I grew up in a small town in southern Delaware called Milton. The town now boasts a population of 1,657, which was lower when I lived there years ago. There were a ton of antique stores crammed with all manner of dusty, random junk that I absolutely loved. We had a farmer friendly grocery store and a number of small, family-run shops for whatever else you might need. When news of a corporate chain moving into a lot of vacant land began to surface, there was an incredible uproar from community members. At the time I couldn’t understand it, anything new that came to town meant something to distract from my “boring” days of hanging out on my favorite felled tree by a peaceful, quiet lake in my tiny, picturesque Victorian town.
Your gross negligence in assuming I am ashamed of any of my musical predilections is noted, and will be revenged. There is absolutely no reason to assume, self-righteous pricks that you are, that the carmine creeping up my collar is anything other than stoic pride, a touch of the ol’ toxoplasma gondii, and perhaps a brief spike in my everyday, baseline feelings of discomfort.
Listen you, I was enjoying the Ruski pop nymphets way back, before any hoity-toity English remixes got loose, much less actual American album releases. This shit was edgy and inaccessible. Hell, it still is! I would get home from my live-action Vampire the Masquerade roleplaying session at the local college campus (back when I was a ginger-curled nymphet myself), maybe boot up a game of Fallout 2, invite my BFF Steve over, and we’d watch these videos, on repeat, in silent awe. Why, I thought to myself, did I not have a dark pixie of a partner, an eternal semi-succubus, someone to cling to during the long nights of crippling self-doubt, someone to share my pants and lipgloss, someone to hold my hair while I purged, someone with whom to ghost ride the whip? I mean, someone besides Steve?
Now, emerald-haired, naked in a wooden trunk, chugging Red Bull and typing on a keyboard for which I cannot see the screen, I ask myself: if I had found her, this dark unicorn, would things have turned out better?
Meet Max Gogarty, the latest addition to the Guardian’s company of travel bloggers. Don’t let his appearance fool you. Beneath those £400 sunglasses, that meticulously tossed coiffureage and the carefully cultivated stubble perforating his lilly-white androgyne throat throbs the lion’s pulse of an adventurer. The most obvious allusion is to a swarthy Richard Burton, carving away his foreskin with a dirty flint in a cave just outside of Mecca before bravely entering the holy city where white men feared to tread. But more so! This is the face and soul of the adventurer, the hero, the titan.
But like most titans, Max has already found himself the target of a swarm of small, envious Lilliputians. After a few short hours of his introductory post going live, Max has received over 500 outraged comments from the Guardian’s readers: a cacophonous roar of shrill, petty voices from which only the words “twat”, “git” and “wanker” can clearly be discerned. His lithe, twink-like muscles are restrained by the flossy ropes of jealousy. It irritates the gossamer lanugo of his alabaster skin. This incessant biting, of the lesser, lice-like humanoids, sucks the radiance from this Herculean man-of-action.
But what’s the rumpus? Who is this homoerotic love child of Achilles and Adonis? Who is this avatar of colonialist adventure, hearkening back to an age of heroes? Who is Max Gogarty?
In sheer defiance of the World Wide Web Consortium's will, Ectomo was designed using a non-web-standard font. Luckily, it is included in the excellent font pack released by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, which can be freely downloaded in Mac and PC formats here. Ectomo should still look fine without it, though.
