The Valley of the Dolls

I'd like to be that guy who's spartan, and minimalist, and unfettered by the trappings of our consumerist society, but it's simply not true. I'm a product of my environment, and buy crap I don't need all the time. My motivations tend to be a little different than my neighbors the Joneses, but the core is the same - exchange green bits of paper for other equally useless things.
Granted, some things purchased have an enormous amount of utility. The Motorola RAZR is a very good phone, and coupled with the BlueTooth headset I can talk without endangering anyone on the highway AND be the envy of nerds everywhere.
The iPod Nano was purchased explicitly because it was a flash-based player and wouldn't run into HD issues like the previous generations.
But my other pursuits. . . ugh.
Everyone has their little downfalls. Your grandmother might collect Hummel Figurines, or collectible coins. Your ex-girlfriend might be shooting for three or four venereal diseases (collect them all!). You might be cultivating spite and hatred of all your ex-girlfriends, and writing about them in derogatory manners. Maybe you spend money on snowboarding equipment or volleyball gear. Maybe you're really into buying mountain-bike stuff even though you never go off-road. Heck, maybe you're just into good ol' DVDs and finally figured out the whole NetFlix + DVD Ripper == unlimited movie collection for $17.99/mo (plus materials).
Me, I seem to be unable to attach to one specific love for very long. But they all have a few things in common:

• Mere mortals find them prodigiously expensive or wasteful
  
• The numbers of women in these "hobbies" can be counted on one hand (I don't care WHAT gamer magazines you're reading or what articles you see about "the rise of female Xers" it's moot; 10 girls out of 100 still leaves you in really bad shape when it comes to finding partners in your hobbies
  
• Anyone in these hobbies thought the mere mortals line was gold. The rest of you, not so much.
  

