Stardate 03:01:11, here I am still standing on this freakin’ infested orb called earth, hurtling through space at 67,000 miles per hour 48 years after my birth. Damn! Middle-age? How the fuck did I ever get here? Strange thing, I don’t feel all that different than when I was 13, oh sure I can’t quite run like a 13 year old my voice doesn’t crack, mirror doesn’t lie, but pretty much feel the same.

It’s funny, somehow I thought looking back on my life I would come up with a different word to describe it. Thought, you know, something grander like genius or maybe at least demi-god. But no. Not me. Nah, I’m a geek, that’s right a geek. No. Not a nerd. No glasses or buttoned up to the collar dress shirts with a sweater vest(no offense hipsters). No plaid dress pants with sneakers (again no offense hipsters)or pocket protector, etc. Just a plain old stinkin’ geek, friki in some spanish speaking circles, otaku in Japanese. I watched Star Trek but was never a trekkie. I hated Dungeons and Dragons.

The earliest thing I can remember geeking-out on were GI Joes at age 5 or so, I had every one, all the accessories, the jeep, the scuba & spy gear, everything. I had a little suitcase full of them. I went everywhere with them. Damn, now I’m just realizing I played with dolls. OK it’s arguable it was all military propaganda to prepare little boys for war, but it was still a doll. Unfortunately one day, my GI Joes were stolen.

Next in line, mainly because my folks wouldn’t buy any more GI Joes, I focused on plastic models. This obsession lasted a few years. Planes, tanks, ships, cars, movie monsters, trucks, I even think I put together a Jesus model once. Unfortunately most of my models ended up victims of fireworks. Even plastic Jesus.

Smelling glue and long hours inside kind of ground on me, needing to kick that habit I turned to the outdoors, that’s when I started fishing, saltwater, freshwater, party boats, surf, trolling, deep sea. Not only did I fish but my very first job at age 13 was at a bait & tackle store. I hung out with all the old salts, heard every fish story. 5am weekends packing bloodworms and sandworms, eels, killies, moss bunkers, herring.

Received a skateboard one Christmas. Nothing great, I think it had a Jaws sticker on it, that should date it pretty good. Grabbed that board and started on my painful new infatuation. Soon I’m reading every boarding magazine there is, know who all the gurus are. All the board manufactures, the lingo, the clothes. Built a 1/4 pipe ramp at the end of my driveway, skateboard competitions, parks, pools. Next thing you know I’m working at a skateboard park.

In between all this I needed my daily pinball fix. That is until 1975. A friend’s Christmas gift was an electronic gaming system from Magnavox that hooked up to your TV’s antenna connection. It had several pong games and I think a rifle game. Then they started to come, Space Invaders, some stupid motorcycle jump game, Asteroids, Missile Command, Centipede, Pacman and his sister, Defender, then came more home systems, Coleco, Atari, others that vanished quickly. I then proceeded to geek out on TSR-80, MS-DOS, Windows, Nintendo, and SEGA. Then there was a stint with computer games, Leisure Suit Larry, several Star Trek games (I’m not a trekkie) and later Doom. Then Zelda, Mario Bros and all their sequels.

In the middle of all this I reached driving age. I never thought about cars too much up until then, but I think you have an idea what happened. By 17 I had three cars, 70′ Chevelle, 71′ Impala and a 63′ Impala. I knew all the makes, models, engine sizes, gear ratios, horsepowers. I did brakes, changed oil, tuned engines, changed engines.

Then came PC’s. Holy shit what’s not geeky about computers? What’s not geeky about technology, especially before it’s mainstream? I had a PC before PC’s. I was on social networks before social networks. TSR-80 was my first, it had a good old cassette tape data storage. No Commodore 64′s in my house they were for nerds. Yeah, yeah, yeah there were Apple’s. Mid 1980′s a Tandy 2000 with 16bit color, a 20mb hard drive and MS-DOS. First night I had it I messed up the hard drive config and had to reinstall from scratch. FDisk, then Format, then install the operating system, configure it, I was hooked.

That led to BBS’s. What are BBS’s? The precursor to the internet were Bulletin Board Services(Systems), while Darpa and Congress were working out all the technology and legal hurdles us PC geeks were dialing into PC’s running BBS’s. BBS’s ran parallel with the Internet for years, some merged. AOL was originally a BBS before the days they mailed everyone on earth cd’s. 300baud modems, I still love the sounds of negotiating modems. They were so freakin’ slow. It was all text based, command line stuff. Weird thing about BBS’s many owners were formally HAM Radio geeks. No time to go into HAM radios, try Wikipedia. But HAM people were usually like Comicbook guy on the Simpsons, nothing against them, just trying to make an analogy.

Somewhere back in the 80′s, college I think, I got exposed to darts. Shot for fun for years and then got exposed to Old English Dart League of Philadelphia in the 90′s. Geek-out example #1,565,413. I started shooting Tuesday nights and then I added Thursday nights in Quaker City Dart League, then going to money shoots on weekends, summer leagues and then I joined the Board of Directors. I was a dart geek. I now only shoot Tuesday nights.

Which brings us to my latest geeky endeavor, but if history is any indicator not my last, photography. I started 4 years ago with a Nikon D40x, well as usual, and heavily influenced by my geek genetic make-up, this camera proved to not be enough and I had found BH, Adorama and Calumet by then, so first was a 50mm 1.4 lens, then a Nikon D300, then a 60mm lens, then a 150mm, a 20-300mm, 80-200mm, 10-20mm, 24-70mm, then there was tripods, lightboxes, flashes, umbrellas, backgrounds, studio, Photoshop, Lightroom, Flickr. Then there were workshops. I went through a street phase, studio phase, nudes, architecture, candids, portraits, weddings, events, magazines. HDR, crossprocessing, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

LifeSum = Geek