Letting My Geek Flag Sag Under The Weight Of So Many Microwave Pizzas.

I have something to tell you...

I was at a party the other night and it came up that, during my youth, I had been a fat geek. At which point , my friend Sarah said, “I just can’t picture that.” Which is great. That is good. If I said, “I was a fat geek when I was a kid.” And everyone just kind of nodded like that much was obvious and then moved on to a new topic, then there is a great deal of hard work that would have been for nothing. But the fact is, I was a fat geek.

Now, I suppose that it could be something you just left behind and pretended that it had no bearing on your life. And if I were a part of an older generation, that might be my preferred route. But older generations were repressed to the point of functional alcoholism and mine is confessional to the point of public embarrassment. (for us, functional alcoholism is a lifestyle choice, not a necessity.) Also, having overcome that childhood as a tubby outcast, it is now part of my story. The survival, conquering, and reform of my body and my public image is part of what makes me tougher than most. But this brings us to the next problem.

Nowadays, everyone claims they were a nerd. Everyone claims they were a geek and an outcast, unloved and abused by their peers who didn’t understand that they were just different. I think, on some level, in spite of the statistical impossibility, people actually believe this about themselves. I think youth is a time when you feel unsure and insecure and even the prom queen feels that deep down inside. It becomes easy to look back and remember only the sense of internal conflict that comes along with puberty and simply forget that you expressed it by dumping the contents of your cat’s litter box on the pimply girl with bad teeth during a public assembly. These days, the former prom queen rewrites her personal history so that she was the pimply girl and, most of the time, I would bet that the prom queen is entirely unaware that she is even doing it.

There is a reason it has come to this revisionist history on such a grand scale. The tech age, the rise of Sci Fi on TV, the ascendance of video games and comic books, porn. We live in a time when Geek Culture is what defines mass culture. These days the nerds are the Masters of the Universe and the only ones still making money. All of the jocks who went to business school are villains too lacking in self-awareness not to complain about losing their bonus on the cable news shows. Meanwhile, Steve Jobs debuts a tablet computer and gets more press than the President (who also gave a speech that day, apparently) and spends a week being compared to Moses. All of this started with John Hughes, to give both credit and blame where it is due, and now twenty five years later, our high schools full of Blaines have become a world of would be Duckies. All of that is fine, we all want to be on the winning side and one of the best things about nerds is that they tend to be forgiving welcoming people who are more willing to look the other way at whatever horrible secrets a person’s past might hold. Even terminal popularity.

There is one thing though, and this brings us back to the party, because the question people always immediately ask and that Sarah asked is “Are there pictures?” And this is when you get to lay the smack down on all the wannabes. I have shown this picture to only two or three people in my adult life. (not counting a different situation which is tough to explain, weird shit goes on in acting school.) One of these people was a woman I was with for eight years, another is the woman I married, and I think a very old friend has seen it. The first woman said she could only recognize that it was me because of the moles on my neck. But now, I am coming out. I am going to let my geek flag fly, with apologies to the posers because, like a true geek, I hate it when people feel bad. But still, kids, the truth is the truth. And now the truth will be seen…

in all its horror.I was around 13 or 14.

Yes! That’s right! In your face! I was fat and unpopular and it sucked to be me… wait. that isn’t cool.

Oh well, too late now. Anyway, there you go, Sarah, photographic evidence. “Enjoy” doesn’t  seem like the right word.