Two Questions

A really great science fiction show asks two simple questions: 1, “Who are you?” and 2, “What do you want?” Here are my answers.

Who are you? If you, my kind reader, glanced at the author of this essay, it would have sad that I am Tim (the Middle Age Geek) Harlan. The middle age part is because, at this time of writing, I am currently close to fifty solar cycles. Or as I like to call it, I am a level 25 humanoid race with 24 years of experience. The class is still to be determined. I was a geek back when being a geek was not as mainstream as it is today. We kept to ourselves and only socialized with others of our kind.

Being somewhat anti-social and introverted gave my plenty of time to read. This fed the geeky fire within me. You would not believe the amount of books dealing with sci-fi and supernatural I found at the parochial prison school that I attended, and I’m not talking about the Bible. That book alone has all kinds of geek stuff in it — God being nice, The Devil, God being not so nice, murder, a flood, destruction of cities, plus a woman getting turned into salt. That’s just the first book.

I loved to read whenever I could. While the rest of my classmates played during recess, I had my nose in a book. I remember going to the local library and with tilted neck looking at the spines of paperback books to see if there was something I had not checked out. There usually was always something new.

Books were a good thing, but like any child growing up in the seventies and eighties my butt was in front of the television. Before Fox and the CW, I had three networks to choose from and two local stations. There was a Public Broadcasting Station but when you out grow Sesame Street, you don’t really care what is showing, except for The Electric Company for two reasons. One, it showed a Spiderman short, and two, it introduced the world to Morgan Freeman.

After my ritual of Saturday morning cartoons, I would wait until noon when the local channel 30 would run different movies. The first one would be a Kaiju monster movie from Japan (before anyone knew what the term Kaiju meant). After that, they would show some kind of horror movie. They usually showed one of the Hammer studio films. Even to this day, I still have trouble remembering that Christopher Lee was Saruman and Peter Cushing was Grand Moff Tarkin, not the other way around.

Primetime also had its fair share of geeky shows. There was the original Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rogers (Bedeep, bedeep, bedeep!), plus many more. One of my favorites was The Six Million Dollar Man. Now I know what you are thinking, but that was a lot of money back then — close to 24 million in today’s value. How cool was it that the opening credit showed Steve Austin’s ship crash and his body getting rebuilt because they “had the technology.” This led to a spin-off show, The Bionic Woman. Of course, she only had a skydiving accident and got cybernetic implants. So I guess the technology got cheaper or there are some missions that a bionic woman can go on that a bionic man can’t. The one episode of The Six Million Dollar Man that I remember is the one where he fought Bigfoot, appropriately played by Mr. Rousimoff, better known to the world as Andre the Giant. A rhyming Sasquatch — I would have loved to have seen that.

Television may have been my weekly ritual; I cannot forget the movies that came out during my younger years. While most of the films would have been seen on television or video tape, I have the honor and pleasure to say that I have seen every Star Wars and Star Trek film in the theater. I did watch one Star Trek film at a drive in. That still counts, doesn’t it?

Books, television show, and movies were just a portion of others things that I was exposed to. It is what made me the geek that I am now. By telling you this, I hope to give you a better understanding to the question I posed before. Who are you?

As for the second question, “What do you want?” I want to share my passion with others, to introduce them to some of the things that I enjoy that they may not know about. I also want to learn from them about their geeky passions and the things that I may not know about. Please continue to read future essays, share them with others, and never stop being a geek.