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 more a kind of psychic weather. And trying to write about it is, frankly, absurd. It’s like trying to describe the taste of a dream after you’ve brushed your teeth — the mint scrubs away the texture.

But let me try. Let me walk you through a Saturday — a single Saturday — that might have quietly contained a lifetime.

1. Instinct as a Malfunctioning Fire Alarm

Saturday morning began as most of them do: dog leash, bleary eyes, sky hung in that pale limbo between indifference and blue. My wife was with me — which is a detail not for romance but relevance, because she, more than anyone, knows how my instincts work. Or malfunction. She sees the twitch before the sprint. She knows when something in the air makes my body move before thought gets a say in the matter.

We were barely 10 minutes into our walk when the screaming started.

Actual screaming. The kind that doesn’t come from headphones or drama class or kids on sugar, but from deep inside a house. A full-throated panic. And before logic or social norms or any of the usual adult protocols could intervene — Call someone. Don’t get involved. That’s not your door — I was already walking up the path, voice raised and too raw: “Is everything alright in there?”

And in the periphery: the dog, confused. My wife, calm but coiled, watching the edges of the moment because that’s what she does. Not stopping me — she knows better than to try — just there. Anchor.

The door opened.

And what happened next isn’t the kind of thing you write down for applause. It was messy. Human. Slightly terrifying. And private in a way that resists being flattened into narrative. But this much I’ll say: I’m glad I went. Even if I had no idea what I was doing. Even if I was unqualified and underprepared and probably did half of it wrong.

Because there’s something in me — and I’m not proud of it, exactly — that jumps in. I’m the guy who tries to hug a bomb. I run into burning houses with no plan, just an idea that maybe someone else needs help first. It’s idiotic. It’s naïve. It’s probably trauma in disguise. But I’d do it again.

And walking away, heart still vibrating, breath caught halfway between panic and relief, I thought the stupidest thing:

“Well. It can only get better from here.”

2. The Mythical Logic of Shotgun

Enter: the Meat Pack Hustler.

If my Saturdays were a religion, the Hustler would be our minor prophet. Less messiah, more trickster deity. The man has, and this is not hyperbole, an uncanny talent for winning meat raffles. One ticket. Any venue. Walks out with a kilo of sausages like it was destiny.

But to reduce him to raffles would be missing the point. The Hustler is vibe incarnate. He rides shotgun in the Koro Lounge — that’s the name of my car, for reasons too layered to explain — and he doesn’t just sit. He curates. He summons. He opens a CD wallet that looks like it was rescued from a house fire and selects the exact track the cabin needs, not based on mood but on something deeper — the emotional barometric pressure of the car. He plays songs you didn’t know you needed until you hear the first four bars and think, Oh, of course. Of course this is the song.

Shotgun is his cathedral.

He doesn’t explain. He doesn’t narrate. He just is. Like water or jazz or that feeling you get when your name gets called at the fish n chip counter after a long wait. And he’s not “cool” in the curated, algorithmic, “HUFFER”  way. He’s cool in the Pākehās-Know-How-To-Party-shirt-worn-non-ironically way. He’s cool because he’s unbothered by whether you think he is.

You don’t assign people like that a role. You just let them be.

3. The Goal, and the Goal Beneath the Goal

The Hustler scored.

This might not seem like a pivotal plot point, but if you know — really know — how stories work, you understand that sometimes the emotional climax happens in a sidelong way, dressed as something ordinary.

He scored the most him kind of goal: feint, shimmy, dummy, nutmeg. Keeper sprawled. Ball tucked in like it had been sent a written invitation. If it had been filmed, you’d call it scripted. But it wasn’t. It was just Saturday football, sunshine in the air, lungs screaming, and the Hustler pulling poetry from chaos.

But the real goal — the one we all saw but didn’t say — was that he scored.

Five years ago, the Hustler was deep in it. In the dark. Told he might not play again. Not just physically, but mentally, existentially. The thing that tethered him to joy — to motion, to team, to meaning — was under threat. And you don’t just lose something like that. You bleed it out over time.

So watching him slide that goal in, and then casually walk it off like it was nothing — we all felt it. No over-the-top celebration. Just quiet, reverent nods. The kind of nod you give when you’ve been around long enough to know.

That’s when I realised: we’ve developed a language on Saturdays. One made of shorthand and inside jokes and inexplicable phrases like paru hei hei (translation: shitty chicken, spiritually speaking). A dialect built from absolute truths that make no sense outside the circle.

4. Communion Around the Chillibin

That night, we gathered — for no reason, and for every reason.

It wasn’t a celebration. Not officially. No awards. No closing speeches. Just people around a barbecue and a chillibin full of steadily vanishing beers, talking garbage and occasionally, accidentally, talking truth.

And I don’t know how this team happened — this assembly of misfits and saints, overtalkers and overthinkers, men who would never sit at the same table in any other version of the world — but something clicked.

I’ve noticed it lately: people aren’t just tolerating each other. They’re leaning in. Asking real questions. Following up. It’s like politeness mutated into something closer to care. Somewhere along the line, the idea of “teammates” became… something else. Something slower. Warmer.

And then someone started reading my words out loud.

Not dramatically. Just reading. Stuff I’d scribbled once — probably late, probably tired — never meant to be spoken. And there they were: twenty guys listening, not laughing. Listening.

And I sat there, visibly uncomfortable, which is how I know it meant something.

Because I act first. Think later. And when you're the one who usually delivers the punchlines, being heard — properly heard — can feel like standing naked in a quiet church.

But they didn’t mock it. They held it. Like it mattered. Like I mattered.

And maybe I did.

5. Exit Wounds and Cheap Petrol

I left early.

Part duty. Part brain fog. Part that creeping internal whisper that says: You’ve given all you can give today.

I told the Hustler. Because he’s the only one I could tell like that.

“Mentally done, bruv.”

He didn’t flinch. Didn’t sermonise. Just:
“Yeah, Daniel… I know that too well. Thanks for the ride.”

On the way home, I wasn’t alone. One of the boys — also done, also early — rode with me. We didn’t talk much. But we didn’t not talk either. It was that soft, unspoken kind of talking where meaning floats in the spaces between the actual words.

And then, just as we were about to pass it, he spoke:

“Sorry to interupt but didnt you need cheap petrol?”

He remembered.

And that — that — was the final gift. Not the talk. Not the ride. Not even the listening. But the remembering.

A single moment that said: I heard you earlier. And I still care now.

So I pulled in. Filled the tank. Drove home.

And sometime around midnight, staring at the ceiling with the quiet ringing still in my ears, I realised:

I’d been held all day.

Not in arms. But in attention. In language. In nods. In music. In sausage raffles. In silence. In petrol.

I’d been seen.

I was there.

And it mattered.

Even if only to the ones who know.

 


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