It is time to make a confession.  One of my guilty pleasures for the past month has been watching VH1’s new “reality show” The Pick-Up Artist.  For the less informed, it’s a show where a group of geeks were taken to live for a few weeks with a man named Mystery, a “master pick-up artist” in the world of seduction.  (Seriously – the dude has a Wikipedia page.  Who the fuck are these people?)  The object, like any good “reality” show, is to be tested every week by a challenge or another.  It’s, essentially, Who wants to be a Superhero?, except the prize isn’t a movie and comic book, but rather, ostensibly, an STD.

I also find it incredibly amusing.  And it’s not for the reasons you think – these guys are not fumbling around like the idiots you’d think.  Well, they may have done that in the first episode.  And some guy started break dancing on the second… er… ok, there may be some fumbling around.  But that part is less amusing, and far more painful.  Painful, I think, for me, because I’ve become invested.  Yes, it’s the dread curse of the reality elimination show.

I’ve become invested in the players, because they’re geeks.  Most of them.  One of them was old and kind of a nerd.  Which is fairly geeky, in its own way.  But either way – they’re geeks.  I’m not here to judge.   I’ve liked the guys.  (Except Pradeep.  He’s a waste of space on that show who has so far done nothing but fumble constantly, and has only gotten along so far because people keep saving his ass.  He’s a hyperkinetic, neurotic mess, who does nothing but wring his hands in nervousness and never applies his knowledge.  But I digress.  See with the caring?)

But they’re not why I’m here.  (Except to comment on that whole bullshit with Scott being kicked out in place of Pradeep.  Dude may be a stiff-necked robot, but he’s fucking trying!  And he’s getting better.)  No.  I’m here to talk about the secret to “the Method’s” success.  (The Method being the process by which these Casanovas-to-be will pick up women.  It’s a mixture of basic sociology, basic psychology, and general social skills.)  Specifically, Mystery’s success.

Seriously – take a second, if you’re interested, to read his Wikipedia entry.  (I am, sadly, too lazy at current to link it myself.)  It’s not necessary, as I will reveal the secret to you right now: He’s a geek.  Really.  Well, I should say, he was a geek, as society defines geekdom.  He just dropped his geekdom out of frustration and learned how to seduce women, by going out there and, well, probably getting slapped a lot.  Certainly rejected a lot.  But, by gum, he developed a method.

It’s admirable.

It’s also geeky as hell.

Seriously.  Mystery’s a geek.  That’s his secret.  Sure, he’s a geek about social interactions now.  But the facts are there.  Think about it:

1) the costumes.  Who the fuck dresses like that?  He’s wearing the equivalent of a Klingon costume!  We just see it as flamboyantly “metrosexual”, in a kind of flaming, extreme way (whatever flaming to a metrosexual would be.)  But, sitting here today, I realized, these are really just the trapping of a cosplaying ubergeek.

2) the trappings.  Medallions.  Defined terms like “Avatar”, “Indicators”, “Triggers.”  Levels of mastery.  Need I go further?  I mean – honestly.  It’s quantification of unquantifiable qualifiers.  It’s putting things into a rule system that can be learned (and exploited.)  It’s rewarding “system mastery” with tangible, meaningless symbolism.  This is the stuff of geekdom!

Now, let’s also look at who was targeted for the Method: Geeks.  Sure, as I said, they’re not all true geeks (as society defines them.)  But they all have geek in them.  You can see it, thrumming somewhere deep inside.  Some are worse than others.  And, I would venture, the geekier ones have been doing fairly better than the less geeky.

Why?  Because the Method is really just another rulesystem to be learned.  And that’s, basically, what geeks do: obsess about something to the point of utter mastery of the subject.  Name your geek, that’s what they do.  Music geeks learn all about music – artists, singers, songs, bands, and even the music itself.  Trekkies?  Star Wars geeks?  Browncoats?   It’s all about mastery – about taking something that is there to be loved, to be obsessed over, and to maintain a kind of symbiotic dominance with the subject by means of the obsession.

That’s what this show is doing.  And I find it highly amusing.

