All right, so I was sitting there on the couch Sunday, minding my own beeswax when suddenly it dawns on me that someone is talking. Somewhere in the back of my mind an alarm bell went off, but a little person in a football uniform quickly hit the snooze button and the sense of impeding dread subsided. I continued to watch the football game on TV oblivious to the storm clouds gathering to my right. A while later, perhaps three plays or maybe after a slow-mo replay, I again became aware of some noises emanating from my right that might have been construed as human speech.

Female speech.

This time the little guy wasn’t quite as quick and the alarm set off a chain reaction of events within the confines of my football-hazed mind that allowed me to do what all men learn to do as a means of self-preservation at a very young age. I waited until there was a break in the flow of speech-noise to my right and made a non-committal grunt.

A little history about the noise I made, known to scholars throughout the ages as the ‘Male Grunt’. It is something that every man knows how to do almost instinctively, a kind of nasal humming noise made for the sole purpose of appeasing a talkative mate. Long ago, in simpler times when fire was new and exciting, and the wheel had not been invented and hence there was no garage for the male caveman to retreat to in times of great stress, the grunt came into being. Female Neanderthals would try to strike up conversation with the males during times of inactivity. Our ancient ancestors were not stupid though, and quickly learned that hunting a saber-tooth tiger while wearing a suit of raw meat was preferable to ignoring their females should they wish to talk.

The men knew this because some actually tried it.

They also knew that it didn’t matter whether the male wished to talk or not. Male cavemen were taught at a very young age that their role in these discussions was to simply listen and sympathize with the female. Whether the conversation was inane, juvenile or completely unimportant was not the point. Whether he thought she was right or wrong, or simply insane was irrelevant. Being able to follow the conversation, or comprehend the ‘logic’ behind it was not necessary. He was merely required to ‘support’ her in her time of need regardless of his own thoughts on the subject. He was not to ‘find a solution’ or ‘fix’ anything. He was merely to listen.

And so, the noncommittal male grunt was born.

Fire paled in survival importance next to the male grunt. Before the perfection of this grunt, there were many misunderstandings between male and female members of the tribes. Many battles were fought because one party ‘never listened’ or the other ‘never shut up’. These horrible battles and unfortunate deaths led to the creation of a new and vital social class within the tribes known as the marriage counselor. Most scholars agree that these marriage counselors probably invented the noncommittal grunt to help them survive the terminally boring sessions with their clients. It is highly probable then, that the males in these sessions saw the benefit of this new sound and adopted it for their own uses.

Ancient man was no dummy.

Anywaste, back to my story. HoBiscuit my girlfriend, momentarily satisfied by my masterful male grunt, continued to make her conversational noises and I continued to watch the game. All was calm and good in GeekLand. Then, just as my team was running an interception back for a touchdown, HoBiscuit my girlfriend jumps in front of me, blocked my view of the TV, and asked me a dangerous question.

Pop quiz hotshot.

When a woman asks, “Is watching that game more important than listening to me?” you should;

1. Say, “Would ya’ leave me alone I’m watching the game!”
2. Say, “Of course not, my love. I was listening to you but became distracted by your figure. Have you lost weight?”
3. Turn up the volume on the TV and eat another pork rind. Or,
4. Swallow a bullet and call it a day.

What do you do, hotshot?

What. Do. You. Do?

Sometimes, I surprise even myself with how clueless I am. Allow me to elaborate.

A few months ago while I was in the shower, I had an epiphany of monumental proportions. Now, I don’t know why most of my life-changing realizations occur while I’m blissfully washing the accumulated daily dingleberries from my posterior with my ‘sensitive skin’ llama-shaped loofa, but they always do. It’s almost as if the dark green mold growing in the folds of my shower curtain is hatching ideas, concepts and thought processes overnight only to spring them upon me while I’m blinded by shampoo.

Lather, rinse, epiphany, repeat.

