When I was a kid I had a couple flannel shirts in my closet for no discernible reason. I didn't know they were "flannel" at the time, so I called 'em "lumberjack shirts." Since they were really big on me, I wouldn't wear them all the time, just on mornings when I got up early and it was cold, and even then I would usually wear a housecoat instead. I had a really nice one, it was red.

Flash forward to around grade 10 or so. My mother had started to hang up my t-shirts and put them in the closet instead of folding them to put in the drawer, so every time I went in there to get a shirt, my hand would brush past one of my old flannel shirts that didn't fit me when I was a kid. I always thought about maybe wearing one to school, but I was worried it might make me look dorky. (Looking back, I can't think of any way to look dorkier than I did back then, since I wasn't quite as sociable and I looked heavier than I do now.) Finally, one day I said to myself "The heck with it, I'll try it on just to see how it looks." That's when I discovered that if I left it open, I could wear it over a t-shirt and look very presentable. I tried wearing it one day, and I liked it so much that I wore it again, and then again.

Before long, I was wearing it all the time. It was cool to have this thing I could call my own, since nobody else was wearing flannel at the time. It became my trademark apparel.

A few months after that, I finally got the Internet for my computer. When I started writing on IF, I would essentially write myself in as my own AC, flannel and all. Other things that I wore started to creep in as well: my carpenter pants, my baggy white shorts for when it was too warm for carpenter pants, my red Dreimar jacket for IFs in Winters, the trenchcoat I tried on in a second-hand store one afternoon. One day, my father came back from a teaching assignment in Thunder Bay with a gift for me: a pendant with a spirit wolf drawn on it and a little paw-print carved in the back, which became the Wolf Pendant. But nothing was really a common factor between each story - except for the flannel.

Eventually I found out that flannel was apparently something that Canadians and Pearl Jam fans traditionally wore, but I decided it was all coincidence. I'd made the conscious decision to wear the flannel - or "lumberjack shirt" - by myself, and nothing influenced me beyond the inherent coolness that was there. Oddly enough, my parents were concerned that there was another reason why I was wearing it. They sat me down in the dining room and asked me very seriously if I was doing drugs.

"We were just wondering, because when we were kids all the druggies wore flannel."

It took me about a week to convince them that all the druggies at school wore hiphugger pants and tank tops.

Gradually the flannel thing got into the collective mindset of the website, and now it's one of those super-regs-only-in-jokes. But it always started with me, playing video games on cold Saturday mornings, sitting under the heat vent with a lumberjack shirt on my back. So from a little came a lot, I suppose.