There are times, in life, where one must let go. Times where, despite the passion and fervour inherent in one’s worship of an ideal, an institution, an expectation perhaps, that one just has to stop; to breath deeply; to accept.

I’ve  watched, as have many others, the demise of a behemoth. And yet no one can tell me why it died.

I’ve watched the queering of a culture, and no one can explain to me the twists and turns it’s taken to get here, why something once so mighty now rests in sullen repose, any excuse benignly offered mere background drone to the cacophony that’s ringing, reverberating almost permanently, from the belltower of the Church of Here & Now.

Fuck that noise, I’ve thought to myself on myriad occasion these months past. And yet I’ve not come to truly believe even myself, because what manner of man am I, if I believe the word of someone becoming, however incrementally, a non-believer himself?

Oh, how thou hast forsaken me, I’ve thought in drunken moments of biblical bastardry, turning the word of Jeremiah to my own whim with little, if any, thought to heavenly repercussion. To what end can this come, at what sordid conclusion can we possibly arrive?

The short term endpoint is inevitable, if unsavoury. It’s at this point that one must, as aforementioned, just let go, accept the consequences of a behemoth humbled and turn one’s thoughts to what’s next, and how this will play out; the far-reaching ramifications, if you will, of what’s unfolded and what is souring the blood of even the most staunch of believers.

For blow upon blow has rained down upon the object of the faithful’s devotion, a sight almost sickening in its brutality. Akin to the latter stages of a prize fight in which the challenger, his face battered beyond recognition, is still swaying on his feet, even the most hardened of fight fans silenced by the one-sided nature of it all, just willing him to fall, to meet the mat, to put an end to it all before more serious damage can be inflicted.

Except, in this case, it’s not the challenger that’s punch drunk and bloodied.

Of course, one must be sanguine about it all, for there’s never been a power that hasn’t eventually faded, a civilisation that’s not ultimately failed. And from these ashes grow new opportunity and, in time, greatness will likely be achieved once more.

In the heartland, the hot and dreary suburbs where the faithful worship, in fibro and twisted wood abodes, draped in the colours and sipping from yellow tins, this is where it will all begin to rebuild. It’s said that the devoted are the grease to the wheel of the machine – this blue collar grime will form the essence of the New Opportunity.

Some, though, have lost hope, and this is not of the realm of surprise. Some, not accustomed to the quagmire in which the object of their worship finds itself wallowing, have literally thrown their colours at the door from swiftly passing cars, the throbbing of muscular engines barely drowning their howls of rage, of disappointment, as they hurl their symbolic love with a passion and accuracy that’s been sorely missing from the Real Thing these months gone.

As if gestures like these will affect some sort of miracle, a realisation among the Team that there’s more at stake than they realise and so a rebirth happens before the very eyes of those who have doubted, a reawakening, a reunification, a new beginning, before this horrid end has even reached its inescapable conclusion.

For in the heartland, the hot and dreary suburbs where the faithful worship, these people need. They’ve become, over the years, accustomed to a showing of pride and devotion that matches their own. And their own, it is powerful indeed.

And so, one must stop, breath deeply, and accept. The search for answers is a fucked and fruitless exercise that brings forth little other than excess agony and despair, adding to an already overwhelming supply. The faithful must be just that; faithful to a fault and they need to continue to believe, and almost as importantly, to believe that the ship will right itself and the ideal, the institution, the expectation perhaps, will once again prevail.

Some of the spiders are still here.

Fat and long-limbed golden orbs stringing their thick webs from wattle to decking post, laden with slung bugs and wayfaring Jacaranda stems.

Most of them are up high, hanging off the teev aerial, shooting yellow-ish strands to the palms against the fence. Some come down low and thread across the path to the clothes line, across access through the back gate. They get dissuaded quickly though, and so we’ve come to an easy impasse.

In the dark, on Thursday or Friday nights, when there’s footy on and I’m drinking beer though, it’s a crapshoot as to whether or not I’ll tangle on my way to piss in the garden. No one wants eight legs on their shoulder when their business is out. Ain’t that the truth.

The news is all the Same. And yet it’s news you can’t do without. I’ve got people down south, as do many, and I read and talk and listen and try to understand.

At the bottle shop, life goes on and then some, the constant human flow rarely abating. People need a drink, and I am not one to judge; Don’t Judge, is my watchword. It’s hard to abide. To be honest, I judge constantly. And not as you’d think, not judging people by how much they drink – I could not possibly care less.

