Facebook serves many functions, and among them is a Magic 8-Ball quality.
Ask it a question, and answers float to the surface. We’re in that what-am-I-doing-today phase of the morning when a friend posted his sale table at the toy show.
Some showers and a quick drive through a light snow – seriously, more snow in New England – and soon enough we are enmeshed in toyland. And geektown.
For this geek in particular, there’s nothing like toys to really get me going. I’ve written about toys in this space a few times, from favorite items to long pined-for hunks of plastic that got away.
Toys are personal. They belong to you. As a child, playing with them lodges you deep within your own mind, playing out your own fantasy worlds and bending others’ creations to your will.
For a geek in particular, toys are the introduction to adaptations.
You see a cartoon or a movie, and you like it so much that you want your own little version of it for yourself. You play out the story and create your own. They’re the first fanfic, the first collection, the first material expression of fandom – the heart of geeking out on anything.
We enter a Best Western hotel off an I-91 exit a town over from us. The bus for a small-college men’s basketball team sits in the parking lot, and several players lounge impatiently in the lobby. Oh dear, jocks and geeks all in the same place. Don’t make eye contact, keep walking down the hall before they shove you in a locker. (I kid, I kid.)
The geek antennae ping fiercely as we enter the ballroom and find ourselves awash in 50-something years of pop culture.
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