Ha ha it’s made from butter. Nice punky attitude tee for the irreverent but fashionable.

Butterfly Tee

This design takes its inspiration from the old ‘Keep Britain Tidy’ slogo (yes I’ve just invented a new word… logo + slogan = slogo). Essentially it comments on the lack of love in the modern world. I’ve been with my partner for years and as yet neither of us has run off or tried to kill the other. Yet when you take a look at current divorce rates you’d be hard pressed to find a marriage that lasts as long as fifteen years, by the way we didn’t get married. Maybe that’s the trick. Al that legal mumbo jumbo probably puts a dampener on most marriages to be, plus there’s the cost, the heightened expectation, and the final realization that married life sucks.

I believe most peopled get married out of boredom, exhaustion, and even just to escape the dating scene, which from over here seems to be more nightmarish than ever. Sure you can do loads more people, but none of them give a damn about you, what goes round… It’s been commercialized - dating is a scene - an act, a long drawn out and badly written play. Almost everyone under thirty is on stage and performing, and a lot of older divorcees  are starting to do the same.

A guy has to get on a bit before he realizes there’s more to it than sex, a lot of women are following suit now, in fact one day I doubt there will be anything other than f*ck buddies and lifelong partners,  I can’t see marriage lasting in the West. Sure you have your strongholds,  religion plays a big part in it.  Catholics  will always give it a go, for most religions  believe there’s no way getting around it. Their whole society is based on the foundation of marriage. I’ve noticed a lack of that reverance in UK politics ever since Blair left… phew. Society isn’t based on marriage, my parents hated each other. Society should be based on mutual respect. But what do I know?

Heartbreaker as with all my tees is available in over 30 styles and shades. Sweats, Tees, Hoodies, come and see the whole collection at www.retrogod.com

It’s true, I never kept a diary as a kid (way b4 this old blogging thingy started.). You know I’ve tried a couple of times at submitting this blog to that bloody awful site www.blogexplosion.com - it’s totally duff but I thought hey some traffic might help raise the profile for Retro God but oh no… it just won’t do at all - B.E say that my blog is too commercial - well duh! I do make and sell t-shirts. Anyway if anyone knows anyone at www.blogexplosion.com - tell them I’m slagging them off and maybe they’ll change their totally dumb regulations. Hey I don’t use Adsense so I’m less commercial than any blogs they do favor.

Phew - take that as an apology (yet again) for not keeping up. I’ve been working on more music for www.onemanbrand.co.uk but nope I’m not happy with any of it so you’ll all have to wait a little longer (thank god I hear you say).

Okay on with the tees! I’ll post what I can when I can, to be honest I would rather you bought the tees than read about them, but if you have to know more, keep those eyes peeled for new posts very soon!.

Hey! Yep it’s been a while since I’ve added to the blog, I apologise for that, let’s say I’ve been too busy making tees to write about them! Anyway for my next crazy installment - check out the Junk Food T-Shirt.

It was inspired by a recent TV program that dealt with how much food we throw away these days. It made me think, better than eating the junk, but that’s not the point. The point is food must be really awful these days if we will all buy it but not even eat the stuff. Then again consider all the crap many of us choose to eat everyday, I include myself in that category, I’m lucky, I don’t really have any weight problems, maybe a few pounds on and off somtimes at Christmas, but mainly I take after my dad, I am a skinny sod at the best of times. But Christ, doesn’t junk food screw you up? It must be my age, I just can’t process that stuff after a while. There are certain burgers that give me wind and stomach cramps and their buns taste of sugar, their shakes give me a headache, and their fries are so salty I get heart pangs from the sodium build-up.

I was a veggie once, I was even an activist for an animal protection group, but I was only 12 years old, very impressionable, and recently moved to a new school after Mum and Dad’s divorce. The point is I wanted friends, and if they were veggies, then I was, if they were activists, then I was. I spent two or three years living of Beanfeast and Soya, it was so ironic, I’d just spent over a decade detesting vegetables and now here I was trying to be a vegetarian.

