Wil Wheaton's Blog, page 9

finally being included is everything to me

Last night, TNG was given the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 51st Saturn Awards. (The Saturn is the sort of the Oscar for genre movies and television, if you aren’t familiar.)

I have never cared about awards (I think I’ve mentioned that being nominated is more than enough), and I still don’t. I’m not minimizing this, to be clear. It’s fucking awesome. But I didn’t need an award to know that I am part of something special.

Photo via TrekMovie.com I was standing on the other side of Dorn, until Gates insisted I stand with her. I’m not crying, you’re crying.

The thing about last night, though, is that for the first time in almost 30 years, when the TNG cast was recognized and celebrated, I was finally included. (Put another way, I was not deliberately excluded). I got to stand on stage with my TNG family, arm around my Spacemom, while a room of our peers, including people I idolize, cheered for us.

And I got to be part of it. After all these years, that meant everything to me.

look what you made me do

If I cared any less about the NFL, it would take effort. I get that it’s massively popular, and for some of its fans, “I like football” is their entire personality. Good for them. Sincerely. It’s just not my thing.

But! I love and admire Taylor Swift, which is the only reason I know that the Chiefs had some kind of huge comeback against Detroit and they are going to the Superb Owl against a team I can’t remember and don’t need you to identify. (EDIT: whoops. I mixed up the two playoff games. I still don’t care.)

I still don’t care about the NFL or the game, but oh my god do I love love love love love how outraged and furious and unhinged all these toxic right wing idiots are about Taylor Swift and her boyfriend the football guy. I love it so hard. I love how it’s waking them up at night, I love how they’re just so goddamn angry about it they feel sick. I love how self-inflicted it all is, and how they keep punching themselves in the dick about it, howling with what they think is righteous outrage, but sounds an awful lot like a toddler having a tantrum.

But the thing I love more than anything, the absolute best part of all of it, is watching a political party, under the complete control of the weakest, most pathetic, tiny little man, discover a new and novel way to alienate millions of voters they desperately need, while they push away countless voters who may have been open to their message, if only it wasn’t … this. LOL.

Republicans have already made it crystal clear that they hate women and want to have absolute control over every single thing a woman does. Voters have responded to that with record turnout to codify laws that protect women, and to replace as many misogynist lawmakers as they can.

So please join me in a robust round of mocking applause for whoever made the choice to attack and vilify and attempt to terrorize the most popular and influential woman of her generation, who polls more favorably than their entire party and all of their candidates.

Just a huge, roaring, standing ovation for whoever decided that the party of angry, toxic, predatory, authoritarian men will *absolutely* increase their support among a demographic they can’t afford to lose by picking a fight with their Joan of Arc.

Outstanding work, gentlemen. I have never seen a group of people slam their dicks in the door so beautifully and successfully. I wish you all the worst as you stare directly at the sun, but never in the mirror.

have your fondest wish, my friend

In TNG’s first … we will generously say “uneven” season, Q gives Riker his powers, with … unexpected … consequences. He goes on this “wish granting” spree in the fourth act, which includes a moment with Wesley that’s memorable for maybe not the reasons the writers intended. (Here I am, talking about it on Memories of the Futurecast)

This episode and its moment set the stage for this, from Star Trek Wholesome Posting on Facebook.

Some number of you are laughing at this because you recognize the references. But I have noticed that this is the first time a lot of people are seeing The Infamous Clown Sweater, so this is how I answered what became a FAQ:

“I did this fundraiser for EFF in San Francisco in … 2001? 2002? Something like that. It was at DNA Lounge, and after we were done, this person came up to me with this horrific sweater (jumper, for you non-Americans). They told me it was part of The Infamous Clown Sweater Project. What’s that, I asked. They told me they are getting as many people as possible to wear it and pose for a photo, which they would then upload to their webpage — not website, webpage, because it was 2001 or so — for all to see.

“Of course I was down for it, and that face I’m making in the first photo is my very real reaction to the awful stank that was just infused in the acrylic fibers.

“The second picture is from a con about … 2014? Something like that, based on how I look. Someone actually made their own version of that horrible sweater for me. One arm is too long, on purpose, the neck is all stretched out, on purpose, and it fits poorly, on purpose. It’s so damn funny to me, and it came along at a moment when we were doing this “then and now” thing on Twitter (before the fascists took over).

“I still have the second sweater. I have no idea what happened to the original. Last time I checked, the website that hosted all those pictures — so old it was manually coded in html, predating even Flickr — was lost to the sands of time.

“But it never fails to make me smile when this picture comes back around. It reminds me of a specific time, when there was just so much hope for the online future we were all building.”

I’ve done a LOT of things involving The Infamous Clown Sweater over the years. It’s never not funny to me, it’s moment has long come and gone, but when it shows up (which is does, about once a year), I always enjoy it.

And for those of you who are too young to know what Riker giving Wesley his “fondest wish” is, well …

Wesley wanted to grow up to be a blue-eyed blonde who I’m pretty sure the costume designer wanted to fuck?

GEORDI! GROSS! You’re not helping!

Look. I love you, Commander Riker, but … you’re gonna want to try again. Wesley’s fondest wish rhymes with “marathon betazoid orgy on risa”.

precious and fragile things

I remember in the eighties our local ABC station did a summer promotion thing where they broadcast a different 1950s 3D movie every weekend for a month. I feel like we bought the glasses at 7-11; maybe they came with a Slurpee or something like that.

However we got them, I remember watching local weather guy Johnnie Mountain host a movie called Gorilla At Large. He shot the host segments wearing a striped suit and straw hat at Magic Mountain (and my memory insists that it had not yet been bought by Six Flags, but the timeline just as stridently disproves that, so we’re going with the data-driven argument while we stare real hard at people who ignore the data-driven argument because they don’t like the way it feels.)

