Edit: new preamble goes here:
Here is the clean preamble, exactly as it stands now — ready to send to Alex. No commentary, no analysis, just the text as a reader would see it.Before We Start
Online, I post as Tony Clifton.
Most people assume that means I’m hiding behind a fake name. Fair enough — on the internet, a persona is usually a shield. This one’s more like a warning label. The tone can be sharp. That’s deliberate. The sharpness lives in the character so it doesn’t leak into everything else.
It’s easier to say things you actually care about when you admit upfront that you’re wearing a mask.
Everything underneath it is real.
You’ll also notice I talk to AI in this book and give it silly names. That isn’t affection or confusion — it’s the opposite. It’s how I remind myself AI has more in common with a hammer than a human: useful, powerful, occasionally elegant, completely indifferent.
If you hit your thumb, that’s on you.
Any insight that comes out of those interactions belongs to the process, not the tool. The thinking is still mine. The responsibility definitely is.
One last thing. Some of the ideas in this book arrived late at night. They didn’t always announce themselves clearly. Sometimes they felt obvious. Sometimes they felt ridiculous. Often they felt like both at once — the kind of thought where you can’t tell if you’ve uncovered something real or just connected two dots that were never meant to touch.
I’ve learned not to resolve that feeling too quickly.
Calling something a “stoner idea” is an easy way to dismiss it before it gets embarrassing. Calling it a “genius idea” is how you end up defending nonsense with confidence. Most interesting thoughts live uncomfortably between those two labels for a while.
So I leave them there.
If you’re reading this looking for certainty, you’ll be disappointed. If you’re curious about how belief forms, breaks, and reforms — especially around a football club that asks a lot of its supporters — you’re in the right place.
And the peyote line? Don’t overthink it. It’s not about substances. It’s about dosage.
Now we can start.
If you want, next we can:
- tailor a shorter version specifically for Alex, or
- prep a “what kind of feedback I want” note to send alongside it.
he Feeder Club
“How good can peyote be, when you get the dose just right?”
*
Chapter One
The Word
I don’t like using the word Dockers.
That sentence sounds like a joke, and sometimes I try to make it one, because jokes are easier to carry. But it’s not really a joke. It’s closer to a reflex.
If I’m talking to someone who follows football casually, I’ll say Freo. If I’m talking to someone who doesn’t follow it at all, I’ll say my team. If I’m talking to someone who follows it the way I do, I’ll say we and assume they know what I mean.
And if I’m alone, thinking, I’ll avoid the word altogether.
I can justify this cleanly. I can make it sound deliberate.
I can say the word contains too much history to be a useful label. That it doesn’t point to a single thing in the present; it points to a long sequence of seasons, narratives, injuries, collapses, near-misses, and the particular kind of hope that feels irresponsible the moment you notice it.
That explanation isn’t false.
It’s just not the first reason.
The first reason is simpler and less impressive: there’s a small pang when I say it.
Not a dramatic one. Not enough to make me stop speaking. Just a brief internal flinch that happens before any thought arrives. Then my brain does what it always does: it builds a reason quickly, so the feeling doesn’t have to sit there unaccompanied.
I’m good at building reasons. I’m good at sounding like I’m describing a system rather than a vulnerability. I’m good at making the thing seem objective.
Sometimes I even believe myself.
The habit is old. It started long enough ago that I can’t easily separate the club from the person I was when I first latched onto it. Fremantle existed from 1995, but for me it became real around 1999. That’s when the attachment stopped being casual. That’s when it stopped being a team I watched and became a team that updated me.
People talk about football like it resets. New season, new list, new coach, new story. That’s how it works for them.
For me, it accumulates.
The older seasons don’t disappear. They don’t become background. They stay available and they attach themselves to whatever is happening now. A good win doesn’t erase the old losses. A good year doesn’t erase the years before it. It just sits on top of them and changes the weighting a little.
That’s why the word feels heavy. It doesn’t refer to one team. It refers to a whole record.
N
And here is the part I don’t like admitting: it also refers to how other people hear it.