At first I went the whole hog, veganism is a very tough regime, no dairy, nothing. I became rather ill and slipped back to vegetarian so I could eat a few cheese sandwiches now and again, it got worse. After a year or two I was one of those awful veggies who ate Tuna. Eventually I became as close to a carnivore as you can get. I’d been so starved of just about every edible treat known to man.

Even now I can’t resist a bit of junk. Sweets mainly. Chocolate. Perhaps I have my brain all wired up wrong, are males suspposed to get a buzz of chocolate? Anyway, I was always getting the munchies in my late teens and Student years, I wasn’t so bang on all the fast food junk as much as crisps (US - chips) and sweets. I know I’m paying for it now. A rather wise friend once pointed out that there is a balance. If you eat healthy food and you hate it you really aren’t receiving all the benefits. Your body won’t process it as efficiently, and you will rather skip meals than face another bowl of lentils and a detox tea.

It’s true, fruit, veg, if it’s healthy I have trouble with it. I’ve learned over the years to trick myself into enjoying a rather more stable diet these days, I hardly touch caffeine in the day. I’ll eat yoghurt crunchies instead of sweets, when I actually find them in the shops. I probably have less than ten takeaway meals a year now which is progress I suppose.

What still gets my goat is the occassional vegan or even worse (I knew a girl who lives on fruit and nuts!), badgering me about the healthy advantages of a meat-free diet. To be honest, they look ill, kinda defeats the whole point I’d say.

Do what you like within moderation seems to be the best advice. Anyway, who the hell wants to live forever these days. People die from jogging, people get run over, people who never smoke or drink, or eat meat or dairy, who exercise everyday die from cancer. I don’t know, I’d say the healthiest thing to do is stay as happy as you can, and make sure you keep up a diet of healthy cynicism too.

This accidentally came out as a rather Japanese Manga style tee. It’s inspired by all the sleeping businessmen I saw at Budapest Airport recently. I started to imagine what a wannabe tycoon would dream of and made a sketch. I only found it again recently and thought it’d be a great t-shirt design.

To be honest I so hope I’m wrong about businessmen’s dreams, sexy ladies, fun in the sun, the good old days, anything but master plans for world economic domination. As a kid there were lads who pulled the legs of insects, tied cans to cats’ tails, shoot birds with air rifles. I found it horrifying, I didn’t mind a fight, I used to watch ‘Monkey’ - an old 1970’s dubbed Japanese Kung-fu proggy for kids. I bought a bamboo stick like the kid next door and we used to fight on top of a garage. But he was my equal, it was a challenge.

The difference with most people and businessmen who want to dominate the world is that they have a different attitude to competition. Destroy the weakest, the poorest, those with the least influence in the world, and then work your way up.

I’m in no position to complain. The Net, this blog, the duff laptop I’m using to write it, everything that enables me to be here is due to a competitive market. I just think it’s a little sad that for someone to get everything, everyone else must lose out. Don’t worry I’m not going all Commie on ya, I know there isn’t a political solution. Perhaps as resources become scarce (to the extreme), self-sufficiency will present itself as a medium for empowerment of the individual. Who knows, perhaps it’s just a pipe dream.

Pipe Dream

Party Pooper

I confess - I am a party pooper. It must be part of the ageing process. I wasn’t exactly Fun Time Bobby, but my catchphrase throughout my late teens was ‘Where’s the party?’. It was a sincere expression, I truly wanted to party every weekend. I know that means screwing in the USA, but I just meant house parties. Now don’t get me wrong, this isn’t like your Fresh Prince kinda house party, all I needed was a house, booze, attractive girls and music. That constituted a house party. I loved it, just when the whole concept went tits up.

I had a house party once, it was awful, my family returned home early, everyone was bored to tears, the music was, shall we say limited to a bunch of miserable records I’d stumbled across in 2nd hand vinylshops, and yes they were all badly scratched. It made me realize that no one who has regular house parties has a home. My place was trashed like everyone else’s. It was just nice for a while to be somewhere more personal than the dingy pubs and clubs around at the time.

These days there’s more atmosphere at a supermarket or an airport than some clubs I could mention. Super clubs are the worst. Vast warehouses, that unless you’re on some kind of mind altering substance, you soon notice just how ugly the whole place is, the girders, the rafters, the pidgeons in the eaves. I’ve worked in a few factories in my time, and to tell the truth, they were friendlier places.