I’m surprised at the daily amount of abuse people are willing to put up with in their lives, never realizing that the answer is just a simple choice of not taking it anymore. Jesus F. Christ, people, wake the fuck up! If you want to take your abuse, fine, accept it, deal with it, just shut the fuck up about it. Needing other people’s pity is goddamn pathetic, and you sure as fuck won’t find any from me.

Next time I hear about how you decided to take some shit for the sake of one more week, I swear to God I’m going off on that person.

Edit: I realize I left this a bit vague.  Now, I’m not complaining about people who write things for the sake of emotional catharsis.  I’m not complaining about people who complain about some traumatic event that’s occurred to them in their life.  Or even some tiny thing that’s been blown out of proportion.

I wouldn’t see, ’cause I’ve done it plenty.

But I’ve never sat and taken any sort of abuse from any circumstance.  Go on – I challenge you to pour through my archives to see anything I’ve reported that you could construe as my being victimized.  Go ahead – I’ve got time, I’m really just 1s and 0s on a machine, I can wait forever.

Couldn’t really find any could ya?  Oh – you can find a few things where I complain about more or less the same thing, sure – but these concepts are abstract.  Man’s inhumanity towards man, that sort of shit.  I’ve never accepted these in search of pity.  What really irks the fuck out of me is these people who just lay on the facts of their “horribly messed up” lives forgetting the simple fact that: 1) you can move out of your apartment, 2) you can quit your job, 3) you can dump your boyfriend/girlfriend, 4) you can change your fucking circumstances, man.  You’re not a child anymore.

Grow up.  You’ll be happier you did.

Ok. So, first thing out of the way: My brother is married, as of…. seven hours ago. It was the best wedding I’ve ever been to – probably because I was in it, and that gives you something to think about. I was lauded for my reading of 1st Corinthians. You know the one – “…when I was a child, I spoke as a child, I thought as a child; when I became an adult I put away childish things”? Anyhow, yeah. Because – and we all know this – I don’t speak much, so people don’t expect me to exert a presence when I do. But, fuck – you know, twelve years DMing, two and a half years of law school, three years of journalism… how the hell would I not know how to build presence?

But I digress.

The wedding was, as mentioned, very nice. I stood best man – although in this case all that meant was that I got to stand Mafia style behind my brother decked out in tuxes. It was, I admit, a very happy moment for me watching my brother get married. And I met a whole slew of Ana’s – that’s my sister-in-law’s (I caught myself as I started to write brother’s girlfriend’s) – family.

Wow, my brother married well.

I went stag to the reception – for many reasons. Primarily, I didn’t ask anyone. Of course, there’s the second reason – I didn’t have much of anyone to ask. And third, I don’t like to put on airs. Still, they sat a nice Spanish law student whose spelling of her name escapes me and so I won’t attempt it, though I’ll refer to her as K. We talked a little of the differentiation between Spanish and English law, and our respective schools and such. It was nice. We were at the head table, of course, and it was impossible to talk to anyone else – the bridesmaid, Ana’s sister, and her boyfriend were all the way on the other side, lengthwise, of the table, and my brother and his wife in the center, a few feet away. So with the music, one had to resort to pantomime and smoke signals to get messages across to the other side.

But we sat for merely a few minutes, then it was on to the dancing, and the drinking. I drank more at the reception than I have in a damn long while, and yet it affected me not a bit. It must have been all the sweating and grinding out on the dance floor. Either way, I also danced more at the reception than I have since… a long time, too. My feet are, needless to say, killing me, and I had to peel off my shirt as it was drenched in sweat.

There were a lot of beautiful women there. Good Lord. My brother married really well. I wish I could’ve danced with all of the girls that I wanted to dance with, but I only really got to dance with a couple, as the rest of my time I was hijacked by my mother’s friends. Which isn’t to say they aren’t attractive women some – just to say they’re my mother’s friends. Oh, and my aunts and cousin. Anyhow. Dancing was had. Lots of dancing.

But it set to me thinking – which is what I’m doing here, writing. Thinking about the past, the present, the future. Who I was, who I am, and who I am yet to become. About present circumstance and chance, problems and permutations. And I wandered… who am I? Who I Am?

