Field Theory by Hadyn Green

In the middle of winter last year, I was walking to work in some awful Wellington weather. I got to a pedestrian crossing, glanced up to see an oncoming car that was slowing and walked out. While the car slowed it didn't actually stop and its bumper just missed my leg as it went by.

Maybe I was listening to some loud music, but something made me turn and flip the driver a middle finger. As I did the window was already coming down and abuse was hurled at me. I kept walking. The car, a BMW if that helps with the imagery, did a U-turn and pulled up next to me.

The man, of course it was a man, stepped out and berated me. I yelled my opinion of his driving back at him and went to walk away. Then he called me a faggot. I turned and told him to fuck himself. Then he made a comment about my mother. I walked back; it was, in the mildest sense, on.

This guy was slightly shorter than me and wearing shorts. I remember this for two reasons: firstly it was not shorts-weather; secondly I may have made a comment about them in the course of events. In the back of my brain I figured he must've just come from the gym down the road. In fact I was making quite the back-story for him. A property developer or maybe real estate agent who was on his way back to some ugly McMansion in the suburbs, angry that his advances on gym bunnies were rejected.

But that was the back of my mind. Most of my brainpower was put into inventing the best swearwords I could as we stood nose to nose shouting at each other. Afterwards I noticed that people were watching us from nearby buildings.

In the end I'm not sure what caused us to stop. Perhaps a dawning realisation that the next step was almost certainly physical. We turned with parting comments; his about me being clearly homosexual and mine about his "cute shorts". He then sped off to wherever it is arseholes go and I kept going to work. Shaking with rage-induced adrenalin.

Rage. Injustices are easy to find and ranting on twitter or via a blog is so simple. Yet that rage is also so impotent. We yell at the TV and the news doesn't change. We complain about the ill-thought-out processes of our office but nothing comes of it. We have become used to this system. Anger, venting, no change.

But when this rage is physical, when there's a balding homophobic man in shorts, screaming swear words into your face, suddenly this is real. There may be action.

I have replayed this scene over and over in my head. I don't think I would've hit out first. I wonder if he thought the same. I haven't been in a fight since I was a kid, could I actually act on the rage that I throw at the internet every day? I often think that the dicks who comment on Stuff articles would never say those things to your face because they'd be slapped. But would we actually slap them?

See, I just don't know. In this last year I have been joyously happy, bottoming-out depressively sad, and burning with rage; and I have had all of these emotions levelled at me too. The first two can be useful emotions, getting you to do things. Generally though, (impotent) rage just gets you angrier. And so, rage fuels the internet. Whole websites, memes and t-shirt empires are based on being angry at something. Tweets are written about the death and destruction that will occur as fiery anger spills forth from a person slighted by a slightly annoying pop-up.

The world is a short, angry BMW driver who almost runs you down. You yell in his ugly face, you invent new words and language to attack him, you imagine all of the horrific violence you would exact on him, and then… nothing. You wait for the next rage trigger.

If you're expecting me to go somewhere with this, you're shit out of luck. I was just quite angry the other day and reflecting on the phenomenon. But I feel that I need to say this: I am sorry that I made you angry.

Early this morning the Alliance News Network started tweeting the beginning of an invasion of Earth by huge squid-like robots. It was an online re-enactment of this.

They used the hashtag #solcomms. And then it went a bit mental. LA was the first city hit. Dallas is in flames. Manhattan is a smoking crater. Most of the eastern seaboard is going silent. London is toast. And some of the images coming in are amazing and terrifying.

Right now #solcomms is a huge collaborative piece of fan fiction, being vaguely directed by a few people at Bioware but largely community driven. You can sit and watch the tweets coming in like the script of some movie or you can join in, like I did (to the annoyance of my followers).

Moreover people are talking to each other around the world, and following the "yes and" rule of story-telling. It really is something to see it happening in real time.

And then a curious thing happened. The Social Media Gurus jumped on #solcomms declaring it a viral victory and "this is how you market a game". Except it wasn't. Sure, it was "viral", but no marketing was involved. Just like the "shit people say" meme this has taken off organically as those wanting to tell their apocalypse survival story, did exactly that.

