HAIRSHIRT
Helping You Get the Most Out of Your Misery
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HAIRSHIRT Helping You Get the Most Out of Your Misery |
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Saturday, July 24, 2004Ich Bein Ein Fanboy
There's a very fine line between being interested in things that might be considered, for lack of a better term, geeky and actually being a huge, mouth-breathing geek. It's not, though, something you can really determine for yourself. Brad Pitt can put on a pair of thick-framed glasses and brandish a pack of Magic the Gathering cards, yelling, "Look at me! I'm a huge nerd!" The rest of the world, though, knows that, no, in fact he is a supercool pretty boy pothead movie star. Conversely, Bill Gates can buy The Shins, make himself lead guitarist and start fucking Beyonce and the world will still say, "Mr. Gates, you are a very rich and powerful geek. But geek you are."
There's a trick in this. The trick is in being cool enough that you can get away with having shamefully geeky habits. This is how Chris Rock can be a twelfth-level dungeon master and nobody thinks less of him. Charlize Theron can have the complete Kenner line of Star Wars figures mint in the box and she's still super hot. Jake Gyllenhall can dress up in medieval costumes on the weekend and go jousting and still hold the anorexic attentions of Kirsten Dunst. I can't get away with this. I am in no way, shape or form a cool person. I don't know where to find any underground after-hours clubs. I'm never even out "after-hours." I buy clothes at Old Navy. I still really like They Might Be Giants. Not cool. Not even a little. And so I find myself worried about this nosedive I seem to be taking since moving to New York a few years ago. When my wife and I lived in Seattle--well, first off, she wasn't my wife during the seven years we lived together, so that's a little hipper than marriage right there--we had a fairly large group of friends and we rarely had a dearth of things to do on the weekend. Again, I'm not saying that we were snorting cocaine off of the cast of One Tree Hill, but we went out. Since moving here, my wife's been in law school. This doesn't lend itself to partying. So we stay in a lot. Consequently, I spend more time on line. And here's where things start to get slightly scary. I have, for many years, been a reader of comic books. I don't deny this if people ask, but I keep my comics--literally--in the closet. You will not see justice League posters in our living room. Neither of our dogs is named Krypto. I do not dress as Swamp Thing at Halloween. Over the last year and a half, though I've been surfing a lot more Comic Book news sites. ("News" is a term used fairly loosely here, as the vast majority of the world could give a shit that there's a new letterer on Teen Titans.) This weekend, in San Diego, is the huge San Diego International Comic Convention. Think of all the horrifying cliches you can imagine about a comic book convention--the acne, debates over Wonder Woman's bra size, people speaking Klingon--and then multiply it by two hundred thousand and you have San Diego. It's like South by Southwest, Lollapalooza and the Mel Tillis Theater in Branson all rolled into one, but for geeks. This is where many comic book companies announce their huge projects for the year. They announce new books, they announce changes in writers, they discuss upcoming storylines, etc. And this year--pardon me while I grab a straight razor to slit my wrists open in shame--I'm following the news. Twice daily. Why? Good fucking God, why do I care that Lois Lane will be shot this year? Does it make any tiny bit of difference in the world that Captain Marvel is going to return to the Justice Society? It does not. I need to get out of the house. I need to be around people who not only don't care that Aquaman now has a magical hand made of water, they don't even know who the fuck Aquaman is. I need to go drink. 'Cause that, that would make me happier with myself.
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