Do something, even if it's wrong

When I was about five, my grandparents bought bikes for myself and my sister. Those bikes were promptly stolen from our garage, well before I'd mastered the art of staying upright on mine. The following year, my sister got a new bike, learned to ride it and was all over town in short order. I got a Nintendo, and quickly decided that going outside for almost any reason was overrated. After all...frickin' Zelda. 

This set up a pattern for me, one of the kids who'd be inside reading instead of...whatever else kids that age do; I'm still not sure. On the minus side, I didn't learn to ride a bike for another 20 or so years, and yet didn't actually end up any better than my peers at video games. On the plus side, I still have yet to break a bone or get stitches, I never fell down a well or got into a van with this guy.

But I grew up as a pretty sedentary kid, on into my teenage years. This bothered the hell out of my dad, who once had jumped a freight train in Addison and took it out to California, lived there for two years and hitchiked back. He didn't just get into a van with that guy, he was that guy for a while. Frequently, when sitting around the house reading comics or whatever, I'd find myself subject to his admonition: "Do something, even if it's wrong!"

To be frank, I'm still a pretty lazy kid. I'm almost 30 and I'm well used to 120-hour work weeks, but that sedentary nature really did take root. Lately, I've taken to yelling that mantra to myself, since Dad has since packed up and moved to Mexico (where my stepmom was summarily bitten by a scorpion and nearly died - she does things even if they're wrong, too). See, if I'm not careful, like many God-Damn nerds cerebral lads of my general age, I find myself spending way more time thinking about what to do and planning the right way to do it that I get caught up in that process and seem never to get around to acting on those plans.

So I've tried to live by a watered-down version of this credo; I'm not feeding beer to stray half-wolf dogs in Arkansas and then taking them to a vacation house as pets for my kids or helping any of my friends dodge college to sneak off to the Vietnam War like he did, but...baby steps, man. Baby steps. I started with occasionally cutting myself off in any kind of plan-making or thought process, even when it wasn't 100% there and going to work. Now...well, things aren't just not thought out 100%. I'm probably lucky if it's as far as 50%. Or maybe 35%.

Yet, I'm still immersed - since I couldn't get away even if I wanted to - in that nerd culture that seems like it can't order a pizza for two to save its life. It's gotten particularly frustrating lately, with me feeling like everyone else is two steps behind, and looking like I just walked out the door with my underwear on over my jeans and without my car keys.

There are a few specific incidents that precipitated this, but I'll spare you the details for the time being. Suffice to say that I'd been planning the right way to start this blog for awhile now, and while it's probably wrong, at least now it's done.