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www.crimeoflife.ca  ¶ 6:09 PM

  Remembering I was young when my grandfather died. He was a veteran of the second world war. This is what I remember.

Mom was crying, dad was holding her. My aunts and uncles, cousins and grandma, they were all there, but I didn't want to look around. When grandpa was sick, we visited him a lot in the hospital. I never wanted to go. The smell bothered me. But mom said it was important, so we all went together. When I saw him in the casket, I remember he looked the same as he did in the hospital, only asleep. For a while after this I was afraid of going to sleep.

After the service, we went back to my grandpa's farm. One of his friends was there, too. He was dressed up like a soldier, with medals all over. He arrived in a limousine, and I remember all of us were amazed by that. We'd never seen a limousine in our small town, just in television shows and movies. So my grandpa's friend took us for a ride while he told us a story about my grandpa in the war. But I don't remember the story, just the ride.

I know my grandfather was an incredible man, I just wish I could remember that.  ¶ 7:41 AM

  Huffing and Puffing After he kicked in my front door, I stopped threatening to call the police and actually did. The man wanted nothing more than to come inside and pull Ivan out -- and it wasn't as though I liked Ivan, but by comparison he was far safer than the big bad wolf at the door.

This man was prone to bad decisions. A distant friend of a friend who was new in town and lived nearby. I was friendly, we hung out. I recall one night when I went camping, he showed up. No tent, no sleeping bag; nothing but a few flats of beer. He drank without pause. There was this place he knew of that he insisted on driving to, and he went, a dozen beers later. When he came back, he bragged about his near collision. Like it was some mark of manliness.

The big bad wolf had been dating Ivan's sister, and for whatever reason, they hated each other. We'd all been at the only bar in town earlier that evening, and apparently they had exchanged words. They were drunk as all stinking hell, angry, and in my home. So when I locked the door on him, he kicked it down. I know that he wasn't thinking clearly, and I know he was sorry for doing it, but that was the last I ever saw of him. Driving away in a hundred wild emotions, risking everything around him.  ¶ 9:07 PM

  Confessions One of the things that you have to get used to when going to a Roman Catholic school is its many customs. Frequent masses, classes, and religious overtones from teachers who don't necessarily believe themselves.

In seventh grade we had an introduction to confession. The entire class gathered in the gymnasium, every person sitting on mats apart from each other. We were told to think of something to confess to the priest that day. I was hardly prepared. I remember sitting there quietly, looking around at everyone else deep in thought, watching my classmates get up one by one to confess and leave. That's all there was to it, but for the life of me I couldn't think of anything. So I just sat there feeling badly about not having anything to feel badly about. But it was mandatory, so I made something up. I don't recall what.

Today, I wonder how many religious people in the world are like that little boy I was, sitting among the masses, confused but going through the motions. I wonder how many of those people are religious simply because they're told they are.  ¶ 10:40 AM

  Bureau There is an e-mail lingering in my inbox from one of my former college instructors.

My college days are best summed up as a brief sprint through personal growth. I moved out on my own when I was nearly 20. At that point, I'd never really tried smoking grass, had never had a girlfriend, had never even been kissed. In my first few months, all of this changed. At the time, I couldn't appreciate the affect that it was having on my life because I was so eager to be a different person. So eager to change.

The course I took in college was much too easy for me to excel in. Without trying, I achieved consistently high grades. And so in the second semester, I stopped trying altogether. I skipped a lot of class, stopped doing all but the large projects, and coasted through. But before the final project was announced, I found that my calculations were incorrect. I had a failing grade.

I went to the department head one afternoon, a charming and eloquent old Scotsman named Mr Bureau, and discussed my grade. He must have recognized my potential, because he gave me an extra assignment to bring my average up. I did this assignment with the diligence of the first semester, passed the course, and on the last day of class, I'll always remember what he'd written on the assignment when it was returned to me.

It read, in part, "you have everything you need to be successful."

