MINORITY RECOGNITION PAIN SET OFF IN THE MOST CASUAL DAILY LIFE

Today, in the later half of November, is blue sky sunny, but from a frosty start, nippy enough air to have some folks in woolly hats, and some of the seasonal German market's security staff wearing scarves over their mouths. Temperature up to 9 then falling to 6 at sunset.

In this, in the crowd exploring the German market there were as many as 6 other folks in shorts. Both adults and kids, and from both visually apparent sides of the gender spectrum. (Well worded?) I, as an aspie with a shorts sensory issue and a metabolically active body heat, have a lot of pain baggage around a minority identity struggle that I did not get a good life start in. So to see actually what I want, the social liberty I care about doing well and advancing, carries pain. The pain of needing simple equal recognition, needing to be identified as one of the shorts favouring folks comfortable in this type of air and further.

I did not see this in my childhood/youth. Is it climate change, that more folks find days at this time of year sunnier now, hence also milder? Yet there were some folks visibly wrapped up feeling cold, and all of us shorts folks were also wearing coats. Is it this region's climate, helpful to folks finding their cold boundaries: for I have always thought that shorts are seen more and colder here in East-Central Scotland than they were in the unhappy exiled location of my childhood, South Wales. Is it the existence of the web, allowing now for anyone who doubts it to confirm that colder shorts are doable and won't give them colds. Is it a good era shift, away from the evil conformity caused by hard macho attitudes in the punk and alternative comedy eras? I grew up before the web, but after the mid-century tradition of knee-length breeches for boys had died out; and in a region affected by saturated damp air causing cold-like symptoms that prevented me until my 20s from discovering my shortist identity as a real life option; and I was never a cub because my tastes were not outdoor enough and did not at the time know they wore them; and I went to a school whose uniform was rigidly only long trousers right from above the first primary year; and the unfairly difficult older boyhood when there is an irrational age prejudice against shorts I was at exactly in the punk era when shorts were most out of fashion. Amid all that unfair hammering of circumstances, never did I see what I saw today, nor before my 20s get the opportunity to be one of the folks seen in them on this type of day at this time of year. But my soul identity has always been that I should have been.

So even if it's good right social change and to be celebrated, also it's a deep stinging oppression pain concerning life fairness. For all shortists who have been oppressed and in struggle, I have to push society and posterity to consider analysis of the causes.

Maurice Frank
18 Nov 2018

seen a light?

Comedy billed as not for the easily offended usually fairly certainly means not for me. I'm ever so'seeeeeerious, ya see, with a sick world of injustice always at the forefront of thought, and seriously down on all the ethicality of everyone who has an emotionally cruel sense of humour, which is indistinguishable from being an emotionally destructive person seriously. 1980s alternative comedy was just a fashion statement for blatant bullying and violence, for delight in destroying everything anyone cares about.

But there is a very real practical question around how referring to injustices in comedy sometimes helps the serious impact against them. Like the old Berlin Wall graffiti "Jump over and join the party". Like Life of Brian. When is comedy that refers to injustices ever constructive? Ever not just a further kicking in suffering's face?

When it is open to thinking about. When it is not an act of bullying aggro with a socially intimidating effect. The way all that distressingly aggressive 1980s alternative comedy fired up all that is ugliest in peer groups, is why it failed to get across the serious political messages it sometimes hoped to.

Fringe stand-up performer Abigoliah Schamaun makes you think, because every time she crashes through an offence barrier she actually pauses and reflects on it, checks out how the audience feels with it. It gives the whole question of offence a significantly different feel. It is more survivable for the audience, and each time you wonder whether it is more justified for the performer, because you are not just getting hammered by it, passively. For usually that aspie unfriendly helpless position, take whatever I throw at you and like it, is the relationship an audience who feel ever so super-cool really have towards a comic who wants to make them sick. An audience who have the fairness of their own feelings acknowledged are in a stronger feeling, better feeling, less pushed around, position.

Seriously don't want that light bulb she eats to be real, or she won't be performing for long. No audience can pass on the reason for doing it, because there isn't one.

Maurice Frank