The Hose

Attack of the Dork-wannabes

Any one give this a read? I did and I have some thoughts.

First, some level setting:
I'm a big time, dork. A well cultured, well spoken and occasionally charming dork, but a dork nonetheless. I was fucking with computers when I was four, I have been reading comic books since I was 6 and I can almost word for word repeat dialogue from Star Trek the Next Generation. I was/am a mess. END OF LEVEL SETTING

Why is there such a thing as a dork-wannabe. Well, that's easy. Remember 1999? Prince thought it was going to be a party and to a degree it was, but the not kind he imagined. Instead of crushed purple velvet and hedonistic behavior we had square rimmed glasses, ironic comments and technophilia. That's right dork wannabes is what sprung up in the wake of the dot.com society.

Suddenly geek culture overran everything, to the point that when the party ended its influence remained eternally etched of the zeitgeist of modern society. Star Wars (Eps IV and V at least) were cool. The X-Men and Spider-Man were cool. Seth Cohen,the second lead on The OC, is the epitome of this phenomenon. When we meet him he is the extreme dork with no friends, spending all his time reading comics and playing 25 year old records in his house. By the end of the first season, he's dumping the hottest chick in school?? Weird. Here's a more personal example: When I got to Berkeley, everyone was given a tee-shirt to represent our membership in the class of '04. Each cluster/cohort was given a different color, but they all had some variation of this logo:



Was I the only one to notice, that I and my fellow blue cohortians, look like we fell out of a Fantastic Four Fan Club meeting? I think not...

The point is, why wouldn't someone want to be a dork? We're the coolest shit out! WOOOOO! I'm not attacking Jon-El's cred (Jon-El HEH!...go read your Superman comics to make sense of that reference). I'm just trying to make him earn it a little bit. Why does Jon only get to be a dork when its cool? Shouldn't he have to put up with the indignity of being a dork in the late 80s in order to claim some of the reward? I'm just saying you have to put in the time, to get the cred. Not that I wish such extreme marginalization on anyone, I mean look at what it did to poor Evil. The poor guy is so scarred he lashes out at everything in site.

So I'm sorry Jon-El. I'm sorry that I can't accept you into my little club with open arms. Its just not going to happen, like a short person suddenly blessed with a huge cock or the ugly girl in middle school that is the first to sprout huge mammories, I'm going to make you work for my acceptance as long as humanly possible, or at least till the "dorks are cool movement" is over. In which, case I'll let the whole thing go and/or possibly apologize.