Inside the Mind of the Geek

In this day and age it is suddenly sort of cool to be a geek. It turns out that knowing how to tackle someone or throw a football, unless you make it into the NFL, is not really going to make you the most profitable guy on the block. It turns out that studying and spending your time geeking out on things can lead to companies like Apple and Microsoft and such and that, in turn, can make you billions. I would love to say this is universally true of all geeks, but that isn’t really the case.

You see, I am a geek. Yes, I am willing to admit it. While I am managing to eke out a living as a writer by being a geek, I am not exactly rocketing up the New York Times Bestseller list at this point which is what leads to the untold millions that some authors like Stephen King and J.K. Rowling make.

The mind of the geek is a very strange place. It can also be confusing and frustrating. I often find myself shaking my head at the things that take up space in my brain. My brain is very much like a cluttered attic filled with boxes that contain things no sane person would ever really want to keep.

I can recite almost the entire script of the movie “Jaws” for example. What possible use is this except when I sometimes run into another person who happens to be a fan of that movie and then we can spend hours reciting lines to each other. Why does this amuse us? I have no idea. Is someone going to hold me at gunpoint some day and ask me to recite the speech Quint gives about being on the USS Indianapolis? Unlikely. Will I some day be able to stop a terrorist plot by slamming a compressed air tank into their mouths and shooting it with a gun? Again, unlikely. However, should I ever be needed for such a task I am ready.

We geeks thrive on minutiae and silliness. I am on Facebook these days and I recently got into a debate analyzing the central logic flaw that the movie “Terminator 2” is built around. To the rest of the world, no one notices such things and no one cares. Everyone else is ready to accept that logic in a movie about sentient robots traveling through time is not a movie to expect flawless logic. Yet, for a geek like me, the central logic flaw is there and it nags at me.

You see, if John Connor manages to stop the evil SkyNet from taking over the world, he cannot exist. Why? Because in the first movie John, as an adult, sends a guy named Reese back in time to protect his mother before John is even born, that’s why. During that time Reese and Sarah have a thing one night and she gets pregnant. Therefore, Reese is John’s father. If there is no SkyNet, there is no war with the machines and no Terminators and no reason to send Reese back in time. If he doesn’t go back in time, he can never meet Sarah and they can never conceive John.

See! This is how a geek mind works! Well, at least mine. But I also did some research and, apparently, I am not the only geek who thinks about things like this. I spent the better part of an hour reading a bulletin board where people discussed logic flaws in the movie “Minority Report.” I think if you were to make a movie or write a story that involves time travel, you had better be prepared for the geeks to come out of the woodwork.

We geeks remember everything we read and see, so it seems. I can still recall conversations I had with friends ten or fifteen years ago and movies I saw only once twenty years ago. I can read and re-read comic books and novels and not feel like that is a waste of time. I can watch a movie for the thousandth time and still notice things I hadn’t seen after the 980th time. I have friends ask me why on earth I would want to watch a movie even a second time. I have no answer. I just shrug. We geeks don’t understand why it happens, we just know that it does.

At the same time, all of that somehow leads, often, to creativity. It took creative minds to look at a bunch of circuits and wires and see personal computers on everyone’s desk. It took creative minds to look at those same wires and circuits and envision small devices that could carry digital music files.

Einstein, Edison, Bell, Ford, Marconi, Tesla were all geeks, folks. They were all people who spent more time in their labs noodling around with things instead of going to the movies with hot chicks. As far as I know, none of them were captains of the football team. The world needed them, however and the world still needs the geeks. It turns out we have value and that society would probably stall if it weren’t for the brainiacs that everyone else liked to make fun of for their pocket protectors and braces. The guy who was convinced he was a Dungeon Master may be the billionaire you are sending your resume tomorrow.

So, give the geeks a break. And, ladies, if you really want a future you can be lazy in, you may want to snuggle up next to the brace-faced, pimply, glasses-wearing geeky guy instead of the muscular, but dumb, athlete or the idiot bad buy with the switchblade in his pocket.

But seriously, can someone please tell Sarah Connor that trying to stop SkyNet is being a bad mom! If she does so, her son will wink out of existence, for crying out loud!

I mean really.

Bryan Alaspa is a featured writer for Xomba.com. Read the rest of his work here .