The day started with bedsheets pulled up over my head. Some sour thought nagged at the back of my mind, warning me not to get out of bed. But I did anyway, forcing myself into the day. Maybe a hot shower would wash the hollow feeling somewhere far, far from me. But the water was hot and that was all. My mood did not change, did not drip from my body as I stood in the tub cold and wet.

I tried curling up on the bed again, but I couldn’t stay there. I left home like a child. Angry, upset, scared. I did not lock the door behind me. Continued…

Using public transportation is a great way to get around the city. Under ideal conditions, it is efficient and reliable, and you’re never standing on a crowded and overheated bus as it inches toward a traffic jam caused by a parking dispute. This of course leads to the ongoing debate of pulling in versus backing in. I don’t know if there is an actual law, so I won’t pressure you with my opinion except to say that I’m with George on this one.

Typical gray winter days loom over Vancouver, ruining nearly everyone’s Corn Flakes. If it’s not currently raining, it’s either just stopped or it’s about to start. Usually both. This relentlessly wet weather brings out the Irresponsible Umbrella Owners, a secret society that I’m convinced is dedicated to poking out my eyes. As a person of above-average height, you can imagine my perfectly rational fear of these people. They’ve yet to connect with more than a scratch, but I have once again initiated my seasonal defense mode. Oh yes, it’s on.

A few weeks ago there was a suspicious incident with a local specialty supermarket. Early one morning, I saw that fire investigators had it all roped off and were inside beeping and reasoning. A sign on the door now says that it was declared arson, and as I’ve learned from movies, arson is always suspicious. Hypothetically, if there were a supermarket of similar specialty in the same area, this would be an opportune motive to shut them down and ruin their inventory. But hey, draw your own conclusions, I’m just spreading gossip.

There’s an underlying frustration during the holidays that can’t quite be obscured by massive sales and Salvation Army carolers. People with no time, no patience, no money, whatever. It affects drivers, pedestrians, and grocers alike, and you can either let it affect you or let it pass right through. Lately I’m a ‘pass through’ kind of fellow, and when the seasonal madness approaches, I grab a rum-and-nog and relax by the imitation fireplace with my best gal.

Believe it or not — and I certainly hope you do — occasionally I’ll hear that someone enjoyed one of my stories. This always leads to a little parade in my heart, with balloons and streamers and stilt-walkers. Herein is a shortlist of a few such parade-inducing briefs so you can avoid the fluff of my entire catalogue.

Flowers For Pepito was inspired by one of Kristian Adam’s beautiful paintings. As soon as I saw it, an entire story poured out of me, and I knew I couldn’t capture it all. Within the story are hints at this bigger story, and I would be delighted if one day I had the time to tell it.

Dolls was for a monthly contest done by Other Voices where they offer a prompt such as, in this case, no man is completely masculine and no woman solely feminine. I imagine the main character in this story as a living embodiment of a Russian doll, but hopefully with more interesting redundancy.

Under The Bed was based on this feeling I had one morning that there was something under my bed. When I lifted up my air mattress, there was nothing there but dust, but it gave me some flashbacks to some of my childhood worries. The same day that I posted this, three of my friends let me know that they enjoyed it. They might have once had similar worries.

Petals In The Fall is a story I read at an open mic, and afterwards a couple people told me it was their favourite of the three stories I’d read. It was written based on my own speculation of a conversation I was eavesdropping on.

Regrowth was read by a friend of mine who subsequently told me she had a nightmare about it. I suppose that’s just about the highest compliment for a story that is intended to conjure these similar fears. Like most of my briefs, it was written impulsively based on an idea I had, this one being about modifying plant genetics.
Continued…

When I first started this site years ago, I found it enormously easy to update frequently. There was even a month when I had updated almost daily, something I probably couldn’t achieve today. Back then I wrote very emotionally, very abstractly, and now, even though that style comes naturally to me, I don’t enjoy it. I want my work to have a deeper significance no matter how artistically constraining it is. This post will not be constraining or significant: I will let it be what it is.