These days it’s almost impossible to find a real good quality party run by amateurs, out of the goodness of their hearts, just for the kicks. Nope. There’s always some agenda, networking usually. I’ve been drawn into conversations on all sorts of crap, but costume jewellery and health products, that really is the pits. You can get Ann Summers parties, now they could be more interesting if they actually invited the blokes along too, but they know that business would be pushed aside and everyone would end up drunk as usual. Shame that.

There are swingers parties (god forbid), I’ve seen a Channel 4 doc on that whole scene, and if you are over fifty, sex mad, sport thongs, and enjoy rolling around in a dark room full of oily bodies, then good luck to you. S&M parties, why on earth anyone can enjoy pain, I don’t know, I was caned at school (corporal punishment incase you are a confused stoner). I didn’t enjoy it. Being punished doesn’t sound like a fun night out to me.

I suppose I must resign myself to the prospect of dinner parties (now they are not parties) and restaurants, theatre, film, art, the usual haunts of the reserved. I miss the party people, but unless you’re off your face you don’t want to bump into them anymore. Most of them are far uglier than I remember, but their hearts are as good as gold, as long as the drugs don’t wear off.

The people who scare me the most say they are ‘High on Life’, that sounds absurd to me, then again I am a miserable git. Who knows - perhaps they have a enjoyably toxic reaction to breathing air, or smiling makes them orgasm, their brains must be wired in a completely different way, an alien way, perhaps they are the future. I am certainly not. You can’t get me excited anymore, I’ve had my share, I’m a party pooper now, if you do invite me I am guaranteed to stand in the corner of your kitchen for ten minutes before making my excuses.

A massive Escape Button surrounded by crowds of tourists. It would be nice if we all could really get away. Another planet, another dimension, somewhere where you’ll meet few if any humans.

My partner would always point out beauty spots of the countryside whenever we travelled on a motorway. Not so much now though. I heaped a debate on her, and she wasn’t really asking for one, but I did anyway. It went something like this…

What actually enabled us to see these beautiful places, from afar, from a car. The motorway (or freeway if you want me to go all American on you - besides that’s probably a misnomer by now anyway… I mean with the amount of toll roads these days I doubt few of them are actually free anymore.).

If you can see a beautiful place from somewhere as ugly as hell, you are spoiling the view. It’s kinda difficult to quantify what spoils a view. I have no problem with Wind Turbines for instance, I know a lot of nimbys do (nimby = not in my backyard). A blott on the landscape for me has more to do with function than form. It’s not how it looks so much as what it does, or rather how efficiently. All the Post Modernists back me up on this, form and function is a symbiosis of two essential disciplines. Anything that strips one from the other is a failure as far as design is concerned.

A wind turbine is essentially a beautifully ugly thing. It’s beauty comes from the knowledge that it does little if any damage to the environment in as efficient way as possible. From the belief that it is the way of the future, anon-polluting one at that. There are areas of the UK that won’t let you put up a satellite dish because it spoils the look of a listed village, a historical town, a heritage centre. I love history, but if it meant isolating myself from the present then I’d rather give it the heave-ho. Imagine what all those nimby council planners think about solar panels and wind turbines. Here’s a quickie, how about a wind turbine on every church steeple (how many are left now?) and disguise the top with a weather vane. It would be ugly, it would be inefficient, but if it gets past the beady eye of a planning officer with a heavy historical bias then it would be worth it.

Motorways are ugly. Cars can be beautiful in their own way, from a design perspective I mean. But get a thousand in a tailback with a cloud of smog overhead and you’re not painting a Turner are you? Until cars can hover we are stuffed. Let’s face it, we won’t have any countryside to tear through within fifty years. Even if we do learn to hover, we’ll still have difficulty seeing anything through that smog. How many years does it take to clean the sky anyway?

Getting back to the point, you can’t see beauty without ruining it, if man get’s his dirty mitts on anything beautiful, whatever his intentions, he does usually end up ruining it. I know we’ve got a few National Trust parks, they still get the smog but at least they’re not twelve lane bypasses for nearby cities. But what about the rest. It takes millions of years to form a landscape, man has always played with it, digging a tunnel here, building a bridge there. But now he can flatten it, raise it, put it out to sea, you name it. By the way - how long will those ornamental islands in Dubai last now that we know the world’s sea levels are rising?

