geek

There are all kinds of geeks. If you're a geek when it comes to something cool, you're an enthusiast or a buff. A sports enthusiast. A fitness buff. An outdoors enthusiast. Because these passions... are cool sounding. In reality they both just make you smelly and sweaty (I know, I'm a buff and an enthusiast and I spend an inordinate amount of time being sweaty and smelly....luckily I am also a soap enthusiast). However, if you're into computers or fantasy/sci-fi, or comic book super heros....ohmigosh...you're such a geek.

I know this for a fact because when I graduated high school, I started dating a boy who'd graduated a year before me. He was a major sports enthusiast. He'd been a captain of our varsity football team and our state champion wrestling squad. He knew sports in and out, kept in shape. Rowr. 5 years later, I got totally played. I married a comic book geek with a plan for the zombie apocalypse. I married the same boy. I didn't ditch my high school jock hottie for a bespectacled nerd wearing mismatched plaids. He had an alter ego. It was very much like marrying Superman, to find out he was really Clark Kent, which is a whole different experience than marrying Clark Kent and finding out he can lift cars and fly.

I don't come from these kinds of people. I come from sports/car enthusiasts with a special interest in working enough to pay the damn bills. I had no idea that grown ass men (and yes I mean men, but we'll get to that later) got comics. Every week. Wha-wha-what???

Have you ever been in a neighborhood comic shop? Its like the bar on the old sitcom Cheers...but with less women, less having sex and less matching clothes. Everyone seems to know one another, the entire place seems to be engaged in the same conversation. And oh yeah. There are almost never any women. Back in the day, there were tables and tables of back stock comic in long white boxes. These are called long boxes. There is usually an organized mess: stacks of flyers, preview magazines, pop cans belonging to whatever geek is standing at the counter talking, etc. There are card board stand ups of comic book favorites like Wolverine, Batman, and Superman. I think its a law that there has to be a blow up Spiderman hanging from the ceiling somewhere. And then there is the gaming stuff.

My partner doesn't game, so I don't know a lot about that. But I'm pretty sure all the fairies and wizards and dragons you see there are for the gamers. Its interesting, right? You just imagine spiderman hitting it with the big breasted head piece wearing forest queen witch lady. Superman calls the wizards homophobic slurs and then the wizards blast him. If you've never been in a comic book store, this doesn't really happen. This is just my overactive imagination playing with the juxtaposition of the classic American icons of the hero world and the grimy underworld of fantasy that decorates these shops.

But this isn't where the cultural experience ends. The folks you see in a comic store are a gathering that you won't find anywhere else. You have pimply teenage boys who don't fit in with the jocks (see why my boy had to keep his geekdom a secret???). Then you have those boys twenty and thirty years later. Often they are wearing superhero shirts, or hawaiian shirts, jorts, tall socks, or sandals.Some are thin, some are heavy. Most are pale. I have only seen maybe a half dozen women all together at this comic store in all the years (a good ten to fifteen) that I have been going along for the ride. And these women (and I don't know how to say this without sounding like an asshole) were not obviously women right away.

It has taken me years to get anyone to acknowledge my presence in the comic shop when I go in with TB. But recently I've made friends with the guy who manages. And he gave me a book suggestion. I am reading The Dresden Files. Holy shit, people. This is good stuff. The main character is totally easy to relate to, the dialog is hilarious, and the stories have more twists and turns than your colon. Amazing stuff. And its a series, so you get to really enjoy the development of the characters. Not to mention that I really enjoy plowing my way through a well written series of stories. The Dresden Files are about a wizard who is also a detective. Yeah. Pretty much an urban version of Dungeons and Dragons in book form. I have to go to the Sci Fi/Fantasy section of the library or bookstore to get the books. Usually, the bookstore staff asks me if I 'need any help.' Like when I go to Home Depot...I don't look like I'm there on purpose, I suppose.

But I am a total geek about these books. I have to get 2 at a time, so that I always have one in reserve. I look forward to going with TB to the comic store so I can talk about the books with the manager who recommended them to me. Typically he and I talk, and then I wait while he checks out and converses with the other patrons while they very pointedly ignore my presence. Or, they wait until we are done talking while pointedly ignoring my presence.

Until the other day.

I was talking about my more recent reading with my Dresden Files friend when a Hawaiian shirt clad fan boy looked up tentatively. "I know just what series you're talking about, I've been trying to get him [pointing at his friend who was also ignoring me] to read it for years." And WHAMMO. I was in a conversation with the comic store guys. Like several of them. Not one of them that I know already.

I am a geek. Sweet.