I’m realizing as I type this that I just described Lyle Langley, so maybe my memory on that specific point is also unreliable. But, you know, print the legend I guess.

Gorilla At Large is the only movie I remember. I feel like there was one other gorilla-focused film, but I can’t say for sure. What I do recall about Gorilla At Large is that it was a lot of a guy in a suit who found reasons to lunge toward the camera, the 3D was cool, but not as immersive as I hoped it would be, Johnnie Mountain’s host segments were SO CORNY, and that I loved every second of it. I watched it on the floor in the den, with my brother and sister, on a huge pile of blankets and pillows we built, with all the lights turned out so there were no reflections on the TV. Mom made us Jiffy-Pop (we did the kind of helping where you watch), and dad must have been at work because I don’t remember him being there.

I just remember staying up past our bedtimes, watching a bad movie that was still fun, feeling the way I imagined families were meant to feel.

Wow. I’d forgotten all of that, but now I can see it as clearly as if the blue blanket was wrapped around me right now. Jeremy is wearing one of his hats, and Amy is still really little, so she falls asleep before the second or third commercial.

This must be from a time I call Before. It’s the most precious time in my life, before my mom sold me and my sister to The Curse, before I knew how my dad felt about me, before he decided to be my bully. Before sadness, loneliness, confusion, and fear filled up all this space in my life that I am still cleaning up today.

I don’t have a lot of clear and happy memories from my childhood, and when I saw this picture on Tumblr earlier, and thought it would be fun to write about watching a 3D movie on TV, I had no idea it would unlock this particular one, literally seconds ago.

But it’s like I’m looking at one of the pictures I don’t have because my mother still refuses to let me have any of my childhood. I can see it all so clearly, how much fun it was, how I felt like the big brother I always wanted to be, even if it was just for that one evening in the eighties.

I’m grateful for that. It’s nice to experience one of these memories, instead of the usual, for a change.

two thousand nine hundred and twenty-two days

January 9, 2016 is the day my life — a life that belongs to me, that centers my needs and dreams, that I built out of the ashes of my abusive childhood — began. It was the day I chose to stop numbing my pain and started a slow, deliberate, committed journey toward healing the trauma that I experienced at the hands of my abusive, neglectful, emotionally immature narcissist parents.

Here’s what I wrote about this in 2021, the first time I think I was ready to talk about this in public, on my fifth soberversary:

For probably three years, I knew that I was slowly and steadily killing myself with booze. I was getting drunk every night, because I couldn’t face the incredible pain and PTSD I had from my childhood, at the hands of my abusive father and manipulative mother.

It was unsustainable, and I knew it was unsustainable, but when you’re an addict, knowing something is unhealthy and choosing to do something about it are two very different things.

On January 8, 2016, I was out in the game room, watching TV and getting drunk as usual. I was trying to numb and soothe the pain I felt, while also deliberately hurting myself because at a fundamental level, I believed the lies the man who was my father told me about myself: I was worthless. I was unworthy of love. I was stupid. The things I loved and cared about were stupid. It did not matter if I lived or died. Nobody cared about me, anyway.

I knocked a bottle into the trash, realized I had to pee, and — so I wouldn’t disturb Anne — did not go into the bathroom, but instead walked out into the middle of my backyard and peed on the grass. I turned around, and there was Anne. I will never forget the look on her face, this mixture of sadness and real fear.

“I am so worried about you,” was all she had to say. I’d been feeling it for a long time, and I faced a stark choice that I had known I was going to face sooner or later.

“So am I.”

Roughly 12 hours later, I woke up with the headache (hangover) I always had. For the first time in years, I accepted that I brought it on myself, instead of blaming it on allergies or the wind.

I picked up my phone, and I called Chris Hardwick, my best friend, who had been sober for over a decade at that point.

“I need help,” I said. “I don’t think going to AA is for me, but I absolutely have a problem with alcohol and I need to stop drinking.”

He told me a lot of things, and we stayed on the call for hours. I realized that it was as simple and complicated as making a choice not to drink, one day or even one hour at a time. So I made the choice. HOLY SHIT was it hard. The first 45 days were a real struggle, but with the love and support of my wife and best friend, I got through it.

2016 … remember that year? Remember how bad things got? (2023 Wil hops in to add: Oh, you sweet Summer Child) I was constantly making the joke about how I picked the wrong year to quit drinking, while I continued to make the choice to not drink.

Getting clean allowed (and forced) me to confront why I drank to excess so much. It turns out that being emotionally abused and neglected by both parents, then gaslit by my mother for my entire life had consequences for my emotional development and .

I take responsibility for my choices. I made the choice to become a drunk. I own that.

But I know that, had the man who was my father loved me the way he loves my siblings, had my mother just once put my needs ahead of her own (or been emotionally mature enough to even acknowledge that I had needs), the overwhelming pain and the black hole where paternal love should be would not have existed in my life.

I made a choice to fill that black hole with booze and self-destructive behavior. That sort of put a weak bandage over the psychic wound, but it never lasted more than a few hours or days before I was right back to believing all the lies that man planted in my head about myself, and feeling like I deserved all of it. If he wasn’t right, I thought, why didn’t my mother ever stand up for me? If he wasn’t right, how come nothing I ever did was good enough for him? I must be as worthless and contemptible as he made me believe I was. Anyone who says otherwise is just being fooled by me. I don’t really deserve any happiness, because I haven’t earned it. Anne’s just settling. She probably feels sorry for me.

