perfidy

Voting is now closed in this round of the Ministry of Minor Perfidy's Biggest Dork competition. Round 2 between Johno and Buckethead is now open for reading and mockery here.

GeekLethal has been bested in the first round of our no-holds-barred, slap and flail, triple cage dork match. Under normal circumstances, one would expect that the next round would involve a duel to the geeky end between Ross and myself. We would bare our nerdy souls to the harsh judgment of our gentle readers, and the winner (loser) would advance to final combat with Johno to determine who amongst the perfidious ministers can wear the crown of infamy, dorkmaster, lord high king of the geeks.

But Ross is unavailable to participate in our little tournament. Due to a perverse confluence of debilitating gastrointestinal disorders, an unfortunate encounter with a less than hygienic dinner date, and his own monomaniacal work ethic Ross is flatulent, itchy, exhausted and on the verge of a complete mental, moral, and spiritual breakdown. Forcing him to participate our dorkfest would certainly push him over the edge and leave him wondering which is worse: moving back to Canada or base jumping off the Washington Monument with an hanky for a parachute.

So, we move directly to final combat. Buckethead v. Johno for alpha geek of the Ministry pack.

Front Toward Enemy

While a perusal of my posts to this blog over the last couple years should convince anyone of my dork credentials, this fight requires more meaty stuff than just writing a twenty page essay on space warfare, or repeated ravings about giant space robots.

When I was in high school, like many other geeks I played RPGs. We played Paranoia, Traveller, Twilight 2000, Cthulhu, but Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, 2nd edition was out meat and potatoes. Pretty much every Friday, we would gather together in the basement of future rocket scientist Jeff’s house and begin the dark rituals of high dorkdom. Armed with fifty-pound bags of reference materials, notebooks filled with deranged scribblings, bags of varicolored dice and laboriously yet ineptly painted lead miniatures we trooped into the dankness and imagined ourselves as grumpy dwarves, pure hearted paladins, crafty rangers and in one case, a sanctimonious fundamentalist cleric. (That last one was from the heart, not really acting.)

But after spending several person-years using our minds to imagine ourselves in fantastical and vaguely ridiculous situations palled, and we felt an irresistible desire to put ourselves actually, physically in farcical and most definitively ridiculous situations. Each of us repaired to our individual lairs. We prevailed upon parents who had long since lost any hope of having normal children to make trips to the hardware store and invest hard earned money to outfitt us as medieval warriors. We all had different ideas on how best to kit out as a warrior. The constraints were poor materials and a total lack of woodworking, metalcrafting, or in fact any other skill. In a couple weeks, we had all equipped ourselves with a stunning variety of poorly made and inelegant weapons and armor. We met at Cory’s house, because Cory’s parents had five acres of land. This wooded lot would be our tournament field, our Agincourt, our Waterloo.

I had chosen for my armament a long sword and Norman kite shield. The shield was a crudely shaped flat piece of plywood, painted green and with an expertly painted heraldic logo of, uh a shield green on a field, uh green. The sword was a four foot dowel. The ‘blade’ was wrapped in duct tape and the hand guard was a shorter piece of dowel lashed, with duct tape, to the sword. For armor, I had a thick sweatshirt and a woolen watch cap. Thus accoutered, I was ready for battle; my portly figure rendered manly by the weapons I bore. Or so I thought. My friends mostly had chosen swords. A couple had axes, and one had a bo staff. Only I had made a shield. But with the common sense native to all geeky teenagers, we were convinced that no harm would come to us. We knew about these weapons, we had read about them.

Amazingly, the first three sessions went without incident. Aside from a few minor bruises, and shame at our ineptitude, we were unscathed. Over the course of these battles, we had of course (as our dork natures required) developed extensive rules to govern our activity. We had rule systems to determine how battles should be scored, and how even to integrate the use of magic spells. (The latter mostly involved water balloons.) We also set up a complicated triple elimination tournament based on individual and team scores. Teams ranged from two to four per battle, and we’d have at least three battles per weekend. Team scores were dependent on both individual duels and reaching victory conditions in the overall scenario.

