Dorks rule... or at least have their day

I saw an article in The Wall Street Journal about digital SLR cameras, and how they're hot now because people who used to have film SLR's now finally feel like the digital versions are affordable and improved enough to buy.

It made me think that there's a lot of Dorkic Convergence going on with my age cohort and its near neighbors. (Iwas born in 1953, graduated high school in 1970, graduated college in 1974, married in 1976, started a family in 1978, and hit my stride in my career about last year... just in time to start thinking about retirement.)

In grammar school high school and college, I always thought of myself as someone who didn't belong to the main group of kids. I got along with them, OK, but often (especially in high school) I only felt marginally like I belonged. I started to think of myself as someone who had interests that I wouldn't necessarily make public for fear of ridicule. In grammar school I thought stamps and coins were fun. In high school, I became a big science fiction fan (thanks largely to reading my older brother's books after he was done with them). I played the guitar, but had to hide the fact that before "Gloria" and "Louie, Louie," I knew how to play "The Shadow of Your Smile" with that mellow, upper pickup sound (thanks to Ralph Polinski, wedding performer and my first guitar teacher). I also loved photography and darkroom work, and used to ride my bike to the camera store to buy developer, fixer, paper, and whatnot.

I was never athletic, and hated gym class (I was one of those that the captains argued over NOT wanting on their kickball team). I did play intramural ping-pong in high school, but never made it to the semi-finals.

But what I'm starting to see is that a lot of us who were non-jocks (and some who were jocks) are getting in touch with their Inner Dorks about now. My college friend Gerry sent us their annual Christmas letter and titled it something like "revenge of the dorks," because he got a picture he took of his train layout on the cover of Model Railroader magazine. I bought a ukulele and think about buying guitar accessories and being in a "band." I tried dusting off my old SLR camera that I used to use to take yearbook pictures in college, and when I'm doing laundry I look at the photo enlarger in the basement with fond nostalgia -- even though I wouldn't know where to buy paper and chemicals anymore, even if I did want to get involved in all that mess -- ahh, the smell of sodium thiosulfate...

Science fiction still isn't exactly cool, but has become much more mainstream since Star Trek and Star Wars. (Although I was greatly reassured, after attending a Star Trek fan convention in 1976, that I was nowhere near the dork that most of those people were. Still, while there my wife and I heard Harlan Ellison read "Shatterday," and that was pretty funky.)

But in general, I get the sense that people my age are much more comfortable these days doing what my friends and I used to call "Fascinating Ourselves," than I would have suspected a few years ago. I talked in my first post about the early letters being a form of blogging, and we also did tapes (sound recordings) that we mailed to each other, which I suppose you could call an early form of podcasting. We were heavily influenced by the Firesign Theater, but we were pretty weird in our own right, and at the time we thought most people would never understand what we were doing or why.

Now that everyone is sending each other weird humor, and having websites (like thesneeze.com that are almost exactly the kind of humor we used to do), it makes me wonder if we weren't more mainstram than we realized. or just ahead of our time.

Being in this band with three other guys my age brings that point home. We play anything and everything but there's an underlying pattern to it. We're "fascinating ourselves" again. We don't care if anyone ever pays to hear us (though that would be fun), but we know we're not interested in what passes for entertainment these days and like the idea of taking responsibility for entertaining ourselves.

So all you people out there (not just guys, I'm discovering that women are just as capable of this kind of thinking) -- show us your dorky interests. Let's hear it from the people who:

• Have had model trains and built little buildings for them. Even better, have researched paint schemes for railroad lines to see if our trains are historically accurate;
• Have a reel-to-reel tape recorder in the basement with boxes and boxes of tapes with your own and your friend's voices, band performances, or just weird sound effects and experiments on them;
• Every tried building your own fuzz-tone box;
• Can talk intelligently with someone about small details in Roger Zelazny's "Amber" series, or Larry Niven's "Ringworld" series;
• Have copies of "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" - the BBC radio series, not the movie;
• Have ever shot Tri-X at ASA 1200 and push-processed it;

You can add to the list but I hope you get the idea.