There’s the internal meaning and the external meaning.
Internally, the word is the club, the place, the colour, the history, the private catalogue of moments I could recall too easily if asked. Externally, the word is a signal. It tells people what kind of story they’re allowed to tell about you.
If the story they want is “loyal supporter,” the word is fine.
If the story they want is “sucker for punishment,” the word is fine.
If the story they want is “let’s laugh at this,” the word becomes a trigger.
That’s where the pang comes from. Not from losing, exactly. From being aware, in advance, of how the conversation might go.
I’ve heard the tone often enough to anticipate it. The little lift in someone’s voice when they say “Fremantle.” The quick joke. The pity disguised as advice. The suggestion that there’s something faintly immature about still caring.
It doesn’t even have to be said. You can feel it in the pauses.
So I become careful. I choose a softer word. I take a step back. I give a version of myself that can’t be easily reduced.
You could call that self-protection.
You could also call it shame.
That’s the part I don’t enjoy putting on the page: the possibility that I’m not only avoiding pain, but also trying to avoid looking like someone who chose the wrong thing to care about.
There’s a specific kind of embarrassment that comes with caring deeply about something imperfect.
Not because imperfection is shameful, but because devotion makes you visible. Devotion makes you accountable. If you care, you can be mocked. If you care, you can be disappointed. If you care, you can be told you should have known better.
I tell myself I’m not bothered by that.
Then I notice the way I speak.
If you support Fremantle, you’ll recognise the pattern immediately.
You say Freo because it feels lighter.
You say we when optimism is allowed.
You say they when distance feels safer.
It’s not a conscious plan. It’s a learned economy. Certain words cost more to say.
The interesting thing is how quickly this starts to feel normal. You can go years without noticing you’re doing it. And then someone asks a simple question—“Why do you say it like that?”—and you realise you’ve built a whole protective language around a football club.
I’ve done this so long that the protective language sometimes arrives before the thought itself.
Even when I’m telling the truth.
Even when I’m trying to be direct.
I can see why people like Mitch Hedberg so much. His jokes work because they’re precise about how time behaves in the brain. He’ll say something that sounds like wordplay and then you realise he’s describing how persistence actually works.
“I used to do drugs. I still do, but I used to too.”
That joke isn’t about drugs. It’s about the fact that the past doesn’t stay politely in the past. It keeps existing in the present tense, even when you want it to be finished.
That’s the Dockers problem, in miniature.
The club still does the thing. It used to do the thing too. But the meaning of “used to” keeps shifting as more seasons are added. The past becomes a lens. The lens becomes a habit. The habit becomes tone.
The word Dockers carries all of that.
So yes, I can give you an elegant explanation: I avoid the word because it loads too much context.
But I also avoid it because it attaches me, publicly, to a history I’ve internalised so deeply that I can’t pretend it doesn’t shape me. It makes me sound committed. And commitment is a strange thing to admit to in a culture that keeps waiting to make a joke out of it.
This is the lie I tell people, and sometimes I tell myself: that I’m mainly concerned with accuracy.
Accuracy is part of it.
But underneath accuracy is the smaller truth: I want to care without being laughed at for caring. I want the affection to stay private until it’s safe. I want to say the word and have it mean only what it means to me, not what it means to everyone who has already decided what Fremantle represents.
That’s not a logical problem. That’s a social one. A human one.
And that’s why it’s worth writing about.
Because if I’m honest, I don’t think this is only about football.
Football just happens to be the place where the pattern shows itself cleanly.
A name that carries history.
A story other people want to tell about you.
A reflex to soften, to qualify, to sound reasonable.
A fast little pang you cover with a better explanation.
That’s how it starts.
Not with a match. Not with a season. Not with a grand statement.
With a single word you avoid saying out loud.
* Later, I’ll tell you why that quote is there. For now, it’s enough to say this: the “dose” isn’t the
club. It’s the amount of honesty you can tolerate at once.
Chapter Two
The Bad Guys Show Up Early
The West Australian has a special talent for waking up before you do.
