Plastic Earl Man

This shot may have been taken the day I returned a volleyball serve by bouncing it into the basketball hoop on the other side of the court. I earned no points. 

Universiade Tickets, 1983

Back in 1983, Edmonton hosted the Universiade, an international competition of university athletes. I was only 14 at the time we scored these tickets and not much interested in sports, but I was happy to see some of the spectacle. I remember nothing of the volleyball (the fact that the stub isn't missing seems to indicate that perhaps I didn't use the ticket), but I do recall the cycling vividly, perhaps because there was a mid-race crash that involved most of the riders.

What amuses me most is the price of the tickets. Even in 1983, paying six or eight dollars to see world-class athletes seems a bargain.

Anonymous Love Note, circa 1989

Back in the late 80s and early 90s, when I had all my hair and I was still fit, my friends used to tease me about my many girlfriends. Of course I had no girlfriends at all, but that didn't stop the teasing, including this anonymous note, slipped under my door at 139 Kelsey Hall sometime early in my third year of university. I'm pretty sure my friend Susan Shyluk (nee Neumann) was responsible for this light mocking. I was rather befuddled the morning I woke up and found the note. (I kept it all these years because I'm a sentimentalist.)

A little earlier - sometime in second year - I discovered that someone had slipped a girl's bracelet into the pocket of my jacket. Completely lacking in self-confidence and desperate for female companionship, my heart leaped - a girl liked me! Why else would she do such a thing? What a wonderfully cryptic and yet romantic gesture.

My hopes were dashed about an hour later, when my friend Kim (who, it can now be confessed, I was somewhat enamored with) knocked on my door and asked for her bracelet back. She'd stuffed it into my pocket because I'd left my jacket on the floor in the proximity of the volleyball court where she was playing, and my pockets provided a convenient place to stash her stuff.

I meekly handed over the bracelet. If I couldn't have True Love, the trust of a good friend was equally precious.

Ghost Rally 1 & 2

I really love scanning my old negatives and discovering photos I never even knew existed. Some of these photos are wonderful, but many are frustrating: out of focus, underexposed. One such shot features an unknown volleyball player, probably one of my friends, but the image is too dark to make out his face, even with extensive photomanipulation. So instead I started playing around and seeing if I could transform the image into something interesting. The results are above; the original image, below.