Interestingly it's hard not to compare these tweets to those that came out of Tokyo and Christchurch after their disasters. Real helpful facts caught up in a swirl false rumours and general panic.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to man the barricade we built from the Wellywood sign, for the Aotearoa Resistance.

When last you saw me I was hunched over a media desk in Eden Park, praying that for 20 minutes we could hold out the French. From what I understand, we did.

Since then, well, sport hasn't held my interest much. For various reasons.

The Superbowl was, as it always is, a chance to watch as many closeted fans of American sport come out of hiding for one day. New Zealand did that thing where we beat Australia in the cricket (I even followed along online). The Aussie open gave us record breaking matches and a new Men's champion to watch and be enamoured with. The Sevens was its usual self; full of colour and fun and alcohol. But nothing really grabbed me or inspired me.

Then this article happened (cached version). It might just be one of the greatest sports stories I've read from New Zealand.

"I asked Beaver how much whitebait he had. When he replied 2kg I said son that's enough to get you in the All Blacks."

It marks something we've never seen before, or at least not for a long time. A retiring coach that isn't trying to defend themselves. Graham, sorry, Sir Graham Henry won the World Cup and hasn't stopped smiling since. Just look at the goddamn shirt he's wearing!

But this line, this line, for me at least, is the clincher.

"[If we had lost the World Cup] I would have been in the south of France smoking marijuana and drinking red wine. I would still have the same woman ... nobody else would have me."

He later goes on to call Quade Cooper a "little prick". And why not? Henry never seemed to actually like the guy, so why fake it? Perhaps a sense of class or sportsmanship would have curtailed that. Fuck class, fuck sportsmanship. Hendog is off to get blazed with his lady in the French countryside. Bad ass.

Henry's constant smiling and open candid nature has reinvigorated me. As has his apparent lack of concern for the generations of dope smokers he might inspire (I'm not sure what demographics see Henry as a role model, but hey, who wouldn't want to hang out in the south of France with a joint?).

Long and the short of it is, I'm back into writing, as it were. Sport and beer and all sorts of other wonderful things will be covered. There'll be few small side projects that I'll bore you with eventually, but generally the happy, breezy, swear-filled tracts that you've come to love and ignore. 

The streets will be loud tonight, car horns will blare until the early hours, we will drink and scream and cheer and groan and complain and cheer again. We will applaud and slap backs and hug and some of us will cry. We will congratulate winners and buy drinks for losers. We will revel in the last night of a party that has been more fun than most of us expected, even the people who just wanted to hang out in the metaphorical kitchen.

Wherever you are, what ever your opinion on the game, if you watch it, you have to watch it with people. No hiding in the bedroom calling for updates, no sitting home alone watching the TV. Go out, the rest of the country is going to be. Even if you don't want to watch the game, I don't think we're going to see anything of this calibre here for a very long time, and you don't want to waste an event like this. It's the Halley's Comet of long weekends.

Win or lose, it's going to be loud. Right there, that third fucking word, I used the L-word. 

Despite the confidence of the rugby-watching public, the veneer is thin. We've been in this position before. Many, many times. Does it bear thinking about? Probably not. Then I read this, again.

In that four year-old thread Charles Mabbet collected Fairfax media commentary from just before our game against the French:

Jim Kayes: Forget '99, the last four years are what matters. The All Blacks are too quick, too strong, to skilful, too good. France has forgotten how to play French rugby. No scrum and little flair, they will rely heavily on a kicking game.

Marc Hinton: Everybody keeps saying that the French have a big one in them, a la '99. I don't see it. This is an average Les Bleus side and Bernard Laporte's selection gambles are nothing but last rolls of the dice. The All Blacks have been waiting a long time for a significant test at this tournament, and I fully expect them to be magnifique.

Tony Smith: The moment of reckoning. Now is the hour to justify the All Blacks' billing as world No 1. France can't beat them - they can only beat themselves. This is one of France's worst World Cup squads. Where are the backline Serges? Bernard Laporte has chosen robots as backs.

Greg Ford: Kip time is over lads. Time to earn your pay by bludgeoning France into submission and then by flaying them some more just for kicks. The tabloids in the UK call the French Cheese-Eating-Surrender-Monkeys. Could not have said it better myself. They'll roll up the white flag.