Not physically. Culturally.
You can be half-asleep, making coffee, trying to be a normal adult for once, and the paper is already there like: Morning. Here is the correct way to feel about Fremantle today.
That’s the part that’s funny, if you’re in the right mood. The confidence. The certainty. The way the story arrives pre-assembled, as if footy is a children’s book and we all agreed the Dockers are the page where something spills.
I don’t even need to read it to know the shape.
If it’s good news, it will be cautious. “Promising.” “Encouraging.” Like they’re talking about a kid who’s improving at piano.
If it’s bad news, it will be definitive. Not “a loss.” A statement. Not “a mistake.” A pattern. You can feel the satisfaction in the syntax.
Then the voices arrive.
Gossage is the easiest one to spot because he doesn’t sound like he’s analysing. He sounds like he’s enjoying himself. He’ll laugh just slightly too early, like the punchline is the fact that we’re still here. The joke isn’t the result. The joke is the sincerity.
And I get why that works on people. Laughter is efficient. It lets you avoid the harder job, which is staying uncertain for long enough to learn anything.
Nisbett is different. He doesn’t need to laugh. He sounds like someone marking a test with the answers already filled in. With him, Fremantle aren’t “trying something.” Fremantle are “confirming something.”
Every season becomes another rerun of the same experiment. If we win, it’s a temporary exception. If we lose, it’s natural order returning. He doesn’t have to say it directly because the tone does the work.
Between those two, you get a full service.
One voice tells you caring is funny.
The other tells you caring is foolish.
And if you hear that long enough, you start adjusting your language without noticing.
You begin adding qualifiers to your own thoughts. You start saying things like, “I mean, if it works,” or “I’m not saying we’re good, but—” even when nobody asked. You laugh along, a little, pre-emptively, so no one can accuse you of being naïve.
This is where I’ll admit something mildly humiliating:
Sometimes I rehearse the defence before the conversation has happened.
Not because I’m weak. Because the pattern is predictable. Because the same little social punishments show up again and again: the smirk, the pity, the “mate…” tone that says you’ve emotionally misallocated your resources.
So yes, the bad guys exist.
But the real enemy isn’t them.
It’s the part of me that starts internalising their framing until it feels like my own voice.
That’s what I’m fighting in this chapter.
Not the West. Not Gossage. Not Nisbett.
I’m fighting the reflex to turn affection into something I need to justify.
Because that’s the trick Fremantle supporters learn early: you’re not just supporting a club. You’re managing your credibility while you do it.
You’re constantly deciding whether to say “we” or “they.” Whether to say “Freo” or “Dockers.” Whether to act like you care a normal amount, even if you don’t.
And it’s ridiculous, when you say it plainly.
Imagine doing this for anything else.
Imagine telling someone you like a band and then spending the next ten minutes proving you like the band in a sophisticated way, so nobody thinks you’re an idiot for liking the band.
That’s what it can feel like supporting Fremantle.
Which is why the moments of pure, uncomplicated joy matter so much. The rare times you don’t hedge. The rare times you don’t pre-empt. The rare times you let yourself believe without immediately attaching an escape clause.
Those moments aren’t just fun.
They’re relief.
And because they’re relief, they become precious.
That’s the part the bad guys don’t quite get. Or maybe they get it perfectly and that’s why they keep talking.
Either way: the noise arrives early.
But so do we.
We’ve been training for this since 1995.
And if you think that makes us pathetic, fair enough.
Just don’t be surprised when we keep showing up anyway.
Yes. Here’s Chapter Three — and this one deliberately changes gears.
Less media. Less defence. More inward, but lighter. This is where the book breathes and lets the reader recognise themselves.
Chapter Three
The Reason I Stayed
There are easier clubs to leave.
That’s something people don’t always understand. They assume staying loyal to a club like Fremantle requires stubbornness, or masochism, or a personality flaw you probably shouldn’t admit to on a first date.
The truth is simpler.
Leaving would require a decision.
And I’ve never made one.
