Greek Geek

I may have officially entered the hallowed halls of Geekdom yesterday when a satirical magazine agreed to publish an essay I wrote about the Greek debt.  It was a piece I had worked on diligently, and includes a copious number of references to Greek classical literature, mythology, and the pantheon of gods and goddesses.

In short, it's a classic essay and I am glad someone, at last, recognized the moribund and bawdy humor in it.

This Greek piece, along with several poems of classical Greek reference and another humorous essay I wrote on Latin cognates, would seem to make me an official Geek.  I expect to receive my decoder ring and club membership in a plain brown wrapper any day now.

Naturally, I will have to tell me wife about my Geek fortunes next time I see her.  She is always perturbed by my writing choices (as they produce no money) and she continues to request that I sell one of my novels for a tidy sum.  She doesn't understand why I would waste my time writing about Zeus, or Heracles, or Hades (god of the underworld, in case you didn't know).  She thinks I should focus on writing mysteries or thrillers (of which I have many) and most recently she has insisted I write romantic novels of the type and variety that women purchase by the truckloads.  So, I thought I'd try my hand at it . . . a romance novel with paragraphs like:

She undressed him with her eyes but then realized this was the way most men his age looked while they were taking a shower.  He was hideous and she walked away in disgust.  She didn't realize a man could have udders and she felt, suddenly, hungry for a Dairy Queen Blizzard with Reeces Pieces.  She removed five dollars from his wallet and sped away in a cloud of purple exhaust fumes, wondering why she had married him twenty-eight years before and how her life would have been different had she married Stew, who was now a sales manager for H.H. Gregg and could get her a sweet deal on a plasma television.  But she knew she would never leave him; he had hooked her big time years ago when he washed her chassis for free and then wrote heartfelt notes to her mother, asking for her hand and her heart.  She would love him forever, into the twilight of their years when, at last in retirement, they would study the works of Aristotle in the original Greek and would, some day, make out in the back of the pickup on an old mattress they had once purchased for their son from Goodwill.  Theirs was a classic love story for the ages, and they were still writing it in large 14-point Times New Roman font.

You see what I mean?  No wonder my wife wants me to write romance.  I could make a million.