Okay, I’m done.

  * Hey look at that! A little casual homophobia to go with the objectification, ableism, and other inexcusable, problematic behavior.

  I want to be clear: I deeply regret thinking or writing this. It’s just so offensive and hurtful, and accept full responsibility for it. I am better now, I promise.

  * Show on VH1 in which musicians tell the stories about their music. Hence the clever title.

  I’m sure I should also explain what VH1 is, but you should learn to look up some things on your own.

  * Editor: Sooooo cool.

  Wil: DUDE.

  * If you saw this, I’m actually pretty impressed.

  * This is copywritten, Lin-Manuel Miranda, so I don’t want to see you accepting any Tony awards based on my life.

  * At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Carson was probably one of the most famous, most recognizable people in the world.

  Let that sink in.

  * I can go two ways here: one, I can make the easy and obvious joke that Carson Daly was as exciting as a Chia Mr. T, and lean into the irony.

  Or, I could elevate them both the way I did in the text, which is still ironic.

  Alternatively, I could cringe my face off that getting a Chia Mr. T and meeting Carson Daly were, at that moment, very high points in my life.

  * Problematic term aside, one thing a lot of people don’t tell you about SDCC is that it’s fun if you’re attending as a fan, but not as much fun when you’re there for work. Oh, fun can be had, but it’s still work.

  * I think I cursed the con as soon as I typed this.

  * Editor: More Cool Things!

  Wil: . . .

  * Sadly, they’ve been lost to the ages.

  * Chris Hardwick and I were roommates while he went to UCLA and pretended that I was, really, honestly, seriously, totally going to enroll (more on that later). One of our favorite activities in those days was taking in indie film festivals, and Spike & Mike’s Sick and Twisted Festival of Animation was one of the high points of the year for us. It was founded in 1977, and was our first exposure to animators like Mike Judge, Bill Plympton, Craig McCracken, and John Lasseter. Meeting Spike was one of the rare experiences of meeting a hero that went well. (That’s foreshadowing.)

  * Huh-huh. Cool.1

  1 Yes, another cool.

  * I’ve stopped counting. This is starting to bother me, too.

  * Fag Hag is a wonderful, John Waters–style indie film that my friend Damion wrote and directed. I cameo as the owner of the Christian bookstore and nail salon.

  If any of that sounds like something . . . Divine . . . that you want to watch, it’s online and won’t disappoint you.

  * ARRRRGGGHHHH!!!!

  * I sincerely thought this was funny. College Girls Gone Wild seemed so outrageous and ridiculous to me, and in all my twenty-something privilege and lack of awareness, I didn’t stop to consider how problematic, objectifying, and exploitative this entire series was. To be clear: I fully support sex workers and sex work. I’m not supportive of preying on intoxicated young women for male gratification.

  * Want to feel old? My son turned thirty-one on the thirty-first last year. The year I’m writing this, I will turn forty-nine on the twenty-ninth.

  * Reading this now, I feel this uncomfortable mixture of cringe and sadness. It’s not great, Dan.

  * TV show based on the comic book.

  * Which, in hindsight, not so pathetic to anyone who has listened to a podcast.

  * Imagine a not-very-smart phone, that’s not much more than a glorified calendar planner. Now, that thing can download some very basic articles once a day, provided you remember to sync it.

  Sounds unimpressive, I know. But in the early 2000s, this was a goddamn miracle of technology.

  * This entire paragraph just isn’t true. This is me, barely an adult at twenty-eight, desperately struggling to simultaneously convince my father to care about me, while living in total denial about his contempt for me.

  If I haven’t made it clear already: The man who was my father was and is an abusive, selfish, cruel, narcissist. As long as I can remember, he treated me with contempt and mockery at every opportunity.

  The man who was my father made a choice, when I was a child, that he didn’t love me. He made a choice to be my bully instead of being my father. My depression and anxiety are largely a consequence of his emotional abuse, and my mother’s gaslighting about it.

  Today, in 2021, I despise that man, and I will never see or speak to him or my mother again if I can help it. But in 2001, I believed that this brush with death would wake up my entire family. I believed my parents would realize how fragile a family is, how fragile a life is, and that he and I could have a fresh start. I convinced myself—and my mother encouraged me to believe—that my father’s disinterest in me and the distance he created between us, was my fault for being a difficult teenager. The truth is, it was a choice he made, as an adult, to dislike and be cruel to his son and namesake (I legally changed my name in 2020, to fully disconnect from him), and nothing was going to change that. He’d spent my entire life being a bully to me, and he continued that until I ended contact with both of my parents in 2018 after years of fruitless efforts to heal my childhood pain.

