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PIGS, it should be no surprise to anyone that I am a Geek. I have the pedigree: Eyesight ruined at an early age from reading all night in bed, a pudgy era of role-playing games enthusiasm, plenty of organized sports humiliation as a child. The only thing that has saved me from standing in line for a casting call for Beauty and the Geek was a late-inning growth-spurt in High School and my heroic intake of spirits, resulting in a thinner, yellower person who can pass for cool as long as he keeps his mouth shut. Although I have to admit, publishing a zine doesn't help my cool factor much. My poor suffering wife knows the pain of my Geekness. The Duchess will tell you all about the pain of watching me hunched over a computer tapping at the keyboard, or having entire conversation with my friends couched in Simpsons quotes. She's feeling particularly burned by my Geekness these days, because I just bought myself a new laptop. Nothing fancy, just a low-end ThinkPad z60t manufactured by our brutal communist friends in China. You may sneer at me for supporting an evil empire by purchasing their manufactured goods, but never forget that China holds enough U.S. currency to collapse our economy any time they wish simply by releasing it into the market, not to mention enough spare citizenry to invade and conquer through the simple expedient of fifth-column immigration. I say, keep the Chinese happy. But I digress. The Geekness has nothing to do with lust for a new laptop, which many of my neighbors no doubt struggle with as well. No, the Geekness comes in to play because the moment the laptop arrived, complete with pre-installed Windows XP, I immediately formatted the hard drive and installed Linux. Hear that? If you listen carefully, you can hear The Duchess roll her eyes. This comes under the heading of "More Shit I Gotta Do" because installing Linux is never easy, and valuable days were lost while I sat, sweating and swearing, hunched over the new machine. Installing Linux isn't as bad as it used to be, of course. A couple of years ago installing Linux on your computer was like opening it up, ripping out several important things, wiring the rest back up so that it still sort-of worked, then smashing the removed parts with a hammer and spending the next year trying to glue everything together and replace it inside the machine. By the end of that year, you might have a fully working system, but it wouldn't be pretty, and you yourself would be a shivering, thinned version of your former self. These days, things aren't so hard and within a few days I pretty much had everything in hand aside from a few minor annoyances. Of course, in the mean time, no work was getting done. The amazing thing about being a writer is the amount of work you do even though you aren't getting paid much for it. At my 9-5 job I will patently refuse to do anything more than what I'm already doing—which ain't much, Poncho—unless they give me a fat raise. My boss is always trying to get me to expand my duties into things like bathroom cleaning, custodial maintenance, car-washing and snack-run areas, usually with vague promises of gifts of liquor as the dangling carrot, but I always refuse on the grounds that they don't pay me for such services. On my own time, however, I frequently spend months working on writing projects that pay me, when it's all said and done, about twenty-three cents a day, if I'm lucky. I haven't done much research on the subject, but I don't think I can live on $0.23 a day, unless they've upped the nutritional content of Bazooka Joe gum. The problem is, once I get one of this Geekness episodes, I lose track of time entirely: ME:God's love! What does it mean, "kernel panic"? Let's see... [TIME PASSES] ME:What? Christmas again already? But I've almost got this figured out. Zounds! My beard has grown through the top of my desk! I'm trapped! Why would an otherwise only marginally-insane man put himself through something like this? It has it's roots, of course, in my insufferable determination to seem smarter than everybody else. I mean, I am not a smart man. I am a simple man amused by shiny objects and Things That Taste Good (Not Bad). But I like to pretend I am smart, so i do things like rip a perfectly good installation of Windows XP out of my laptop and install Linux, just so I can say things like "Well, I can't get the wireless card up and running, but I did manage to install Scribus!!" Pity me. Meanwhile, my revision of The Electric Church is not getting done and if I don't have it done on time Warner Books is going to a) not pay me my advance and b) send thugs to my house to beat me up, hold me by the ankles, and shake me until all the spare change falls from my pockets. No, really. I have proof. Plus, my steady and unwanted barrage of short story submissions to the unwilling magazine markets of the world has been slowed to a trickle as I sit, dumbfounded by my inability to get DVDs to play on the laptop. Pretty soon The Duchess is going to start implementing her long-threatened program of “vigorous beatings” in order to get me back on track. The one thing that never seems to slow is my generation of "Amusing Haikus", which is becoming something of a cliche out there in the world, since it is very easy to write a Haiku that amuses: If there was any market for amusing Haikus, I'd be a rich, rich man. As it is, I am rich in many things—booze, love, back issues of my zine—but money is, sadly, not one of them. Until next time, my friends, when you speak of me, speak of me well.
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Jan 12, 2006