The answer was there, all along. He hovered behind me, about an inch from my shoulder, a ghost of a memory. He who is not and cannot be.

The question was posited not so long ago as I was trying to figure out a conundrum. Of course, the conundrum existed because I have, in the intervening years, become lax in my understanding of the universe. …

Alas, my conclusions shall need wait. My brother has need of me.

I return, some 20 minutes later, honeymoon crisis averted.   But, of course, I don’t have the same rhythm that I had built up before, so my present writings shall be more stilted and stunted, I should think, until I do manage to carry myself into a temperate tide of typing.  (I admit, I added the temperate solely for the alliteration, of which I am quite proud.  It does seem I am far more amused now than I should be, given my level of sobriety and the idea that I’ve struggled to the surface.)

The truth, my friends, is this: the Shadow is gone, long live the Shadow.  The Shadow, who he is, we’ve known for a while.  He’s the Dark One – not the evil one, that one’s a different guy – but the one who is one with the night and talks with the stars.  Who asks the moon for advise and learns poetry from the lapping waves of the sea.  He is who I was, and who I will forever be.

The Shadow keeps me from succumbing to the mass of frivolous life.  It keeps me from becoming dumb to the truth, numb to the reality of torturous existence.  The Shadow keeps it real – as real as any thing can be kept.  And I’ve come dangerously, perilously close to forgetting that that is what we do.

We.  I speak of course of the warriors.  The ones who struggle onward – for whatever cause we struggle, but indeed, the struggle is there.  I was the Shadow, and It was me.  I have donned his cloak once more, and I have gained that quiet and certain unpenetrability that gave my vision such clarity and focus.  That allowed me to see where few before did.

I donned the Shadow again tonight and he answered my beck and call.  And from the darkness we saw, with eyes that looked beyond seeming, and studied.  And what we studied was as through a mirror darkly: a roiling Abyss, and at its center was the one who was I, and he struggled with the blackness.   We reached our hand to him and he came, and he stood with us, as brothers.

And so only I remain.

I walked alone back home.  It wasn’t a long walk, and I wanted the loneliness after being surrounded by so many people.  I needed to distance myself from my fantasies.  We cannot live a life of fantasy.  They are the playthings of children.

When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I thought as a child, I reasoned as a child.  When I became a man, I put away childish things.  Now we see as in a mirror darkly; then shall we see face to face.  Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.  (My own interpretation, a poetical blend of NIV and King James’ version of 1 Corinthians: 11 – 12).

This one is, effectively, the closing argument in the Baltar trial.   Well, an excerpt anyhow.

“I’d say we’re very forgiving of mistakes.  We make our own laws – our own justice.  And we’ve been pretty creative about finding ways of getting people off the hook for everything from theft to murder.  And we have to be.  Because we aren’t a civilization anymore – we are a gang.  We are a gang on the run, and we have to fight to survive, we have to bend rules, we have to break laws – we have to survive.

But not this time.  No.  Not this time.  Not for Gaius Baltar.  No.  You have to die.  You have to die, well, because we don’t like you very much.  Because you are arrogant.  Because you are weak.  Because you are a coward.  And we, the mob, want to throw you out the airlock because you didn’t stand up to the Cylons and get yourself killed in the process.  That’s justice now.  You should have been killed back in New Caprica, but since you had the temerity to live, we’re going to execute you now.

That’s justice.

This case is built on emotion.  On anger.  Bitterness.  Vengeance.  But most of all, it is built on shame.  It’s about the shame of what we did to ourselves back on that planet.  It’s about the guilt of those of us who ran away.  Who ran away.  And we are trying to dump all that guilt and all that shame unto one man and then flush him out the airlock and hope that just gets rid of it all, so that we can live with ourselves.

But that won’t work.  That’s not justice.  Not to me.”

I forgot how much I enjoyed the character of Romo Lampkin on Battlestar Galactica.

“Love. A precocious evolutionary move fashioning Cylons to be capable of experiencing it.  I don’t know if it was engineered to be a tactical imperative but… it’s not for the feint hearted is it?”

“No.”

“Maybe you should have been nicer to your mechanic.”