But I do judge by character, by how people carry themselves, how they interact with other people.

I don’t like people. Not really.

People need to follow the rules. At least in this day and age.

I’d not give a shit in hell if not for the fact I work in retail. If I didn’t, if I didn’t constantly come into contact with people who do things the Wrong Way, why would I care, really? But I do, and it grates, and just because we’re not in Victoria, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t look at the floor and follow the arrow directions marked on same.

I’m wearing a mask. So, it’s fine right?

Some people thank me. Others don’t bat an eyelid. I don’t care. I don’t judge.

The front garden is a blank canvas, one which Claire and I have started to paint upon, at least in theory. It’s coming to fruition though, slowly, a labour of love that will pay dividends. Once we get down to Ballina and load the truck with gravel, bring it back, scrape it out, spread and compact it – plus red-clay dirt, solid turf, expert paving courtesy of yours truly, who’s never paved a square foot in his life.

But you do it, right? You pave the squares, you make it level, you lay the stone and fill the gaps. You pave it.

Tonight, my plan was to watch football and drink beer. A simple, inelegant-yet-fulfilling evening; well spent, to my mind. I executed it well.

Around halftime – during a match in which I had no skin in the game, and so was watching for pure enjoyment – a round of phone-tag matched up and so I spent the second half, and then some, speaking with an old mate from Melbourne.

Where before we used to talk about rock ‘n’ roll and smoking weed, now we talk about where our kids are at. We talk about politics and the pandemic, about our work and our wife’s works, what we’re doing and what we want to be doing.

And we talk about rock ‘n’ roll and smoking weed.

For the two go, undoubtedly, hand in hand.

A few years ago, at Bluesfest in Byron, I walked over to watch Iggy Pop with nothing in hand other than a can of beer, and emerged half an hour later high as a kite. And so I walked back to where I’d started, where Claire was, perched in the back of someone’s ute on the raised road between the two major stages, and watched the rest of Robert Plant’s set as he took time-honoured Zeppelin songs and reworked them in his own way.

Purists hated that set, but it was one of the best we’d ever seen.

At one point, before I left to see a bit of Iggy, a photographer walked past and, glancing towards us, stopped in his tracks and took a shot of Claire, sitting on a milk crate in the back of that ute. She had tears running down her face as she listened to Plant do ‘Whole Lotta Love’, in his re-worked way, a song she’d grown up with. In the foreground, elbow on the truck’s side tray, was me with my mouth open, listening to the same song I’d heard since I was maybe five, done in such a fashion as to render me gobsmacked.

Would have been a cool photo. I wish I’d seen it.

Now, Claire is asleep. Addy is asleep too. I’ve finished my phone call, but not my bourbon. The air is moving in such a way as to amplify the highway, as opposed to the surf, and so there’s B-Double noise, not crashing waves.

It’s still. The wind, blustery all afternoon, has gone. It’s just airflow now, just the way the air is moving, that moves the sound. No one else in the neighbourhood is up. Just the trucks and the odd bilby (our local guy), and the tapping of black keys onto a white screen.

Which is nice.

The air is cold. There’s a last-ditch wintery cold snap on the way. I’m wearing jeans and boots, but could do with a jumper.

But I like how crisp it is.

And just occasionally, just every now and then, there’s a gap in highway traffic.

And it’s quiet. Perfectly quiet. Like nothing is happening and everything is fine. And that’s nice too.

Three weeks ago, spurred by the news of two Covid-positive returned travellers in southern Queensland, I started wearing a mask at work.

Down south too, things were ramping up and masks were about to become mandatory for everyone. NSW was on a knife’s edge as Victoria began to spike, quickly entering Second Wave territory, stage 4 lockdowns imminent. The southern border was closed, but there was always the possibility, and coupled with the Queensland situation, I decided it was in my best interest.

No one told me I had to. Wearing a mask was at the time “encouraged” in supermarkets and other places, particularly in the city, but no one living or working in NSW had been told to wear them (medical professionals and police aside). As well, the bottleo is the, by far, the busiest shop in the village; since restrictions were introduced back in March, we’ve been doing the same numbers we’d usually do over a normal Christmas / New Year period. And while virus cases here have remained low, people have become lax, and as a retail employee and cynical journalist, I don’t trust anyone. Time to mask up.