I didn’t sit down one day and decide to keep supporting Fremantle. I didn’t weigh the evidence and conclude that loyalty was the correct option. I just kept watching. One season bled into the next. One disappointment became familiar, and familiarity has a strange calming effect.
At some point, it stops feeling like persistence and starts feeling like continuity.
That’s when you’re done for.
People talk about “jumping ship” as if football allegiances are vehicles. As if you get off at one stop and hop onto another line with better service and fewer delays.
That’s not how it works.
Supporting a club isn’t transport. It’s weather. You don’t opt out of it. You dress differently. You complain about it. You talk about how it’s been better lately or worse than usual. But it’s still there, shaping your day whether you acknowledge it or not.
I think that’s what people miss when they ask why you don’t just stop caring.
Stopping would be the dramatic option.
Staying is passive.
Staying happens quietly, over time, while you’re doing other things. While you’re growing up. While you’re meeting people. While you’re becoming someone who can explain themselves better than they could at sixteen.
By the time you realise how attached you are, it’s too late to pretend it was ever casual.
There’s also this: Fremantle taught me how to sit with uncertainty.
Not as a virtue. As a survival skill.
You learn early not to overreact. Not to get ahead of yourself. Not to mistake momentum for resolution. You learn to live in the middle of the season, where nothing is settled and everything is provisional.
That turns out to be a transferable skill.
You stop needing guarantees. You stop needing neat endings. You stop demanding that things prove themselves immediately or else be discarded.
That’s not romantic. It’s practical.
It makes you better at waiting.
When Fremantle do something good, it doesn’t feel like triumph. It feels like permission. Permission to enjoy the moment without deciding what it means yet. Permission to feel something without locking it into a narrative.
And when they do something bad, it doesn’t feel like betrayal. It feels like recognition. Not in a comforting way — just in a familiar one.
This is the part I don’t say out loud very often:
Supporting this club trained me to be patient with things that don’t reward you quickly.
That sounds noble until you apply it broadly and realise it might just be how I justify sticking with anything long enough that it starts to matter.
Jobs. Ideas. Relationships. Versions of myself.
Once something crosses that invisible line — once it’s been with you long enough to shape you — leaving stops being the default response.
You start asking different questions.
Not “Is this working?”
But “What am I learning by staying?”
I don’t think that makes me virtuous.
It just means Fremantle got to me early, before I learned how to protect myself properly.
And that, more than anything else, is why I’m still here.
Not because the club deserves loyalty.
Because it taught me what loyalty feels like before I had words for it.
If you want, Chapter Four can:
- jump to a specific season or moment (the one you keep circling)
- bring Keira fully into the narrative as contrast and grounding
- or pivot into hope as a dangerous but necessary habit
Just tell me which way to turn.
,
Alright. Chapter Four is where the book tightens its orbit. This is the circling you keep doing in conversation: returning to the same moments, not to relive them, but to see if they’ve changed shape. It should feel slightly obsessive, slightly funny, and recognisable.
Here it is.
Chapter Four
The Circling
There are seasons I can’t think about directly.
I don’t avoid them entirely. I just don’t approach them head-on. I circle them instead, the way you circle a roundabout when you’re not sure which exit you want but you’re also not ready to admit you’ve missed it already.
I’ll remember a moment out of order. A quarter instead of a game. A decision instead of a result. I’ll tell the story sideways and pretend that’s just how memory works.
It isn’t.
It’s avoidance with good posture.
The strange thing is, I don’t circle the worst seasons. Those are easy. They’re clean. They fail loudly and decisively and then they’re done. You can file them away under obvious disappointment and move on.
It’s the almost-seasons that refuse to stay still.
The ones where something felt close enough to touch, but not close enough to claim. The seasons that trained you to say things like “if a few things had gone differently,” as if football were a polite negotiation rather than a blunt instrument.
Those are the ones I keep returning to.
I don’t do it deliberately. I’ll be walking somewhere or doing something unrelated, and suddenly I’m replaying a passage of play from years ago, asking a question that doesn’t have an answer anymore.