On this particular day I did what every good father warns his sons to never do and dropped the soap in the shower. Quickly looking around to make sure that there were no other men present within the confines of my private bathroom, I reached down to pick up the soap from my scum and mildew covered bathtub floor. It was then that my life as I knew it came to an end. Right there, as I bent over in the shower with my soap-covered tushie exposed for the entire world to see, I came face to face with the ugly truth and found religion in an instant.

I had a belly.

Not just any belly, mind you, but a beer belly. In and of itself, there is nothing wrong with a beer belly and I have a quite a few friends who are exceedingly proud of theirs. They’ve spent years in training, going from dive bar to dive bar, in an effort to acquire the perfect, oblong, almost-round belly shape. Many have even foregone fun-filled weekends with friends in order to ‘train’ the entire weekend by watching bad TV and eating pork rinds. Some women I know even enjoy their man’s manly belly, rubbing the “little pooch” and referring to it as their “baby”. But it’s different for me, y’see I don’t drink. That’s right, I’ve never had a drink in my life. Ever. And suddenly, almost overnight, I had developed a beer belly.

Small for a belly since I had caught it in the embryonic stage, but a belly nonetheless.

I was at a loss for words. I stood aghast, incredulous and flabbergasted as the water ran over my back, across my sides and fell from my stomach as if my belly button was a spout. I’ve always been the skinny one, the guy who women look at and curse for having better curves than they do. I was the beanpole, the stickman, a scarecrow but suddenly I looked like a straw that had swallowed a pea. I poked my new discovery and it jiggled back as if it were laughing at me, mocking my confusion and horror and proving beyond a doubt that it was really there. And then, as if to push me over the edge of sanity, it did the unforgivable.

My stomach made the ‘I’m hungry’ noise.

That was the last straw. However this malignant growth had come to be attached to my body I was going to make sure that it died an agonizing, horrible death. I quickly went into the city and joined HoBiscuit my girlfriends gym. I chose her gym because it’s a large chain with many gyms in and around NY. And although there was no gym near my house, I figured I could always stay at her place when I needed to work out. It was also a great excuse to see her without her feeling like I was making a booty call.

Like I would ever do that.

Believing that I needed help in my war against the insidious evil of my sloth-like behavior, I decided to pay one of their ‘Fitness Trainers’ to torture me with daily workout routines that involved much sweat and pain on my part and lots of helpful suggestions on his part. I would meet with my Fitness Trainer, who I liked to call Lord Beelzebub, every other day at the gym closest to my girlfriend’s place in the city. It was a good working relationship. I would sweat and moan and bitch and cry and generally feel like a wimpy piece of wet noodle while he took my money and did all he could to make sure I left the gym as a wimpy wet noodle of a man.

Sadist is too weak a word for him.

So far, things have been going well. My belly is getting smaller and I’ve stopped using Lord Beelzebub’s services because he seemed far too happy when lifting weights forced my body to make loud, embarrassing sounds. I’m talking about whimpering and sobbing for mercy.

Sicko’s.

The only problem I have with the gym is that I have to travel over an hour to get there every time I want to work out. It’s become a hassle and a chore but I’ve been going as much as possible because hey, at least I get some boo-tay from HoBiscuit my girlfriend afterwards.

At least, I used to until I wrote that last line.

Anywaste, to get back onto the topic of me being a clueless moron, yesterday HoBiscuit my girlfriend sent me an email wherein she asked me a very important question. She was wondering if I knew that there was a gym not ten minutes walk from my house and that it even had indoor basketball courts?

Say WHAT?

Why, no my sweet, lovable HoBiscuit girlfriend, I did not. I did not know this piece of important information for I am a clueless moron whose inability to notice the world around him has marked him as a social outcast and community pariah for all time. Thank you for once again pointing out something so blatantly obvious that I should simply hang my head in shame and wear a sign around my neck proclaiming to the world that I am mentally unfit to be trusted to blink without assistance.

