Brunswick - Brunswick, Maine. Approximate pop.: 23,000.
But that number needs revising if we consider those whose bodies dwell in Brunswick but can't be said to live here.
It's (why not?) a rainy night. You're puddle hopping Maine Street in a mad dash to reach Gelato Fiasco before 11 p.m. You make it at a quarter-til but you don't immediately step inside; instead, you stand before the great lighted windows and make an inspection.
The patrons can be roughly divided into two groups. The first, the approachable ones, comprise the WASPS, sunbirds, Bowdoin bears, prospective students and their glad-handing clan, professors busy with their private lives and the like. You know. Decent working people.
They ask you questions: what's your job; what's your major; where are you from? These questions are reciprocated.
No matter where the conversation leads, if parties discover they can use each other or not, topics typically tend to bland affirmations of likes, dislikes, personal triumphs and stock anxieties. Then there's the other group. His name is Nick Bent.
No. Nick Bent is not a pseudonym for superhero, porn star or private eye. You might have seen him cycling around town in baggy camo trousers and a glossy leather jacket.
He wears slender metal eye-glasses to focus a stare directed out of this world. He's an encyclopedia of medieval weaponry, battlefield strategy and tactics (in this world, he protects himself with a flick-knife, the blade shaped like a gust of fire).
Nick Bent also leads a second life as a cyberoptic wanderer of MMORPG platforms. But when he graces this world (only for a few hours a day—as he said himself, "The graphics are terrible") you'd be privileged to know him.
Or at least mildly satisfied that at a quarter to 11, licking gelato, you can commune with a soul who cares about something more than the immediate material attributes of what condition you're in.
Nick has a philosophy. Beginning with chat rooms formatted for D&G players in Ivy League and West Coast colleges circa the 1970s, the Society for Creative Anachronism, academia and virtual online worlds enjoyed a vibrant partnership.
It seems that, ever since the medieval ages ended, some subculture longs for their imminent return. The 19th century had William Morris; we have Nick Bent.
Through online video games, Nick revives a Utopian vision of chivalric values which spills into the real world in the form of martial preparedness and superlative etiquette. (He'd abruptly interrupt our conversation to hold the door open for some elderly patron.)
He dreams of a world of clean air, meat-based diet, communal living, 'questing' or guild economics and infinite natural recourses. By plugging himself in for hours each day, he attains the most convincing likeness of this heaven-on-earth that pixels can authenticate.
A simulation, yes, but a reminder of the seductiveness of alternate worlds—like Dante's cosmology or Fourier's machines of loving grace. It is perhaps by tragic oversight that academia has not yet tackled this prodigious interactive mirror of our society's desires other than cursory evaluations of the medium's violence.
It is perhaps by tragic oversight that a movement comprised of Nick Bent has remained underground.
But there's also a Nick Bent who falls short of his online avatar's ideal: the tough, nervous, consternated Nick Bent who believes he lives in a violent world.
I see in his autodidactic military education a man who's perceived and dimly refracts a periphery violence flaring outside the vigilant scope of streetlights lining Maine Street, outside Brunswick, Maine, outside the United States in the grim deserts of the east, which on Google maps are blank.
For this reason also, I like Nick Bent. This week, he's our townie.