  All of the stuff I wrote here was an attempt to accept responsibility for what I thought was my role in a difficult relationship. (None of it was my fault. It’s not incumbent on a child to deftly navigate his parents’ ever-changing whims so he can earn their approval, which loving parents give unconditionally.) I hoped that my parents would read my blog, see what I was saying (something I couldn’t say to them directly; whenever I tried to have heart-to-heart conversations with my father, he would mock me, humiliate me, minimize my feelings, and turn whatever he’d done to hurt me around on me. My mother would reliably take his side, and I would end up apologizing to him).

  When I wrote that “you’ll regret every single moment you wasted” I believed that. But it wasn’t ME who wasted all those moments. It was him. It was always him, and even though I think I knew that in some way, I wasn’t able to accept it. I couldn’t change him, you see, but I could change myself, I thought. I believed if I could just atone enough for the hormonal, anxious, insecure kid I was, then he’d love and accept me. He’d stop being so cruel to me all the time. He would care about me and take an interest in me. We would finally do things together, and I would feel like I mattered to him. I believed all of that because I had to. What I didn’t realize until just now is that I was desperately hoping my father would realize he had wasted a lot of time he could have spent getting to know me, loving me, being a father to me.

  * This remains the only time I ever saw him show any emotion other than rage.

  * I mean, I was seven. Give yourself a break, Wil.

  * Okay, all this supernatural bullshit aside, let’s talk about coincidence and pareidolia: I was waking up almost every night like this, because I was having panic attacks in my sleep.

  I put a lot of woo-woo mumbo jumbo bullshit into this moment, because like most people who believe in woo-woo mumbo jumbo bullshit, I was scared and looking for reassuring patterns in the fractal noise of existence.

  * Goddammit.

  * I’m not, and I wish I hadn’t spent so much of my life believing the lies my father planted in me.

  * “Cool” here refers to the temperature. Given my propensity to overuse it to mean “generally pleasing,” it feels out of place here.

  * I cared about this book. It wasn’t “lame” and I really, really hate how I keep saying this, not just because it’s ableist language that’s hurtful, but because I sincerely believed everything I did, even reading a book so I could learn a new skill, was stupid.

  * Blind Date was maybe the ur-reality dating show that ran in syndication for a few years around the turn of the century. It was ridiculously entertaining. Letterman was . . . okay, honestly? If you don’t know who and what Letterman is, I’m thrilled that someone your age is reading my book.

  * In the Before Times, when we could go places without fearing exposure to a deadly virus, a call to the CDC was rare and serious.

  * Alternatively, I could be honest here. He wouldn’t play with me. He never took me surfing, not once. He never even tried to teach me. It was the most important thing in his world, I believed, growing up, and I didn’t matter enough to him for him to share it with me.

  And his jokes were all racist or hurtful in some way. He always punched down, and he never let an opportunity to embarrass or humiliate me go unrealized. When he made jokes around girls I wanted to impress, his goal was always to humiliate and embarrass me.

  Encouraged by my mother, I took on all of his bullshit, believed that I was responsible for every shitty thing he did to me, and dedicated three decades of my life trying to figure out how I could atone for all the things I believed I did to earn his scorn.

  * In 2001, my union and our sister unions were speeding toward a work stoppage.

  * My friend John Scalzi says, “the default fail mode of clever is asshole.” This is a failed attempt to be what I thought was clever. But there was nothing clever about this, at all. What it is actually is insensitively and cruelly taking the tragic death of someone who was my friend, a person whose loss touched and affected a generation, and using his memory to set up what I guess was supposed to be—ugh, here it comes again—edgy. It’s not. It’s shitty and cruel, and if anyone who knew him read it, it would have been hurtful to them. I regret it. I didn’t know better then, but I know better now, and I’m sorry.

  Also, “just lighten up,” in this context is a rhetorical trick I picked up from the man who was my father, a favorite of bullies and abusers for ages: say something deliberately hurtful or offensive, and when someone calls you out for it, tell them to lighten up. Get it? They’re the asshole who needs to stop being so sensitive. You’re just making a joke. I spent my entire childhood being told to lighten up.

  * I honestly don’t know why I felt like I needed to Streisand Effect1 this comment. I didn’t have a problem with people thinking I was gay. It was just so weird that so many people who had never met me made this presumption about me. I’m worried it comes across as homophobic, and that was never my intent.

