I Have Seen the Enemy...and It is Nerds

A couple Sundays ago, I found myself in the car - alone - running errands around town -alone- and realized that for one of the rare moments in my life the past few years, I was actually alone. So, I did what any nearing middle age father would do when face with similar circumstances, I went to the comic book store. This is, actually, a bit unusual for me, because I found that tiny voice in my head that sounds a lot like Jiminy Cricket telling me, "You never go to the comic book store on Sundays. There's a reason for this, you know." You know the voice I'm talking about. It's the same one that told Tiger, "You know, a voice mail here would be a BAD idea, Tiger." And like most men, I completely ignored that little voice. Then I walked into my local neighborhood comic book store, the esteemed Prairie Dog Comics, and realized that there IS a reason I don't go to the comic book store on Sundays. . .Sunday is card gaming day.

I will be the first to admit that I am a nerd, but one thing I have vehemently avoided is playing card games. Aside from a briefs dalliance with Magic, which I swear was a one-time thing and the result of some bad advice from a friend, I don't get into Yu-Gi-Oh, or Magic, or anything else along those lines. As a matter of fact, when I was teaching I was the sponsor of the Comic Book Club and rule #1 was "NO CARD GAMES." Generally, I leave card gaming people to their own little world. But that particular Sunday, in that Particular comic shop, our worlds collided, and I was not happy.

Why, you ask? Allow me to explain. The first thing about card gaming days in the comic store is that the store smells funny on those days. Yes, I know this sounds cruel, but people who work there can back me up on this. The other thing that struck me as odd, is that I noticed one of the teens playing Yu-Gi-Oh had a tripod with a video camera set up so he could record his Yu-Gi-Oh match......which I later learned would be posted on his facebook page. There was also another teenaged boy (that goes without saying -- they were all teenaged boys) who appeared to be some kind of game moderator or something walking amongst the (2) tables of gaming talking trash to the other players. About Yu-Gi-Oh. Seriously.

Now, here is the part where I started to get annoyed. First off, these guys make all nerds look bad. Through the carefully planned success of four "Revenge of the Nerds" movies, Bill Gates, Harvey Pekar, and the Spider-Man move franchise (OK, just 1 and 2) we've been able to bring about some semblance of respect for nerds. Then these guys come along. Nerds of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains! Only through solidarity will nerd-dom rise above the shackles of preps and jocks. Way to go card dorks, you've set our movement back 20 years.

The other thing that bothered me about this incident, was the sudden memory of what I was doing at their age. When I was a teenager, on Sunday afternoons, I was doing something apparently unheard of to the Yu-Gi-Oh playing denizens of Prairie Dog Comics...I had a JOB! If I wasn't working, I was probably involved in a backyard football game somewhere, or at least watching football somewhere. What I wasn't doing, was sitting inside the comic store, smelling up the joint (once again, this is confirmed by reliable sources), and spending my time declaring the dominance of my nearly unbeatable green deck of magic cards. I try not to get political when I write, but don't you think the economy would benefit from a few teens working part-time jobs. I'm not even going to bother bringing up childhood obesity, though I could, because most of the card playing kids are relatively thin but doughy. Seriously, I don't want to sounds all preachy and stuff, but I can think of about a million other things that teenaged boys could be doing on a Sunday afternoon instead of sitting in the comic store playing Yu-Gi-Oh.

In any case, I left the store as quickly as possible. I called my buddy Hugo, who used to work at the aforementioned comic store, who reminded my that "you never, EVER, go to the store on Sundays" and "at least you don't work there and have to smell the place after they leave." I was pretty relieved to get out of there, to be honest. But then I remembered, someone has to be the Robert Carridine in this scenario and turn the nerds into the heroes they were meant to be. I will be a role model and show these boys the light. I'm just not going to do it on a Sunday. And I'm pretty sure light burns their skin.