Thursday, September 28, 2006

Comic Art Auction

Out of reasons of poverty I'm selling four fantastic pieces of comic artwork:

- A signed & numbered lithograph of Captain America by Travis Charest
- A Spirit lithograph, signed & numbered by Dave Gibbons & Will Eisner
- A Supreme poster, painted by Alex Ross
- A signed & numbered Ghost lithograph by Adam Hughes

You can find them all here - you won't find pieces like this cared for quite as well anywhere else. In the case of the Gibbons/Eisner piece, it's a bargain too.

Monday, September 25, 2006

Gaydom

I really don't give two hoots about the 'gay community' anymore. This probably makes me some sort of traitor to some circles, but I've had it proven to me again this evening. Going to a local gay pub - old style, thrown together with the requisite cabaret drag act - didn't resonate with me at all. At all. It did once when I was younger, when the world around me was substantially different - now it's just...a throwback to a time in history long since past. Nostalgia's one thing, flogging a dead horse however is completely different.

It's a subject which came up in conversation with an ex in recent weeks - it's surprising how quickly and how utterly my views have changed in this. I used to volunteer for the Terrence Higgins Trust, Stonewall, the London Lesbian and Gay Switchboard, went out to places like the Village Soho, G-A-Y, I even worked at the Albert Kennedy Trust. None of this does anything for me now - my needs of the world around me, and the needs which come from my sexual orientation are being expressed completely differently. Is this maturity, greater experience or jadedness? Who can tell?

Wednesday, September 13, 2006

Change of Season

Maybe it's because we're in autumn, yes, maybe that's it. You may wonder, feeling the temperature right now, but businesses are gearing up for the run-up to Christmas, the university's doing it as well, kids are back at school - the false sense of security which the summer provided is well and truly gone. Yet maybe that isn't the reason I'm feeling as bad as I am.

A lot has happened in the last few weeks, a lot has been changing, some of which I've ridden along with, to my considerable enjoyment, some of which has been less obvious but no less significant. And at the moment I'm living a life of tumult - multiple demands from the day job, freelance work and unpaid work, stress because I'm the only one in our household with a job (I'm not apportioning blame here, although it does leave me in the unenviable - and inappropriate - position of being 'the one in charge of the money')...and this is not including the people on the fringes.

It's a time where I feel unappreciated by my family, unappreciated in general actually. I need a holiday, yet I'm paid by the hour - if I took a week off I'd not get paid for it until I left my current employer; great news for them, useless for me. It's awkward - the only people I can really ask for support aren't really in much of a position to provide any. So I wend my lonely way on, hoping that people understand and find invariably that they don't. Apologies for the whinge - I didn't really want this blog to have any - but it's a mostly unhappy time for me and I thought I'd practice at bringing a sense of it to the screen.

It's an odd unhappiness - the profound reasons which accounted for it last year are no longer in play (a situation I'd never thought would come to pass), yet I'm still feeling quite adrift.

Tuesday, September 05, 2006

Dumbfuck

First we have Tony Blair telling us that Hamas = Hezbollah = Al Qaeda. Now...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/5318204.stm

Bin Laden = Hitler = Lenin.

Fucking hell.

He said the world had ignored the writings of Lenin and Hitler "and paid a terrible price" - adding the world must not to do the same with al-Qaeda.

I see. So it was their writings which caused the Second World War and the Cold War.

Politics is in free fall. You heard it here first.

Age

I'm almost half way to my 37th birthday. When I was going out with James in 2001, 35 seemed such a long way away, yet I've sailed past that and am heading out to 40. I remember when Mum was 40, how could I possibly be?

I'm developing an odd relationship with age. As much as I long to be seen as attractive to the bright young things I see around me, I don't feel a genuine need to be. It isn't so much an age threshold I've crossed as a maturity threshold - the people who simply find me attractive do, those who don't really don't need to. I'm not the man I was in 2001/2, yet in some ways I find myself longing for that mindset, wishing that I still were younger, that I could be seen the way I used to be, by the people who used to see me that way.

I'm proud of the achievements I'm making, the older I'm getting - they're achievements you can only get through advancing age. They're more substantial achievements, more grounded, more meaningful, more attuned to my deeper character than those I celebrated when I was younger. In that respect it's great to be 36. Yet I feel old, I feel ground down, more detached from the mainstream than I ever have been since I first came out. A rebellious side of me screams in resentment against that - Tom and I may have to do something quite unexpected in response to that, upon his return on Sunday. I think marriage will turn out to be the solution to this feeling - as stable (albeit unconventional) as that sounds.