I didn’t have access to the blue surgical-style masks you see all about these days, and so I folded an old bandanna in half and wore it over the lower half of my face like a bushranger. As expected, people commented, almost to a man. These comments ranged from asking whether I’d been told by the company to wear the mask, or if it was my own choice; if I was sick; people thanking me for wearing it; one person who was incredulous that I was wearing it (a comment she directed to the person standing next to me, not to me personally); and numerous quips on how, given I was wearing a bandanna, I should be on the other side of the counter with a shotgun. We all laugh, and move on.

The shop has since provided the blue surgical masks, which I also wear when the bandanna is in the wash. General thinking is, while wearing a mask, you’re up to 80% more unlikely to spread, or imbibe, airborne contagions. I’ve noticed wearing one gives me a far higher sense of safety. Having said that, given in the job I touch a lot of things – money, glass and metal surfaces, bottles already handled by other people – I still wash my hands dozens of times over an eight hour shift.

So the mask is there to stay for a while, whether it becomes mandatory in NSW or not. I’ve gotten used to both types of mask over the past three weeks – how they make breathing a little harder; how the surgical masks rub behind your ears; how they make you quite hot. This is fine, you work out how to get around it.  I’ve also had numerous conversations with other blokes about the pitfalls of wearing a mask over a beard (I’ve been growing mine out, it’s intense), which makes things a little tricky. So too if you wear glasses, I’m told.

It’s still not common to see anyone masked up here, and so even after three weeks, I’m still getting comments. In the main though, people seem to have become used to it. I’ve become the Masked Man From The Bottleo. I’ve found too, given people can barely see me, I’m much more likely to be in a good mood when behind the counter. Strange. My motivations for wearing a mask are to protect myself and my young family, my mum who I see at least once a week, my small community. I feel it’s best to be safe, rather than sorry, and so I’ll keep wearing it for a while, until it’s time to stop. Whenever that may be.

The players are sick. They have, to a man, been infected with something vile and insidious, something which one doesn’t catch from a mere exchange of airborne contagions, the result of wintery affliction.

No. You could see it on their faces last week, eyes downcast and heads hung low. Hands on hips and faces set in stone-faced grimace as the reality and the deep-seatedness of this sickness set in.

They stood as one, a huddled mass beneath the posts awaiting yet another conversion attempt, and yet, despite their proximity to one another, you could barely say they stood together. Not a word was being spoken, not by the hungry up-and-comers, not by the battle-hardened veterans.

The Sickness seeped from their very being, almost visible to the naked eye, the resulting fever dream a stark and saturnine reality from which there seems little hope of recovery. Indeed, the players are sick.

***

Many column inches have been devoted to this sickness, this ailment that is afflicting this particular team. Much has been made of this spectacular fall from grace too, and to be sure, no other team in the competition is subject to this level of analysis, of probing this deep, this now constant demanding of answers.

Every team, in every sport, at some point during their existence, suffers that most uncomfortable of fates, the dreaded ‘lack of form’ – the period in which nothing goes right and so the team is bad, they offer non-contests, they’re the league easy-beats. As is the case today with the Broncos, although despite all the column inches, no one has been able to pinpoint why, exactly, this has happened so quickly, and indeed, so dramatically.

Their loss against the Tigers last week was perhaps the low point, their seventh loss in eight games, their only win since the COVID restart being against the even  more lowly Bulldogs the week prior. Any mistake that could have been made out there on Leichardt Oval, was, and the majority of these weren’t mistakes players of this calibre, at this level of the game, should have been making.

Luck was against them too, as so often happens when any Team is at its lowest ebb.

Bad luck is no excuse though. Perhaps in tight contests it can come down to luck, to being in the right (or wrong) place at the most inopportune of times, or otherwise, but Brisbane are beyond that now. Now, it’s about the Sickness, one which no one seems to be able to diagnose, let alone cure.

The symptoms are easy to spot – a distinct lack of communication; a disregard for the Team, instead playing as individuals; a seeming ambivalence towards even a base level of participation; inexperience, highlighted by the fact their fill-in captain has only played 28 games; a very obvious lack of leadership. All these symptoms combine, fester, spread. As a result, the Team loses, their confidence shot, it’s often over before it even begins.

Tonight, they come up against a typically rampaging Melbourne Storm, an outfit who have barely played a bad game in the past decade, and for a team lacking spine and purpose as the Broncos seem to be, a fixture like this couldn’t come at a worse time. Indeed, a conflagration of epic proportions is quite probable, a “cricket score” as one pundit noted earlier in the week.