Needless to say, I went over to the gym yesterday and it’s big, clean and not crowded so I think I’ve found a new workout home. I’m going tonight for a kickboxing class and if that goes ok I’ll have to find some way to thank HoBiscuit my girlfriend in an appropriate and gentlemanly fashion.

Can anyone say Boo-TAY?

I really need a new computer. I bought this computer so long ago that I regularly receive phone calls from paleontologists who want to excavate the data buried deep within its boring beige exterior. How can I be Mighty when I can read War and Peace before my computer finishes booting? Every time I double-click, the hard drive spends the next couple of minutes protesting so loudly that the garbage men knocked on my door and asked me to keep the noise down. Just yesterday, while waiting for PhotoShop to load, I was able to make a life-sized llama out of duct tape, a few coat hangers and some old socks.

I sold it on ebay for $135.

Don’t get me wrong, I really love this computer and it’s served me well over the last few *coughfivecough* years, but I think it’s high-time I got me a new one. Especially since I make my living with it. There comes a time when even old reliable becomes just plain old and not worth upgrading. Why, I bet that if I hadn’t found that book of ‘Ancient Computer Resurrection Rites and Other Satanic Rituals of Evil’ it would have died long ago. So even though I enjoy painting ‘abort, retry, fail’ on my nekkid body while chanting the entire text to The Road Ahead in C++ and dancing to the windows startup song, I think it’s time I broke open the old wallet and bought a new computer. I’m really tired of the strange looks I get from my neighbors the next day. Especially when they shield the eyes of their children and whisper, “Don’t look at the crazy-man, Tommy. He’ll eat your fingers.”

In my defense, it was only one finger and the doctor says the operation was successful so it should heal fine. If the little brat had only let me see his limited edition, gold-foil Pikachu card… bastard.

Anywaste, I’m a busy little Geek today because I’m having a Monday Night Football gathering tonight and I have to get ready. I’m making Cream of Pumpkin Curry Soup, Filet De Tofu with Apricot Dijon Sauce and baklava for dessert. I’ve even made fondue for a snack during the game because nothing says ‘Guys Football Night’ like fondue.

Yeah. Right.

Actually, I’ll probably be making seven-digit pizza or, if I must cook, tacos. Hot, spicy, death-to-your-colon, my-anus-is-bleeding-lava tacos. I think my tacos are really good and a recent survey of prison inmates on death row agrees. According to the study, the inmates preferred eating my tacos to a lethal injection almost 2 to 1!

Wow. If that’s not a ringing endorsement, then I don’t know what is.

HoBiscuit my girlfriend and I might be on TV. Oh yeah, you heard me llama-breath, The Mighty Geek might be coming to a small screen near you.

Yesterday HoBiscuit my girlfriend got wind of a special taping of Inside the Actors Studio starring Will Ferrell of SNL fame. For those of you who don’t know about Will, he does a hilarious impersonation of the host of Inside, whose name is James Lipton. With his makeup on, he even looks like him. So we decided to go over to the New School and see if we could be part of the live audience. Expecting a long line of students and faculty waiting to get inside because every episode I’ve ever seen has a packed audience in attendance, I arrived at the theater two hours early in order to guarantee seats for myself and HoBiscuit my girlfriend.

What can I say, I always try to be early.

When I arrived at the school I politely asked the security guards checking student id’s where I should wait in line for seats. The guards asked me where my id was and I patiently explained that I was not a student and merely wanted to see the performance and would they please tell me where to stand in line. They stood there like cud-chewing cows and blinked at me.

Moments pass.

Trying not to sigh in exasperation, I looked deep into their glassy, uninterested-in-life eyes and tried to make contact with whatever shred of intelligence might have once lived within the confines of their hollow skulls. I reiterated to them that I wasn’t a student and was only there for the show. The guards then explained to me, in small monosyllabic words, that they were clueless, minimum wage morons who were barely able to work up the mental strength to remember how to swallow their own spit and they again asked me for my id.

