The love of a good woman
Like most guys, I knew the seductive dangers of solitude all too well — how hard and important it is to resist the siren call of the unalphabetized collection of rare Steve Miller Band bootlegs. At some point in adolescence we all realize that building radio transmitters and memorizing Monty Python routines will not, despite the infuriating unfairness of it all, be rewarded with the love of a good woman. And so we learn to moderate our den-ish tendencies, to poke our heads out of our caves and into the soft and scary light of restaurants. And then, when good love goes bad, we know that we have to be on guard against the urge to devote our lives to Civil War-era stamps or First Edition D.C. Comics.
All my life, it says, I have been told by my superego that dressing like a Marvel superhero will not get me laid. And, here, here and now in this temporary saturnalia, surrounded by other males who are - at best - my equals in the ugly league division table: here is my perfect woman. But the world knows that this mad girl’s flickering eyes craves just one thing. A man dressed as Galactus, Eater of Worlds. And not only have I left my Galactus costume at home. I never made it. Worse, I threw those biro drawings of me in the Galactus helmet away the moment I’d drawn them, ashamed to show them even to (say) Dave. And now I know: I’m not a virgin because I’m a geek. I’m a virgin because I have pursued geekdom with a less than pure, directed gaze. I have faltered, and now I’m just another guy at Baycon. And some other guy in front of me will be Galahad with the Holy Grail because he spent two weeks measuring out huge papier-mache clamps to fit on the side of his head. And I did nothing but stare at my Lara Croft pull-out poster, in the belief that she was not real and that I could not ever meet her.
One of ‘em must be wrong.
(I previously posted about the latter here.)
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