I’ve been generating content on various sites since the mid-to-late 90′s, back when not everyone and their dog had a web page. The same day that my family got Internet access, I bought a book on HTML programming. This was when we had a top-of-the-line 56K modem that barely achieved 14K. My first web page — (called My Asylum, clearly during my black-jeans-only phase) — was a collection of various links and a logo drawn in MS Paint. I thought it was cutting edge. It had animated GIFs.

My next site came years later and was much more refined. I called it iMike, which more accurately reflected my less gloomy, more geeky lifestyle. It’s still up — surprising, since Tripod used to have a tendency to remove inactive accounts. All the manual coding became so tedious that I eventually signed up for one of the earlier ‘blogging’ sites called Diaryland. Later I moved my content to Blogspot, and finally to this present site, my handcrafted, WordPress-powered The Trigger.net.

Today I find myself updating less and less frequently. Multiple unfinished drafts glare at me, pending, but never quite seem perfect. Years ago I wouldn’t have had a problem posting them. I must have grown, evolved, improved; became cynical, pessimistic, unenthusiastic. Maybe I’m waiting for some cosmic signal to risk everything for this hobby of mine, something I used to consider a passion. But what does passion mean anyway?

The picture attached to this post was taken in Belize. It has the most hits of any picture in my Panoramio account. There is no relation between this picture and this post except that they’re both my own original content. I think that’s important.

It’s tough having a birthday over a holiday. Trust me, I know, I’ve got Thanksgiving. To make up for a childhood of often-disappointing parties, this past October my girlfriend and I chose to celebrate in San Francisco, a city neither of us had ever been to. So at Ridiculous O’Clock in the morning, we took a bus to Seattle and from there, an overnight train to California.

This was my first time traveling by train and although fun, I’d be hesitant to do it again. Sleeping was a challenge — we hadn’t splurged on a sleeper car, instead choosing to bunk at Hotel Trainseat. The wastefulness also bothered me because every food item was pre-packaged in an oversized container. Seriously, every bagel, every burger, every utensil; and the recycling bins didn’t take all of these various packages! One thing that I’ll give Amtrak credit for is their vegan food selection. While not the best-tasting — think microwave dinner — I was relieved to at least have what was, technically speaking, food.

On the second day we went to Alcatraz. I won’t go into too much detail except to say it was a fascinating facility and I was looking forward to seeing it. I took a few pictures, and this one was kind of artsy. (Maybe you dig what I was seeing at the time, maybe you don’t.) But the trip wasn’t all jails and churches. There was a pirate ship in the Bay and a great big tower, too!

Continued…

Years ago, the corporation I work for centralized our Internet access so that it ran through its head office in the States. They didn’t notify us of this change, not that they necessarily had to, but I only realized this after noticing my external IP address was located in Illinois. At first this didn’t affect me at all, but after a while they started restricting some web access. Again, I can’t emphasize enough that this is entirely within their rights to do, but lately it seems a little absurd.

The first sites to go were the obvious social media sites (like Facebook and MySpace) and adult content sites (like 99% of the rest of the Internet). Then they started expanding the restrictions to include streaming media (goodbye Youtube, goodbye radio), then gaming sites (including educational games, which were great fun on lunch breaks), then any sites that include certain keywords, until now it seems like its more of a question of which sites aren’t blocked.

It wasn’t until I tried researching how to donate my hair to cancer patients that I realized the extent of this absurdity. As you can see in the screenshot I took, it’s funny that a page titled ‘Donating Hair For Cancer Victims’ is blocked because of its malicious reputation.

Sure makes me wonder.

Whenever I encounter a particularly unpleasant person I generally assume they’re just having a bad day. It’s getting harder to be naive these days. I saw a girl yesterday drop a lighter, and she didn’t notice so I picked it up and approached her.

“Excuse me,” I said, lighter in hand, ready to complete my Good Deed For The Day.

“I have a boyfriend,” said Miss Derisive, her head spinning around like a demon that could never be properly exorcised.

In the spirit of the stairs, I should have marveled at how delighted that boyfriend must be with such a charming lady as she, but instead I put the leopard-print Zippo lighter in my pocket and walked away. Regretfully, of course, because now she must think she was justified, now her presumptuous bitchiness will continue unimpeded until she loses every last thing in her purse.

So it goes?

I made up for yesterday’s missed Good Deed by starting the day off with a zinger. A construction worker waiting for the bus almost forgot his hard hat on the bench. And properly, he just said thank you.

