Spores, Molds and Fungus

Over the years, I’ve fallen madly in love with many fictional nerds. Special Agent Dale Cooper, George McFly, Dennis Kucinich. Some people think I’m too intellectual, but I think it’s a fabulous way to spend your spare time. My first mad hardcore nerd god crush was on Egon Spengler, Ph.D. I couldn’t have been more than six or seven when I wrote him a love letter in which I expressed my desire to grow up to be a Gohstbuster [sic]. If I had known there would be math on the test, I wouldn’t have been so excited. Still, I grew up wanting to move to New York. I wanted to eat Chinese food bought with petty cash. I wanted to get kicked out of Columbia for my bizarre research. I’ve never been inside the New York public library ’cause every time I walk by I get the urge to run away. I even forced my parents take me to see Ghostbusters 2 in the theater, during that heady summer when I ate a pound of those hard sticks of Batman card gum, which is probably still somewhere in my body. After seeing the trailer for the new video game (with real, actual jokes!) and holding out foolish hope that a new team of smart-ass comedians might strap unlicensed nuclear accelerators to their backs, my love for Egon has awakened like Cthulhu. Ray is the true believer, but Egon is the brains. The kind of guy who would ignore you for weeks, and you’d come downstairs and find him asleep in his lab with a page of Tobin’s Spirit Guide stuck to his face.  He’s the brilliant, basement-office-dwelling, obscure-degree-holding heartthrob that really gives me a case of total protonic reversal.