Dreams are odd things. I mentioned that my dream was not about doing a comic strip and that’s true and not true at the same time.

Comics are a lot of work. My art wasn’t up to par at the beginning of the strip. Never studied comic how tos, didn’t know very many people who could give me tips so I muddled through as best I could. Starting this strip was almost an accident. It wasn’t my dream. Not my goal. And yet.

And yet I thought about it and realized something; my dream was to tell stories. The fact I’m doing it with art combined with words is still living my dream. Telling stories.
Through Dodge the Bullet I’ve been able to live that dream in a manner different to what I hoped but I still live that dream. Sincerely, I want to thank each and every one of you who have read this strip and helped me to achieve that dream. Without an audience this strip would probably have been abandoned years ago, so thank you for reading.

But what I always dreamed of was writing novels.

Not the Great American Novel, mind you. Partly because I’m Canadian and I’d be at a disadvantage there. And not the Great Canadian Novel either since I’d rather stab myself in the chest and eyes with a sharpened carrot (and I’m talking a really sharp carrot, like overly pointy) than read a Great Canadian Novel, much less write one.

Too serious. Too important. Too much and too little nonsense.

Instead I wrote a novel called Dragon Assassins. A buddy comedy about incompetent eighteen-year-old supernatural hitmen who must battle an ancient evil while hauling around the corpse of a girl they accidentally killed.

It’s meant to be a rocket fueled romp of banter, insults, stupidity, action and a slight dash of heroism. It turned out well and I’m very happy with it.

If you’d like to know more I’ll be talking about it in this space in further detail in the coming days.

Or if you can’t wait till then you can go to thedragonassassins.com for more information.

Or, best option, you can go to Amazon.com. and read a sample.

Thank you for reading (both this strip and the sample, or just this strip, up to you)

Steve

(sorry for not blogging lately, I realized I didn’t really want to talk about the third fight but I also didn’t want to leave the story of those fights hanging without the ending lesson so I was stuck with other things to say but knowing I had to say this first but not wanting to say it at all. Now, I figure I might as well just say it and get it over with so I can move onto more fun stuff)

This is the only time in my life that I lost control. Complete and total lack of control. Was I pushed? Yeah. Beyond my breaking point? Yeah. But I learned a lesson that stuck with me since that day and it’s not the lesson you’d think I’d have learned.

I had a study period so I was doing what I always did during a study period and not studying. Instead I was in the library with my glasses on the table and my head down next to the book I was reading. A teacher brought in her class to do some kind of assignment. No skin off my nose, barely even noticed them, until one idiot thought it would be hilarious to shoot rubber bands at the guy with his head down on the desk. Because rubber bands to the eyes equals instant comedy. But his aim was awful and he had a hard time even hitting my table. No big deal. Annoying but I kept reading. But I was aware.

Aware because I knew deep down that a lesson I’d learned from nearly everybody in authority was wrong. If you ignored the bullies they wouldn’t go away, they would escalate until you had no choice but to react.

So, I was aware of the kid missing me with the stupid rubber bands. I knew he was going to escalate. I didn’t know how but I knew to be alert. Therefore it wasn’t a surprise to me when he came over and stole my glasses.

That was a mistake.

I cannot see more than two feet without corrective lenses. My glasses were not an aid to me but something that literally kept me from walking out into traffic. Taking my glasses was like taking a crutch from a man with a broken leg. He could still function but not well.

But I was aware.

I stood up as he passed by me with the glasses in his hand, grabbed his shoulder and slammed him into the bookshelf. My forearm against his throat. I was six foot two and two hundred and twenty pounds. He was about five ten and less than one fifty. Silly of him to try to provoke me but he thought he had protection because he was on the football team (which was stupid of him since my brother had been the QB for three years and was a volunteer coach for that year and while I didn’t have protection exactly I also wasn’t worried about them).

He desperately gave me back my glasses and I let him down to the ground.
That should have been the end of it but over my shoulder I saw his friend and I realized the extent of his idiot plan. Pig in the middle. Using my glasses. Funny. A mild joke of making a show of wearing someone’s glasses? Harmless, you can leave it alone even though it’s annoying. But a plan to toss my glasses across a library for giggles? They were two hundred bucks. My parents weren’t going to buy me another pair. The likelihood of them getting damaged in the idiot game? High.

This made me angry.

But I was willing to live and let them live.

