Gearhead

Turns out I'm a geek. There have been
a few clues along the way. I was an English major
who took Engineering Calculus, and I know how
to debug PHP (that's a programming language) and I own
a bleeding edge pocket pc with a 624 mHz processor
and a full-color VGA screen. I use spreadsheets
to keep track of everything from my business
income to the first time I had multiple
orgasms from oral sex.

On the other hand, I didn't think Serenity
was that great of a movie and I'm a
dramatic-crunchy-granola-hippy-artist-poet-homeschooling-mom
and I listen to Eminem. But it turns out
I'm a geek, which I figured out while
not quite fucking.

It was the first time
between us and we'd gotten to the point
where we'd pressed most of our skin
together but we hadn't connected yet. We were still
talking, in between painting each other with saliva, about
technology in the 70s, which occurs to me now
might have been kind of geeky in itself, and I told him that
I learned to program in Basic when I was twelve.

He said cool with the kind of enthusiasm guys usually
reserve for things with melted cheese and beer which probably
means he's a geek too. And I liked it. I liked it a lot that
he thinks it's cool that I know archaic programming
languages and that's when I realized I'm a geek, cause
I like that about me too.

I like gadgets and I like guys with gadgets and I really
like guys who find me fascinating
cause I like those things. I'm really turned on
by guys with big brains and big hard
drives. Oh, I like muscles and I like following
the treasure trail, but give me the guy who
understands what I'm talking about
when I say I need a multi-user
interface with granular permissions and
I'll fry his circuit boards with
hot geek love.

2006

Thoughts and Comments

Gearhead is one of my spoken word pieces. I performed it at the March Poetry Slam here in Eugene.

Listen to Barbara read Gearhead

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