Trigger or trigger

When you were young to the point where Trigger took a capital T (because what other Trigger could there be beyond Roy Rogers' horse?) story had a limited meaning for you.  Boys, young men, and slightly older men doing things on and off horses, or racing to or away from things in fast cars or boats, these were the objects and subjects of story.  These were the elements of stories you wished to follow.

Girls, young women, and overtly sexual women were distractions you knew you had to put up with, thus some degree of nuance was already beginning to worm its way into your all-adventure psyche.  With each passing year, you began to allow more nuance into story, recognizing the effects girls, young women, and overtly sexual women had on your real and imagined behavior.  The progression forward was a welcomed immersion in one of the great drives associated with the human condition and, indeed, the dramatic condition.

Soon, you began to see the importance of events, then the causal relationship between them wherein one event could trigger another, retaining its lower-case t and having nothing to do with Roy Rogers or his horse.  In fact, it has been some considerable years since you have given this much thought to Roy Rogers and his horse, focusing instead on triggering devices in your own multifarious careers as a writer, editor, and teacher as well as a male hopelessly imprinted by now with the notion of the importance of the sweet nuance in your life called women.

Life is not about you, it is about itself, the eddy and swirl of tides and currents, the pressures of generations, the needs for expansion and contraction, exploration, trade, interconnectedness, and how you, as a mere leaf can set about effecting a relationship with a forest.  Drama is appealing because of its nuance, its causality, its determinism.  Drama helps give the momentary illusion that it is about you thanks to the fact that drama makes you aware of how you feel about things and people, then go forth and relate to them.  Drama somehow gets you synchronized with this incredible surge called life, breaking it down for you into more digestible bites.

The result is that much of the time you are devoted to trying to manipulate the flow of units of life into scenes, pages, moments.  You will ultimately be buried by the stream of events, perhaps even welcoming this ultimate burial but you do wish to leave behind items, elements, influences that will nourish yourself and others as you go lurching along, triggering events, experiencing feelings, moving even farther away from triggers with a capital T and closer to the lower-case t of the catalytic agent trigger that moves drama along.