All of that was just so much. It was so hard. It hurt, all the time. Because my mother made my success as an actor the most important thing in her life, I grew up believing that being the most successful actor in the world was the only way she’d be happy. And if that would make her happy, maybe it would prove to the man who was my father that I was worthy of his love. When I didn’t book jobs, I took it SO PERSONALLY. Didn’t those casting people know how important this was? This wasn’t just an acting role. This was the only chance I have to make my parents love me!

The thing is, I didn’t like it. I didn’t love acting and auditioning and attention like my mother did. It was never my dream. It was hers, and she sacrificed my childhood, and ultimately my relationship with her and her husband, in pursuit of it.

I didn’t jump straight to “get drunk all the time” as a coping mechanism. For years I tried to have conversations with my parents about how I felt, and every single time, I was dismissed for being ungrateful, overly dramatic, or just making things up. Every single time I tried to have a meaningful conversation about my feelings, I was met with an endless list of excuses, justifications, denials. They just refused to accept that my experiences were true or that my feelings were valid. When the man who was my father didn’t blow me off, he got mad at me, mocked me, humiliated me, made me afraid of him. I began to hope that he’d just blow me off, because it wasn’t as bad as the alternative.

It was so painful, and so frustrating, I just gave up and dove into as many bottles as I could find. And I was varying degrees of a mess, for years. A functional alcoholic, is what I believe people like me were called.

But then in 2016 I quit, and as my body began to heal from how much I’d abused it, my spirit began to heal, too. I found a room in my heart, and in that room was a small child, terrified and abused and unloved, and I opened my arms to him. I held him the way he should have been held by our parents, and I loved him the way he deserved to be loved: unconditionally. I promised him that I would protect him from them. They could never hurt him again.

I realized I had walked up to that door countless times over the years, and I had always chosen to walk right past it and into a bar, instead.

But because I had made the choice to stop drinking, to stop hiding from my pain, to stop self-medicating, I could see that door clearly now. I could hear that little boy weeping in there, as quietly as possible, because he was so afraid that someone was going to come in and hurt him. Without alcohol numbing me, I clearly saw that my mother had been lying to me, and maybe to herself, about who that man was to me. I realized that the man who was my father had been a bully to me my whole life. I accepted and owned that it wasn’t my fault. I didn’t deserve it. I didn’t do anything to cause it. It was not may fault. It was a choice he made, and while I will never know why, I knew what had happened to me. I knew my memories were real, and I hoped that, armed with this new certainty and confidence, I could have a heart-to-heart with my parents, and begin to heal these wounds. I sincerely believed this time would be different, because I was different. My parents are people you can’t talk to. You have to write everything down so you can refer to it when they twist around what you said and meant. So I spent a lot of time carefully putting my words together, shared a lot of my feelings and fears, and finally told them, “I feel like my dad doesn’t love me, and I don’t know what to do about that.”

I know some of you are parents. What do you do when your child says that to you? What is your first instinct? Pick up the phone right away? Send a text right away? Somehow communicate to your child immediately that, no, that is not the case at all, and they are not unloved, right?

Of course you do, because you’re not a selfish piece of shit. But if you’re my mom, you ignore me for two months. Total radio silence. When you finally do acknowledge the communication, you spend paragraphs telling me how much your horse costs, complaining about some woman I’ve never heard of down at your barn, and several other things that you don’t even realize or care are a list of things that are more important to you than your son’s realization that his father — your husband — does not love him. Eventually, you get around to telling me how you are incensed and offended. How could I be so hateful and cruel and ungrateful? Why would I make up so many lies about the family? Nothing is more important than family! How could I say such hurtful things?! Why would I make all that up just to hurt them? If you’re my mother, you don’t even acknowledge, or allow for the possibility, that I am in tremendous pain, and have been for my entire life. If you’re my dad, you wait four months before you write an email titled “your mother wants me to email you” that I don’t even open, because everything is in that subject, isn’t it?

Well. There it was. I had changed. They had not. They will not. Ever. They are emotionally immature narcissists.

So, I want to be clear: I take responsibility for the choice I made to become a full-time drunk. But I also hold my parents accountable for their choices, including the choice to ignore me for weeks when, after a lifetime of failed attempts to be seen and heard, I finally confessed my deepest fear: that my dad didn’t like me, much less love me. I can not imagine ignoring my child, who is clearly hurting, the way they ignored me. When I used to do the bargaining part of grief, I always came back to the weeks of silence after I confessed that I, their eldest son, felt unloved by his father. I mean, who does that to their kid? After a lifetime drilling into his head that “nothing is more important than family”?

Their silence during those long weeks told me everything I needed to know, and my sobriety was severely tested for the first time. Everything I had always feared, everything I had been drinking to avoid, was right there, in my face. When they finally acknowledged me, and made it all about their feelings, I knew: this was never going to change. I mean, I’d known that for years, maybe for my whole life, but I still held out hope that, somehow, something would be different. I had known it, but I hadn’t accepted it, until that day.

During those weeks, I spent a lot of time on the phone with Chris, spent a lot of time with Anne, and filled a bunch of journals. But I didn’t make the choice to pick up a drink. I’d committed to taking better care of myself, so I could be the husband and father my family deserved. So I could find the happiness that I deserve.

Once I was clean, I had clarity, and so much time to do activities! I was able to clearly and honestly assess who I was, and why. I was able to love myself and care for myself in ways that I hadn’t before, because I sincerely believed I didn’t deserve it.

I will never forget this epiphany I had one day, while walking through our kitchen: If I was the person the man who was my father made me believe I was, there is no way a woman as amazing and special as Anne would choose to spend her life with me. Why this never occurred to me up to that point can be found under a pile of bottles.

Not having parents sucks. It hurts all the time. But it hurts less than what I had with those people, so I continue to make the choice to keep them out of my life.

