Don’t Forget Your Change

Oh, man, it’s a little past time for a new column and I’m out of interviews. I’ve been very, very busy with school stuff – so busy my life is about to change. It already has, a lot. Which’ll mean I can devote a lot more time to writing and editing-related pursuits. But still… that change is very new, so yesterday I just relaxed. For a change. It was nice.

Of course, I already got out of teaching at the under-college level. No more high school, no more middle school… which, as I was telling Drew Edwards (warning – Drew Edwards may not be work safe) the other day, is just as well. He and I discussed school shootings, this, and Stand-Alone Complexes…

But that’s just the thing. Hotlinks are starting to show up in my emails, in place of sentences or whole paragraphs. This morning my mom emailed me and asked if I saw something on TV this morning that she missed about Cormac Maccarthy’s The Road – My first impulse was to look on YouTube.

Wasn’t there. Not geeky enough, I guess. You may say that YouTube isn’t necessarily for geeks. Well isn’t it on some level? I saw a guy's astounding 9-11 anniversary speech where he tore into Bush – but isn’t politics just a different geek genre these days? Come on, there’s everyday citizens, and then there’s the rest of America who DON’T know about Jon Stuart (wait… is John Stewart the political guy or the African American Green Lantern? Those spellings are hard) and Stephen Colbert -- and then there’s people like Barbara, who are glued to CNN and MSNBC and so forth. Last night she and I were looking at MSNBC political editorials… That’s political geekery.

Spent the day out today. Got home to look at this clip of Ms. Edwards portraying Marilyn Monroe at the Women’s Museum as part of the Texas State Fair… sites and links are just becoming so much a part of communication and culture. Ask a kid how they think their future will be different than the past, and they’ll probably, you know, try to be imaginative and guess how the world will change. But two generations ago, and every generation before that, you could ask the average person what he or she thought his or her future might be like and most of them would almost certainly say, “I dunno, I suppose I’ll grow up to do what me dad/mum does now. Don’t imagine anything’ll be all that different. Why would it?” This blows my mind. Wars are fought over change. Changes are what everyone hates and fears. Change is a certifiable X-Men vocabulary word. Because the X-Men universe is about the deep-seated fear that your kids will grow up to be different than you.

And so is the real America.

You know what blows my mind? The Bronze Age. I realized today that that’s secretly what my dissertation is about – the merging of where the need to address social problems meets art, except my study deals with novels ninety-nine percent, and comic books only one percent (see past columns on Colson Whitehead).

Sure, comics are TOPICAL now, but do comics often anymore address the need to explore and expose social problems? Hmm…

Follow me here. I have online PRESENCE. I got me a myspace, a livejournal, a 43things, a 1up that I’ve probably forgotten the password for, a comics creators board that I’ve forgotten how to get on, another comics creators site that I still remember how to get into, a Deviant Art site, I’m on a bunch of other message boards where artists hang out like the A-Kon forum... That’s just my newest registration… all of this is beside the fact of having a website, a GSG and Wicker Man forum, the Half Dead website and so on and so forth. The previous stuff, well, you know, someone opens something up or you hear that people are going there, you go too, you register, and you say hey here I am… if it’s got a forum, you register, because you can put your comic and whathaveyou in your sig and profile, and then maybe readers will click on it and come and see… But look how I’m adding to the information load. But if there was only one site like this, where everyone could find everything to do with everyone else, we’d still complain about not having the choice to go elsewhere, which I guess is why we still have Apple… you know, besides those wacky anti-trust laws designed to side-step monopolies…

Here are a couple of webcomics I look at which update pretty often. One is Overcompensating . The other is http://www.ctrlaltdel-online.com/comic.php. What is up with that? I have a pile of magazines to take to school for examination purposes. Esquire, Game Informer, Giant, Tips and Tricks, Spin, Psychology Today… things that Barb somehow often gets for free through online deals (some magazines don’t mind you trying them for free for a while because that means they can say they have a wider audience reading them). Esquire is for both of us. Giant is for both of us but is less satisfying. Spin is certainly for her and not me. Psychology Today is better than you’d think. But Game Informer and Tips and Tricks… Geekery again invades.

What does all this have to do with anything else? Somehow geekery, geek concerns, I submit, are at the core of the new and changing American experience. Come on, it’s getting so Americans can’t survive without an iPod or some other type of music device ready to calm them down or entertain them at all times. Try to tell a kid in a school that hasn’t already cracked down on the things that they have to put them away, that they must stop listening while they do their work and it’s “No, no, please, I can’t concentrate without it.” And I’m not talking about kids who have been prescribed medication, either. Well actually I am, but not just them. Not at all.

There’s a lot of change coming. You don’t have to turn into a mutant with powers. Everything around you will change. Your edge over the rest of humanity will lie in how well you adapt to, and with, change.

And I’m trying to suggest that geekery is the way to go.

Geekery means focusing on something so intensely you explore, understand, and grasp EVERY ASPECT of it. If it’s comic books, pop music, detective novels, anime, politics, manga, the skateboard scene, gaming, movies, sci-fi, horror, sports, computers, Harry Potter, if you are a GEEK for any of that stuff, then man, you OWN it. It is your NINJA WAY. You GET it. You GROK it. It is YOURS. It changes, something happens, someone announces something at a con, overnight, on a message board, you are THERE. You knew about it LAST WEEK in many cases.

Come on. Isn’t there an INTENSITY to the geek life, even OTHER people’s geekery, that you can’t help but kinda respect?

That’s a big thing.

It's not necessarily a life skill. But it’s a big thing.

But I think it’s GONNA be a life skill.

This is the information age and it is SCARY. I looked into someone else’s grocery cart and had a conversation and learned a whole lot about how babies and chemicals really shouldn’t intersect because most diapers contain chlorine. I found out yesterday that there’s things going on in Turkey, you know, that country north of Iraq, that are really disturbing. If the guy who was talking about it on TV can be believed.

And that’s what I mean. This is a time of rapid information bombardment.

You’re gonna have to stake out your corner that you’re watching and OWN it, my friends.

Ask some geek how that’s done. They can tell you.

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