My 10 years with 8-TM was a crazy trip into the land of underground subcultures (or, at the risk of sounding New Age-y, "tribes") hiding in the crevices of our oppressively monolithic corpora-culture. I’d actually been exposed to such a subculture which developed for ne’er do well suburban white kids like me in the early ’80s, when I went to my first punk rock show and fell in love with that weird and inexplicable family of misfits and thrill seekers. It was so easy to find people who were as sick of Reagan and trickle-down and lame-o Top Forty rock schlock and the whole effort to discredit all of the idealism of the ’60s to justify the greediness that was the call of the day. Unlike the punk scene today, it wasn’t all about Gucci rebellion; it was kids wearing the crap their mothers bought them for Christmas or stuff they bought at thrift stores so they would have enough money to go to see Hüsker Dü at the local rock’n’roll toilet all-ages show. We were poor and misunderstood and passionate and disorganized, and it was quite a thrilling time and place to be in.

Fast forward a few years to the end of the ’80s, and my thrift store purchases were leaning more and more toward music instead of clothing, and it wasn’t uncommon to see me leaving with a garbage bag filled with clumsy cartridges and a dusty old player or two. Generally I would get my booty for under a ten-spot, and I can’t remember every spending more than a Jackson. I’d get back home and tinker for a few hours, and figure out some ridiculous way to incorporate 8-tracks into whatever goofy punk band I happened to be in at the time, although by this time we weren’t calling them punk bands anymore. We were all noise or grunge or whatever term we happened to like that week. We played in Chicago dumps like Batteries Not Included, or, if we made it big, the Cabaret Metro. There were a few of us who would soon have major label deals in a few years, like Urge Overkill and Material Issue. But for the most part we were the misfits we always were, directionless and proud of it. And the oddest and most wigged-out of us were into 8-tracks.

Looking for anything unacceptable to latch onto, we started a weekly bowling team at a neglected bowling alley called the Fireside Bowl. We brought our 8-tracks and players and amps and dressed up in our most heinous ’70s thrift store garb and even got on TV with our Disco Bowling antics. Traveling punk bands would get dragged into the craziness, years before they would be playing at the Fireside when it became one of the premier all-ages venues in the country. I was on the verge of finding a subculture that would congeal and sustain me for more than just a few years at a time.

I won’t repeat the story of how 8-Track Mind and the 8-Track Underground came to be such a big part of my life (you can read about that in Useless Angry Ravings 11/00). It followed the same pattern of my earlier subculture dabblings, but went further and deeper than all the others. I ended up forming bonds with people all over the country, who became part of an impossible, ridiculous community. Just like the punk and noise and disco bowling communities in my past, eventually this community moved onto bigger and more important issues and bonds, many of us getting immersed in jobs and families and the like. But as an eternal seeker of communities outside the Nuclear Family norm, I find myself searching for a new subculture for sustenance.

And realizing the basic geekiness that is woven like a thread through my life, I hit upon the notion of the Geek Nation. A lofty and even more ridiculous concept than anything in my past, the Geek Nation is for the millions who have been Black Sheeped into the underground, into cultural ghettos like Burning Man, clandestine raves, rock’n’roll toilets, freestyle hip-hop competitions, underground film festivals, homemade art galleries, and thousands of other places the self-important scene-makers would never be caught dead in. You might be part of the Geek Nation too, and not even know it. All I can guarantee is that everyone in the Geek Nation will have an amazingly good time, and my credentials are pretty good on that promise.

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