After five years, I don’t miss being drunk at all. It is not a coincidence that the last five six years have been the best five years of my life, personally and professionally. In spite of everything 2021 took from us (and I know it’s taken far more from others than it took from me), I had the best year I’ve ever had in my career — and this is my career, being a host and a writer and audiobook narrator. This is what I want to do, and I still feel giddy when I take time to really own that I am finally following MY dream. It’s a shame I don’t have parents to share it with, but I have a pretty epic TNG family who celebrate everything I do with me.

I wondered how I would feel, crossing five years without a drink off the calendar. I thought I’d feel celebratory, but honestly the thing I feel the most is gratitude and resolve.

I am grateful that I have the love and support of my wife and children. I am grateful that because I have so much privilege, this wasn’t as hard for me as it could have been. I am grateful that, every day, I can make a choice to not drink, and it’s entirely MY CHOICE.

Because I quit drinking, I had the clarity I needed to see WHY I was drinking, and I had the strength to confront it. It didn’t go the way I wanted or hoped, but instead of numbing that pain with booze, I have come to accept it, as painful as it is.

And even with that pain, my life is immeasurably better than it was, and for that I am immeasurably grateful.

Okay, before I add some new thoughts and reflections, I want to share last year’s progress / status update:

Okay, we’re back in 2023 now, and I’m so glad I read that all the way through. I’d forgotten some things and lost sight of others. I have some perspective again that I really needed today. As surprisingly good 2021 was, 2022 came in HOT. My memoir was released and I made the New York Times bestseller list for the second time (when they debuted the audiobook list, I was on it at number freakin’ one for Ready Player One. NUMBER ONE Y’ALL!). I mean, come on. That’s pretty incredible. Then I got to play on Celebrity Jeopardy THREE TIMES (my final airs next month). Oh, and I turned 50, which was not guaranteed as recently as eight years ago, when I was slowly drinking myself to death.

The most significant thing in the last year, though, has been a deliberate and consistent effort to heal as much of my cPTSD as possible. All the press for Still Just A Geek took a lot out of me. It was tearing a scab off a wound every day, exposing that wound to potential new infections, and then trying to clean and dress it before the whole thing started again. I don’t regret it. I did really good interviews and participated in public discussions centered on mental health care and abuse recovery that I know were meaningful to a lot of people. I’m sure the hard work I did promoting the book helped it get to the NYT list. But that work came with a hidden emotional cost I didn’t know to even look for. Since I finished, I’ve been doing EMDR therapy every week. I’ve been doing daily mindfulness exercises. I’m prioritizing my mental health in a way I haven’t, before, and it’s making all the difference. In fact, mental health care has been my theme since July, and is currently my theme for 2023.

None of this exists if I don’t make the choice I made 2556 days ago, that I have made every day since then, that I make today and plan to make tomorrow. But tomorrow is tomorrow, and I’m going to let today be today.

Hi. I’m Wil, and it’s been five six seven years since my last drink. Happy birthday to me.

Real quick: there’s a lot in this post and I want to take a moment here to tell you that if you’re hurting, there are wonderful people who are waiting RIGHT NOW to help you. I didn’t know that when I was suffering the most. I also didn’t have instant (and private) access to resources and professionals online to counsel me via my phone or laptop or whatever. I can’t tell you how to approach your journey, but I can show you two places you can start: https://www.mentalhealth.gov/ or https://nami.org/Home

As I observed last year, the press tour for Still Just A Geek exposed and intensified a lot — a lot a lot a lot — of deep emotional trauma. All my panic attacks came back. The night terrors returned. I started seeing my dad out of the corner of my eye, all over the place. I was so anxious and activated, I lost my shit at more than one person who absolutely did not deserve it. It was so awful, so painful, so scary, and I’m only now noticing that I never once considered diving into the bottom of a bottle to escape it.

That’s a big deal.

Instead, I did the work. Oh man. The work has been really hard. I’m doing EMDR therapy using an IFS model to help heal from childhood trauma that is so overwhelming and so extensive, I frequently have to stop and take a step back to just take in the enormity of my parents’ selfishness, abuse, cruelty, and neglect. It seems like, once a week, I remember something shitty or hurtful or selfish one or both of them did, and I have to like … disconnect from reality for a moment, become an objective observer of this set of facts and behavioral choices that two adults — two parents — made, and … even now I can’t find the words or images to describe the enormity of my father’s disinterest and cruelty, or my mother’s gaslighting and manipulation. It is no wonder I did everything I could to soothe that, but it’s a blessing that I found the strength and support to begin healing it.

About a year ago, I began spinning a cocoon for myself. With the help of my therapist, the love and support of my wife, my kids, and a couple friends I can trust, I went into that cocoon as fully as I could, to be in a place where I could safely do The Work.

I’m still doing The Work. I do it every day. It’s practice, like yoga or writing, or whatever you do daily with no expectation of solving or completing. It’s something ongoing and evolving, and while it is so much more challenging than pouring a third and fourth and fifth drink, I’m worth the effort. My wife and children are worth the effort.

Hi. My name is Wil. I’m 51 years-old and a survivor of child abuse and neglect. I have CPTSD, and I am a recovering alcoholic. It’s been eight years since I stopped drinking, and every day I make a choice to continue the streak. If you recognize yourself in my story, and you’re thinking that maybe you want to begin your own journey, I believe in you. It’s not going to be easy (for me, it wasn’t even about physical addiction; I don’t miss booze at all, and never had any withdrawal symptoms. It was all the emotional pain and trauma that I had to feel and experience without the alcohol to numb it, and finding other things to do to fill the time I spent getting drunk.) but nothing worth doing is ever easy.