Yes, yes, this has entry has turned in to one of those awful eco-rants you read just about everywhere. I’ll stop badgering you, I’m no better. Sure I recycle, I don’t even drive, but this old house we live in could never be described as ‘ecologically efficient’. I could do a lot more to help, but as the years have passed I’ve come to accept that what I remember is so drastically different from what the next can recall that soon a tree will be a surprise for the kids growing up these days.

I was on a plane recently, first time in years, I didn’t plant a tree, I didn’t carbon offset. But when I saw all those businessmen who use planes the way I used to use buses (get a bike), it kinda knocked me back for six. There is no great escape, no getaway. Next time you think you’ve managed to get away from the world, look up, that guy in the plane staring back, he’s thinking of putting a Starbucks franchise just where you’re standing.

The Great Escape

It seems that mental health has always been a no-no when it comes to general conversation. You can say you are crazy about snowboarding, football mad, you can say your job is driving you insane, you can use the words, but never play out the actions. Until now.

Loony Bin T-Shirt

General society has until recently treated mental illness like an infection, don’t talk to mad people or you will end up exactly the same way, talking about god knows what conspiracies, impossible tales of impossible deeds. But funny enough it seems that all you normal people out there have accidentally embraced lunacy without realizing it.

I’ve had my turns, it’s true, I’ve suffered from manic depression, I’ve had suicidal friends, a lot of well-meaning straights would love to blame the drug culture, but when you take a closer look, you have to blame culture, nothing more than that.

Noise drives people crazy. City dwellers beware, noise does screw you up. The reason there’s so much noise these days isn’t just a matter of over-population, it’s the fact that everyone wants to make more noise. Their phones, their cars, their offices, their homes, their lives are noisy. Their friends are noisy, their bosses are noisy. Why do you think so many retire early from the Stock Market?

I met a retired stockbroker once, he was in his late twenties, he was jumping up and down in the train carriage as I played a stupid little Casio synth I was absorbed by at the time. He came over, wiping what seemed to be coke from his nose and grabbed it. He offered me double its worth in cash, I accepted, he didn’t have any cash. We laughed and he told me to play my junk, I just made it up and he stared out the window contemplating.

He started to recall his life, almost as if to no one in particular, he had made millions from junk bonds or god knows what, and blew almost all of it on coke parties. He told me I was better off out of it. I took the advice to heart. The point is this guy was no different than any crazy I’d met at The Priory. He had his nervous twitches, his pharmaceutical love of white powder, and a tendency to place his conversation in the context of the earth and the human race, rather than an individual one.

Look at TV and film these days, I’ve always loved the tools of Sci-fi, not so much the gadgets as the endless conveyor belt of what if’s, it seems that everything I see has appropriated the predictive nature of that once cult format. It seems that most celebrities are now officially a little crazy, some more than others. It seems the same can be said for scriptwriters too. To me it’s all old hat, I’ve been mad for years so I and many of my crazy friends from times gone by are prepared.

If you think normality still exists, you are outnumbered. Originality is such a sought after commodity now, that no matter the market, medium, or craft, no matter how little sense it makes, if people like it, it’s a roaring success. The point is sanity has become boring. People try to escape the cold harsh light of reality everyday. Women who let advertisers fool them into believing in eternal youth and beauty. The promise of wealth. The illusion of sophistication and glamour. Take a ride into space for $20m and wonder what it’s all about. Smoke a doobie and wonder how you are going to make that much money in the first place.

The lunatics escaped from the asylum a long time ago, they run the media, the government, the corporations, they design your clothes, paint your art, start wars, sell reconverted asylums as executive apartments with panoramic views, they’re everywhere. Get used to it.

PRIVACY - Well this is a rather straight forward design, based on an old and tatty motel door sign. Simply called privacy, it hints at more than just the insane overcrowding and over-population of so many of our cities today, but the absolute lack of privacy, what could once have been called a human right, and now, well now I suppose it is considered something of a luxury.