Lord, give me strength.

After ratcheting down my intelligence to the level of your standard pile of steaming broccoli, I managed to fight through their intellectual deficiencies and finally found myself standing alone outside the main entrance to the theater. Two hours later I could still be found standing there with only HoBiscuit my girlfriend and a grandmother-type woman as company. Apparently, no one at the school or the show bothered to promote this meeting of the minds and therefore no one knew it was taking place except your friendly neighborhood Geek and his HoBiscuit girlfriend.

I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that the old lady was Will Ferrell’s mother.

She spent the time ignoring us completely and simply stood there with a bag of knitting supplies as her only companion and knitted. By the time we got inside she had knitted a pullover, a pair of mittens, two sweaters, a few hats and some square things that looked like mutant red and yellow doilies.

Really, this woman should be on the Team USA Olympic Knitting Brigade.

Anyway, we really enjoyed ourselves because Will was super funny and we laughed like crazy. Even James was funny, which surprised us since he seems so pompous and arrogant on TV. In person though, he was a pretty cool guy who wasn’t at all afraid to poke fun at himself. It took a while for everything to get set up once we were inside and a few students showed up while we waited, so all in all about 40 people were in attendance. We got lucky and sat in the center of the second row, so we have a good chance of being caught on camera.

The show should air October 14th on Bravo as some sort of special intro to the Gene Hackman show, which is also the 100th episode of Inside. If they have any audience shots with us in them I’ll be sure to point it out here. Especially if I’m picking my nose, cause that’s real entertainment for the masses. Nothing like a Geek picking a winner on national television to brighten your day. Only thing more entertaining than that would be watching a seniors bowling competition on widescreen HDTV complete with Dolby Digital sound.

You wouldn’t want to miss it when Old Man Johnson throws his back out shooting for the seven ten split now, would ya’?

Yeah, so I didn’t get to go fishing while I was away. Apparently most ‘normal’ people don’t like to go out into the middle of the ocean on a small boat when it’s raining so hard you can’t see anything five feet in front of your face. Something to do with a ‘Perfect Storm’ or some such nonsense.

Wimps.

HoBiscuit my girlfriend and I woke up at 4:45am to drive for an hour to get to the docks where we were told by a rugged, squinty-eyed, rough-bearded sailor-man that there would be no fishing that day. HoBiscuit my girlfriend thought he was ‘hunky’. He (hunky) explained that even though there were eight of us willing to brave the storm in search of striper, he just couldn’t go out unless he had 14 paying customers so the fishing tour was cancelled. I expressed my understanding by shouting profanities at the heavens while jumping up and down in a large puddle of water. I may have also thrown down and stomped on my hat.

HoBiscuit my girlfriend expressed her embarrassment by shielding her eyes, mumbling apologies to the sailor-man and walking away from me as quickly as she could.

Another highlight of this weekend was being awoken at 4:30 in the morning with the fire alarms blaring because our Inn had been struck by lightening. HoBiscuit my girlfriend and I grabbed our stuff and booked (ran really, really fast for you non-urbanites out there) to the car. Ready to drive off should the building burst into flames, we sat in the car in the rain and watched the drama unfold. It seemed to me that every fire truck and fireman in the area came out and surrounded the place as if they were hordes of starving ants that had stumbled upon a giant Twinkie.

I swear I thought I saw a few of those guys salivating.

Luckily, we were given the all clear after only 20 minutes and everyone was allowed back into the building. It turns out that the lightening had struck the telephone switchboard and fried all the lines in the building and everything attached to them. It was a good thing that I hadn’t set up and connected my laptop yet. I don’t know what I would have done if lightening had fried Alita, but I bet it would have involved a lot of crying and cursing on my part.

I might even have thrown down and stomped on my hat.

My family is insane.

