Wherein I am surprised by a friend.
Nerds are really friendly.
This is a broad statement. It's also kind of true. When I started to feel a little homesick for my Vancouver cadre, I added two things into my schedule. Solo movie nights at the Aero Theatre, which shows old and unreleased films; and a weekly event called Friday Night Dice, which is an open group of board-and-tabletop gamers who meet in a church basement.
One of these choices yielded a group of sweet, inclusive, helpful people. Guess which.
I've been to the Aero a good five or six times, and never spoken to anyone but the ticket taker. This doesn't preclude a good time (they showed The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly last week!), but it is telling. At my first Friday Night Dice, I wandered the tables for maybe three minutes before a couple pulled me into a back room where a Settlers of Catan game was set up. We did awkward introductions with the five guys sitting cross-legged on the floor, and by the end of the night I had an invitation to a Mystery Science Theatre group-watch, a bag of Twizzlers*, and a ride home.
Nerds are really friendly.
Since that night, I've fallen into a little posse made up of some of the regular Friday Night Dicers. They fall into familiar archetypes for me - a few computer programmers, an elementary school teacher, ex-military model-painters... and this is Los Angeles, so of course there are a few actors.
My favourite of the bunch is a guy in his mid-twenties inexplicably named Kyle Wylie (seriously). He's a journalist for a local paper, and every time he opens his mouth it feels like I get another piece of the puzzle about his mysterious backstory. Jason Isaacs used to read Wylie to sleep. Wylie has been to thirty-three countries, mostly on location scouts. Wylie grew up on an Indian Reservation with his mom. He loves Tarkovsky, but doesn't want to be a filmmaker, because his father is 'in film'.
He somehow makes this all sound very matter-of-fact, but I am pretty sure Wylie's father is not just 'in film'. He lives in a way fancy house - nicest basement I have ever gamed in, not that nerds appreciate full-sized windows in their subterranean domains. Despite all this nonsense, like the rest of the Friday Night Dice crew, Wylie seems like a smart, down-to-earth guy.
This is a long run-in to the run-in I had with Wylie on Friday when everyone was taking a smoke break outside The Building. Side-Note to churches: if you don't want to project a menacing image, please don't name your ostensibly all-faiths community centre The Building. It sounds like you're constructing a Death Star in the attic.
In addition to his mysterious past, Wylie has endeared himself to me by being totally willing to debate at length. We seem to agree on major issues, so the debates are mostly pop-culture centred and only parodically intense. I love to argue, so it's nice to have company who does too.
I don't remember how the gun thing came up, but come up it did. Like many liberals, I have a fairly narrow portrait of what a gun advocate looks like. Gun nuts are dangerously unstable teenagers raged out on despair, or old guys in the woods with armour-piercing bullets definitely not designed for bears. Gun nuts live in the south. They are backwards and terrifying. They are not my friends - they are not left-wing college graduates who play Dungeons and Dragons. They are not smart.
But apparently sometimes they are.
My argument with Wylie about gun control went on for two hours, and what his side boiled down to was this: "The founding fathers knew that all governing bodies eventually trend towards chaos and dictatorship, and the only thing preventing that trend in America is that the governing entities know that their population is armed and will not stand for abuse. Sometime in the next three hundred years, a dictator will arise, and the people will speak against him. With bullets. Ergo, it is the responsibility of the current government not to interfere with the arming of the populace because that would be undemocratic."
I... had no idea how to react. This made so little sense that I couldn't even assemble a response. And thus, I lost a debate against someone who thinks George Zimmerman had every right to own the gun with which he shot Trayvon Martin. I've never understood how differential politics can 'wreck' a friendship or marriage, but I did feel weird hugging Wylie goodnight after learning that about him. Life is complicated and strange.
But this song is not! I sent it to Wylie as a joke, which he accepted with good humour.
Notes on the California Air-Care laws.
The other surprising element of the Friday Night Dicers is their total embrace of California's medical-marijuana dispensary cards. "I told them I had an eating disorder, and that the pot would help by giving me the munchies," said Kei, who is skinny in that low-exercise indoor-dweller way. We were all standing outside in the warm California night air, smoke drifting away as Kei lit his pipe. "They didn't even ask." I went around the circle and got the rest of the gang's excuses for their medical cards.
"Back pain."
"Insomnia."
"Social anxiety."
"Post-traumatic stress disorder."
This from Michael, a sweet-faced, heavyset twenty-something who always comes to the gatherings with his fiancee. He was in the Air Force from eighteen to twenty-four, and spent three years in Iraq. "It helps with the nightmares," he said quietly. Like me, Michael doesn't smoke with the rest of the players, but he showed me his card. "I was waking Danielle up at night. It was a real problem. I don't take it unless I can feel something coming on and it's nighttime - the smoking is too gross. But I'm worried about getting addicted if I take sleeping pills instead. The pot, I know I won't take unless I really need it."
More sides for the dodecahedron.
Cheers
Julia
* They call them Red Vines here, but trust me. They are Twizzlers.
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