Luke McIlveen, uber jocks, footie, poetry and Australia's best conversation

Here's how it goes on a silly wet Friday afternoon:

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote

The droghte of Marche hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour ...

By golly Dorothy you swoon - go on swoon you heathens - you're a cracker of a culture vulture. I bet this is a canny, clever throw to a story about April, which starts:

April is the cruelest month, old T.S Eliot used to say, but where does that leave October?

Gotcha, you see it's a throw to a story by Luke McIlveen, deploying the oldest trick in the book - start by showing you know who old T. S. Eliot is, just to show you're not lacking in culture - and then spend the rest of the column October, it's Hell on earth for sports lovers yammering on about sport.

That’s what I’d like to say, because life without a footy game or replay waiting for you at home is one of emptiness and isolation. Had a look at the sports pages this week? The only consolation was the sight of Hindy in a Kangaroos jumper with a bloody big VB logo on the front.

Eek, an über jock. Mark that reference to T. S. Eliot down to a google search, or perhaps an English teacher searching for a sign of a brain in young Luke.

Quick, lordy, hand me a poem:

April is the cruelest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch.* ('I am not Russian at all, I am a...
And when we were children, staying at the arch-duke's, (... a German from Lithuania)
My cousin's, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.

In the mountains, there you feel free.

I read, much of the night, and go south in winter. (the rest of The Waste Land here).

Phew, that's better. I can breathe again. A little substance after the Luke sugar hit.

But what's this old Thomas Stearns? Spend much of the night reading you silly old Eliot, before heading south like some ponce swallow? Not young Luke.

I actually spent time counting each of his (Hindy's) tackles in the GF on video this week, convinced that he had made 64 and not the meager 59 that stands in the NRL record book. The pedants were technically right, but the five in dispute were all Hindy. NRL headquarters, incidentally, is now refusing to take my calls on this.

Oh dear lord, the humanity, the suffering.

No league, no AFL, nothing really to live for.

Nothing to live for? You mean we can hope that some time in the next month a flock of jocks will head up to the gap at South Head and hurl themselves off into the sea, the first known but splendid sighting of jumping jocks (the very same who appeared in the famous song jumpin' jock flash), designed to replace beached whales and cliff leaping lemmings in the popular imagination?

But what about soccer? Won't that do for a fix? Pending the arrival of goodly supplies of crack and heroin?

Hell, not even club rugby on the ABC on a Saturday. There’s something called the A-League, but as far as I can make out it’s largely populated by volatile blokes with blonde highlights, either too old or mentally unstable to cut it in Europe.

Oh dear, the usual joke about soccer. Well at least he didn't call them peroxided poofters. Perhaps they need to learn how to do scrums and shove their faces up other men's bums to catch Luke's attention. Seeing as how that's a much more manly activity? Or is rugby a descendant from the days when Greek men liked to wrestle in the nude? Who knows?

Well how about the other half, the ball and chain, the strife of life, the missus, the old lady, the better half, she who must be obeyed, the little woman, the carving knife, the trouble and strife, the duchess of fife, the bag for life, the bread knife:

As the weather warms up and the sport winds down, you begin to rediscover weekends. This is by no means a good thing. Your better half declares Friday and Saturday nights the time for “catching up with people,” time you would happily have spent watching NRL games back-to-back in the winter months.

Oh dear, I'm so sorry, I'm so so terribly sad, condolences to the better half. Catching up with people! A pox on them all. Not that we're misanthropes here. We're just happy in our loneliness:

I wandered lonely as a cloud
I wandered as lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o′er vales and hills,
That floats high above valleys and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
When suddenly I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden eels supporters.

But no doubt Luke is a steadfast partner, a sterling worker, and always busy in the shed:

It’s going to take a Nathan Hindmarsh resolve for many of us to get through this difficult time. Some might take on DIY projects or clear out the shed, only to place the same stuff back in there in a neater fashion. Good luck to you. I figure I can soak up three Saturday nights with The Godfather trilogy. Rocky I through to V, screened at the same intervals, gets me even closer to the pre-season trials.

Jeeves, pack the bags. It's time to go to London, New York, Paris, Rome, or any of a hundred other cities, provided they're not Sydney.

The thought of a crazed Luke McIlveen stalking the streets, after being deprived of rugby league for a week, followed by serial viewing of the Godfather trilogy and the Rocky sextetology is simply too frightening to bear (as is the use of the words sixology or sexology).

Why a trip to the Art Gallery of NSW might find that he's planted a horse's head in the foyer. A trip to the Opera House might result in internal bleeding as a result of him mistaking concert goers for Russian boxers.

One poor reader took exception to the whole thing:

It is Australia’s sporting “culture” that makes this country SUCK. The way Australians revere sport makes us look like unrefined, uncultured fuckwits.

Poor Buttons clearly has no understanding of Australia, or why Gallipoli is such a triumph, or why a loon who has already declared the grand final a snooze would sit down again, and watch it and count the tackles!

Surely this is why The Punch is by far Australia's best conversation, and why if you can't stand the heat in the kitchen, you must surely get out of the kitchen.

Oh show me the way to the next whiskey bar, oh don't ask why, for if we don't find the next whiskey bar, I tell you we must die ...

O Chairman Rupert,
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, lame penalties, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix,
rugby league hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat
up smoking in the supernatural darkness of
cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities
contemplating jazz and coathangers and chicken wings,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El Masri and
saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes
hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light Hindy tragedy
among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy &
publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,

or throwing forward passes and brain dead knocking on,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear,
burning their money in wastebaskets and listening
to the Daily Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through
Broncos with a belt of marijuana for a storm tossed Melbourne
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in
Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their
torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares,
alcohol and toads and cockroaches and endless balls,
incomparable blind; streets of shuddering cloud and
lightning in the mind leaping toward try time ... etc (the rest of the real Howl by Allen Ginsberg here).

(Below: and it's goodbye to jelly wrestling for men for the moment, thank the lord).