Freely Offered

Character sketch: Freddie, the intellectual of his gang, "whatever that means. I read a lot, and so have a voluminous working vocabulary. What some people call 'big words". People take one look at me - tall, skinny, chinos, goatee, wire-rim glasses, fedora - and assume I'm a smartie prim and proper professor type who wouldn't know a dirty joke if one hit him over the head. My friends know better though!"

An introvert, except around women he doesn't know: "I love to talk and look and titillate and make them squeal. Especially the wholesome types - they tend to be wicked good at wit and innuendo. They prove that saying just like I do - you can't judge a book by its cover."

Full name: Frederick James Thorndyke. "My best friend always tacks on "the Third, Esquire", but I'm not a third, thank goodness, nor am I an Esquire - that has a very specific meaning, and I'm not it."

Job: courier, "which takes me all sorts of interesting places. Some uninteresting locales too, you might think, but I find that just about any place can be quite interesting. As you might imagine, couriering leaves me with copious amounts of time on my hands. Most of the other couriers I know read, or do puzzles, or play video games, or such, but me, I'm a learner. I've learned all sorts of things thanks to that dead time: programming, multiple foreign languages, and macramé, just to name a few. And of course I see no end of interesting people on my journeys, which gives me endless fodder for my drawings. I put my apps and art up on the web and make some extra money. That plus all the frequent flyer miles I've racked up means I can go pretty much wherever I want to go and do pretty much whatever I want to do. I travel light: a change of high quality travel clothes from REI; my tiny slate tablet and not much bigger convertible, the latter for coding and both for drawing; my crazy-big music collection ripped off in lossless format; a digital camera; and a world-wide cell phone. That's about all a body needs, don't you think? It's all I need, at least. Some people seem to need - or want, at least - way more, but I just don't see the point. There are too many cool things to see in this world to get tied down to just one place, you know?"