I’m not here to preach at you or judge you. I’m just here as an example of someone who has endured a whole lot of real traumatic shit, who believes in you. I know how hard this was (and occasionally still is) for me, and I know that if I can do this, so can you.

I assure you that I am a fully functional human with a backstory and everything.

Yesterday, in r/losangeles, someone asked folks to share their weirdest celebrity encounter. This comes up about every three months, and regular posters in that subreddit know that it’s only a matter of time before the entire thread is horrifying, shocking, come-on-that-never-happened tales starring Andy Dick. Like, every single time. And the stories are always different, though basically the same.

So I went into that thread to see how long it took for the Andy Dick stories to get to the top (4 hours) and saw someone relate how they saw Gary Busey at LAX, and he was just sort of badgering everyone who was near him. I commented that I have seen him at LAX two different times, separated by at least a decade, and he was doing exactly that both times. You know that Far Side “How Nature Says Do Not Touch”? This is where I gesture toward Gary Busey and his teeth.

In response to that, someone asked me to flip the thread and share my weirdest fan encounter. I don’t know that I have one that’s weird (the space between weird and terrifying in this instance is measured in microns), but I do have two that are especially memorable, so I shared those.

I’ve had people behave in appalling ways, treating me like a thing, like a Pokemon to be caught and displayed. One guy followed me into a bathroom at an airport, literally trying to shove a pile of 8x10s into my face while I was at the urinal. I’m a generally laid back person, and I lost my shit at that guy. In retrospect, I should have just peed all over him. His version of the story must be … interesting.

But that’s a real outlier. I’m so lucky that I seem to draw the attention of kind and gentle people more than anything else, so those are the people who tend to approach and interact with me.

My favorite (well, most memorable) experience in recent memory was about … maybe six or seven years ago. My wife and I were in San Francisco for work, and we were waiting at a light to cross the street. This guy comes up from our left, jogging, and as he passes us, this sixth sense I have developed to keep me safe tells me that this guy just made me, and I need to be aware of that. Luckily for me, there are endless escape routes in this moment, but something in this guy’s body language tells me I won’t need them. (Hypervigilance, which is part of my body’s response to trauma, takes all of that stuff in, processes it, and blares it all back at like an air raid siren in the span of about a second and a half. WE ARE AT DEFCON 2 PEOPLE.)

He stops jogging and does that jogging backwards thing. He says, “Are you on The Big Bang Theory?”

He’s jogging in place which always looks funny to me, even though I’m a runner and do it myself.

I tell him that I am. His face lights up. “I knew it! Oh man! I love you on that show!”

WE ARE BACK AT DEFCON 5.

“Thank you!”

Then he takes a second while he’s thinking of something and says, “this is embarrassing. I know that your character is Wil Wheaton, but I don’t know what your name is.”

That’s when I got to tell him that I am Wil Wheaton Prime, and that the Wil Wheaton he sees is a character.

“I had no idea you were a real person!” He said. Then, he kind of caught himself, like maybe he’d insulted me or been unkind.

Oh buddy. You have no idea.

“Oh, I assure you, I am a fully functional human being with a backstory and everything,” I laughed.

He laughed with me. The light changed. We did a terrorist fist jab, and went on our separate ways.

I related this to Anne last night. She remembered all these things, because she was there for them.

“Weird shit happens around us a lot,” I said, “because of this weird job I have. But I read that whole thing, and I gotta tell you how grateful I am to know that I’m never showing up in one of those threads as the bad guy in someone’s story.”

“Except the bathroom guy,” she said.

I laughed. “I would love to hear that guy justify how he was the aggrieved party in that story.”

Of course, I know what that guy told himself. He told himself that he waited at the airport for hours and I owed him. That’s a thing that happens all the time, and it’s why I have this blanket policy of never engaging in photos and autographs at airports, ever, for any reason. And I don’t feel guilty about it. I used to, sure, thanks to all my mom’s conditioning, but I gotta tell you, the day I said to a belligerent guy at PDX, calmly and simply, “No, I’m not signing anything for you and I don’t care how long you waited here. You chose to do that, and I don’t owe you anything. Respect my boundaries.” And walked away while he sputtered in self righteous anger? Yeah, that felt great.

I am a fully functional human being with a backstory and everything. 99% of people I encounter know and honor that, and I am so grateful.

Write, you fool! [Arcade Games] [Bagman]

A couple years ago, I gave myself this challenge to post something new to my blog every day in the month of December. I liked the alliteration of Daily December and I needed to practice the discipline of creating and posting something new every day.

At the time, I hoped it would sort of revitalize my blog, which had taken a back seat (in a vehicle that was parked in a garage across town) to social media and the like. I hoped I would be inspired to keep writing in the new year, maybe get that vehicle out of storage and drive it around town.

But I felt like all the effort was for nothing. I wasn’t creating to satisfy myself; I was posting to create content. Eww. Gross. And the numbers on my blog didn’t move at all. Hardly anyone commented, I didn’t see an influx of returning or new readers, and when January rolled around, I remember thinking, “well, thank god that humiliating waste of time is over.”

Until just recently, I didn’t see any value in the exercise. Like I said, the goal was to generate interest by posting new content every day. And I didn’t hit that goal, because generic content isn’t what people came to my blog to read (and it isn’t what I like to write). I wasn’t all that interested in what I posted (though I love the post I did, and still laugh when I think of calling my team “The Los Angeles Los Angeleses” as they played the “Vancouver Vancouvers”) and the old adage “When you are interested, you are interesting,” has an equal and opposite adage “When you aren’t interested, you’re labored, or trying too hard.”