So, on the fourth weekend, battle was joined once again. I was on the verge of being eliminated from the tournament, though happily I would not be the first if I didn’t make the cut. My primary objective was to survive longer than Bill. Bill was the fundamentalist cleric I mentioned earlier, and at this point was about a year away from being shunned for degenerating into a complete asshole. Though he remained part of the group, tensions between Bill and I had been on the increase. I had to beat him.

The battle started off well. My team located the enemy flag, and eliminated one of their fighters in the process. The enemy lacked reliable intelligence on the location of our flag, and were outnumbered four to three. For me however, the situation was grim as Bill was the one who got credit for the kill. (Even though the weasel had backstabbed someone Jafo had already engaged.) He was one step closer to moving on in the tournament.

Thus motivated by desperation, I decided to act decisively. The enemy had taken up defensive positions on a small ridge. Heavy undergrowth protected their flanks, and any effort on our part to swing around to take their flag from the rear would give them plenty of time to redeploy, or even to move their flag. I turned to Jeff, and told him to cast a paralysis spell on the enemy. Then, I said, we would rush them. The plan meeting their approval, my teammates and I went into action. Jeff threw two water balloons at the enemy. One missed, and the other splashed Cory. Now Cory could not move until he counted to thirty as fast as he could. But we had engaged too soon. Cory was already at twenty five by the time we scrambled up the ridge.

Like a retarded and clumsy shadow of the Viking berserkers of old, I rushed up the ridge. I blocked a blow from Tim’s short sword with my shield. This is going to work! My mind completely free of any thought that I was fighting my functionally unarmored friends, I swung my sword in a massive overhand blow. Future eye surgeon Bob raised his sword to parry. My sword hit his hand, and I heard something very like a wet crack. Instantly, my berserker rage was replaced by geekly self doubt and confusion. I managed to get out an, “oh shit!” before losing my balance, falling down the incline, in the process stabbing Jafo with my sword. Simultaneously Jeff was hors de combat according to our rules and knocked out of breath. Skidding down on my back, I knocked over our wizard, future rocket scientist Jeff. Cory, having reached his count of thirty, nimbly sprang down and administered the coup de grace to Jeff and me. In one spastic maneuver, I had removed myself and two of my teammates from the fight, reducing our combat capable fighting strength by exactly 75%.

And of course, there was the matter of Bob’s hand. His fingers had already swollen up like Polish sausages. So, we had to troop back to the house, and explain to Cory’s parents what had happened. Cory’s mom was a teacher at the high school, and was at least somewhat prepared for teenage idiocy. Cory’s dad was a bit grumpy even on good days. He threatened to feed me to his dogs. If I’d hit Cory, he probably would have. But he never really liked Bob anyway, so I escaped that indignity. But then I had to personally apologize to Bob’s mom, who was herself a doctor. She had heavily invested emotionally in Bob’s future as a surgeon, and only a clean x-ray saved me from her undying wrath.

In less than a minute, I had: nearly ended a friend’s career before it had even begun to begin, humiliated myself, brought the tournament and any future combat to a ignominious end, humiliated myself, embarrassed two of my teammates, humiliated myself, and gave Bill fuel to feed his supercilious arrogance for most of the next year. Oh, and I humiliated myself.

[wik] A fresh and well rested Buckethead enters the fray attacking my strong point: gaming dorkery. I should have expected as much, knowing as I do a few cherce tidbits about his past. Before I continue, I have to ask one question of my esteemed colleague: dude, just how old were you when this sad display happened? AD&D 2nd Edition came out in 1989, at which time I was turning 15. That would have made you… eligible to vote?

