Musing' From The Shitter

Musings From The Shitter: Volume Twenty Three Theres no story, just this. Some nights it hits like a warm hand on your shoulder…gentle, familiar, and completely unexpected. Not a revelation. Not a mental health “breakthrough.” Just...calm. The kind that creeps in sideways, in between two sips of something warm or bitter, when no one’s asking anything of you and nothing hurts, and the present moment somehow...against all odds…doesn’t feel like a place you’re trying to escape from. Let me explain. I’m 45. I have a wife who loves me enough to worry. Two daughters who love me in ways I’m still learning how to receive. And a brain that, for most of my adult life, has been hell-bent on convincing me that I’m either: a) not doing enough, b) not doing it right, or c) already too late. And most nights, I manage that noise with motion: pacing, fiddling, stepping from couch to kitchen to shed and back again...chasing the illusion of doing something, when really, I’m just trying to ...

Musings From The Shitter: Volume Twenty Two On the Sidelines: Cheering, Pressure, and the Quiet Art of Support On any given Saturday, there is a group of people standing on a sideline. Sometimes that “group” is just one person. A lone figure, arms crossed or raised in cheer, voice carrying across the field. Sometimes it’s a pack — parents, friends, extended family — all there to support their player. Their pride. The display varies. There’s the cheering: loud, wild, full of reckless abandon. Then there’s the critique, shouted in frustration, masked as motivation. And sometimes, it all blurs together in a cacophony of well-meaning noise and poorly disguised embarrassment. We’ve seen it before. We hear it in headlines and whispered conversations at kids’ games — parents going too far. Shouting too loudly. Expecting too much. There's often no code left sacred. No line that can't be crossed in the name of "support." But still, it’s not all bad. Because in bet...

Musings From The Shitter Volume Twenty One 24 Hours (Give or Take): Notes Toward an Understanding of the Untranslatable Language of Saturdays There’s a peculiar warping of reality that happens inside a Saturday — and I don’t mean that in a cosmic, existential sense, but more in the way time becomes like warm chewing gum on concrete: stretchy, unpredictable, prone to collapsing inwards or snapping back and slapping you in the face. You enter it thinking it’s just another day — same dog, same coffee, same small decisions about socks — and by Sunday night, when the fog has rolled into your brain and your legs feel like strings hanging from a marionette no longer being manipulated by any discernible hand, you look back and think: Wait… did that all actually happen? The answer is usually: yes. Sort of. But not in the way your memory wants to file it — not in neat chronological folders labeled “event” or “important” or “lesson learned.” Saturday resists structure. It’s less a day and mor...

Musings From The Shitter: Volume Twenty Lynx, Laminate, and the Fairest Player There’s a certain smell to school prize givings. Not a bad smell, exactly…more like a composite atmosphere, a curated blend of over-varnished wood floors plus the faint, throat-catching edge of whatever Lynx body spray is trending with 13-year-olds whose relationship to moderation is still in development, all undercut by the inescapable base note of adult unease. You can smell it. The awkwardness. The restlessness. The existential question…unspoken but humming like a low-frequency speaker test…of why exactly are we here ? Because prize givings are, in some ways, elaborate performances of value. Of symbolic order. Of hierarchy dressed in community colours. They attempt to summarise a whole season…or year, or whatever unit of youthful effort the school is measuring…into one night’s worth of laminated certificates, misfiring microphones, and rhythmic clapping that can either feel wildly disproportionate o...

Musings From The Shitter: Volume Nineteen A Detour Backwards, A Step Forwards There’s something vaguely absurd about showing up to play with a team you haven’t worn the jersey for in five years, especially when your usual team...by which I mean the “Masters,” the club’s sanctuary for those of us whose knees have issued their solemn retirement notices but whose brains and hearts stubbornly refuse...didn’t need you this week. The Masters, of course, is where the “older heads” gather, a euphemism that sounds both tender and vaguely euphemistic, a place where one plays not quite for glory, not quite for fitness, but mostly to stave off the creeping sense of athletic obsolescence. To feel still relevant, still slightly fast, still slightly young. But no. This Saturday, fate (or perhaps the cruel but generous hand of the schedule) delivered me a different platform, the Bs, the reserves, a team I once captained, a place I once called home. The one I hadn’t touched in half a decade. Walkin...

Musings From The Shitter: Volume Eighteen Sometimes, It’s Just a Puddle of Mud There’s something simultaneously absurd and quietly profound about lying on your back in a puddle of cold, brown water, mud sneaking its way up past your ears, your chest heaving in that way that reminds you just how much you’re still alive, your lungs burning, legs feeling like they’ve been in a slow-motion battle with gravity for days. You just threw yourself at a ball—maybe even missed it—but somehow that’s irrelevant. You went . And in this context, that’s the whole point. This was Saturday. Just been. To someone on the sideline…maybe a mate holding a coffee, maybe a stranger scrolling through their phone…it probably looked like a mistake. Like two grown men in the waning light of youth playing some local game that nobody will remember in a week, let alone a year. But I turned my head and saw my mate beside me, also flat on his back, sharing the puddle, sharing the silence. No words exchanged. Just...

Musings from the Shitter: Volume Seventeen Dear Feilding Women’s Socials, From the Subs Coordinator I know there are still two weekends left in the season. Maybe it’s too early to be writing something like this…maybe you’re supposed to wait until the final whistle before trying to name what something meant. But sometimes, when you see it clearly enough, you have to say it while it’s still happening. While it’s still alive and unedited. This isn’t about the end of a story. It’s about recognising something mid-chapter…before memory can tidy it up or turn it into a highlight reel. From April through to now, I’ve watched this team…the Feilding United Women’s Socials, play in the 2nd Division…and what I’ve seen isn’t just football. It’s not just the scores or the formations or the slow rhythm of a season unfolding. What I’ve seen is something harder to name. Something that, if you stand back far enough and look at it with the right kind of eyes, looks a lot like trust. And trust, re...