"Okay, Obi-Wan."

The zinger hit me like a slap in the face; I wasn’t expecting it, so my defenses were down.

I'd just corrected the boss' daughter after she called an Apple-obsessed co-worker "Mr. Gadget."

"Inspector," I said, intending only to maintain the flow of conversation.

(Because his name is NOT “Mr. Gadget.” It’s “Inspector” Gadget.)

She cut loose with the Obi-Wan crack, and the room erupted into laughter, and I turned bright red. My mind filled instantly to overflowing, with a lifetime of similar cracks and redness, all because I love the movies of a bearded flannel man who has an unhealthy relationship with computer-generated images.

I adore Star Wars. I play video games. I read comic books. I am a geek.

*****

What does that mean, exactly? It means I bite the heads off chickens, and I like it. It's a form of performance, a way I can express myself. It is...my art.

You know what a “geek” is because you’re one too. Maybe you’d never look yourself in a deep, dark truthful mirror and admit it. But being a “geek” has never been more, um, cool? Superhero movies are massive business. There’s a whole damn graphic novel section at Barnes & Noble. Comic-Con attracts hundreds of thousands of fans.

When I was thirteen, I went to Chicago Comic-Con alone. It was a couple thousand people in a hotel ballroom digging though dirty bins of decaying pulp. It smelled like dying dreams and body odor, and we LIKED it.

It’s a different time. Being a geek means something completely different than it did in the late eighties and nineties, my formative geek years. As a geek, I’d like to think that we’re beyond judgment in this bold new age, but I’m not sure we are.

Secondary only to my fixation with the objects of my geekdom is my fixation on where my geekdom and my identity intersect. Back in that work meeting years ago, Daddy's Little Girl shot a fiery arrow straight into that juncture with her pithy one-liner about Senor Kenobi. It's a tender spot, which is why I still guard my geekdom carefully around strangers and some friends and the occasional loved one, keeping it safe from a cruel world that can only abuse it without mercy.

I overreact. I feel self-conscious even writing this. I'm proud to be a geek, wear it geekily on the geeky sleeve of my geeky shirt, yet I am defensive and territorial and fierce when my geekdom is threatened. Well, not so much threatened as tweaked.

*****

My wife and I once fought over a T-shirt I had owned for more than ten years. Said T-shirt, which I wore in a high school production of Godspell, was both tye-dyed and emblazoned with an image of a defiant Donald Duck gazing out at the viewer, hands on hips, as if to say, “Fuck me?! No, fuck YOU.”

This shirt—it was decaying, it was frayed, it was nigh unwearable. Yet I wore it as often as possible, and even with the tiny holes and the flaking duck graphic, I LIKED it!

I ENJOYED wearing it. It made me feel good—about myself? About Donald Duck? About…well, actually, about being the kind of person who would wear a shirt like that with pride. In other words, it made me feel geeky.

I ended up throwing the shirt away, and with the assistance of time, I now realize what a reasonable decision that was—it was one ratty-ass T-shirt. Yet at the time, my wife’s insistence that I should toss out this stupid shirt came across as a direct assault on my sensibilities, my hobbies, and my identity.

So I take this shit way too seriously…and yet, I self-deprecate at every available opportunity. The best defense is a good offense, I suppose.

*****

Who I am, and how I carry myself in the day-to-day of marriage and job and parenthood and interaction with the “real” world—my geek life is with me every second.

It’s in the action figures I buy my kids, and the action figures I buy myself and won’t allow my kids to touch. Perhaps most of all, it’s in the words that I write. Because if being a geek has defined me as a person, it has dominated my creative life in ways that are hard to express.

This is an attempt to express it—a journey through my life anchored by my geeky obsessions and the ways in which they’ve made me who I am. Like David Sedaris, but with lots more Ewoks.

Maybe you will recognize pieces of yourself here too, or maybe you won’t. At the end of the day, maybe you’ll just get a kick out of laughing AT me instead of WITH me. I can live with that.