You can see — I can see, rather — the very meaningful difference between the two. And with the benefit of hindsight and experience, I get why I didn’t achieve what I wanted. I went about it in a way that was unlikely to deliver what I was looking for. Lesson learned.

Yesterday, I saw that my friend John gave himself a Daily December last month, where he wrote about a different comfort movie every day. He said it was to get that daily writing muscle stretched out and warmed up, because he has two novels due this year.

I don’t have anything due, at least not right now, but I do have some things I want to finish and release this year, and the muscles and discipline I need to use them have been neglected while I’ve been focused on mental health therapy and complex trauma recovery for much of the last year.

I’m not ready to commit to daily posts. I’m going to do daily writing (I’ve written this over the last six days), but I don’t know for sure that I’ll have something to publish every day. I’m not going to pressure myself with expectations. I’m going to start out with weekly posts from a list of topics that interest me, in the hopes that I will be interesting when I write about them, as well as looking forward to the creative process involved.

Inspired by a lifetime of RPGs, I made a table featuring all the different topics that are interesting to me. I’m going to roll on the table, and use the result as my prompt.

Today, my rolls landed on Classic Arcade Games: Bagman.

Okay, here we go.

Bagman was released in America by Stern in 1982, when I was ten years old.

I first saw and played Bagman at Shakey’s Pizza on Foothill Blvd. in La Crescenta, when we went there for one of those school fundraiser things that I weirdly remember were always on Wednesdays for some reason. This place had a dedicated arcade room, large enough to hold maybe five machines along one wall, with two pinball machines perpendicular to them. A change machine and candy machines were against the other two.

The routine was familiar: order dinner, drink as much soda as I could before my parents caught on, cram some mojos into my face and then go play video games while we waited for the pizza to come out. We sat a long, banquet tables on padded benches. Lamps hung low above the table, dressed up with fancy stained glass shades. The glasses were red, pebbled plastic. Mine had a chip out of the lip.

In 1982, video games were a huge part of my life, but my exposure to them was relatively limited. I didn’t get to go to arcades often, and never alone. I didn’t get to go to the mall where they had everything. I got to go to the 7-11 where they had two games and a pinball machine, and if they weren’t fun for me, tough shit, kid. Maybe they’ll be replaced next month, which may as well be a year.

Shakey’s was a place we only went to every couple of months, so there were always new games there, and they were always ones I never saw anywhere else. They had Pac-Man and Galaga, Space Invaders, of course, but they also had Star Castle and Vanguard … and Bagman.

In those days, everything you needed to know about the game was on the cabinet. Some games, like Karate Champ, had all kinds of combinations to refer to betwen levels or turns. Some games told you who the bad guys were and how to defeat them. Some games had vital parts of the instructions burned out by a player who carelessly let a cigarette burn down across it. (This happened way more often than you’d expect).

All games had gorgeous artwork on the sides of the cabinets, that hardly anyone ever saw, because most games were stacked right next to each other to maximize space. In 1982, I was starting to notice games with an attract mode, where it would play music and walk you through how the game was played.

Bagman’s bright, yellow, cabinet stood out in the dark arcade room. Other kids were clustered around Pac-Man and whatever was just past it, but Bagman was wide open. Nobody was playing it, and there wasn’t a single quarter on the “I got next” rail at the front of the marquee. I noticed that there was a comic strip on the marquee, and I took a closer look.

The marquee was so bright in the dim light, I had to squint to read it. Okay, so the Bagman breaks out of prison and goes into an old timey gold mine to collect bags of money he stashed there, with the prison guards hot on his heels. Okay, that makes sense, and it’s kind of promising an experience that is closer to Choose Your Own Adventure than Galaxian.

See, all the games I played up to that point were essentially about being a space ship, or whatever Pac-Man was. Occasionally, I was a car. Those games were about getting points and putting in my initials (or ASS if nobody was looking). This looked like a story, where I was a GUY. The only other game I played where I was a GUY with a story was Donkey Kong, and I loved that sense of being a person instead of a thing. (You know, something I was desperate for in my real life.)

While I considered what could happen should I take control of the story myself, and what (if any) animation I could expect to see when I picked up all the money bags, the game began its attract mode sequence. It played music, there was something that sounded like speech, and holy shit was there a lot to do! You could ride in a mine cart! You could break down walls with a pickaxe! There were multiple screens that were all connected! And though I would NEVER EVER EVER EVER EVER admit it to anyone, the sprites were ADORABLE. The little Bagman in his prison suit, the guards with their giant mustaches and little shotguns? The money bags that could have come out of a Saturday Morning Cartoon? UGH! STAHP! happytearsemoji.png It got me the same way the Smurfs did, for the exact same reasons. I stole a quick, furtive glance around to ensure that nobody — especially my dad — had somehow heard my secret inner thoughts. Of course, nobody did. That was impossible.

And yet. Where my dad was concerned, I could never be too careful. I’d learned that the hard way, over and over and over and

Still. Even a single quarter represented a significant portion of my budget. My parents were so stingy with the quarters at these things, I’d get maybe a buck and a half to spend on six games (the 50 cent games didn’t exist, yet) and I had to make each one count. It’s funny, the parent in me is like, “Maybe it wasn’t as unreasonable as you think it was,” but I’m telling you this story from a specific point of view, and I’m just relating how ten year-old me felt, something he wasn’t ever allowed to do.

So. To recap: in Bagman, you walk around a mine, picking up bags of money that you carry up to a wheelbarrow, while you avoid the guards. Fun music plays while you do it, and the whole thing is adorable. Okay, very simple. I got it.

I reached into my pocket and fished out a quarter. I felt its ridges against my fingertips as I turned it around and held it flat against my thumb in a singular motion before pushing it into the slot.