Get rich, buy an island, but a pod on the Moon, no doubt you’ll still be spied on by a satellite for some dodgy reality show, I’m sure some TV executive can crowbar a mention of ‘Moonies’ just to add some frission to the whole idea. Maybe not.

The only thing I can say is don’t get famous, get rich, not famous. Fame certainly must suck. Sure some crazies need that much attention, but I doubt many want it for the rest of their lives.

There sure are a lot of trailer trash (to be succint) who’d love to be famous. If you live without privacy, in a trailer, with god knows how many people peering over your shoulder, it probably is a step up. Still no ‘me time’ but at least I’m rich.

It’s all back to my old argument, too many people on this planet. When the time is right and the money is available I guarantee they’ll be building tax-free casinos and health spas on the Moon. It’s quiet up there right now, cold dark and quiet. If only I didn’t need to breathe air and was restricted by the laws of gravity, sounds a great place for a vacation. In fact anywhere that the rest of you six billion busy people have failed to notice would do me, it’s nothing personal, it’s just we all need a break from our vastly extended primordial family - once in a while.

I heard in a documentary about ‘Whirling Dervishes’ that mysticism is far older than religion, I wouldn’t argue with that, but to be honest, loose or rigid, it’s all still religion to me. I know we all have to believe in something, ourselves, the future, in good government, whatever you like. But to me belief, hope, infact anything in that general area is simply blind and over-optimistic at best.

Most people can’t deal with the terrible truth, the human race is a virus running riot. It isn’t an individual life at stake anymore, it’s a whole race. We’ve only managed to carve a slither of history out of this old planet, and what have we achieved, apart from an awful mess that some poor sods will have to clean up one day, and that’s if they are lucky.

We’ve screwed up, we have, and just about everyone who came before us, but mainly us, the people empowered with language, technology, information, knowledge. We can organize anything, we can communicate instantly, feeding the world a new idea, within minutes, literally. But are we going to save the world? Are we potentially a generation of heroes, or will we simply keep watching the TV in vain hope that someone else does it?

Back to my point (if I have one), belief is unfounded, it simply means ‘I don’t know’ or rather ‘I don’t know everything’. You can believe you are going to be rich for instance. You just bought a lotto ticket and you believe you can win. There, that’s what I call almost religious belief, sure it’s money and not life everlasting, but with the way Hollywood peddles its superstar lifestyles, the difference has blurred. Now what if you’d set up your own highly successful software company and it was about to be floated on the stockmarket and you believe it will make you at least a million pounds in personal fortune. You see that’s not belief, that’s just an estimate, however rough.

All I’m saying is if it sounds too far-fetched, just as with advertising, I tend to ignore it. Buddhism used to escape the glare of my growing objectivity, perhaps a fondness for the whole ‘let’s make reglion more Marxist’ approach. There’s no hierachy as such, you just have to be very good for a very long time, then you win or something. Ok so then you get to meet Kurt Cobain. Sorry. Of all the people out there, I don’t want to knock Buddhists, lovely people I’m sure, best out of a bad lot I’d say, but still, I’m feeling irreligious today.

I once worked as a temporary dustman when I was struggling with college fees and got to work a whole day with a very devout Jehovah’s Witness. He was a nice chap, bit beardy, but very relaxed and friendly. But soon I realized why the council could only get temps to work with him. He was working his mojo, he was actually trying to convert me.

I spent the next hour ‘de-converting’ him, making him deconstruct all his beliefs in a logical progression of deduction and conclusion. By the end his head was in his hands and he was bawling his eyes out. Why? Well, his wife, kids, parents, siblings, friends, everyone in his life were Jehovah’s witnesses. I then spent the next hour reassuring him and joking about my foolishness, explaining I was simply testing his faith, not denouncing it.

Some people need a divine purpose, some don’t. Religion has always exploited that belief. But there are incongruencies in all faiths, contradictions that pull apart any resemblance of logical structure and reasoning. The last religion to let me down was Buddhism. If they believe in reincarnation, then how comes the Dalai Llama is continually reborn? If anyone should set them a good example, it’s him.

Monkfish - a t-shirt and philosophy - all rolled into one!