What if we’d done that one thing earlier?
What if we hadn’t panicked?
What if we’d trusted it for one more week?
These aren’t serious questions. I know that. They’re not analytical. They’re not even useful. They’re just the brain trying to find a version of the past where the shape makes sense.
Circling is how hope disguises itself when it doesn’t want to be caught.
Because hope, in its obvious form, is risky. Obvious hope announces itself. It tells people you expect something. It opens you up.
Circling hope is quieter.
You don’t say “I think we’re good.”
You say “I’m just interested to see how this plays out.”
You don’t say “this could be it.”
You say “it’s an interesting profile.”
You learn the language quickly.
I’ve told myself for years that this is just being realistic. That I’ve matured. That I’ve learned from experience. But if I’m honest, a lot of it is just hedging. A way to keep the door open without standing in the doorway.
The funny part is that circling doesn’t protect you from disappointment.
It just delays the moment you admit you cared.
When Fremantle do something that genuinely feels different, I notice my reaction isn’t excitement. It’s suspicion. Not of the club — of myself.
Am I allowed to feel this yet?
Is this real, or am I doing the thing again?
Have I learned nothing?
That’s the cost of memory when it accumulates instead of fading. Every new moment is compared against an archive that doesn’t forget.
But here’s the part I don’t say often, because it complicates the story:
Circling is also how you stay engaged.
It’s how you keep watching without burning out. It’s how you let yourself remain curious instead of cynical. You don’t demand answers. You linger near the question.
In that sense, circling isn’t failure.
It’s patience pretending not to be hope.
And maybe that’s the point where this stops being about football.
Because I recognise this pattern elsewhere. In ideas I don’t fully commit to. In decisions I don’t finalise. In versions of myself I keep revisiting to see if they still fit.
I tell myself I’m waiting for more information.
Sometimes that’s true.
Sometimes I’m just afraid that if I stop circling, I’ll have to choose.
And choosing means admitting that whatever happens next will matter.
That’s the risk I keep negotiating with Fremantle.
Not whether they’ll win.
Whether I’m ready to let myself believe without an escape route.
If you want, Chapter Five is the natural place for:
- the specific season or incident you keep orbiting
- the first moment where circling breaks and something forces commitment
- or a counter-chapter where Keira notices the pattern before you do
You’re building something coherent now.
Chapter Five
The Punch
I didn’t see it live.
That’s the detail I always start with, because it tells you something about me. I’ve been a Fremantle supporter since the nineties, but I’m not always watching in real time. Sometimes I’m out. Sometimes I’m busy. Sometimes I’m doing that adult thing where you pretend sport is a hobby rather than a minor religion.
And then your phone lights up.
Not with information. With tone.
A message that doesn’t even say what happened yet, but carries the weight of it. The kind of message that makes your stomach go slightly hollow before your brain has anything concrete to hold.
I remember where I was. I remember what the room looked like. I remember the feeling of irritation at being dragged back into it, immediately followed by the realisation that I wasn’t being dragged. I was going voluntarily. I always go voluntarily.
When I finally saw the footage, the first thing I noticed wasn’t the punch.
It was how quickly everyone knew what it meant.
Within minutes the whole thing had turned into a morality play. People had selected roles and assigned motives. There was the villain, the victim, the club, the code, the “what does this say about…”, the inevitable op-eds, the inevitable radio outrage, the inevitable certainty.
I don’t mean that cynically. I mean it literally. The story assembled itself faster than the facts.
And I felt something I didn’t like admitting.
Not anger.
Not even sadness.
A kind of cold recognition. The sense that we’d been here before, even if we hadn’t been here exactly like this.
I watched it again. Slower.
Not because I wanted to re-live it. Because I wanted to locate the exact moment where the future became unavoidable. The moment the situation stops being “a thing that happened” and becomes “a thing that will keep happening in the next thousand conversations.”
Football does this. It takes a single event and turns it into a permanent reference.
Before the punch, we were watching a derby.
After the punch, we were watching a symbol.