Check the papers today to see if they say the same thing. Though this isn't the same tension I had before the game against Australia. This is more a hope that we can actually finish it off this time.

I have previously joked that losing the World Cup in New Zealand's quadrennial tradition. But after all of this, all these weeks of travelling the country, of meeting some amazing people from around the world, of partying into the night because everyone is in high spirits, losing just doesn't seem like an option.

And then...

There's a lot of things going on right now that will suddenly be spotlit by a public and media in the lull that inevitably follows an event of this size. It's the hangover and no amount of Blue Powerade will help.

But until then, I'm going to wash myself in nostaligia at NZonScreen instead.

This is not a post about rugby. Or sport of any kind. Which is pretty much what you should've expected from the sports blog on Public Address after the All Blacks made the final. This is a post about oil and a white sand beach.

I haven’t been swimming at Mount Beach for years. When the Rena ran aground and started to leak oil on the beach, it was all I wanted to do.

I lived at the Mount for first few years of my life, in the shadow of Mauau, before moving across the harbour to Tauranga. I have spent a lot of time at that beach, I got attacked by a dog there as a child, I got stoned in the dunes as a teenager and, well, other things too. I spent eighteen years of my life in that area before moving away for uni, this is my home town.

Then I hear things about shipping companies not feeling guilty and not taking responsibility, about insurance companies who have put limits on the amount they’ll pay out and politicians who seemingly keep telling us: “Don’t worry, she’ll be right, I’m sure they’ll pay us. Until then though you’ll have to foot the bill”. This gets me a little angry. Actually it made Hulk-mad. I had to go home.

I arrived at my Dad’s house and he showed me all the papers he had collected with the Rena on the front. While other newspapers are dominated with smiling All Blacks, the BOP Times keep showing the population a destroyed ship. This is more important to the people of Tauranga, right now, than the outcome of the World Cup. Yesterday’s paper had some sobering numbers:

• 1346 tonnes of oil remain on the ship.

• 350 tonnes has been lost into the ocean
• 5000 volunteers are registered to help
• 500 volunteers were used over the weekend at Papamoa and Maketu
• 618 tonnes of oily sand removed
• 181 live birds are being treated after being covered with oil
• 1250 birds were found dead
• $3.5million has already been spent on clean up.

I had to go to the beach.

The signs were clear: the main Mount beach was open, but the water was closed. This did not mean the beach was empty. The sun was shining for a time and there were quite a few tourists around and kids playing everywhere. Some rather clever person had written huge letters in the sand spelling out “Clean Me”.

The air was fresh and smelled like the sea. This is a contrast to previous days when, my Mum told me, the beach had stunk of oil. Walking along the soft white sand in the sunshine it was hard to fathom that an ecological disaster had occurred here. The waves were a wonderful blue green, birds (NZ dotterels, see the pics above) ran about on the sand and it just seemed like any other work-day when the beach wouldn’t be packed. The cafes were doing a great trade and only three hazard suited workers were seen.

They weren’t working today, but the beaches weren’t clean. On the open part of the main beach (for those who don’t know the main beach stretches from the Mount to the little spit of land known locally as Leisure Island) I found a lot of clumps of oil. Solid pancakes ranging from the size of a 50c piece to ones the size of my hand. The beach considered safe enough to open to the public was still contaminated.

The economic impact of this disaster, and let’s be clear that’s what this is, to Tauranga’s economy will be huge. Not only will The Mount potentially “lose the summer”, like Amity in Jaws, but the downstream impact on job creation in the area could be affected. The Port of Tauranga wants to dredge the harbour to allow even larger ships in, ships much bigger than Rena and with more oil on board, the exact type of ships people are scared of now. Understandably they are keeping their heads down, though ships are still coming and going, now much more noticeable on the horizon.

We drove down Marine Parade, stopping every now and again to take a look at the beach, but no oil could be seen from behind the “keep out” tape. The tape covered every path down to the beach; every official path. The dunes are filled with desire-lines, and walking down to the water is simple if you wanted to. Today nobody did except, about a few hundred metres down from Tay St, a lone surfer bobbed out behind the break. A long boarder too, he seemed so relaxed catching a wave in to shore and possibly having the best day of his life.