This Magic Moment

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I've to be to work in a few hours. The night has ground down and all but the off schedule service industry lifers and the most highly functioning alcoholics have gone to ground but I'm not yet towards the door. Today's been too plainly perfect, too simply, subtly sensational for me to be willing to walk away from it just yet.

I've done nothing exceptional today. In fact, today will probably fade from memory in a few weeks time, so devoid of actual events it was. T'was nothing, really: just Sunday brunch, a favorite movie, an hour at the range, dinner and a bit of live blues and every minute in the company of dear, dear friends.

These are the days, the stacked moments that define contentment and that embody joy. We trick ourselves into thinking we have miserable lives because these occasions seem so banal on the remembering. They reflect in the mind's eye as any other day.

They're not any other day, though, and I can feel that now despite the knowledge that I will forget it in a fistful of tomorrows. So, I linger as long as I can because today was a good day, indeed.

Tomorrow, and the forgetfulness of today's perfection, looms, bloated with expectations, desperate for my worthiest attention. And so, I pay my tab, embrace my dearests and turn my feet towards home.

May there be so many more such days.

The Geeks Have Won Tonight

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We've been hearing for some time now about how the twenty-first century is the age of the Geek, about how the stigma of bookishness, the scarlet letters of intelligence and imagination were finally coming into their own, about how fanfic authors, table-top gamers and comic book collectors were finally going to earn some cultural currency rather than ridicule.

I never really did believe it. For all the popularity of super hero movies, for all the MMORG subscribers, for all the traction that major video games have gotten, it always seemed that any fascination that mundane world had with us was strangely academic and always accompanied by an un-annunciated snicker. To the fashionistas, to the taste-makers, to the arbiters of tomorrow's values, Geeks were, at best, a market to be exploited, at worst, a social garment to be tried on, examined and then discarded before leaving the house. We were a curiosity, not a culture.

Though, when I saw this, I realized that we might have that moment in the sun after all.



Kate Moss, on the cover of Vogue Magazine, in a tavern-wench dress. The world's top supermodel is on her way to the RenFaire.

It's not the first time I've been wrong.