The other morning I was headed in to work, (not my happiest part of the day) and while I was channel-surfing on the radio, I caught a song I hadn't heard in a while. Run To The Hills, by Iron Maiden. I was a Maiden fan way back in middle school, and for a while I bought every album of theirs that I could get my hands on. This was way back when you actually bought a flat disk the size of a dinner plate, and then played it on a record-player. Eventually I switched over to cassette tapes, and these days I'm grudgingly buying MP3's off Amazon. I still miss getting to hold the album in my hands and stare at Derek Riggs's cover art.
Those days back then were when I did most of my exploring of what life has to offer. Not all of it, and not even as much as wish I had. I let a lot of opportunities go by that I wish I had taken advantage of, but I also found magic. I listened to Iron Maiden, Deep Purple, and Black Sabbath. I read Stephen King, H.P. Lovecraft, and Dean Koontz. I discovered House of Mystery, I watched The Legend of Hell House, and I saw a weird martial art that had a really bad reputation become one of the latest crazes. I played Dungeons and Dragons, and I started to sneak out of the house in the middle of the night to go walk around the neighborhood because I couldn't sleep.
None of those things gave me much to talk about to the kids I went to school with. I made a few friends who became a gaming group, and my best friend in those days was also a Maiden fan, and that was the bunch I hung out with.
These days I still like good heavy metal, intelligent horror, gaming, and the little bits of reality that Mr and Mrs North America seem to try their damnedest to sweep under the rug. I have a larger group of friends with tastes like mine, and even when our tastes don't match exactly, nine times out of ten we still get the appeal that the story, movie, or hobby has for the other person. The dialect may be different, but the language is the same.
That same morning that I heard Run To the Hills, a co-worker in the break room was reading the sports section and asked if liked boxing. I already knew better than to try to explain that I like boxing as a martial art, but that if I've ever watched a match, it was playing on a screen somewhere in the background of a restaurant I was at, and I didn't look at the people's names, I just looked at each fighter to see if they were heavy on their feet or if they overextended their punches. So I dodged the issue with a simpler truth, I don't watch television. Cue awkward silence.
Now here's the point: was it awkward for me, or for him? I've been like this my whole life, this is who I am. I've also known people who read the sports section, watch TV, and who don't read. I don't speak their language, but I know it when I hear it. I can usually find something in the thread of conversation to go with and keep it going. Those times when I can't, or decide that whatever I'm working on writing at that moment needs my attention, the conversation dies. The other person has no more clue about what to say to me than he or she would if a die-hard Trekker asked them to get in on the Kirk vs Picard debate. I dislike the 'us' verses 'them' mentality because it falls short of the truth that we're not that damn different, but from the other side of the mirror, are we? Just what do the muggles think of these strange people?
What, you think I have the answer? I just work here. Now let me get back to writing a ghost story where a man in post-revolutionary days is haunted by his living son.
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