It’s such now, that I awoke this morning with a knot in my stomach, almost knowing for a fact that what I’d be watching in 13 hours time, would be horrible, such has the sickness become a part of life following this team. And yet, us whose hearts reside north of the border, swathed in maroon and gold, we live in hope.

***

Coach Seibold is in a bind. One would hope he’s paying attention to Tigers mentor Michael Maguire, who has showed little mercy this season in dropping high-profile players who weren’t performing. For Seibold however, this is a luxury he can ill afford – one player out on suspension, another on hardship leave, over ten players on the injured list. Yes, he could drop Anthony Milford in order to send the highly paid Broncos pivot a message, but who would he replace him with?

Having said that though, replacing a highly-regarded player with a younger, more inexperienced player would have its benefits – sure, now wearing the 6 is someone who’s not done it very often at this level, but they’ll no doubt be hungry and give it their all, not infected by the Sickness thus far. It may not be enough to overcome the Storm, but at least it’ll offer a contest and perhaps provide some sort of salve, at least a temporary cure, to the Sickness the rest of the squad are languishing with.

So is this the answer? Bench every senior player who’s too overcome with the Sickness and replace them with young, untested development players? They’ll keep losing games, but they’ll lose them on better terms, surely, better terms than they’re losing now. As a fan, I’d rather Brisbane lose a contest, than get run over while playing football, in the words of a close friend of mine, “like the ’94 Byron Under10s when Woodlawn came to town.”

To this end then, the injection of Tom Dearden into the halves could well pay dividends. His return from injury and subsequent call up pushes the lost-looking Brodie Croft to five-eighth, and the all-too-regularly-underperforming Milford to fullback, a position he inhabited for a number of games last year.

With Staggs and Farnworth returning from injury too, perhaps this is the shake-up that will at least begin the paving of a long, long road to recovery? Time will tell, and as anyone who follows sport knows, this sickness too will pass, eventually.

But now, in the cold and hard light of day, this sickness needs to be identified, diagnosed, treated, inoculated against, eliminated. But identified, that’s the key, the first step,  because until the Team knows what the Sickness is, it’s not going to go away any time soon.

Events down south make people uneasy. They thought things were pulling back, a seeming return to some sense of normalcy. A fallacy in this day and age though, it would seem, and so The Fear returns, albeit in a smaller, perhaps more manageable fashion.

We grab a couple of apples from the bowl on the table, dig around for raincoats, pull on gumboots and jump into the truck. We stop for fuel and a donut and then head out of town, across the highway and through green and rambling farm country. We slow down to pass through Mullum, coming out the other side and gearing up again, out past the golf course before turning right and booming through the low-lying flat bordered by cow paddocks to the base of the hill where we gear down and begin the climb.

Here, The Fear doesn’t exist, merely a feeling which dissipates the further up we go.

She sits in the back and chats through a mouthful of fruit, her old and frayed stuffed sheep sitting on her lap. I sip coffee from the ever-present travel mug and navigate the turns and dips with one hand on the wheel. We reach the top and begin the winding drive through the rainforest, leaving Mullum and the farmland below, and the ocean across the way, behind us. We bump over potholes and the truck rattles and hums.

Passing Malcolm’s Corner, we head down into the gully, over creeks, the sixth and seventh crossings under water which sheets out behind us as we plough through, pulling off to the right and up the steep driveway to Mum’s place. She’s lit the fire and we eat donuts and drink coffee. The sun hasn’t yet made it into the valley and it’s cold and damp outside, despite the fact it’s almost nine o’clock.

After a bit, we pull on coats and boots and drive further up the hill, pulling in beside a looping and rambling fern, jumping out onto the wet grass, stepping across puddles left from last night’s rain. Some sort of flowering native bush arcs over us, upended pink trumpet flowers hanging down, their unheard symphony directed right into the wet earth.

Birds call from unseen boughs, and the noise echoes through the dense forest as we enter. It’s loud, yet there’s barely a sound.

She adds to the sound, the every-present chatter bouncing back to the birds as we step over strewn rocks and moss-covered branches fallen from the trees arching above us. The path is faint but we’re able to navigate, down dips and across dry creek beds, further into the wood and up, the path cut into the side of muddy hillocks, jerry-rigged steps build into the steeper parts, ducking under ferns and hanging vines.

