ethos. Sort of like a Montessori kindergarten. Which explains why they have to wear hi-vis shirts whenever they're allowed to go down to the park to play.

However, all this high-falutin' touchy-feely humanities-major Klopp-trap is clearly just a front. He is not the Messiah. He is just a very naughty boy. For, as this bit of footage indicates, Klopp's zenmaster facade lasts only as long as it takes (f'rinstance) Napoli to score in an important Champions League tie, when he transforms from Uber-Hipster Football Guru to....

THE ANGRIEST GEOGRAPHY TEACHER IN THE WORLD.

For attempting to shout the fourth official's face off, Klopp copped a two-match sideline ban, which made him fairly cross.

However, in the most recent of those matches, this morning's game against Wenger's philosophy grads, Dortmund waltzed into the Emirates and kicked Arse. Which, as you'd expect, made him much happier.

I think something was lost in translation.

Der Doktor ist heraus.

If the cap Fitz, don't wear a fucking bandanna

Peter Fitzsimons is a former Australian rugby lock known best for being punched repeatedly in the head by Frenchmen, who has somehow managed to parlay this specious fame into a persistently shouty media career in sports and social commentary. In latter years he has become a self-caricaturing troll in a dreadfully affected bandanna who rails against the youth of today, other football codes, and fans of other football codes, in his various media commitments. His most recent column was a series of unconnected thoughts lambasting Generation Y (nominally the national-level sportsmen of Gen Y, but basically Gen Y as a whole) for being lazy, disinterested, unpatriotic and generally on his lawn at times when he was not prepared or willing to receive them on his lawn. Paul McCartney once said the Sex Pistols were another band playing Chuck Berry, etc etc etc.

Buried amidst the trololol and the young-people-what-even-are-they of Fitzsimons' piece is, it must be reluctantly conceded, a point struggling to make itself heard. That point was made best by the quoted diatribe of ARU boss John O'Neill, directed at non-performing Wallabies players following yet another All Blacks shellacking:

'Twenty per cent of you are letting down the other 80 per cent,'' O'Neill roared in the dressing room. ''That 20 per cent are the same 20 per cent who have their mobile phone in their hands right now. The same 20 per cent are the ones on the grog midweek instead of complying with the rules. So put your f---ing mobiles away. In fact, don't even bring them with you on match day. I'm your employer. I'm not your mate. You're getting paid for the privilege of wearing the gold jersey and representing your country. And you are letting us down.''

Thing is, they could get paid more for not wearing it, and they know that. Professionalism and patriotism are, if not mutually exclusive, then problematic bedfellows. Fitzy finally flirts with this point after many, many paras of sputum-flected faff:

One thought I have is that way back when the culture of playing for Australia was set, honour was pretty much the only thing you got out of it … so you honoured that. The jersey, the cap, the Australian blazer was everything, the stuff of dreams, so for whatever time you had to wear it, of course you gave it absolutely everything you had in you.
These days, a more important consideration is the immense riches on offer in sport, and given that those riches will flow anyway, is it really that important, to bleed to win?

The problem is generational, but not quite the way old man Fitz would observe it. The problem is not only is playing for your country no longer the only way to get ahead in your chosen sport (setting aside the point that you can now actually make a career in your chosen sport instead of fitting it in around work), the undying flag-waving nationalism which underpins the sort of motivation Fitz is talking about is an old-person thing. That simplistic idea of national identity - that you are one people under one flag who will live, breathe, fight, kill and die for said flag - is hardly relevant to The Kids Of Today. Fitzy's generation were brought up by the survivors of multiple world wars who did exactly that. This generation were brought up by Fitzy's generation, who have tried very hard to make today's Australia a fucking embarrassing place to be from, ruled by bigots and shitcunts for the benefit of idiots and arsehats. Generalising is always fraught, and kiss-the-flag-or-fuck-off fuckwittery still lives on amongst the stupid and inbred, but broadly, the monochrome view of national identity was dying amongst Gen X and seems largely gone in Y. (The X-Y boundary has been a moving target over the years but as a late-70s kid I know which camp I belong to.)

What also needs to be considered is the increased mobility and migration of populations. You can't be as dedicated to one nation and one flag to the exclusion of all others if you aren't solely of that nation. The much-maligned James O'Bieber's parents are South African and Kiwi. Do you really think he was brought up with any obsessive drive to fight, kill and die for Australia's version of the Union Flag Plus Additional Southern Cross? His situation is hardly unique, even if his hairdo fucking should be.

As for me, I still have edible marsupials on my passport, but I've lived in NZ for most of a decade and my kids will grow up to be Kiwis with a trans-Tasman mindset. The Wallabies are playing the All Blacks in my (and yes as a DCC ratepayer it's fucking MINE) stadium this weekend and my only real interest is that a lot of Australian currency gets channelled through the bars and hotels of the region. I'd never say I've toured the world and elsewhere, but the more you interact with the world, the more you realise a myopic nationalistic view is completely anachronistic, from a black-and-white newsreel era. And while we cling to that in sports, because it provides a frame of reference and a context for viewers to care about international contests, you can't tell me the twenty-somethings who play today are as invested in their personal sense of national identity as the thirty-somethings who played a decade ago, let alone the fifty-somethings who talk endless bollocks about it in the MSM. This is neither good, nor bad; it just is. And all the young-people-don't-get-it columns in the world ain't gonna change it.

Besides, rugby's for obnoxious cunts anyway.

Trololol.

The Doctor is OUT.