#fremsley

Even after this long, what irritates me the most is the piddling little shit that gets in the way.  Stuff one doesn't NEED to deal with but external circumstances force one to, before one can deal with things one genuinely has to.

Today's lucky winners of the "If I ever get you in a room with a very rusty, blunt chainsaw.." Awards are ee and the Post Office/Royal Mail. For services not rendered.  But sure as fuck charged for.

Yep, nothing I like better than having to waste my time with corporate Customer Disservice when I should be using that time to dig myself out of other holes.

North of the South Pole, as everything is, yet towards New Zealand, is a vast plain of white.  It appears desolate, empty and cold, but if you look closely there is a great deal of activity and even a surfeit of life.  Lots of it as monochrome as its surroundings, and penguin shaped.  Perceived often as clowns.  Birds that don't fly.  When anyone's looking...

This is the Ross Ice Shelf.

North of Antarctica, where the white stops, is a blue so deep that one imagines Robert Johnson never died, and every hurt that ever was came home.  Here too is life and an insane amount of activity.  A certain percentage of it cetacean, with huge hearts and very hot blood in a subzero world, also monochrome, chasing seals and penguins and dayglo orange things that fall off boats and splash around yelling too much.  They run very deep.  Then they come up for air.  Amongst other things...

Thank you for your question.

"Who are you?" can be answered with a name, which tells one little, if anything, or it can’t be answered in any depth accurately as most people spend their lives trying to answer that to their own satisfaction, let alone another’s.  The latter is true of me, I suspect.  However I don’t wish to be flippant or dismissive.  I’d just find it awkward to answer that in any detail-free but revealing manner to a fellow online proxy-personality.

Simply, I’m a man living in a country he prefers to the one he was born in, sharing space and cats with another but not together.  Who has, from an early age, been through much that is traumatic and (for good or ill) shaping.  Who relishes all that is extraordinary and exquisite and despises greed & selfishness, but mostly mediocrity, especially his own.

What I like, and its ilk, is obvious from browsing “Fremsley” but it’s likely what I like only intersects with the bread-and-circuses majority about ten percent of the time.  I don’t have a television.  Haven’t for over ten years.  I like some television programmes, evidently, but think those responsible for the content of most should be used as biofuel as it’s the only way they’ll ever make a valuable contribution to society.  I wearied long ago of having to explain the difference between Television and television programmes to anyone stupid enough to ask.

I love technology but don’t fetishise it, it’s a means to an end (pertinent e.g.: I can watch tv shows I have as discs or files on my computer without having to subscribe to the tv mindset).

I had VERY long red hair once.  I shaved it all off eventually.  I miss its presence, but not the cost of its upkeep.

Women in stilettoes.  Vodka in the freezer.  Ice in Gin, but never in Whisky.

I talk too much sometimes.

Quite some time ago, for an online account - I cannot remember which and it is likely long deleted - I was asked to set up an answer for a 'security' question.  More imaginative than most such lamentable prompts, this asked: "What did you want to be when you grew up?"

Back when I was a buyer of this medium - this was, how shall I put it? a while ago - I originally po-facedly referred to myself as a comic collector.  I credit myself that at least I had the sense to keep it, in my mind, most definitely small 'c'.  This was back when, if over the age of eight, buying and, heaven-forfend, keeping such things was about as socially acceptable as staging public action-paintings with fresh dysentery in a crowded outdoor market.  So there was a certain pressure to legitimise one's hobby with a grandiose if inaccurate title.

Within a decade of this crap I'd been exposed to enough of my contemporaries and the 'industry' (including harrowing stints as a regular volunteer at various UK comic conventions; something akin to ancient Roman Christians leaping into lions' mouths) to be HAPPY to regard myself as 'merely' a comic reader.  Partially to distance myself from these unmitigated psychopaths but mainly because, more and more, comic collectors were becoming just that.  Big 'C'.  They seemed to have no interest in comics.  Oh they'd talk a lot about them, but they didn't actually seem to LIKE them.

People who liked comics read them.  People who collected comics were simply too afraid to take them out of the bags. And I do mean bags (mylar was much more fucking expensive then), the phrase triple-bag-must-have-item had ceased to be a humorous term and had become a reality amongst the credulous/cretinous acquisitive shite tendency of the ever-growing fan element.

Which was about the point I stopped bothering.  I'm now, if anything, less cognisant of the contemporary mainstream English language comics field than your average Twitter user.

I don't have a problem with this.

If it's any good, there are always reprint albums - not graphic novels; let me explain the difference between a novel and a short story to you sometime... - and, until the tory scum ban them outright in this country, there are libraries.  So yes I happily read comics still.  Currently working my way through the last ten years of Judge Dredd in Housemate's 2000ADs, on and off (apparently the Butler did it).