I love being up early in the morning, with the soft orange light hitting the high points of my Atlanta, light blue down below. The grass in the park is wet and things are quiet.

All the people who have stolen my car stereos or left me, which is to say the evil-doers of the city, are sleeping, presumably with lies in their hearts. For now, they pose me no threat. I can go get some hot coffee and a bagel without fear of a gaping hole in my dashboard or chest.

Over time, the fuzzy orange lines of the daylight get yellower and sharper as they slide down the buildings to the ground. By then, the day is on and morning is over and it’s a shame.

I think the best move is to spend as much time as you can in the fresh air, possibly on a bike, turning the quiet fire in your heart into forward motion and happiness. I may be left behind and stolen from, but my body works ok.

When the sun goes down, I reflect some, but not too much. I like to look at the stars.

Finally, I lock my doors and slip my body into bed to sleep safe like a hidden prize. If I feel a little bit beaten up as I slip off, that’s the mark of a good day.

I can get up early tomorrow and enjoy the morning.

Who knows how many there will be?

Not long ago, a female associate came to meet me so that we could drive around town together and spend some of my money. This is called a date.

As is my custom, I started getting ready at the precise moment that we were supposed to meet. I recommend this practice to all my fellow men. If you say you’re meeting at seven, you get up off the couch at seven. Trust me.

If you start getting ready like you would for a business meeting you will be ready to roll on time. Now you’ll have 30 minutes of fidgeting around the house with nothing to do while she gets un-late, or you’ll be sitting in your car at her house waiting for her to come out.

The last is rare for me as I get girls to come to meet me somewhere or drive to my house. I pay and open doors and comport myself in every way as a gentleman would — outside of my wildly creepy sense of humor of course — but driving to their houses and picking them up on top of all that feels too old fashioned to me until we’ve been seeing each other a while.

On the occasion in question, I got out of the shower, dried off, splashed myself with my signature cologne and put on my evening tuxedo. The head of my animal army worked me over with a lint roller to make sure everything was in order, paying special attention to the gold-tasseled epaulets.

Just then, nearly 7:30, my phone buzzed. She needed directions. I gave them, even using the word “lair”.

“is that, like, your apartment?” she responded.

“Sure, if you want to use a non-creepy word for it.”

Also fairly recently I was putting this practice into effect for a daytime first date, and the message came in asking if we could move it back one hour. I responded “Sure, I should have these bodies hidden by then.”

She met me anyway, which leads me to believe she’s a fairly cool chick.

So, here is my amended list of dating steps for nerds:
Go outside. There will be girls there.
Talk to them like you would talk to a slightly annoying little sister.
If there is one you like, flirt with her. Touch her arm.
If she doesn’t run away, invite her out with you.
If she shows up and you still like her after talking with her more, try to kiss her.

If at any point she runs away or doesn’t show up or doesn’t respond to a text or cancels a date without immediately suggesting an alternate time, you blew it. Take a shower, exercise more, eat right, sleep enough, wear some nicer clothes, possibly get a haircut, and try again with a different girl.

Important note: Once you have blown it with a girl, you’ve blown it forever. There can be exceptions, but if you can’t think of an exception in your case, then there aren’t any for you.

Along the way, you may be trying to gauge your progress by evaluating things that she says. This is a mistake and will surely lead to failure. If she shows up, she likes you. If not, you blew it. If she suggests some other time for you to hang out, that may be okay, but most of the time people who really like you will find a way to hang out with you.

In fact it’s best if you don’t try to evaluate anything women say with your nerd brain. This includes things your female friends say or advice they give on your dating. Most of the time it will be either indecipherable or useless or both. Example: “Just relax and be yourself!”

This is horrible advice. You are a nerd. Your relaxed self is on the couch in sweatpants screaming aggressive homoeroticism into a headset mounted on your face. That’s about the farthest thing from success with women there can ever be.

Beware: as a nerd you are only capable of processing facts, and women talk and act on the basis of emotion. It takes a long time to be able to translate one to the other, but one thing you can count on is that if she’s around, she likes you and if she’s not, she doesn’t.

Trust me, I have an almost magical power over the ladies. Only recently I was very much in love with a girl, but she exploded and the pieces were eaten by a tiger. Very unfortunate and clearly not my fault.

The one before that had a conflicting scheduled appointment to marry someone else, and the one before that stepped accidentally onto a plane and moved away for good, leaving behind a drawing of a middle finger.

The one before that just got tired of my shit. Sorry Cheryl!

First of all, let me just say that my sincere condolences go out to the family of the trainer who was killed by a killer whale yesterday at Sea World. As someone who has experienced a death in the family, I know it can be rough.

Even though I don’t know the trainer personally, I think that surely the question of death by whale had to cross her mind, much as a cyclist thinks about getting hit by a car. I think that anyone who works in that environment surely must say to themselves “Well, it’s unlikely, but if the worst happens, I’d still rather be doing what I love day to day”.

After all, they are called killer whales. Not groovy whales, or like-to-hang-out-in-peace whales, but killer whales. It’s a wonder its taken them so long to rise up and lay the aquatic smack down, what with all the hoop jumping and whatnot.

