So, here I am in the backseat of my friend Jenn’s car. In the front are, of course, Jenn driving and in the passenger seat is Mae, a longtime friend of ours and fellow gamer. Currently, we’re stopped in traffic on I-64 in Chesapeake, Virginia on our way to our yearly visit to a renaissance faire in North Carolina.
Jenn and Mae are eating their Subway meals that we acquired prior to our excursion onto the interstate. I, however, chose not to purchase anything.
“Deploy the lasers. Why haven’t the lasers been deployed?” I asked, viewing the ridiculous amounts of traffic before us.
“They haven’t been affixed to this car yet,” Jenn replied in typical deadpan Jenn fashion. When Jenn replies with this tone, it’s difficult to determine if she’s actually joking or not if you don’t know her well enough.
I pull out my laptop and begin writing this entry as the girls begin chatting about various topics, bouncing to and fro in their discussion about nothing in particular. We pass by two cars pulled off to the side, trapped by the sea of barely-moving vehicles.
“I wonder if they’re trying to get off,” Mae inquired as we passed by the motorists.
“If they are, they’re SOL,” Jenn replied.
“Yeah, ‘We’re going to just cross the five lanes of packed traffic to get off at the Battlefield exit!’ Wait, you can’t GET to the Battlefield exit from this side of the interstate. Well, they’re fucked.”
“Yup,” Jenn concurred.
The girls asked me what I was doing in the back, laptop out and the tippity-tap of my typing evident of some sort of activity. My writing ceased momentarily as I grinned up at them from my backseat haven.
“Writing fan fiction. ‘Ron slowly crawled into Harry’s bed. Neville was awoken by the sound of Ron’s…’ I think I’ll stop there.”
The girls chuckled at my admittedly immature joke, my joke that segued their talk into a discussion about the most recent, and last, Harry Potter movie. This, in turn, led into a broader discussion about Harry Potter in general between the two of them.
I continued to remain silently detached from the talking.
“I hate Katy Perry so much,” I stated simply, hearing Firework start playing on Jenn’s radio, "Get ready to hear this song every fucking 4th of July."
“I don’t mind her so much,” Jenn said.
“Have you ever heard her sing live?”
“Oh, I know that many artists are so studio altered that they sound nothing like they do in real life, and, in actuality, can’t carry a tune onstage. That doesn’t stop me from having their songs on my iPod if I like them.”
Admittedly, I like Perry’s E.T. for god knows what reason.
Then the conversation turned to Glee. Being an out-of-the-closet fan of the show, and Mae being an openly enthusiastic fan of the show, her and I kept talking about our favorite songs, mash-ups, lines, characters, moments, and so on. Even Jenn, who hadn’t seen much of the show, added to the conversation every once in a while.
This lasted for a good 30-40 minutes of nothing but Glee-related talk. This is what happens when you get diehard geek fans together.
Jenn, feeling inspired by the talk of show choirs, decided to turn the course of the discussion to the Evil Dead Musical, the music of which she happened to have on her iPod and wanted to share. We obliged her, Mae and I having never seen or heard the songs before.
I have to say that the one about every man one of the female characters had known was killed by a Sandaran demon was pretty funny.
And, as inevitably must happen between three hardcore gamers that had once gamed together in a memorable campaign, the conversation turned to Dungeons and Dragons.
To be fair, Jenn had told me a week or so beforehand that she was trying to work on putting a timeline of the game she had run a few years ago together. She was having difficulty remembering several of the parts and required the assistance of Mae and I during the car ride to try and fill in the missing bits. However, these talks always start out under innocent pretenses like “filling in the missing bits” and somehow always devolve into laughing and reminiscing about the old games and characters and on and on.
We continued to talk about D&D for the next few hours.
Then we picked up Tim. Tim is one of those few whose intelligence is something I admire and envy. He was my DM once upon a time. I cannot express how terribly he traumatized me during the two games we played in together.
So, obviously, we continued to talk about D&D for the rest of the car ride.
What can I say? Geek pride lives on in the proud.
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