Threadless and Luckless

My t-shirt submission to Threadless has been rejected! In their jaunty American way they tell me that "we feel your idea could use a little more work" and "we hope you take these decline reasons to heart and use them to rework your submission and resubmit" (if they were a creative director, I think they'd have said "it's shit, do it again"). Ah well, it's their loss etc...grumble...gripe...

Doktor Avalanche Threadless T-shirt Attempt

I've meant to do this for YEARS...

Threadless is a t-shirt site where budding fashion-fuhrers submit designs for generic male/female cotton under/work/youth garments and visitors to the site vote for their favourites. The design with most votes gets made into a t-shirt and sold. My effort is a bit shit, but I'm hoping that it's at least accepted to be put up for the vote. It is, of course a tribute to the pre-eminent rock drummer of the 80s - Doktor Avalanche, drum machine from the Sisters of Mercy.

Random Desktop

Here's where my mind took me in my lunch-hour. Analyse as you see fit and please use as a desktop (just click on the pic to see it full-size and right-click). Thank you to FFFFound and Skiffy for the original images.

What a Bastard

I’ve recently been reading a book about a ‘royal bastard’ – the illegitimate son of a Prince. He has a pretty rubbish time of it, with his origins used to abuse and shame him throughout the novel.

This seems to have awoken a certain amount of reflection on my part, as I’m a bastard myself (though lacking royal blood). Of course, I use this term provocatively. We live in an era where judgments about one’s birth are muted or, indeed, nonexistent entirely.

However, as the son of an unmarried, single mother in the 1970s, it was a source of deep shame and embarrassment to me. It’s not something I like to recall often. Not because anyone was particularly cruel, but because fear of being different drove me to tell some ridiculous lies. I’m now disappointed that I wasn’t stronger and proud of who I am.

I remember I only started to feel the need to lie when my mum and I moved to Leamington Spa from Manchester. I was seven at the time. We lived in a poor neighbourhood in Manchester, where there were several other single mothers and so it wasn’t an issue with other kids in my gang at school.

However, in Leamington Spa, it was all small-town values and nuclear families. I think, even at seven, I knew that a dead father is going to get a better response than one who’s just off the scene. So, as far as any of my new friends were concerned, my dad had died. He met his demise in various interesting ways, I seem to remember, but I think the most common version was a car crash.

The other lie was that my mum’s boyfriend at the time was my uncle. I didn’t realise at the time that this was a terrible cliché, I wish I had tired harder to be original (something like “my mum is in a bizarre tree-worshipping cult and that bearded man is her guru”).

Who knows? Perhaps I saved myself a whole heap of teasing. After all, children are vindictive little shits. One classmate, whose mum had polio, was relentlessly bullied and ridiculed. Because his mum was in a wheelchair! Jesus, the Ku Klux Klan has nothing on kids.

Ultimately, however pragmatic I was, I regret not being true to my mother and my real origins. The story of how I came into the world was never shameful and is, in many ways, more interesting than my lies. But that’s a tale for another post…