Wherein I question my status as a geek

I haven't blogged in months-- I could tell you that I was away on a months-long mission of mercy, or that I had a brief affair with an eccentric Eastern European magnate's daughter, or that I was hospitalized with a contagious disease that baffled the world's scientists, and was only just cured by extra-terrestrials (or some sort of mystical entity), and sworn to secrecy by the shadowy Illuminati...  

No, no, friends, the truth of the matter was that I was waiting to hear from my alter-ego, who abandoned me months ago to try his hand at the Gaming Room of the Sky with the King of Curiosities, and got shanghaied by conspiring members of his Royal Court, and recently escaped, knocking on the door of my apartment at 4:47 yesterday morning with strange, horrible tales that left me catatonic with their perversity...

The Line

These are, of course, all lies, and as I still don't know the truth, I decided to try and find the answers at a comic book convention this past Saturday in the City of the Angels. If not by being surrounded with my familiars, then with whom?, I asked myself, while sitting in the subway train filled with ne'er do wells ("Spare a buck?" one such miscreant asked me while I was sitting on a dubiously clean seat, Moleskine in hand, pages as blank as a red-neck's imagination. "Spare me a story?" I snarled back.), faded beauties, scruffy Oliver Twists, and other mediocrities. I didn't know where my inspiration went, I wanted to tell the lot of them, feeling like Amadeus' Salieri.

The Foothills of Southern California, 1996.

Winter.

For the last few months, or more specifically, since he started dating The Harpy, every time we'd enter my friend Jeff's vintage Jaguar, he'd always say the same thing: I can't afford this thing anymore. To which I'd respond with something like, Why in Hades did you buy it?

My friend Jeff: A world-class boozer, fluent in Blarney, but a little too worried about how he was perceived. He started leasing the Jaguar to give him a green-colored chariot of respectability as he parked his car on the parking lots of prospective customers. He was a pharmaceutical supply salesman whose career was now on shaky ground; he talked a good game, but lately hasn't been able to seal the deal, and he figured that the car would grease the wheels of wealth. But his car-tactic was a failure— his debts were suddenly starting to grow like hyperactive-mold on rotten fruit, and now his girlfriend, The Harpy, was demanding he buy Christmas gifts for her two kids because their dad was a deadbeat.

Now, this particular night was to be our Pre-Christmas Drinking Night, consisting of Chivas Regal on the rocks, beer chasers, and Elvis Presley Christmas cassette tapes, but now we had to shop for, and then drop off, the oodles and oodles of gifts for The Harpy, her kids, and, to cover all the angles, her mother.