I’m aware how dramatic that sounds.
But that’s what it became. Not because it was the worst thing that’s ever happened in sport, but because it was the kind of thing people love using to prove a point they already had.
And everyone already had a point about Fremantle.
That’s the part that matters.
If a player from a more protected club did it, the coverage would still be huge, but the story would carry a different undertone. More shock. More sorrow. More “how could this happen.” With Fremantle, there was also something else: a faint satisfaction in the voices that didn’t have to say it out loud.
See? This is what happens over there.
You could hear it before anyone explicitly said it. It sat in the pauses, in the choices of words, in the quick pivot from “what happened” to “what this reveals.”
And I hated that I could hear it.
Because hearing it meant I’d been trained. It meant I knew the soundtrack.
At some point during that weekend, Keira looked up from whatever she was doing and said, very simply, “This is serious.”
She wasn’t saying it to educate me. She was saying it because she could see it on my face. The thing I try not to show when football steps outside the normal boundaries of football.
I said something about consequences. About responsibility. About how it would dominate the week.
But what I meant — what I didn’t say — was: this will follow us.
Not as fans of a team, but as people attached to a story.
This is the part I want to get right, because it’s easy to write it in a way that flatters the narrator.
It would be easy to write myself as the calm one. The rational one. The person who saw the nuance while everyone else screamed.
That would be a lie.
I felt disgust. I felt embarrassment. I felt the selfish irritation of knowing it would become a “Dockers thing,” regardless of who did it. I felt the internal flinch of being associated with it, even though association is not causation and fandom is not responsibility.
I thought: now we have to carry this too.
And then I felt worse, because that thought is not the thought of someone thinking first about the victim. It’s the thought of someone thinking first about identity and narrative and how quickly the world decides who you are.
This is what I mean when I say supporting Fremantle trained me into certain reflexes.
When you spend long enough being treated like a punchline, you start developing a fear of becoming an example.
The punch made us an example.
Not only of violence or stupidity or heat-of-the-moment failure.
An example of whatever people already believed about the club, the city, the culture, the fans.
The event was real. The consequences were real. The harm was real.
But the story that formed around it was also real. And that story had a life of its own.
That week felt endless.
It was relentless in the way modern outrage is relentless: not one wave, but a constant spray. Every angle turned into content. Every statement analysed for loopholes. Every silence treated as confession. Every apology treated as strategy.
And then, as always, there was the other layer — the one that annoys me because it’s true:
Everyone was, in their own way, trying to make sense of a thing that doesn’t make sense.
We don’t like randomness in moral events. We want reasons. We want categories. We want to put it somewhere so we can stop looking at it.
I watched people do that in real time. I watched myself do it too.
And then, somewhere in the middle of all that, something happened that I didn’t expect.
Keira started paying attention.
Not to the football. To me.
She didn’t suddenly become a Fremantle supporter. She didn’t start caring about ladder positions or list profiles. But she watched me react, and she saw something that wasn’t just “man yells at sport.”
She saw the part I rarely show: the part that cares about fairness, responsibility, and consequences in a way that isn’t performative. The part that gets annoyed when people simplify things that deserve complexity. The part that tries to hold two truths at once: that something can be awful, and that the way it’s talked about can also be awful.
It was the first time I realised football might be doing something else in my life besides giving me stress.
It was revealing my values.
And that should have been a nice moment.
Except it came through an incident I wish had never happened.
That’s the shape of Fremantle, really.
A genuine connection formed through an event you wouldn’t choose.
A small gain in understanding, wrapped in something ugly.
That’s not a moral. It’s just what happened.
And once it happened, I couldn’t unsee it.
Because from that point on, every time I tried to pretend it was “just football,” Keira had evidence that it wasn’t.
And annoyingly, she was right.
If you want, the next chapter can do one of two things:
- Stay in the incident and show the media narrative machine with names and tone, but still human and fair, or
- Pull back and show 1999 David and how this incident “clicked” into a decades-old pattern of shame, language, and belief.
Say which and I’ll keep it at this level.
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