In The Buff
Some people are all about something. Some people, for example, are all about chickens. They have chicken dish towels and chicken dish rags and chicken oven mitts. They have chicken calendars and chicken bed sheets. Chicken figurines dot their living spaces like little, made-in-China sentinels guarding against sanity. I personally know a person who’s all about cows and has cow everything. I was telling an imaginary friend about the All About People and he said, “Dude, I totally know a guy who’s all about tractors. He wears tractor t-shirts and wears tractor trucker hats and has a bumper sticker that says ‘My other car is a tractor’, even though it’s really a Toyota Corolla. He writes people John Deere letters and keeps little toy tractors on the shelves where his books should be.”
I’ve always wanted to be a buff. The All About People have obviously gone beyond buff, but I think buffdom would suit me. I tried my hand at being a Civil War buff but couldn’t pull it off because I’m not interested in the Civil War at all. I’ve always preferred the Revolutionary War. So, I became a Revolutionary War buff. I couldn’t pull that off either, though, because once you’ve read one comprehensive, college-level book on the Revolutionary War, you’re pretty much done.
Buffdom is book-centric, I’ve noticed, and so am I. I guess that’s why I thought it was for me. Buffs always have a lot of books on the buff they buff out on. I went to a garage sale once and there were hundreds of books on military planes. Bombers, fighters, fuelers. transport planes, cargo planes, planes you jump out of, planes you get back into, only to jump out of again. They were all planes that either directly or indirectly killed people, though.
“So that’s this guy’s buff, huh?” I thought. “War planes. I wonder why he’s selling it for a quarter apiece?”
I looked around, but there was no guy to be seen. The garage sale was being run by a single middle-aged woman.
“Maybe he died,” I thought. “Maybe in a plane crash.”
I suppose, conceivably, a woman could be a war plane buff, but why the fuck for? It’s stupid when a man is a war plane buff. But, I guess if suffragism has taught us anything over the last hundred or so years, it’s that women are equally stupid as men.
And why is buffdom so often war-centric? Nobody is a Dot Com Boom buff or a Reconstruction Era buff or a High Church/Low Church Controversy Within Protestantism buff. It’s so often war.
I hate war, so maybe buffdom is out for me, despite it being delightfully book-centric.
Frogs. Maybe I’ll be all about frogs.
