I have a secret...

Here are my bona fides: I make my living by thinking.  I am an academic and a scholar.  I am a passionate and excellent cook with a deep love for food, and by necessity, a correspondingly deep love for exercise.  I am a student of art and a teacher of aesthetics.  I enjoy fine wine, classical music, opera (a new passion), and good literature.  I rarely watch TV, I don’t have cable, and it’s hard to sit all the way through a movie. 

But I have a secret.  I am a true-blooded, dyed in the wool, lowbrow lover of trashy things.  It’s a weakness.  I would never watch Survivor or take in a Twilight movie, but put on a season of South Park and I’m your guy.  Hook up the Dave Chappelle show, and I’m glued for hours.  I will be moved by the novels of Paul Auster or the quiet austerity of Dr. Glas, but put the latest Stephen King in my hands and watch rapture follow.  Action books, spy novels, science fiction and fantasy.  God, how I love me some head shots, castle-storming, and dragon riding.  Better than the Iliad and the Odyssey, better than Dante’s Inferno – unless you mean the video game version…butt-kicking through the circles of hell, oh yeah! 

Oh, I like fruit smoothies with farmer’s market raspberries or blueberries.  But I love them southern Moonpies.  And I might make a ceviche with fresh, tossed greens, but some weekends I’m in the kitchen making whoopie pies and homemade cinnamon rolls. 

And I’m a gamer.  A serious one.  Games of all kinds.  Brain teasers? Logic problems? Word plays?  Awesome.  But so is Bejeweled, Portal, and Halo.  Games of all kinds.  Board games, card games, any type of game.  Now, don’t get me wrong.  I’m a mean chess player and I’ve even won a few minor tournaments in my division.  I like the high brow games, too.  But throw on Gears of War or Ninja Gaiden and I’m in my own little version of heaven.  And when all of the reading is done, when the brain is just worn out from philosophizing, and in those few last quiet hours of the evening, you can hear the whir and hum of my game console and some seriously frantic button pushing.  Love it.  And I’m old enough now to appreciate how far gaming has come: I remember the early and cheap PC games.  I remember the Atari, I remember Pong, Pac-Man and Donkey Kong.  Hell, I even have a current playable version of Dragon’s Lair on my computer.  Nostalgia for the good old days.  And dontcha know I can still beat it on one quarter.  Just like old times. 

See, I sometimes think I shouldn’t like these things anymore.  I feel as though I should occupy a more rarefied strata of intellectual pursuits.  And those are fine.  Just fine.  But sometimes, well, a lot of the time, I’m right down in the dirt, so to speak, tracing a bead on a bad guy and trying to save the world from destruction.  And I wouldn’t trade it for anything.  I like my trashy ways.  I like my Moonpies and sci-fi novels, my shoot-em-ups and video games.  Maybe it’s nostalgia, maybe it’s a break from reality.  Maybe.

But I am beginning to think that maybe what it means is that it is never too late to have a happy childhood.  Maybe what it means is that intellectuals do not have to always move along intellectual paths.  Or maybe it means that the high and low brow can coexist.  That inside every wine drinking, opera-loving intellectual there’s a dedicated gamer with the latest John Grisham and a Dr. Pepper.

In the end, I just don’t think the distinction holds up.  Rarefied?  Trashy?  Highbrow?  Lowbrow?  It’s just life and experience and fun and passion.  I will always love my Heidegger and Husserl.  My Pavarotti and Paganini.  But I will also love Halo and Mass Effect, Stephen King and Robin Hobb.  And you will still find me in the kitchen cooking up some biscuits and gravy and then firing up the ole game console and whipping bad guys.  It’s just how I am.