The phrase midlife crisis makes one think of old guys buying Corvettes and taking road trips to Mexico — at least that’s the kind of thing that I remember from my Uncle Bruno’s midlife crisis. My Uncle Stanley lived in Florida, so I only heard tales of his new boat and tarpon fishing. My father, on the other hand, bought expensive fishing equipment and started visiting seafood restaurants to both see and eat what he wasn’t catching.

My midlife crisis came as something of a shock and is rather difficult to describe. It was like one day realizing that there were no more dragons left to slay and that the odds of my ever making it to Mars were just slightly north of nil. Yeah, I know dragons were just as gone the day before, and Mars wasn’t on the itinerary either, but something drove the point home. I suddenly knew what Bilbo meant when he said that he felt like butter spread over too much bread.

I needed to find a way out of my funk, and quickly. Not because I was the possessor of an artifact of ancient evil, but rather because I was beginning to feel rather ancient. So, with a dirge in my heart, I began my quest to maybe recapture some of my lost youth.

I never considered getting a Corvette or a boat, though I would have gotten a submarine if it was inside my price range, but who’d trust their life to a $500 submarine? Fortunately, around the same time my MP3 player went belly up, which kept me from considering anything insanely stupid, or at least potently fatally stupid. I decided to spend my money on geeky toys.

My first purchase was a 32 GB iPod touch, which gave me a bit of trouble when I updated it to the latest version of iOS (hint: firewalls can sometimes get it the way). Once that issue was corrected, my next purchase was Plants vs. Zombies for the iPod touch, which was followed quickly by The Walking Dead: Season One.

There was still a somber theme going on, but the purchases, especially the videos, seemed to help. So, armed with this knowledge, I bought Inception, Predators, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and Captain America: The First Avenger. All of the movies helped, though I found myself watching Rise of the Planet of the Apes about once a week. The movie seemed to strike a chord in me, probably because I was a little kid when the original Planet of the Apes came out. It seemed that I had finally found my Corvette, to quote Sir Terry Pratchett, “Ook!”

I bought the original series of movies — Planet of the Apes, Beneath the Planet of the Apes, Escape from the Planet of the Apes, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, and Battle for the Planet of the Apes — and watched all of them with my daughter in about three days. Every film triggered a memory.

All in all, it’s good to be a geek, especially when there are videos and people to share them with when you’re in a funk.