I shall try and make a meal of this first post in a while though not much has actually transpired in my world since last we spoke - did a little (aheh) drinking, added a quite epic bleeding injury to my list of current poor health symptoms, and altogether been quite bored, but I now realise I have to push onward and manage the RSI rather than hope it clears up on its own and stays away, which means getting back to the arty nonsense and getting David, Dirk and Lee's stories finished so I can stop holding them back.
Little else has been going on, though I did have an interview with the Job Center people and in a break from tradition where the interviewee doesn't turn up, the interviewers didn't turn up. This is out of the box thinking, Cookstown Job Center, and I thoroughly approve. Actually opening your high street office, even for interviews you have set up yourselves is just so mainstream and conformist.
Apparently I have been unemployed and seeking employment in "art and design" for over a decade, which was news to me as I only moved into that area about 18 months ago after working on and off for a small design and printing firm after a decade in construction jobs. "Art and Design" being an arbitrary and general tag that only made sense when I realised this was actually an NVQ I took whilst in school. Some may mock the complete inability of Job Center staff to notice ten years of employment - some of which was in another country, and some of which came about after they themselves referred me to the employer in question - but I personally approve of this thinking where what you've actually been doing for ten years has no bearing on what you might be qualified to do next, and instead you're held to an arbitrary decision made in your youth that you can't even remember as it happened when you signed on for a summer before going to college and had since forgotten all about. I like the notion that there are people going into the Job Center without NVQs or A-Levels and are held to their earliest career choices "It says here that you want to work as a fire engine and/or dinosaur wrestler..." Only in Cookstown could you be going into some Job Center interview thinking you've got no prospects in a downturned economy and someone sends you to Gwangi to learn how to put the Shamrock Anklelock on a velociraptor - how great is that? This is why Cookstown is tops and all other small towns can suck it.
As you may be aware by now, I would never go so far as to call myself entertaining, having been described by my internet stalker as "not funny" shortly before he went on to become a 2000ad regular (so he would certainly know), so you shall have to to accept when I say that my actual Job Center interview was not as entertaining as I make it sound that this is a relative evaluation on my part of what I've written above. The actual event was more of a frustrating, vaguely surreal exercise in futility. And with that seamless link, here is the next page of Frank...
This page means an especial amount of nothing as it's little more than a personal joke. I used to work with a guy who was literally not smart enough to work in a McDonalds - though I feel compelled to point out that "there was no harm in'im" as is proper 'round my way when telling amusing stories about the misconceptions of others - and one time as we were talking about old television programmes, he asked why the Russians were the bad guys in so many shows and so I pointed out that the Cold War was not a fictional construct but a real thing in the real world and this trickled down into entertainment by being a component of or basis of almost every movie in the 1980s. Somehow he took this to mean that James Bond was based on a real person and Star Wars was at least partially factual, though to this day I have to believe this was a result of my poorly explaining things as otherwise I would be forced to go to my grave regretting that I didn't take a shotgun to work one day and end things as God intended. I'm not even joking, he once asked of Ozzy Osbourne from Bo Selecta - this fella here:
He once asked in all seriousness if those were "his real arms."
It was around this time I realised I could do without that job and since then those encounters have come to embody that nagging feeling that there's something wrong with you when you can't bring yourself to say "I'm better than this job" because you are. You always are because people do not live to work and their job doesn't define them, but sometimes you just get stuck, you know?
Anyway, that's what this page is about, but worryingly I seem to have kept this post to a general theme rather than rambled on as usual about unrelated guff, so here's an unnecessary video of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century set to Phunkk Mob's "Only Hope"
I have fond memories of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century as it was a product of producer Glen Larson's fondness for macho male fantasy that gave us Battlestar Galactica and the Fall Guy and many others: shows that fetishised the drinking, womanising, gambling adventurer of lore one last time before ensemble casts and AIDS ruined such notions forever (and to this day I will continue to argue that the original Battlestar was a more consistent, foward-thinking and inclusive beast than the scattershot and ultimately disappointing remake), and while star Gil Gerard had a point in that Buck was a bit of an arsehole for not showing remorse or sympathy for the people who were dying around him, it's a fantastic bit of early 1980s cheese best summed up by my first memory of it: I got a phone call from a mate that went "BRYAN TURN TO BBC2 RIGHT NOW!" because they were seriously repeating this shit well into the 1990s, and it was this scene here where Buck is wearing a dinner jacket and doing a dance where you have to keep one hand on a postbox at all times while Erin Grey jumps about in a bad afro.
So fuck you, BSG and your disposable women sex robots and men making anatomically correct sex dolls in the image of their dead teenage daughters - you'll never top that.