We hear the small waterfall from a ways away. We stop every now and then to listen to the silence. The sound of water gets closer as we wander up and across, the bird call echoes still and the light is gloomy, even though we can see sunlight across the tops of trees up above.

The final part is muddy culvert cut by rain, a slide with rope looped around trees to the side to hold onto as you make your way down to the edge of the creek which pools in between mossy rocks, fallen trees rotted with moisture and cut through with divuts as chunks have pulled away and fallen below in wet and woody piles.

She delights in squatting by the nearest pool and dipping a hand into the water, squealing at the chill and wiping on her shirt front, cheeks rosy and nose running in the cold air. We wander around the side of the creek, climbing across and over to the small waterfall, the deep pool at its base, sheer rock behind, plant-life falling across it all, the birds still hidden in the trees.

We wander back soon after, the promise of time by the fire an allure too good to pass up in the chill. We climb back up the muddy culvert and follow the faint trail back the way we came. I piggy-back her for a while. Off to the side, as the hill cuts way, the growth is dense and green, eternally still, a labrynthian run of cuts and dry beds, criss-crossed with thick, branch-like vines looping trees and swinging low to the ground before soaring up once more into the canopy where you can’t see them any more.

She laughs most of the way back and concocts elaborate games to be played under ferns, or balancing on top of fallen trunks.

We come out the other side, into weak sunshine which washes the hillside for the first time all day, leaving the wooded birdsong behind us to be replaced by the rosellas and whatnot that stay in the open. We walk back to the truck and head back down to Mum’s place where it’s warm and there’s no Fear. She has another apple and anything bad just doesn’t exist.

Claire’s away for the weekend. Has loaded the car with all manner of contraband and hit the blacktop, a high-speed run to an undisclosed location, her co-conspirators too numerous to mention, the lot of them half drunk on mulled wine, good cheese and the righteous feeling one gets from fresh air, exercise and bucking The Trend.

I, meanwhile, having completed the parental tasks required of me – with vigour and aplomb, I might add – am now ensconced upon the couch in front of a brightly-lit teev, a game of football on the go, a can in hand, my feet up on a chair, the picture of house-bound Saturday night fever.

My team aren’t playing and so a carefree vibe is the order of the evening.

Outside, dark has well and truly fallen, blanketing in blackness a reasonably calm scene, one far removed from what’s transpiring down south and across seas about the globe. Indeed, an ill wind blows across there and the fear blusters with reckless abandon, whipping carefully preened hairdos and ruffling feathers.

In our part of the world, and indeed, the majority of the country, the pandemic seems to have halted, at least for the time being; an uneasy truce being reached and so people are going about their lives in as normal a fashion as possible.

Some are taking to it too quickly though, more than once in the past few days I’ve had to ask groups of blathering local folk to kindly move their long-time-coming reunion out of the literal doorway to the bottleshop lest I cut them off and the night, for them, remains dry.

No one argues, no one wants to spend a night without a Drink.

Down the way, across the rest of this State and over the border to the south, things have gotten out of hand and are rapidly escalating. Editorially sanctioned racism fills pages of Melbourne’s other major metro daily, columnist Andrew Bolt in the Herald Sun seizing with barely disguised glee the idea that ‘those people’ are to blame for fresh outbreaks; ill-informed, windy rhetoric at best, insidious and vile race-baiting at worst.

And so the rest of the country watches from afar as things escalate and the state with easily the most hard-line restrictions of the pandemic thus far, succumbs at a rate not seen in months. Drastic measures are being talked about, and states to the north and west are eyeing their southern cousins with undisguised alarm.

Adding to this missive a few days later, I have a cold, which in the normal scheme of things – it’s winter; we have a three-year-old at daycare – is nothing of note. In the current circumstances however, I’m now viewed as a pariah, a walking disease factory most likely out to infect you all. Pull out a tissue in a public place, and the looks you’re receiving could melt lead. I take to using diversion tactics (“Oh wow, what’s that over there?”) so’s I can blow my nose without being publically castigated.

It’s now Wednesday, the winter sun warming all outside. Claire, with a morning off, and Addy have rambled their way through the badlands to the south and are eating sandwiches and strawberries by the river while I recuperate and drink coffee and trim my Lockdown Beard.

I think to myself, standing in the sun out the back, that we’re damn lucky. For it’s not carefully preened hairdos and feathers that are being ruffled, but livelihoods and lives. Here down south, all over the world. It’s something that’s never far from my mind. Indeed, this is life as it is today…