I got some feedback that this comic is hard to understand, so here’s its plot: a man steals an iPod, then sells it to another guy who robbed someone to pay for it. Punchline. Humour.
But seriously, how many of us are buying worthless products using money that isn’t ours?
I am. And I think a lot of other people are too.
So agree or disagree, laugh or super-laugh, it’s all up to you. Because you are capable of making up your own mind. You’re an individual, just like everybody else.
It was a warm day for a cold winter, the temperature hovering around fifteen below. We climbed the fence and walked out onto the bridge. It wasn’t used in the winter, not by trains, just the one-way traffic right below us. You could hear it, feel it, see it through the slits of wood. At the edge, you could see the frozen river forty meters down. We couldn’t have fallen, not easily. This was his idea.
When he told me he wanted to take pictures on the tracks, I thought it’d be fun. We’d be high up there and it’s great to look down at the world sometimes. I think we both needed that then.
We had mutual friends and similar interests, like computers and cameras and being alive. It was only natural we’d become friends ourselves, and it was only too obvious that it would one day get complicated. Similar interests. Mutual friends.
But before all this would come out, we stood on that bridge, in the cold, looking down at the world. I walked half across, then back. No coat, for a while no shirt, always the subject of a camera capturing the instance of a man alive.
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.
As discovered in a box of teen angst, the second from my Nowhere triptych. (The first and third are elsewhere.)
I lived alone and alone I live still
Completely encased, no emotions to spill
Eighteen years, drown choice in drink
Delicate creatures drown voice in think
Free the thunder of a mind controlled
Fight the flailing feelings I stole
Find a purpose for life without love
While I lie awake dreaming I’m never enough
In all of my words are some of my thoughts
I don’t know that I need but I think that I want
As much as I want, I will never receive
Anything more than I’ll get in my dreams
So self-distorted, my reflection is false
A stranger who knows me like no one at all
I keep to myself, there’s no other way
Living in sleep and dying in days
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!
A rifle gets cold when it hasn’t been shot, so cold it freezes to your bare hands when you’re trudging through knee-deep snow falling so thick you can’t see right in front of you. There’s tracks on the ground, and they’re not a man’s tracks, but they’re the only things to follow.
Thick fur coats, blankets, tents, food, fire; who could survive here without these things?
Someone says he must have died somewhere far behind, someone else says no, his body would’ve been found, someone else says to keep moving, it’s too cold to stop unless it’s to make camp. They say he killed two Mounties, they say he’s got to be caught.
He’s not a man, he’s the Mad Trapper of Rat River, a ghost. Can’t be caught. Hard to believe ’til you’re after him.
There’s new tracks now, a man’s, from the caribou tracks to the trees. That’s how he’s been hiding, that’s where he is now. Who knows how long ago, his footprints are almost snowed over. A few hours, maybe, but they’re deep and they’re straight, so he’s not tired. He’s running. Seventy-two miles, he’s still not tired.
The ghost goes to a canyon. The trees are thick, and it’s too dark to see anything but the tracks leading down there. Someone says to set up camp at the top, there’s mountains surrounding him, he can’t go nowhere without coming back this way. A storm hits. It’s gonna be bad.
Even with a fire, it’s the coldest night in months. Nobody knows how he’s staying warm or what he’s been eating. How’s a man on the run find time to hunt, to dry his clothes, to build a new shelter each night?
A rifle is fired, it wakes everyone up, it kills the man on watch. Somewhere down in the shadows, the Mad Trapper is fired upon, and at the top of the ridge, given away by the campfire, two more Mounties die.
In the daylight, his tracks go from the top of the ridge, down through the trees, to the face of the mountain. There they stopped, nowhere to go. The ghost either vanished or the man climbed up, at night, during a blizzard, rifle in hand.
Everyone says he’s a ghost.
In eighth grade, I was introduced to Spawn. I became an immediate fan of its longtime artist Greg Capullo, and one day I sent him a letter with some character sketches I’d created for my own comic, and I asked him to draw a cover for it. If he drew my cover, my friends would definitely buy it.
Two weeks later I got an oversized envelope in the mail. Inside was a completely penciled and inked drawing of my characters Traveler and Shakkle. I was speechless; how many artists would do something so generous?
Soon, the drawing had an effect that I hadn’t anticipated. With such an incredible cover, my comic had a whole lot to live up to. A cover like this warranted a comic I couldn’t deliver. And then, the project ended. Traveler and Shakkle stayed up on my wall, adored, while I moved in a new direction. I created a series called Stick-Man: The Psycho Hero, a funny comic of limited quality that took only days to finish. And then, soon enough, that ended too.
Years later, I decided that the drawing had been done under false pretenses. I felt guilty more and more until one day I made a copy of Stick-Man and sent it to him. I added a note to explain, but it didn’t really make sense, and then I lost interest in comics altogether. I didn’t understand that there will always be someone better than you at what you love to do. What’s important is to keep doing what you love.
It seems these days that some people are hesitant or downright unwilling to do something good for the environment because of cost. This argument always sounds absurd to me because, as I see it, it’s illogical. The planet’s been around a whole lot longer than money and frankly I can’t imagine it’s too concerned with our artificial concept of economy. It’s probably even a little bit ticked off.
As a quick analogy before my mind completely shuts down for the evening, let’s say there’s a ship full of sailors out at sea. One of the sailors — we’ll call him Bucky — happened to bring along his collection of antique buckets and another — we’ll call him Corky — brought his finest corks. When the ship is out as far as it can get, it’s discovered to have a hole in it! And not just one, but several, all over! Water’s getting in everywhere and the ship is sinking!
One sailor goes up to Bucky and asks to use his buckets to save the ship.
Bucky says, “What? Are you kidding? These buckets are much too expensive to use for bailing out water! But I’ll sell some to you!”
So a bunch of sailors pool their money and buy a few buckets, and while they’re doing their best, they realize it’s not enough! They need to plug the conveniently cork-sized holes! So they go up to Corky and ask for his corks.
Corky says, “Not a chance, these are my best corks! But I’ll tell you what, I’ll sell some to you!”
But guess what: the sailors spent all their money on buckets! (Except for Bucky, he must have left in a life raft or something.)
So one of the sailors says, “Listen up, Corky! If you don’t give us those corks, we’re all going to go down with this ship!”
But Corky’s a stubborn and selfish jerk, and he shrugs his shoulders and walks away. Then when his back is turned, the sailors bop him on the head with an oar and take the corks anyway.
So the moral of the story is that if we want proper renewable energy sources and the corporations aren’t willing to sell them at reasonable prices, we’re going to have to bop them on the head with an oar. You know, metaphorically.
As discovered in a box of teen angst, the first from my Nowhere triptych. (The second and third are elsewhere.)
I lived in happiness but now in gloom
I killed that self and locked its tomb
The knife I used just rusts in rain
And won’t come clean from all this shame
What I thought was right was clearly wrong
Because I heard all I wanted all along
And I felt so free, forgetting fear
Had I not been blinded by these tears
I was a pawn in a game of chess
All alone with the queen in check
But after I said all I could possibly say
I opened my eyes and a king was in play
My dreams destroyed and my heart denied
I grabbed my blade and watched it slide
Across my heart, bleeding black
And I knew one day, that blade would be back