Bagman’s start screen

The game skipped the “are you ready” formalities of Donkey Kong and, like someone who had just escaped from jail, threw me into the middle of the action, on the run, bottom of the left screen at the base of a ladder. The music played! The little guard guy came lumbering across the top of the screen toward the top of the ladder, and I realized that I didn’t know where I was supposed to go. All the way to the right, along the bottom? All the way to the top? I guess? To escape? Like Dig Dug? Wait. I have to get the money! First you get the money, then you get the mojos, then you get the pizza. The world is yours.

The guard guy was now coming down the ladder.

I didn’t even have to move to pick up the first bag of money. I just tapped the button and grabbed it. I started to go up the ladder, but the guard was coming down too fast. So I yanked the joystick as hard as I could to the right, running away from the guard whose singular focus on methodically, relentlessly chasing me down was rivaled only by Jason Vorhees. I was about halfway across the screen when he got off the ladder. The money bag was slowing me down so I dropped it, picked up speed near the edge of the screen, and got run over by one of those mine carts I was so excited to ride in.

A sad “you lost lol” tune played.

Shit. That was really fast.

The game reset, and this time I went straight up the ladder. AS the guard started coming down, I was off to the right, picking up a different money bag. I went back to my left and up a different ladder. The guard followed me and gained as I climbed to escape him. Desperate to stay alive, I dropped the bag of money, killing the guard guy, who fell all the way to the bottom of the screen. “Yes!” I hissed with quiet excitement, as I pulled the stick toward me to climb down and retrieve my loot.

I was picking up the bag when I discovered that the guard wasn’t dead. He was just resting, pining for the fjords. Beautiful plumage. The Bagman cried out a digital “aye yi yi!” and the game reset for a third and final time.

Up the ladder, to the left, up another ladder, back to the right, up the ladder to the top of the screen! Now off to the right to see what’s hidden one screen away! IT’S HAPPENING!

The guard, realizing he’d been fooled my my clever movement, ascended the ladder. I scoffed and tapped the button to push the wheelbarrow into the second screen, which revealed itself to me in all its glory. This screen had TWO mine carts, three pick axes, a silver bag of money behind a wall that had to be blown up with a bomb — A BOMB! — and an elevator you had to wait for if you wanted to cross the shaft in the center of the screen. An elevator that didn’t arrive before the guard from the first screen appeared and ended my game before he even touched me. There was nowhere to go. Game Over.

Well, that sucked, right?

Yes. And no.

There was SO MUCH to do, I just had to figure out how to do it. There was probably a pattern or something to get me started. I just had to find it in a book at B. Dalton’s in the mall. (more about those books another time).

It wasn’t fun. It was frustrating. Why give me all these things to do, and program it so that all I could do was run away from the guard? I wasn’t mad as much as I was confused. Crazy Climber would vex me in a similar fashion, as would Track and Field, before I finally figured out that I just wasn’t very good at these games.

I went back to the table a little dispirited and resolved to be more careful with my quarters. I didn’t like mushrooms on my pizza. Mom and dad knew that, and they always got them, anyway.

I saw Bagman again and again over the years. While researching a little bit for this post, I saw that it was actually quite popular. There’s something to be said about perception versus reality, but not by me, at least not right now.

I also watched someone play the first level on YouTube and … yeah, there is no way ten year-old me was EVER going to figure out the things this dude had to do to complete the level. Like, I honestly have no idea how he figured it all out. Trial and error would have cost me a fortune back then, so when I played Bagman — always as a second choice when the clock was ticking on getting picked up and I had quarters left in my pocket — I never got past the first level. I never even came close.

But I kept going back, trying to kick that particular football, and AUGHing onto my back each time.

I have Bagman in my gameroom. It’s why it’s on this list of possible topics. Of COURSE I played it before I wrote this, between drafts, and during the rewrite. It remains as compelling as it is unsatisfying, more of an oddity in my collection than a beloved source of memories like some of the games I will likely write about at some point.

But I have played it so much this week that I got to put my name in for the first time, ever, which was pretty great. Bagman allows for long entries, so WIL RULES is currently looking down upon FANCHOIS, GASTOUNET, PIERROT, and JOJO.

And that’s Write, You Fool, Volume 1, Number 1.

my biggest rpg surprise of 2023

Someone on Reddit in r/rpg asked what the biggest surprise of 2023 was for us.

This is the kind of thing I enjoy talking about, so I thought I’d share it here.

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The biggest surprise for me this year was finding my way back into the depths of my library.

My first RPG was D&D Basic in 1983, and I’ve played ever since, tons of systems. I love it. It’s even part of my job.

But somewhere along the line, I lost the ability to pick up a module, some rules, a sourcebook, whatever, and just read it for the sake of reading it, to enjoy the prose, the box text, the illustrations, the fiction, unless I was going to play the game.

So I have entire shelves in my library that are filled with RPGs I haven’t read, but “want to play someday.”

This year, I read an AMA here from Stu Horvath, and someone asked if it was normal to just read RPG materials for fun, with no intention of playing them. He observed that there was nothing stopping anyone from doing just that, and for some reason, that’s what I, a 51 year-old Ur-Gamer from the Old Times needed to hear.

It was late in the year, but since then, I’ve gone through maybe a dozen of my books, some of them various flavors of D&D, most of them indie RPGs, all of them games I don’t think I’ll ever play, but *intensely* enjoyed reading.

The pandemic delivered a metaphorical (and practical) TPK to my group, and I don’t know how quickly or easily I’ll be able to assemble a new one, but when I do, it’s going to be one hell of a game, because I have all these new ideas and inspirations in my head, from reading systems and adventures I’ll probably never play.