Clearly this has always stuck with me, only brought to sudden memory now that I've heard of his passing. Thank you, sir.  ¶ 9:41 AM

  Sloan I was listening to Sloan the other day, really enjoying the album, and a memory took me back to high school. A friend of mine mentioned them, a new favourite of his. But I was still into the top 40 radio hits, so I teased him about it. Yeah, as if I had some kind of musical authority to critique his preference. And now that I am a completely different person than I was then, I find myself wishing that he was around to apologize to. It might have been different.  ¶ 8:18 PM

  Spontaneous Friend On the way over I thought about another time I'd gone to visit him. It was nearly thirty below and there I was walking through the biting wind to say hello. This time, it was nearly 11 and he'd just told me he was in town overnight. Years earlier, he was on stage with The Subterraneans and blew a string on his bass. He didn't have any spares and there were no other bass guitars around, so I drove home to get mine. Another night, I was supposed to meet some people I didn't necessarily want to be alone with, so I dropped in and picked him up on the way. And yet still, he once called me at six with a free ticket to Nine Inch Nails at seven. The seats were only several rows back from the stage.

It's nice to have a spontaneous friend.  ¶ 7:18 PM

  Untidy She came over one night, upset. I rushed around the room tidying up my things, nervous and frantic. My living room was a mess. Still. I meant to clean the day before but never did, distracted by something that took an entire evening. I had no idea what was going to happen that night, only she did.

I had come into new thinking recently. Nights were often filled with distractions, not with her. Maybe her presence wasn't wanted then, maybe I just didn't know what sort of presence I wanted. Maybe.

When she told me she was really leaving that night, I did not want her to go. I could not confess to myself that my mind had been wandering for some time. Distracted. My room was so cluttered then.  ¶ 4:53 PM

  Programming Languages My first exposure to programming languages was at Peter's home. He showed me something he made in QBASIC where you guessed a random number that the computer generated. The game itself was uninteresting, but when he showed me how he'd made it I was fascinated. I could do that. So I taught myself using the help menu. It was tedious progress on an old Pentium 386, but this was long before internet and instructional books.

Years later, my family got a modem, and soon after, my friend Dale introduced me to mIRC. The interesting thing about mIRC was that you could develop your own scripts, and since the language was similar to what I already knew, I was immediately fascinated. Once again, using help menus and examples, I programmed several different scripts, including a bot that people could play various games with. Soon after that, I learned how to program in HTML, once again self-taught, and made a few simple web sites, like this one and this one.

I'm not sure how I came about learning PHP and MySQL, but most likely it was as a result of talking to Rob. (Rob runs Logical Hosting, which I recommend to anyone looking for domains.) They were fairly simple languages to learn, albeit much more powerful, and there were a few peculiarities to the languages that made my self-instruction more difficult than it had to be. Then, as of a week ago, I've been learning CSS. Yes, on my own.

Ahh, the story of one geek's progress.  ¶ 10:02 AM

  BEAM Comics I can't recall if it was Eric's idea or my own, but around the same time we started making our own comics. It was Eric, at any rate, that took it most seriously, and I remember this because he was the first to use blank instead of lined paper, the first to ink over his pencils, first to go through and colour each and every panel by hand.

Around 1993, I'd been doing a comic called The Rubber Bandit and another called Batsquirrel, and Eric was doing a comic called Silver Squadron. I ended up doing a spin-off called Silver Squadron Chronicles, which remains somewhere completely written and mostly drawn. At the time, this was the closest we'd been to working together, until the following year when we created a comic called Mutaman for an Environmental Studies project. We were allowed access to the photocopier in the staff room to make copies for the entire class, and found ourselves in a geeky form of heaven.

In 1995, Eric and I walked to the Reddi-Mart at lunch. While walking, we came up with an idea for a comic that turned into Cireekim: Alien Parasite. The story was poorly conceived but we managed to run it out to three issues. After each issue we would go to the staff room and use the extracurricular Art Club as an excuse to go wild on printing. We sold them to friends and to teachers and anyone that would buy them. And that's how we became publishers.

We called our company BEAM Comics, which stands for the Best of Eric and Michael. It might have been a naive name though, because the best is yet to come. Yes, I'm ending this on a cliché.

(Incidentally, the fourth and final issue of Cireekim is still unfinished. Eric's half of the book is all written, drawn, and inked. My segment is mostly done; several pages aren't completely lettered and inked, but it's mostly done. I swear.)  ¶ 5:32 PM