The first kid said one insult and I leaned in and I’m pretty sure he saw the murder in my eyes without me having to even warn him. Though how easy I caught him and how easy I manhandled him was probably warning enough. He ran off back to his table without a parting word.

His friend on the other hand? He decided that what the situation needed was one more insult.

He was wrong.

No control. The memory of that fight is in flashes of scenes. Like still pictures. I pushed him, he threw a punch, I ducked it, punched him in the side, he tried to grab hold of me, I picked him up with my off hand and threw him almost over a table. His heels caught the edge and the table went over as he fell to the ground. The punch combined with the fall meant he had no breath. I was on top of him. Loading up. All that anger, unchained rage, going into one punch.
A bad punch. Dangerous punch. Not exaggerating when I say a punch that could have changed both of our lives for the worse.

His teacher screamed. I snapped out of it. Got up shaking with anger. Knowing I was going to be expelled. Too much. Too violent. Only a couple of months left and I was going to be expelled. We got separated and went down to the office to wait for the vice principal.

The kid (I should say this, he was in the grade below me but I was in a grade above the one I should have been in and we should have been in the same grade. It wasn’t a senior beating up a junior or whatever, it was two guys that were the same age) apologized to me for his idiot friend before we got in the office. We were okay, not good exactly, because of the likely expulsion, but okay. I know you can get stuck in your friend’s stupidity.

The vice principal called us into his office together and imparted the lesson that has stayed with me since then. He turned to the kid and talked about the size discrepancy between me and him, and told the kid he was going to be in bars in the city in less than a year. His mouth, with his attitude, combined with his friends, meant he’d probably end up dead or crippled. The vice principal used me as an object lesson to get that through to the kid. Six inches taller, seventy pounds heavier, and (this is the part that hit me square between the eyes) there are going to be guys in the city that are going to be as much bigger than me as I was bigger than the kid.

The kid thanked him for the lesson, said he’d keep that in mind, made a rueful joke about not wanting to be thrown over any more tables in his life and we both left. No punishment.

The vice principal said that he hoped the kid had learned his lesson and that was the most important thing. As for me? He thanked me for my restraint because if someone had taken his glasses as a joke he didn’t know if he could have stopped himself like I had.

The fact I got away with it wasn’t a lesson (though it finally showed me that those in authority weren’t necessarily out to screw me any chance they got), no, the lesson I took away from it?

I was that kid in relation to the wider world.

Yeah, I was big in a small town. Tough in a small town. But there were dudes way bigger than me out there. Way tougher than me. With a chip on their shoulder just as prominent as mine. What benefit was there in proving my toughness? Why risk getting in a bar fight? What did it prove and what would I gain?

Nothing.

That’s a lesson we all learn eventually and I bless that vice principal with teaching me that lesson without having to lose blood to learn it.

Never did get in a bar fight. Only once did I come close but I was able to shrug it off and keep dancing.

I always liked dancing better than fighting anyway.

Thanks for reading,

Steve

Three Fights
Someone said something to me a few months ago that I had to think about for a while because I didn’t know why I disagreed. Essentially, he said that you don’t know who you are until you’ve been in a fight, and you don’t learn as much from a win as you do from a loss.

The first one I argued with because most people, men and women, haven’t been in a fight ever. They seem to know who and what they are as people. Yes, it can tell you some things about yourself but you can learn those things without chucking knuckles. You want to know if you’ll stand your ground or run away? Get pushed around at work and have to put your livelihood on the line. You’ll soon know who you are. The fact that he believed most people didn’t know who they were because they hadn’t been in a fist fight? Nonsense. But it was thought provoking nonsense, as if there’s a truth at the center of it.

The second assertion; that you learn more from losing than from winning gave me pause because it seems more correct. But it didn’t hold up to my personal experiences. Yes, anecdotal does not equate to statistical, I understand that, even still I learned much more from my wins than I did from my losses.

The major part of that was that all my losses added up to the same lesson (don’t get into a fight with a kid who’s a year and a half older than you, who has all the physical advantages you do of being from a long line of people paid to pick up and move heavy things, and who has the same last name). True, fighting an older brother like that probably made me a lot tougher, a better fighter, which means I learned some things but it didn’t teach me anything beyond that.