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When I was in my teens, I read every GURPS sourcebook I could, cover to cover, losing myself in the imaginary worlds they represented. I loved those things as much as I loved any novel. I read all the FASA Star Trek RPG sourcebooks, because I wanted to know everything I could about the imaginary world I lived and worked in. Also: blueprints. So many wonderful blueprints.

I’ve recently read The Skeletons (the players are the undead who guard a tomb that is defiled by adventurers), Maschinezeit (what if dead spaceships were possessed by Lovecraftian cosmic horrors and you went to one, anyway?), Mothership (in space, no one can survive), and about half of The Lost Mine of Phandelver (5e starter box) because I hope to run it in the new year for a small group of friends.

I have shelf after shelf of books from popular systems, indie systems, out of print systems, loved and hated systems, and 2023 was the year I stumbled into permission to read them on my terms, rather than reading them to prep for a test.

Maybe 2024 will be the year I played more RPGs than I have in a long time.

a simple expression of love for each other

While I was cooking the cranberries, Ryan and his wife were behind me, preparing our turkey. Anne and Nolan were in the living room, reviewing the short list of “things Wil forgot we needed” which was only 2 items this year, a new family record.

The spray of orange oil as I zested the peel into the sauce was bracing and wonderful. I looked up and just took in, for a few seconds, the love and the joy all around me.

And I didn’t want to, but I remembered, all at once, 40 years of holiday meals with my parents where I was the scapegoat, my brother was the golden child, and my father was the racist uncle. (About two years ago, I was talking to my sister and one of us said something about how weird it was that we didn’t seem to have that racist uncle. Both of my uncles are awesome. And that’s when I realized that, just like if you don’t know who the sucker is at the poker table it’s you, who our dad was at every gathering of extended family.

And then I was as grateful and thankful and overwhelmed with happysadness as I’ve been in a long, long time. After a lifetime of being an unwilling but fundamental part of my mother’s Happy and Perfect Family lie, which included the demand and expectation that, at all family gatherings, I would make myself as small as possible, that I would absorb all of my father’s humiliation, mockery, and bullying, in front of generations of family, that I would be a thing to show off as evidence of how successful she was, how they were all wrong about her, I noticed something profound today.

Today, when I had those memories, I didn’t get angry. I didn’t get depressed. I didn’t get triggered or disregulated. I felt sad for the loss I always feel for the childhood I never had, acknowledged the grief that comes with it … and then I noticed that the hard work I’m doing with my therapist to heal and recover from my CPTSD and pain has created space I never had before to feel all of the joy and love and being part of a sincerely and genuinely happy family that doesn’t need to be perfect, because we are all enough, just as we are. I realized that I used to dread holidays, but I’ve been excited for weeks to be with my family today.

And I am so thankful for that love we share. I’m thankful for it every single day, but I’m thankful for it today, especially, because I can still feel what it was like, and how much it hurt, before.

The cranberry sauce bubbled as it thickened. I turned down the heat and grabbed a handful of herbs to chop up for the rub. Rosemary, thyme, oregano, and fresh black pepper mingled with the orange oil. The faint aroma of boiling sweet potatoes was just behind it, growing stronger by the minute. A cranberry snapped, releasing a tiny burst of steam.

We got the turkey into the oven, and quickly cleaned up as much of the kitchen as we could, in consideration of our future selves who we expect to be very fat and happy in a few hours, and probably won’t want to clean up a messy kitchen.

We did it all together, a simple expression of love for each other.

When we were done, my sons and daughter in-law went out to my game room to play video games. I came into my office to get this dust out of my eyes, and write it all down, because I’m a writer and that’s what we do, even on holidays, when something special happens that we don’t want to forget.

I am so thankful for that love we share. I’m thankful for it every single day, but I’m thankful for it today, especially, because I can still feel what it was like, and how much it hurt, before.

Mind your business, and don’t be a dick.

Someone asked me why Anne and I wear masks to hockey games, and because they weren’t a dick about it, I answered them.

I’m pasting it here, so I have something to refer to going forward.

Covid is very much still A Thing, and so is the flu, the common cold, and other respiratory illnesses. I started masking during the pandemic, because I didn’t want to get sick and die. I have kept masking when I’m in close proximity to other people, large crowds, or small indoor spaces because I haven’t had the flu or a cold or, gods forbid, Covid, since I made that choice. It’s such a tiny, simple, thing and it makes a huge difference for me. It’s too bad that so many people have decided to make another personal health choice that is none of their business, that doesn’t affect them at all, just another part of their culture war. And it tells you everything you need to know about a person when they are a dick about it.

From a practical standpoint: the guy next to me was coughing and sneezing his face off the whole game, and he couldn’t be bothered to wear a mask to protect the people around him from whatever he had. Whether it was a cold, or something more serious, I know I didn’t pick it up from him. That’s basically why I wear a mask whenever I’m in a crowd, and why I wish it wasn’t such a big stupid deal (pro or against).

I see a lot of thank yous for wearing masks in our photos. I appreciate the kindness, but we aren’t making a statement. We aren’t modeling behavior. We are doing what is best for us, period. This isn’t a statement, it’s just a personal health choice. If it helps normalize the entire thing, I’m happy for that passive bonus, but it’s not something I’m spending an action or even a bonus action on.

I haven’t heard someone complain that I wear shoes into a restaurant, and I haven’t ever had someone thank me for wearing shoes in a restaurant. I hope it will be the same with masks, sooner than later. It’s nobody’s business, and the only people who are dicks about it are dicks about everything else, anyway.

I’m just tired of this being not just A Thing, but A Big Stupid Fucking Culture War Thing.

So. Mind your business, do what’s best for your health and in consideration of the health of those around you, and don’t be a dick.

Thanks for listening.