2004-06-01 - 12:12 a.m.
And now, an entry far less interesting to Kelly than to anyone else:This weekend I got to enjoy a rare pleasure -- I sat and watched a great old crap movie. The great old movie was the fabulous 1971 Vincent Price horror classic The Abominable Dr. Phibes. If you can conceive of how it might be entertaining to watch two hours of Vincent Price portraying an embittered, brooding recluse plotting the deaths of nine surgeons he blames for his wife's untimely death (I can conceive of this, but many can't), then I highly recommend you give this old gem a try. I watched it ages ago, along with its good-but-less-spectacular sequel Dr. Phibes Rises Again, and just loved both. This was, I recall, yet another in the long list of things I had in common with my old friend Ron and practically no one else born of mother on this planet.
Well, I'm sure Vincent Price would have grooved. But he's been dead for ten years. Some companion in moviegoing. Very "Beautiful Losers."
In addition to Phibes, Ron and I could draw up quite a list of common film interests that others would likely label boring, old, too campy for real appreciation, etc. Silent Running, Mysterious Island, Destroy All Monsters, and even Shaft made our lists once upon a time, along with every geeky science-fiction camp we could think of, except for Star Trek, which neither of us fancied.
It occurred to us, surveying the list, that it probably said nothing good for our sanity that we had evidenced such a fondness for movies about embittered, brooding loners. A little too revealing, really. We had so much fondness for the loners, misfits and geeks of the world. And we are both, probably to this day, unusually fascinated with angry genius.
I remember us also saying we could both clearly see the sometime-appeal of the sort of person who sits with his limited set of longstanding, equally socially-bewildered friends and plays Magic The Gathering or another horribly dorky fantasy-themed game rather than futz with the widespread preoccupations of sex, popularity, and the cachet of "cool." We shared an appreciation for people who lived way out past the outskirts of Cool, where the Hipster buses don't run. People who hadn't any interest in keeping up a game like that, not just because they realized how futile their struggle to meet the middle really was, but also because they'd learned to have a lot more fun right where they were, among fellow misfits and geeks.
I'm sure you know just what I'm talking about, though the people you're familiar with like this aren't necessarily Magic the Gathering players. Substitute Dungeons & Dragons, Warhammer 40,000, or whichever Dork Pastime you've spent more time watching ungainly, hygiene-immune pimply boys fill afternoons on university campuses playing.
One phenomenon about these mad little subcultures, though, that I never understood was the One Girl That Got Passed Around thing. There was always one girl who was part of their circle, a girl usually no more desirable or successful by conventional social standards than her male counterparts, who seemed to be girlfriend to a new member of the nerd clan each week. You'd walk by them doing their D&D thing or what have you, and you'd notice that the girl was cuddling up to one of them -- maybe the dwarf, maybe the orc, who the hell knows? And then you'd walk by a week later, and she'd be cuddling up to a different one. This never seemed to damage the group in any way, and if anyone had misgivings about her shifting attentions they never seemed to let it show. Perhaps they were too grateful just knowing they'd at last "gotten some." Perhaps they were just too busy looking forward to when she'd made her way around the circle and it was their turn again. Who knows?
And Speaking of Brooding Loners, Let's Talk About God
One other fine Ron memory before signoff. This: "I strongly suspect that the whole God thing isn't like the old 'find-the-hidden-barnyard-animals-in-this-picture' puzzle... it's a Rorschach test." I've always liked that.