  I want to be clear about something: I have heard from literally uncountable numbers of men over the decades who told me that, when they were kids and discovering their sexuality, they had a crush on Wesley, and he/I was a big part of them coming to accept and love themselves. It makes me want to cry with joy whenever I hear that.

  1 Okay, seriously, this is a GREAT joke, as well as a factual statement.

  * With Ryan Reynolds, Justin Long, and a slew of others . . . that weren’t me. And today that honestly makes sense. Those people are comedy major leaguers, and I was a college player on my BEST day.

  * I haven’t seen it in twenty years, but I recall the movie being good, not great. The script remains one of the funniest things I’ve read.

  * Even then, I wasn’t so naive to be overconfident—I didn’t think it actually meant this. I think it meant (and still means) “we haven’t decided to move on without you . . . yet.”

  * This is both a Beavis and Butthead reference and a Judas Priest reference . . . neither of which I think people might know. But if you’re one of the few who are as tickled by it as I am, remember to schedule your colonoscopy. It’s important.

  * In 2001, Roger had written or cowritten pretty much everything Tarantino was getting credit for. I still think it was petty and shitty.

  * The reveal of what movie it was is coming—have a little patience!

  * Cinderella story, outta nowhere . . .

  * I fucking HATE IT when people call me “Willy,” so I was trying to lean in and take it back. I leaned into this HARD for years.

  It was . . . not the greatest choice.

  * You’d think that, after spending most of my money for almost twenty years, my parents would have been willing to help us any way they could.

  They did, a little bit, and they chose to charge us interest.

  I mean, I would never do that to my children. When they need a little help, and I can give a little help, I love it, and I expect nothing in return.

  And yet. My mother never let me forget that I was indebted to them and it became a useful cudgel for years, one of the many tools she’d deploy to manipulate me when I strayed too far from her control.

  For tax purposes, I was incorporated in 1987, right after Stand by Me, right before Star Trek. I was a child, so my father ran my business. He and my mother handled all my financials, and I just trusted them to invest and manage it carefully and responsibly.

  Stop me if you’ve heard this before: a child actor’s parents took a lot of his money without his knowledge or consent and spent it on themselves.

  When I was in my thirties, I felt like it was really weird that my parents were involved in my business, so I asked them to get all the financial information together for me, and hand it over so I could run my business myself.

  They were REALLY not into it, and that made me deeply suspicious. I got control of my finances and . . . WOW I saw year after year of residuals coming in from TNG and other jobs, and year after year of my father writing himself huge checks for thousands of dollars. At the same time, he and my mother were telling me that there wasn’t enough money in my corporation to pay me.

  So I just . . . I mean, they were stealing from me, then loaning my own money to me WITH INTEREST, and treating me like an asset instead of like a son.

  Anne and I struggled so much, for so long, and it turns out that, just like the choice my father made to be a bully, it wasn’t my fault, or because of anything I’d chosen to do. It wasn’t on me. It was never me. It was always them.

  * I’d come so close, I thought, to resetting the relationship with my parents, especially my father, and I truly believed that all it would take to close the deal was the revitalization of my acting career.

  This just breaks my heart, now, as a parent and as a son. No parent should ever make their child feel like their approval and attention are conditional upon that child’s career success. Or, honestly, conditional at all.

  But the hope was there, and it gave me something to cling to. It wasn’t quite a lifeboat, but it was definitely a buoyant chunk of wood.

  * He said this like he’d just put in a twelve-hour shift at the plant.

  He also didn’t seem aware of the wonderful, prescient pun he had made.

  * I actually could endorse it more. Please talk to my agent, Newman’s Own.

  #influencer #notsponsored #sponsorme #likeandsubscribe

  * Parents have more than two-speeds. “There’s smoke!” usually puts us into “pull a muscle” fast.

  * Do dorms still smell like weed? Living in California, pretty much everything smells like weed these days, so I don’t know.

  * And most of these had come free with a value meal.

  * The boys remain extraordinarily close to this day. I love their love for each other.

  * What I didn’t fully recognize at the time is that I was also asserting myself to my parents, who obsessively read my blog. I was writing about what truly mattered to me, what was truly important to me. I was writing about the things I desperately wanted them to see, the things I wanted the WORLD to see: I was so much more than my job. I had so much more to offer, and I just wanted a chance to share those other things.

  * I tried for .gov, but they refused to recognize me as a sovereign state.

  * You can visit it, and see for yourself, at the Internet Archive.

  * I tried so hard, but I could never wrap my head around style sheets, so pretty much everything I did was hard-coded into a table or