It started innocently enough. A co-worker wanted to go shopping in the mall nearby but didn't have a rental car. Proffered the choice of dropping her off and returning, or wandering around a temple to consumerism, I chose to wander. There were a couple CDs I was interested in getting, and gigantic malls like this one sometimes have pretty nifty stores. This one was no exception. It's the Denver Mills or somesuch and it's enormous. There's 6, count 'em, 6 "neighborhoods" where you can buy crap, each one spanning about the size of an ordinary mall. It's very similar to Gurnee Mills in Gurnee, IL only it's in Denver. Hence the name, Denver Mills.
I've spent about 40 minutes moving from store to store - they had a Games by Jake store so I went into it looking for my favorite game of all-time, Scotland Yard. I don't know if I have 5 other friends willing to play it, but so far it's been moot as I can't ever find it anywhere. The gist of the game is 5 players are investigators and one is Mister X. Mister X is hidden from the board, only appearing 5 times, and the investigators must create a dragnet to attempt to capture him before he. . . kills again, or parks his car illegally, or shouts fire in a crowded theater. They're unclear on what Mr X (that bastard) is doing. The hapless investigators a limited number of different tickets to utilize, from taxis to bus tickets to underground tickets. They all move different degrees, but the trick is you only have enough for 28 turns or so. Apparently Scotland Yard has a very constrained transportation budget. Mr X hides where he moves by the ticket he uses to move there, so the investigators have a rough idea of what's going on in the couple of turns following one of his appearances. It's a fantastic game and doesn't require the monstrous amounts of setup something like Axis and Allies or Risk does, yet still has some very strategic elements.
Games By Jake didn't have it. Neither did the store for budding ninjas nearby, but they did have some awesome swords. Swords seem easy enough to use ("stick them with the pointy end," said a little girl interested in Needle-work) but not really necessary, since we got rid of the orc menace.
I kept walking and ran into a Games Workshop store. Wow. I haven't been in a Games Workshop store (or retailer who sells the stuff) in almost a decade. I fell into it when I was 16, playing Blood Bowl - a football game played on AstroGranit(tm), using fantastic races like elves, dwarves, and the undead as players. I slid into Space Marine and Adeptus Titanicus as well, both epic science fiction games using a ton of strategy and even more money spent on paint, figures, and brushes. The games on my friend Eric's floor were quite legendary, spanning the course of hours. I eventually found marijuana, and didn't have the money to spend on both. Plus, my painting skills sucked ass. No teacher.
But hey, 10 years later, in a Denver mall, I'm making enough money to be considered an adult, and no pesky marijuana habit to get in the way. . . I'm going in the store to see what's happening with my old friends the space marines. Turns out Warhammer 40k is still alive and kicking, in its 4 edition (I was playing in the second) and new races have been introduced. The genestealers of old have morphed into the Tyranids, the Chaos Marines are alive and kicking (and very dangerous!), and the old stand-bys the Space Marines are still around, painted in glory and fanatical devotion to the Emperor. Latin phrases abound (the space marines are the Adeptus Astartes) and the gods of Chaos are Not Fucking Around. It's a British based wargame, and consequently has both the dry, subtle humor of the Brits and the fearlessness to skewer sacred cows. Ten Commandments don't mean shit to the Brits, and "false gods" are the name of the game. No skittishness here - Sla'anesh the God of Pleasure is a cloying, sickly sweet seducer who's armies willingly degrade and mutilate themselves for her (his?) ends. Khorne, the god of Blood, with the World Eaters armies and the ravenous hordes of those lusting simply for battle. Nurgle, the god of Decay and Rot. T'Zeentch, the dark god of Magic and forbidden power. These guys make our sweet father Lucifer look like some pissant 8th grade bully. Oh how I love them.
So here I am, talking to the manager about the game and the changes, and I feel that stirring in me. Not the loins, you fucks. My heart of darkness. That place in me that wants to spend money on garbage that creates more work than it eliminates. The reverse-Roomba, so to speak. I harken back to my kinder, gentler days in high school with my desk covered in old newspaper. Paint pots line the back of my desk - all old school military modeling paints that are crappy for what I'm doing, but the only ones I could afford. All the dragons I shoplifted from the Hobby Shop up the block, and all the other miniatures I pocketed. My father nearly busted me one time, as my dumb-ass friend called me, the answering machine picked up and he said "hey your brother's going to steal a dragon!" So naturally my father's curious about MY collection of fantastic figurines. . . but he couldn't really tell how many I could have bought. Thank goodness for babysitting money. The perfect cover.
I digress.
The gist of Warhammer 40k is simple. Spend all the money you ever make on little plastic figurines that you glue together, then prime, then paint. Build an army based on points values, then go to the local hobby shop and play other unwashed nerds doing the exact same thing, but probably with a different army. We like to call them figurines. We like to call it Warhammer, and we have all sorts of dark, evil iconography.
The Berserkers of Khorne. The Plaguebearers of Nurgle. The Hive Mind Tyrants, an implacable force of predators from beyond the rim, who only consume. (think H.R. Giger or Aliens) The green-skinned orcs who live only for combat, and reproduce like the trailer people. Only green, and with more teeth. The Dark Eldar, who live in the corrupted Warp Paths that collapsed the once mighty Eldar. The masses of Humanity in its myriad forms, fascistic, fanatical, and a pale shadow of what we are today. The defilement of our values, all in the name of survival. The death of thousands per day to ensure that the God-Emperor lives.
Dark iconogrpahy indeed.
Why?
To hide the fact that we're playing with dolls. In dollhouses. Sure, they're burnt out dollhouses in alien landscapes. But it's not that far off from the little girl who's daddy doll hits mommy doll because she's acting out her darkened family life, oblivious to the fact that it can be better.
Our trauma tends to be different - socially awkward young men (and older men like myself) with odd interests who were singled out in high school and called all the names we wear now like badges of honor: geek, nerd, dork, dweeb.
So we create our valleys of dolls, and enact the god-power of generalship over them, sending them to their inevitable deaths as we attempt to establish a pecking order amongst those lowest in the pecking order we flee from. And with good measure - if they knew we were playing with dolls our torment would graduate from words to actual beatings.
While I disparage the hobby, I do so with love. I'm a geek. Always have been. It used to be a burden, but guess what - I make more money than almost every jock-sucker I went to school with except one. Jake Plummer. That son of a bitch is doing much better than me. Of course, all of Denver doesn't hate me, just a few maids and a couple bartenders. While off-topic, I feel for Jake. His defense couldn't stop the Steelers on their first 4 drives, and all of a sudden JAKE'S the asshole. Typical sports behavior - find the scapegoat and crucify him. The mob hath no mercy. As a final aside, even though I called him a son of a bitch, Jake was a really nice guy and I'm happy he's a success. That prick.
Ok back to the hobby. Chitown is the center of it all in Bangladesh. It has one of the "bunkers", and no less than 14 tables to game on. A robust counterculture of geekery goes on there, and I can enter it as an elder statesman. Sort of. I mean, there are 14 year olds there that are better painters and know the rules better. I hesitate to call them better strategists; I'm an old hand at strategy, with decades of experience. Ok, one decade. And another 4 years. But really, I've been doing wargames longer than some of them have been alive. Which is why I cry when they beat me.
Well, ok, nobody's beat me yet. I'm undefeated! Because I didn't fold until last Thursday, buying the Warhammer 40K 4th edition book and the Citadel Guide to Painting Miniatures. Then I bought the Tyranid Codex 4 days later. It really appeals to me to play a mindless swarm controlled by an overmind. It's very Republican of me, I know. It's beyond fascism . . .it's fascism evolved. In hindsight, it was very stupid of me to go for the Tyranids. They're a swarm army, so I have to buy and paint SHITLOADS of miniatures before I'll field a 1500 point army, the standard force. But gosh, they're cool as hell. I've assembled 20 thus far; the basic troops. I'll prime them some time early tomorrow (I hope! Work may prevent me from getting it done until late afternoon!) and begin painting on Saturday. I can hardly wait; I've decided on a color scheme reminiscent of the orks. I figure they've been absorbing their biomass so long that they've taken on some of the same colors of the menace, and will be going with bone carapaces and green skin. Because, hey, I'm a Michigan State Spartan. And so are the Tyranids.
Ultimately, this is a hobby that will consume a fair amount of time. I'm excited about it for multiple reasons:

• It's a creative hobby that isn't writing (I need breaks!)


• It's a hobby that is social, even if it's the society of geeks. Better than video games for that purpose.


• It's a fucking WARGAME. There's a whole alpha-male streak in me that wants to dominate others like a silverback. And this is my chance. Plus, I've been lifting weights so if any of them makes fun of my tactics, I'll punch them in the face. A fearsome general, indeed.

My girlfriend wants to come out and see it. She says. I don't really buy it; it's geekery writ large and while she likes me a lot, I think she's into me despite the geekery, not because of it. Though she IS a music geek. But she doesn't have little dolls of Alice Cooper and The Streets. I'm rather interested in bringing her, though.
After all - my army might suck.
I might even have a suck painting skill and get mocked for that.
My tactics may be horrid and get pounded continuously by 14 year olds just starting out.
But I'll be the only guy in the place actively avoiding reproduction with a member of the opposite sex, while still practicing the act as much as possible.
And that, good friends, will make me the King.