I fought a lot in school, a year didn’t go by where I didn’t get into two or three major fights. Being one of the smallest, one of the smartest, and the youngest in my grade had something to do with it, but it was mainly because I was on a short leash. Kids knew if they pushed me long enough I’d snap and we’d fight and I’d win, but I’d end up with the majority of the punishment (the guy who slammed my head into a locker in grade four who I then beat up? He got a talking to along the lines of don’t play with the bad kid, whereas I got a reaming, a call to my parents, detention for a week, and threat of suspension).

Eventually that meant I couldn’t fight at all in school. In grade nine I got a look at my file for discipline and there were one and a half binders of write ups. What did I learn from all that? Don’t trust teachers. They knew I was being bullied, picked on, ostracized, rocks thrown at my head, and their solution? Don’t fight back. Take it. Somebody must be the target and its better you than me.

Not good lessons. Not something I thought worth absorbing.

I’m Irish, and I have the gift of blarney, a way of exaggerating stories for humorous and/or dramatic purposes but I’m going to talk about these three fights and what I learned from them as clearly and honestly as I can.

The first one was in grade Nine. The worst year of my life. My friends had moved to another school so I was all alone. I was going through puberty, with the added wrinkle of being the only kid in my classes going through it since they’d got it out of the way the year before. Got picked on a ton, and with the nearly two binders of discipline slips hanging over me I knew I couldn’t get in a fight. As did everyone else so they ramped up the abuse to monumental levels. Before that year everyone was a bit circumspect because I had been in so many fights, and even though they lied to their friends about it, they knew they’d gotten their butts kicked. That year was nuts.

There was a kid who was scared of me. To the extent he would run away when I looked at him sideways. We’d fought years before and he’d lost badly so he’d left me alone since then. But that year he got his courage up because he was sure I couldn’t respond. A torrent of abuse came from him and his best friend (who was also afraid and who I’d also fought) near daily until finally I had enough. It was coming up on spring, the ground was a little muddy, a grey sky, I left school and wandered through the gravel lot beside the gym. He and his friend decided that since we were still on school grounds they could have a little more fun and something inside me just said no. Not anger. Just done with it. Taken too much and couldn’t take any more.

I walked over to him and looked him in the eyes and told him that’s enough. He sneered and tried to say some more insults but I shook my head and pushed him. He was not a small kid, I’d gotten my size but he was close to the same size. Should have been even enough. That push sent him five feet away from me. By this time a sizable crowd had gathered. To his credit he came back at me, throwing all his weight and strength and momentum into his own push. He couldn’t move me and I absorbed his push and then pushed him back again five feet. Once more he threw himself at me, once more I pushed him off as if he was a first grader. That time he fell to the ground and I stood over him and waited for him to get up. That wasn’t chivalry, sure I could’ve jumped on him and beat him up and letting him get up meant he could fight back but even if he tried he really couldn’t fight back. It would make me look good and I’d get the chance to rough him up as much as I wanted to. Punching him while he was down? Not as impressive. What looked like chivalry was actually disguised jerkiness on my part.

So, I waited. He lay on the ground, not hurt, no punches had been thrown, he just lay on the ground. As if he was inviting me to punch him. And I looked in his eyes and I saw the defeat in them. He would rather have gotten beat up than fight any more. He knew he was done, he knew I knew. I could have left it there but I didn’t. I had to take something from him, so I balled up my fists and looked down at him as he flinched and said loud enough for all in the gathered crowd to hear: “You’re not worth it.” Then I turned and walked away.

Big deal, right? Three pushes. How is that a fight? How could I possibly learn anything from that?

I learned about cruelty. How I’d overstepped. Went too far. He was a big kid, but soft. I was a suddenly big kid but hard. Too hard. Those words to him. Too much. How do I know? Because those were the last words either of us uttered to the other in the three years we went to school together after that. He would avoid me in the hall. He’d transfer out of classes if he could if I happened to be in it. Never met my eyes, always kept them on the floor around me. When he had to do an oral presentation his voice would fade away when he’d swing his head to my side of the classroom. It was bad. Every time he’d stumble around me I wanted to go over and put my arm around him and apologize but I couldn’t. It would have been rubbing salt into what was obviously an open wound.

Did his silence make my life slightly better? I guess, but I was used to the abuse. But him? He learned about himself in that stupid little fight and had hated what he’d seen. A mountain of insults wasn’t the equal of that.

Twenty-eight years later and I still regret that fight and what I did.

The other two fights I may have learned less. Or more. Depends on how you look at it.

But those will be told later.