No. You don’t understand. Each and every member of my family should be strapped down to a bed in a white padded room under constant, fully armed observation at a mental institution. Then they should be heavily medicated to the point where they are unable to do anything but drool, which would necessitate the use of anti-tongue-swallowing mouth guards and Depends adult diapers. You may think your family is crazy, but my family will take on all comers in a Cage of Rage Worldwide Wrestling Federation Family Smackdown. We’ll even let you have the breakaway chairs.

It’s a matter of pride for us, be-yeetch.

This year my trip to the Fright Fantastic that I call a ‘reunion’ was for the celebration of my Grandpa’s one-millionth birthday. Now, my Grandma and Grandpa are lovable, sweet and charming people but they are quite insane. They’ve been married for about 1,000 years and are constantly bickering over everything and anything ever read, seen, heard, spoken of, listened to, done together, done apart, invented or discovered since someone said, “Let there be Light”. Grandma and Grandpa are always easy to find at any gathering because they’re usually shouting each other’s name loud enough to register on the Richter scale. This is usually followed by some amazingly quick, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it argument like the following gem;

“Where’s my glasses?”

“How should I know!”

“You should know! They were right here!”

“Idiot! They’re on your head!”

“Oh. Who put my glasses on my head?”

“Your Grandfather, he’s driving me crazy!”

“Your Grandmother, she’s driven me crazy!”

On another note, I’m headed to Massachusetts for a wedding this weekend so the Candlelight Vigil pictures will have to wait until I get back. I know you’re heartbroken but try to hold back the tears for a few days, ok? The people getting married are friends of HoBiscuit my girlfriend and I don’t know them very well, but that doesn’t really matter since this is all just one big excuse for me to go fishing.

That’s right, The Mighty Geek likes to fish.

Well, actually I don’t just like fishing, I love it, which is really strange since I hate fish. Fish smell, they’re slimey, they’re ugly and they always look so reproachful when they’re sitting on your plate. It’s like they can’t believe anyone would ever do something so barbaric as rip off their scales, hold them over an open flame, cover them with white sauce and eat them. Their big, film-covered eyes searching your soul for a shred of pity as you sit there salivating. Gaping, open mouths frozen in a silent scream of agony while you carefully remove all of their teeny, tiny bones so you don’t choke.

Now doesn’t that sound just yummy?

I just like to catch fish. There’s something about sitting in a boat in the middle of the ocean or a lake or stream catching fish that I just really, truly enjoy. It’s not only the sport of catching them that I like either because throwing them back afterwards can be even more fun than catching them. It’s not for any humane reasons that I like throwing them back. Quite the opposite since I actually feel like I’m messing with their tiny, fishy minds. Can you imagine what it must be like for the fish to be captured, photographed and released? It must be similar to what an abductee feels like after being dropped back on earth. Try to picture the conversation (if fish actually talk to each other) the fish would have when he gets back to his school and tries to tell all his friends what happened.

“Dave! You’ll never believe what just happened to me! I was abducted by an alien!”

“Sure, Frank. Have you been drinking the fresh water again?”

“No! Dave I’m telling you I was abducted by an Unidentified Floating Object! One minute I’m trying to eat this delicious looking fluorescent yellow worm and the next I’m being pulled by some unseen force into the sky! There were these huge alien creatures that performed strange and painful experiments on me. They stuck sharp metal objects into me, they flashed bright lights at me, they measured and weighed me and then they put me back here! And the whole time I was with them I couldn’t even breathe!”

“Right, Frank. And where’s this UFO now?”

“Well, uh, I can’t remember. We fish don’t have a good memory, y’know.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Oooo! Look over there! A delicious looking fluorescent yellow worm!”

“I call dibs!”

Hey, everyone needs a hobby.

Well, that didn’t take nearly as long as I thought it would.