I’m afraid that I simply can’t compete with Minister Buckethead on the gaming front, having spent the most potent of that ammo on Geeklethal in prior rounds. My remaining gaming stories are fairly run-of-the-mill stuff, slap-fights over whether Paladins can stab someone in the back, whether characters really have to buy clothing for underneath full plate mail (yes, dammit!), and other such incidents that are not so much dorky as just small and pathetic. Indeed, I may be a poor judge of what is actually dorky in the first place. Voters in the last round deemed my Concert of the Squirts not dorky (I strenuously beg to differ), yet deemed a story I thought more an amusing throwaway than actually dorky - my Mexican AD&D Adventure - supremely dorky.

The rules of this contest stipulate that a response must address the themes of the first story. Well, I never joined the ranks of the Duct Tape Warriors, so I will shift axes slightly to give you a tale of being dorky in groups, sometimes outside, as I recount how I out-dorked the other dorks of the Boy Scouts of America

Idiot-arod

The Boy Scouts got me young. First I was a Cub Scout, and we held Den Meetings in my mom’s basement. Then I graduated to Webelos (short for “We’ll Be Loyal Scouts (in Baden-Powell’s Secret Army)),” and made candlesticks in Mr. Souther’s garage. Along with puberty I advanced into the tan uniform and gaily colored neckerchief of the big leagues. For a couple of years, I was one of the official flag raisers at our high school football games (this was when I was in about 6th or 7th grade), and got to raise the flag while the band played the national anthem, finally saluting the sight of Old Glory waving in the Ohio night with my best and most military three-fingered Scout Salute.

I imbibed everything. I found and read old camping manuals in which the women stayed around camp in their dungarees and jaunty scarves and minded the fire while the lads went off swimming and fishing. I read the entire Scout Manual and all the related publications, and made sure after every shower to give myself “a brisk rubdown until the skin tingles” just like one of them recommended. Every summer I went to summer camp, and every autumn I built a little car for the Pinewood Derby. I was into the Boy Scouts big time.

One winter, the regional Scout-council-whatever held a Scout Iditarod, a sort of Very Special Winter Olympics for all the troops in the region to take place at a local Scout campground. Each troop would construct its own dogsled and pull their dogsled around the campground in a circuit race, performing stupid tasks at each station (snowball target practice, light a fire in the snow with two matches, tie a series of knots). My buddy Seth and I got right on everything important (coming up with a logo, banner and name) and helped conceive the sled. Some dads built.

Seth and I spent a few afternoons working on our team concept, and after due consideration we felt we’d really cooked up a cool winter-themed name. We helped his mom sew us up a neat pennant with a mascot and had the sled painted bright red with our troop number and the name we’d chosen blazoned boldly in black. This was one of the first times in my life I’d taken charge of something, and both Seth and I were proud of the job we’d done. We counted down the days until the Iditarod, waiting with anticipation to unveil our creation to the rest of the teams, who would doubtless be thunderstruck with amazement at our creativity and talent.

Our troop arrived at the Iditarod and surveyed the field. There were a good couple dozen troops, probably about 30 or so, present from around Northeastern Ohio, so there was a fairly good cross-section of other Scouts against whom to measure our merits. Other troops had taken names for their team like the Timber Wolves, Huskies, Polar Bears, and Ice Pirates (there was that movie) with flags featuring slavering mascots with talons, fangs, teeth and knives. There were color schemes and airbrushing, and sleds with actual skis for runners. Suddenly our red sled with the plywood runners seemed diminished, and the name we had chosen became far less cool as we realized that we may have erred somewhat in dubbing our team “Penguin Patrol.”

Needless to say, with plywood runners and my sack of jello ass helping to pull the monstrosity through the snow as the other Scout troops jeered – the older, bigger boys of our own troop having lost their taste for this competition at the first sign of my fine handiwork – Penguin Patrol came in somewhere south of dead last, having managed thanks to me to out-dork every Scouting dork for fifty miles around.