Old School

by BobChristianPoetry

I’m an OG.
Original Geek.
Back when geek wasn’t cool—
it was a quiet kind of rebellion.
Back when liking sci-fi was a secret handshake,
and knowing how to fix a floppy disk
was basically a superpower.

I was 8-bit before it was retro,
before Sega had Genesis dreams
and Nintendo hadn’t even found its Power yet.
We had cassette tapes—
forty-eight kilobytes of pure imagination.
You don’t know the struggle
’til you’ve heard the hiss
of a game loading like it’s whispering
its soul into the screen,
’til you’ve waited minutes
for a world to appear—
pixel by pixel—
while your whole weekend
waited behind a dungeon door.

We lived in basements and back rooms,
summoned dragons from graph paper,
fired imaginary bullets with our fingers,
painted miniatures
like we were building gods.
The dice hit the table
like war drums,
like thunder,
like the heartbeat
of a revolution
no one else saw coming.

Mayor West was Batman.
And Batman?
Was everything.
We didn’t just watch heroes—
we became them.
Every lunch table a secret lair,
every hallway a hidden galaxy,
every insult we ate
was just fuel
for the origin story.

I’m talking
D20-wearing,
Sindarin-speaking,
comic-con-craving,
MMO-grinding,
keyboard warrior
with a spellbook in one hand
and a joystick in the other.

I was lore before TikTok.
Canon before cosplay.
I didn’t grow into this—
I was born with it,
wrapped in a cape,
rocking light-up shoes
and quoting Yoda like scripture.

So yeah—
you can wear the title.
Call yourself geek,
nerd,
fanboy,
fangirl,
whatever fits.

But try walking in these pixelated shoes.
Try carrying this legacy
like a lightsaber at your side.
Try loving a thing
so hard
you built whole worlds
just to live in it.

Because me?
I’m not just a fan.
I’m the blueprint.
The origin story.
The one who rolled initiative
before the world knew
what the game even was.

NB You can also call me Rhiluron of Rivendell

(C) Bob Christian