On Geekery

As I slog through the great adventure of life, some things become crystal clear, some remain constant, while others become or are still as transparent as used motor oil. Sure, that would make sense… as I roll up more miles on the ol’ odometer, I gain more experience. And as a predictable result, I have begun to have a broader understanding of the things around me. And as an interesting side benefit, I have gained a better appreciation for the things I’ve learned along the way that haven’t been pushed out of my brain by some random piece of “B” movie dialog, or a torque spec for an obscure fastener on a truck nobody has seen on the road in 30 years.

But on the other side of that hubcap is all the stuff that I once had some kind of a handle on, but now find myself quite vexed when I snap out of my computer-code-induced coma and think about. Yeah, I know… stuff changes, life changes, people change, time moves on and waits for no one. This is all just the natural progression of life here on the 3rd rock from the Sun. But sometimes for me, these worn out aphorisms are often nothing more than ornate containers filled with Styrofoam packing peanuts when viewing the world around me through my 3d glasses.

What am I blabbering on about now you ask? It’s the whole concept of “Geek”.

As a young lad with my bell bottom jeans and my bowl haircut, I was led to believe that a “geek” was someone that was unqualified to participate in sports, usually showed significant aptitude in all things academic (particularly mathematics), and was rumored to have a pencil for a neck. In general, the geek was a pariah of sorts, only finding favor with other “geeks”. And the geek was harassed, tormented, regularly reintroduced to the boys toilet (head first), and was in general, the primary prey of the elementary school Fabio wannabe crowd. Bottom line, acquiring the title of “geek” was something you would by all means avoid with any and all resources available if you wanted to be a “normal” kid.

This understanding of geekdom followed me on through my childhood, into my teen years, and then something happened. Those guys… what’s their names again, Jobs and Wozniak? Well, at any rate, those “geeks” came up with something called the “personal computer” and right before my eyes, the whole geek landscape began to slowly experience a paradigm shift.

Little by little, the geeks were guys that still looked like the geeks of my youth, but now they had become something of a phenomena. They were the guys that made it possible for you to fight off the invaders from space and save the earth. They were the guys that enabled you to blow every quarter you could harvest out of the couch, or nag out of Dad’s pockets by destroying rocks in outer space, or making a little yellow pie consume enough dots in a maze until you were rewarded with a 5 second cartoon that didn’t make any sense.

Now, the geeks started evolving into the ones with the nicest cars, the coolest houses, the latest and coolest gadgets, and were the toast of the town. They singlehandedly turned a sleepy agrarian community of orchards and farms into something that became known as Silicon Valley.  They made all the money, and became the ones that tell the Fabio wanna-bes of days gone by what to do.  This is a geek?  Not by the definition I grew up with.

Growing up, I was under the impression that I was not a geek, and that was a good thing.  Only now, and too late perhaps, am I beginning to realize that I’m still not really a geek, but that isn’t necessesarily a good thing after all.  Sure, I pose regularly as a geek, and in many parts of the country I could qualify as a lower echelon geek, but here amidst the royalty of geekdom in Sillycon Valley, I’m just a poser with a slightly perceptible slant toward geekery.

So what does all this mean?  I guess it just boils back down to everything changes, including me.  And yet, through all I have seen, done, been to, learned, and grown,  I still have yet to find a way to define my persona or “style” with any of the common labels found in contemporary society.  And more importantly perhaps, it seems to me that to a very large extent I march to the beat of a different drummer.

And now that I think about it, it’s not at all a bad thing, really.

~ by armytrucks on September 9, 2008.