This is the very worst picture ever taken of me. The year is 1982 or 1983, and I'm in fifth grade. It was around the time my family's optometrist claimed I was "reading too much" and prescribed bifocal reading glasses. The elderly eye doctor softened the blow to my self esteem by letting me pick out a sports-themed vinyl case for my new glasses.
      Here, nerd. Enjoy your new bifocals with this fake leather case with a picture of a soccer player on it.

I can count my grade school and high school sports victories on one hand. And by victories I mean:

1. I scored one goal (a foul shot) during several years of soccer. (Albeit, I was a defender)
2. I won a single heat swimming the back stroke.
3. I won two freestyle wrestling matches, one against my friend Epi Sedano, who, I'm convinced, let me win.

While other kids had legitimate interest in sports-themed accessories, I was into books like Fantasy Wargaming. It was my immersion in the science fiction, horror, and fantasy genres that prompted the prescription of bifocals worthy of a Bible-smacking televangelist. If I remember correctly, Fantasy Wargaming sent me to the dictionary to look up the word "codpiece." An Amazon reviewer really nailed it, saying, "Other chapters wallow in minutae [sic]--does anyone REALLY need several pages telling you how to model an army of 500 Normans using 18 figures?!"
      My thoughts exactly, dude.
      I was into Dungeons & Dragons, but wasn't all that interested in the complicated rules pertaining to melee rounds and hit points. I was more fascinated in the storytelling and mythological aspects of the game, and when I played with my friends it was always about devising traps and monsters and crafting a narrative together. I look around me at the tech company office where I'm currently writing this, and can bet that the web developers I pass in the halls used to play D&D by the rules. I'm in Editorial. I deal with the words. And I'm pretty sure I get paid a lot less for it.

You can't read it, but the hat I'm wearing in the photo says "Lopez Island." It was by far my favorite childhood hat, purchased on the island of that name during one of my family's mini-vacations. We would stay at the vacation house of Greg and Mary Johnson. Greg was a farmer, one of the tallest people I've ever known, and a fan of ZZ Top, a fact over which we bonded. The property had been in the Johnson family since the early 20th century, and the one-room shack where earlier Johnsons had lived still stood in the meadow, overgrown with blackberry vines. The new house, built in the '60s, sat on a grassy bluff overlooking a private cove with tide pools teeming with sea anemone and starfish. In the summer, at dusk, deer emerged from the surrounding forest to graze.
         I regularly wore the hat to YMCA Day Camp, where I was a counselor-in-training, or "CIT." (I'm wearing a YMCA Camp Anderson shirt in the picture.) One day, soon after the picture was taken, some jerk seven year-old grabbed the hat off my head, ran into the woods, and hid it somewhere. Despite my standing as a CIT and the authority that went along with it, I was unable to persuade or threaten him into revealing the hat's whereabouts. Looking at that hat now still makes me kind of sad.

Those pants.
         Let's move on.

About the contraption slung around my shoulder. I got the blue bag during the greatest water balloon fight of my life, at David Reed's epic birthday party. David's mom Joyce was an artist, his dad my soccer coach. They lived on several acres surrounded by farmland on Fir Island, in the Skagit River delta. Their house was below sea level and the dike was just beyond their side yard. For David's party they devised a massive, multi-team game of capture-the-flag, inviting all the boys in our class and their dads. We divided into four teams and each had forts spread around the Reeds' property. Each player was equipped with an arm band and wooden shield bearing the insignia of his team, and a satchel for carrying water balloons. If you got hit by a water balloon, you were sent to jail--the Reeds' deck--where they'd laid out all the snacks. I can't remember who won, but remember it being one of the most fun days I'd ever spent with my dad.

         The blue bag around my shoulder is my water balloon satchel. And what's in it is one of those old-school tape recorders, with the chunky black buttons and the single speaker. And most likely, the tape playing in that tape deck was Devo's New Traditionalists. In other words, you're looking at the world's most primitive Walkman.
         I'll say this, too, about David Reed. He once almost got me busted for drawing a penis on C-3PO on his Star Wars pee-chee at my birthday slumber party. Crying, he showed it to my mom and accused me of desecrating the folder with non-droid-appropriate genitalia. Presented with the evidence, I was profoundly offended--not because I was being falsely accused, but because that wasn't the way I drew penises. I grabbed a piece of paper and quickly drew a penis in the style I had perfected--testicles dangling one off either side, clean line demarcating the head, no slit in the tip. My mom compared the two drawings and proclaimed me innocent. 

You might notice some weird marks near the top of the picture. These are holes left by a thumb tack, meaning that at one point, this picture was posted somewhere, likely my bedroom wall. I imagine my fifth grade self proudly finding a spot for the picture among my Far Side cartoons clipped from the Seattle Times. Who was that kid, and how could he think he looked, well, cool?

I kept reading too much but ditched the glasses, lost interest in D&D, and eventually got a real Walkman. I went through hair styles and colors and came to terms with this disability that prevents me from comprehending fashion. My disability, in full-flower during my undergraduate years spent in the geographic epicenter of grunge, was exacerbated over a decade working for Seattle dotcoms, companies that proudly trumpeted their anything-goes dress codes. I now depend on my wife to prevent me from looking like a complete disaster.
         My mom sent my very worst picture to me in a batch of other family snapshots. In most of them my hair looks like the kind of hair you snap onto the head of a Lego action figure. There are teal tank tops under acid washed denim and shirts that combine the colors pink and black. There is a mullet, proudly worn, and a black trench coat. But no picture comes close to capturing the vibrant nerdity of my early years as this one, in which I clutch Fantasy Wargaming like a Statue of Liberty who's never kissed a girl, welcoming multitudes of awkward pubescents to my nation of speculative fiction and professional wrestling.
         I've shown this picture to some of my friends, posted it on my Myspace page, and gotten some good laughs out of it. I found there's something extremely liberating about sharing this "before" picture, as if the act of sharing is a way to acknowledge how, miraculously, despite my early awkwardness, I grew up to be a guy a woman actually wanted to reproduce with.