I think that wild animals are, for the most part, best left in the wild to do their thing. Sure, I maintain an army of trained animals here in my hermit lair, but I am a special case. I’m more animal than man. I can communicate with them.

So I’m sad that someone who loves animals got killed by the very ones she loved so much, but maybe its time to let the whole zoo idea go. I’m not sure that zoos or SeaWorld are providing a service to humanity as much as they are just a business model that happens to educate as a side benefit.

I’ll have to think some more on that, but in the meantime, stay safe out there, animal lovers!

Deep in my windowless underground hermit bunker earlier this morning, I awoke as I do every day leaping from my pallet of animal hides and sailing through the air directly to my coffee maker. Upon landing there, I made a pot of coffee.

I am so practiced at this series of movements that it does not require any of my attention and I can continue to sleep while my hands and limbs perform it.

Occasionally my trained monkey army will consider it amusing to hide my fresh ground coffee from me, or place a single shoe in the hallway for me to trip over, thus delaying fresh coffee from entering my body. These are offenses for which all participating members will be summarily dispatched, their bodies thrown to the weasels.

You talkinna me? You talkinna me?

Just jotted that down on my day planner. Thrown… to.. weasels. Yes.

Now, as you know if you spend anywhere near as much time as I do perusing the Internet for boobs or comedy, you have surely heard the nerds lamentations that the movie industry puts all the funny jokes from a comedy movie in the trailer, thus negating the need to actually see the thing in its entirety.

Well, I am happy to say that it appears that those laments have been heard and taken to heart by people who produce movies. The following shocking informative documentary, or SHOCKINFORMENTARY (all caps for emphasis) appears to have dispensed with the inclusion of anything factual whatsoever in the trailer.

Let me preface this by saying that I don’t typically talk about politics because I think the best possible jokes about it almost always appear on the Daily Show or Colbert Report before I can think of them. I’ll leave that material to the professionals.

Having said that, watch this:

Right off the bat you will notice the image of Hitler, which is a very clear symbol. You might think that he is a symbol of evil, but that’s not precisely true. There’s no doubt that he’s probably the most evil person ever to come to such power, but what he really symbolizes is that there is someone clearly to blame for whatever evil is afoot.

So you know whenever you see him pictured or mentioned outside of a historical context, someone is about to get blamed for something.

Next we see images of 1960s America, which was a golden age… except for that whole racial unrest thing. I note the lack of a photo of a black person enjoying ice cream along with the smiley whiteys. Well anyway it was a golden age damn it! Right?

Look at the way dad smiles and mom serves ice cream! I bet she does what she’s told. Hell yeah!

Then we see a peace sign, some hippies, an avalanche, some money, and a shark. Then there’s more shark, some vague words about history, and then we watch the whole thing in reverse back to a nuclear explosion. That better not have been the shark that just blew up.

This trailer makes perfect sense to me. Sharks are Hitler, and that’s what caused the hippie avalanche money crisis! It’s the untold story of the financial meltdown, I guess. Okay maybe I am still confused.

I headed over to IMDB to get some more perspective on just what was going on here, but there was no listing for Generation Zero.

So, I’m left to wonder what the movie is about. I’m a person who has watched a lot of documentaries so I assume I am the target market for a new one, but I refuse to watch anything that blames sharks for our financial woes. I just don’t think they had anything to do with it.

Besides, ever since I went as a shark on Halloween last year, I feel that they are kindred spirits.

I guess I’ll just wait and let Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert tell me what it’s about. That’s where I get all my news from anyway.

Can’t wait!

One of the biggest ways that I keep an eye on the Nerd Mines is through sites like Reddit and Digg. If you’re not familiar with their dynamic, Digg is prettier and more popular and Reddit is nerdier, not to mention openly resentful of Digg’s success and good looks.

You can see the difference represented here by Velma and Daphne from the inimitable Scooby Doo cartoons.

What do you mean, low cut shirts? I have a master's degree damnit!

Having said that, I still love them both and there’s no greater way to find nerd opinions on nearly everything there is to have an opinion on.

How else would I have ever heard of Chatroulette, which is a service that pairs horny male nerds with other horny male nerds, each hoping the other will be a girl so they can masturbate. No, I am not making this up.

The game goes like this: You turn on your web cam and connect to Chatroulette, then immediately disconnect over and over again until you “Score” someone on the other end who looks vaguely female. Then you commence attempting to get her to in some way approve of or facilitate your masturbation via satellite.

This is one of the dumbest things I have ever heard of.

Nerds: Go outside. There will be girls there. Talk to them for a while, and if they don’t run away, try to kiss them. If they do run away, exercise more, take more showers, get some new clothes and possibly a haircut. Repeat process until success.

You’ll know success when you get there. In a few short year’s time you’ll look into the dark recesses of your closet and see your black leather duster hanging there, unworn, and you’ll be glad you stopped wearing it.

You may even reach into the pocket and find the Leatherman multi-tool you used to carry every day for no reason whatsoever. I remember mine fondly, clipped to my belt along side the leather zippo case and text pager.

Little did I know at the time that I looked like an extremely retarded Batman parody.

But I recovered from it, and you can too. Come on, guys!