NEERRDS!!

I don't want to shock anyone, but I've spent some time in comic book stores. I was always more of a tourist than a resident, but I went enough to have a familiarity with the clientele and workers there. I would always have the same reaction after being in there for a while:

"Look at all these fucking nerds."

But wait, I'd think. I'm in here, too. So am I one of them? Well, no, I mean, they probably thought James Bond just walked in here. Hell, yeah. Nerds better recognize.

Then I'd go to Target or somewhere where normal people congregated and realize I was a hideous, socially retarded nerd myself, only my subset of nerddom, record store guy/movie nerd was a step or two more socially acceptable. But my musings about how I'd give my firstborn to get a copy of the complete Big Boys discography or how a full stack of Rudy Ray Moore party records on vinyl was the only thing stopping me from having a full, complete life were equally as incomprehensible to normal people.

There was a comic book store a couple blocks away from our first apartment in Jacksonville. I'd get bored on a Sunday and walk down there to play Golden Axe, a pretty boss '80s video game that I think only got played when I walked up there. The guy who worked there was always cool to me, especially since I was basically taking up space and not buying anything.

Others were not so lucky. A friend of mine would go in there weekly, dropping some serious coin. You'd think that as a regular, he'd get some special treatment. One day he walks in and the guy's watching TV.
"Oh cool, Arrested Development," my friend exclaims.
Click!
The guy turns the TV off immediately and goes back to looking at pictures of She-Hulk.

My ex-wife would go there every once in a while to buy old kids comic books to use in projects. You'd think the guy would be happy to unload of all his old Archie and Casper books dusty-ing up the place, but he'd always drop her change into her hand from like two feet up with a sneer on his face.

You know, I'm always instinctively going to side with the nerds, the freaks and the misfits, but do they have to make it so hard all the time?