I walked to the edge, looked down, knew I wouldn’t, and jumped anyway.

The last time I dove into water was when I was 8, and even then it wasn’t really diving since I always jumped feet-first. This kind of head-first diving was something from the swimming lessons that I didn’t take because of chronic ear infections. Because of these infections, I never learned how to tread water, and only this past year have I gone swimming when I was at the beach. And with growing confidence, now I can dive into a lake from about a meter up! And not just once, but three times, and dozens of times from lower heights! If I keep this up, soon I won’t even need my water wings!

On a completely different note, one of the points I was trying to really get at with my Comicle called “Patriotism is Relative” was my belief that any two people will always be able to find common ground between them. Sure, you may have to use extreme examples — ie, the comic’s punchline — but it’s possible. I’m not a fan of division, and there are so many ways societies divide themselves, as seen with politics, or sports, or food choices. And of course, some division is necessary in order to stimulate discourse and develop new ideas, but it seems to me like when we attack or defend these differences with hostility, we’re just not being productive. So next time you’re about to get into an argument, start by agreeing that you’re both alive, and go from there.

People are interesting creatures. At a store today, I got into the line behind a man just finishing the process of commerce. A woman standing nearby, clearly upset by my lack of telepathy, cleared her throat.

“Excuse me,” she said derisively, “but I’m in line.”

I turned around, confused because I hadn’t seen anybody there. (I’m not one of those heinous line-cutters, after all.) But there she was, as far removed from the Standard Line Area as she could be, scowling. I looked at where she was, looked back at where the line was, and looked back at her.

“Way over there?” I asked.

“Yes,” she answered, destroying villages with her scowl. “This is where the line is.”

I wasn’t especially interested in either arguing or moving, so I stepped aside to let her in since the previous fellow had left. The cashier was printing, stapling, filing, and otherwise just waiting for her, and it’s not like I was in a hurry or anything, but this woman just wasn’t moving, so I told her that she could probably approach the counter now.

“What, are you directing line traffic or something?” (Another village destroyed.)

“No,” I said, “but standing so far back just seems a little absurd.”

She then proceeded to pay for something, put it in her purse, and insist that the cashier didn’t give it to her at all. For context, she was maybe in her late thirties and gave every indication of having lived in the posh part of Vancouver her whole life. We didn’t speak again even though I was very curious about her understanding of how local procedures of commerce worked.

And on an unintentionally-somewhat-related note, weeks ago I was groggy and doodling and whipped up this aggressive little dude. It started out as a can tab, but then grew a weird tablecloth body and wooden fists. I call him Tabman. He looks odd, I know, but he obviously doesn’t like you staring at him, so please stop. Thank you.

I’ve been awfully busy these days taking advantage of the warmth of the sun. I’ve been on the beach, in the water, in the woods, and doing everything summerly that I can. Because of this increase in fun personal activities, my updates have been more and more infrequent. I know you understand, because you’re swell like that. You’re a great big steaming pile of awesome, and you know it!

After Ultimate last night, someone pointed out that one of our opponents was missing a hand. My first reaction was to feel guilty for playing as hard as I normally would, but later reflection left me wondering. Surely by playing a sport that so frequent involves the hands she must want to be treated equally, so if I had adjusted my level of play, wouldn’t that have been insulting? Would I have played differently had I known before or during the game?

At a tournament many years ago, an opponent was missing most of his left arm. This was a much more noticeable amputation, and I found myself changing my intensity while covering him. Not smart. This guy knew the game and he was fast. Even when I was firing on all pistons, I barely kept up with him. I couldn’t treat him like anyone else; he was too good.

This makes me wonder about other physical limitations. Like how I’ll always take advantage of a mismatch with a slow defender. This is of course just good strategy. But what if instead of a slow defender, it was someone who was blind in one eye and I purposefully stayed to that side? Would that be fair play or would I be capitalizing on disadvantages?

The thought I had while making my way home last night was how my actions change, consciously or not, when my awareness changes. The conclusion I came to — at least as far as sport goes — is that if you’re coming to my house, be ready to play. But if we’re going to a tea party, well, I’ll take it down a notch.