Yes, I’m back and I’ve found my funny. In case you’re wondering, my funny was hiding under the second cushion of my couch with $2.57 in loose change and the squishy, jello-like remains of my spine. In a related story, my spine was almost immediately removed by HoBiscuit my girlfriend when she decided we would spend the weekend at her place in the city even though I really, really wanted to stay in Brooklyn. If anyone sees my spine please tell it I miss it dearly and am finding it very hard to walk without it. Also, if anyone has a working number for the Wizard, please tell him I’m very unhappy with my recent purchases of courage, self-respect and dignity and I want my money back.

HoBiscuit my girlfriend isn’t really as bad as I let on here, y’know. I poke fun because she’s so cool and I really like it when she gives me the “I’m not really like that, am I?” look. See? She’s doing it right now. How cute.

I managed to tell my first joke since the WTC incident on Thursday and I told my first funny joke about an hour ago. Since there was no one around me at the time, I told the joke to myself and laughed out loud because I think I’m so funny like that. I also found out that it’s very easy to get a seat on a crowded train if you walk in laughing like a maniac and congratulating yourself for being such a witty and clever individual. It also helps if you twitch.

In non-funny news, I walked around the city Friday, taking pictures at the makeshift memorial at Union Square and some other stuff I found. I also went to the candlelight vigil at Union Square that evening, so I’ll be posting all these pictures in the very near future. Probably tomorrow or Wednesday because I’m still a lazy bastard and I’ve got over 250 pictures to sort through.

I want to take this opportunity to say that my camera rocks! If anyone is looking for a good, relatively cheap digital camera, I highly recommend the Sony P50. Of course, I also once recommended using old vinyl records as siding for a friend’s house, so what do I know?

I should have just stayed in bed.

Friday, I went out to celebrate a friends’ birthday. Usually this would be a lot of fun because my friends and I are a wild and crazy bunch who like to have a good time. However, some of us don’t seem to understand that we are no longer as young as we once were and that certain things that used to be so insanely dumb that they were fun have instead become just plain stupid. Things like chugging beer, eating live goldfish, spur-of-the-moment road trips and going to bars whose claim to fame is having scantily clad women serve you overpriced bar food and watered down beer should have been left behind when we all graduated college. I will now suggest a new law that my friends and I should adopt in order to save us from future mistakes of such immensely moronic magnitude as what transpired this weekend.

When trying to find a restaurant at which to celebrate anything, anyone who suggests Hooters will be immediately flogged to within an inch of their life and then dipped into a lemon juice and salt solution to soak in for the rest of the night.

I won’t even get into the gory details now because I’m so ashamed of our complete lack of good taste that writing about my evening here would only force me remove my eyelids and watch Susan Serandon movies until I honestly believed she had talent.

Trust me, I would die first.

Saturday I got to find out just how old and out of shape I was when I went to the park with my younger brother and his friends to play Ultimate. If you don’t know what Ultimate is let me explain by humming the National Anthem while eating a Shepard’s Pie and skinning a live llama in my pajamas.

How the llama got in my pajamas, I’ll never know. [baduhmp-buhmp]

Seriously, Ultimate (also known as Frisbee football) can be best described as a form of cardio-vascular torture devised by some ancient god of sadistic pleasure who really hated human beings. In Ultimate, there is no time to stop and catch your breath, there are no time outs and the action doesn’t stop until someone scores a touchdown. Originally, we were going to play until one team scored 11 touchdowns but after we realized how amazingly, impossibly, almost freakishly out of shape we all were, we concluded that 5 touchdowns would be more than enough to fulfill our manly quota of testosterone-filled summer sports.

We arrived at this conclusion after the first ambulance left but before the “My god, your eyes are bleeding!” fiasco.

If anyone really wants to know, my team lost in a most spectacularly pathetic fashion. It took about an hour for the game to end and the final score was 5-2 but I don’t think any of us cared who won as long as we could stop running around pretending we were still in college. Hell, I never ran around that much when I was in college.

So, did anyone else try to relive their youth this weekend and get hit upside the head by the Louisville Slugger of Truth and Crushed Dreams?