Still Just a Geek, page 52
I could have sold headshots every day, and nobody would have thought twice about it. But I still had so much to prove, I flat-out refused to go that route, and I (and my family) suffered because of my—well, I was going to say “pride,” but I think “fear” is more accurate.
* This is a classic tabletop game where one player is the human crew of the starship Znutar, which is slowly being overrun by the titular Awful Green Things, who are controlled by the other player. The fun of the game is learning how the various weapons in the game affect the Awful Green Things, because you draw different effects each time you play.
* I cannot stress enough that I did NOT say this like Joey from Friends. In fact, I have never said anything like Joey from Friends, at least not on purpose.
And yet . . . interesting connection to this coming later in the book.
* When I work on a new show, there’s always a call with the hair and makeup department to discuss potential allergies and stuff. I don’t have any allergies, but I have a visceral revulsion to the smell of Sebastian Shaper hairspray, and I make sure they know that.
I’m sure they’re thrilled to deal with my delightful quirks.
* Not a great year for skaters, but this is the year Martin Brodeur was drafted, and he is the greatest goal-tender to ever play the game. I mean, they changed the rules because he was so good.
So yeah, keeping that box shrink-wrapped for a while longer.
* Editor: Any ideas what he’s worth today?
Me: I’d say about three fifty.
Editor: Damn you, Loch Ness Monster!
* When I was twenty or twenty-one, I bought these Ren & Stimpy toys that made fart noises when you squeezed them. They were really stupid and hilarious, and appealed to my inner twenty-year-old, so when my own son turned twelve, I gave them to him. Passing the torch is a big part of fatherhood, folks.
* Even my alter ego had it out for me.
* For years, people have said this to me online, or posted a video clip of it at me, to be cruel or just shitty.
I hate it. I hate the scene that it comes from, for a lot of reasons, but I mostly hate it because in the context of the show, Picard has tasked Wesley with solving a problem, and when Wesley is like, “Dude, I solved the problem,” he is all, “Shut up!”
I was treated like that daily in my life by my parents, my relatives, most directors on Star Trek, and all of the producers except Gene.
In this post, I’m doing my best to reclaim the phrase and use it in a way that’s not hurtful to me. I’m not sure if I succeeded or not, but it felt right in the moment.
To be clear: If I could go the rest of my life without hearing “Shut up, Wesley” again, that would be great.
* Proto ASMR, amirite?
* Action figure humor is about as geeky as it comes.
* This is the only Mirror Universe reference in this entire book. But you can bet your last bar of gold-pressed latinum that I’m going to sculpt a little goatee on one of those action figures I mentioned a couple pages ago.
* Which, of course, would have been impossible, because this bad boy was MIB.
Also, because it was a toy.
* I couldn’t accept the reality of my father’s antipathy toward me, so I blamed it all on you, instead of holding him accountable for his cruelty. You and I didn’t deserve that.
Yes, I’m aware I’m explaining this to a toy of myself.
* Good movie, but not one of Julia’s best.
* A global treasure hunt where you use a GPS device to hunt down a “cache” someone has hidden. When you find it, you sign a logbook and record it on a website. I haven’t done this in years, but it was a lot of fun when my kids were growing up.
* Dr. Giggles, of course, is a forgettable nineties B movie, and Dr. Green was on the unforgettable TV show ER.
* I think I should have “scaled” back on these jokes.
* These Star Trek collector’s plates are surprisingly cool. I always feel fancy when I sign them, though now I am wondering for the very first time if anyone has actually eaten food off my face. I . . . really hope not.
* I don’t like stereotypes, but there’s always someone who is obviously sweating through their shirt who wants to hug you. I don’t fault you the sweat, but that’s your sweat.
You keep it.
* You’ve been to a con. You know EXACTLY what I am talking about.
* I hope you see this, Vincent. I hope you’re still part of my story.
* Ugh. Dude, this is not funny or cool or irreverent or interesting. I get what you’re trying to do, but you cheapen EVERYTHING when you do this.
Don’t try so hard, Wil from the past. I know how wound up you feel, but you aren’t helping yourself here, at all.
* Yes, like every white boy who was in his twenties in the early aughts, I read and thought too highly of Fight Club.
* We’ve established this character’s voice and tone, so why not throw something completely foreign to that character into his dialogue? Make things more complicated! Confusing the reader is pit stop number one on the path to success!
* My editor observes that Wesley, as I voiced him in these entries, is kind of a jerk, yet here I say he’s cool. What’s that all about?
I think I was trying to say that this version of Wesley (who was obviously a stand-in for myself) just didn’t care what anyone else thought, whether they were Trekkies or my father. Ooohhhh, he was edgy! Wesley gave me the support I craved from my parents and from fans, and helped me understand I was never going to get external validation until I learned to love and support myself.
What neither one of us knew was that, once I found that validation and worthiness within myself, I didn’t need it from any external source. And there’s a lesson here I’m going to billboard: The external validation we crave from others is never as satisfying or lasting as the internal validation we give ourselves.
* Has anyone ever figured out what the H stands for? Leading candidates in Castle Wheaton include:
Humberto
Hugo
Hot Dog
Holy-Avenger-Wielding
* See previous note about Fight Club.
* My current editor actually praised my writing in this section. He said it was cool.
Editor: No I di—
Me: HE SAID IT WAS COOL.
* Thankfully, groups like QAnon have gotten us back on track!
* Spammers in 2020 still use this exact language to solicit clicks, so I guess it works?
* In other words: Don’t call me “kiddo.”
* Please see every other time I have mentioned this to understand why I keep bringing it up. *eyeroll*
* I have issues with Rick Berman, obviously. But this call? This call was kind. It was personal. It acknowledged the decade of work we did on the same show. This moment was important. It made me feel like, even though I wasn’t in the movie or on the screen, I was still part of the family.
* I had several freelance jobs, writing weekly columns and features for some online publications, including The A.V. Club, LA Weekly, and SuicideGirls.
* The reality was, having this scene on my reel wasn’t going to make a difference. I earned SAG scale for the job, which was almost enough to cover a mortgage payment.
This wasn’t about money or career, at all (those were important, but not what really drove me). This was entirely about having the second chance to embrace and love and cherish The Next Generation in a way I hadn’t been able to when I was younger.
* The scene we filmed, where Picard tells Wesley it’s good to see him, but Wesley isn’t interested because there’s a cute girl at the wedding was cut from all versions of the film, and to my knowledge, it has never shown up as a deleted scene.
* Maybe a fair point, but wow time and place, people. Talk about missing the point.
* That interview on Radio 5 led to me covering California’s 2003 gubernatorial recall election in 2003. I’m still a BBC correspondent. Even though I only file reports once or twice a month, I’m intensely proud of my contributions to Auntie Beeb.1
1 I did this for a year or so, I think? It was fun and terrifying every single time I called London. When California had our recall election, BBC World Service needed to put someone from California on air, and I was the closest at the time, so they picked me to talk about the election result . . . for a global audience. Live.
I thought I knew terror when calling into London before that night. Turns out I had no idea, but holy shit I pulled it off.
Good night and good luck indeed.
* Whoops. Turns out I crossed a Rubicon back here, which makes this an overused and redundant reference.
Do you think Coleridge would be mad?
Regardless, this moment I’m about to share felt like a one-way gate that, once walked through, would close behind me forever.
So it’s the Rubicon again, and you can just deal with it.
* I have good friends who are on the A-list, though, and while they get a lot of fancy perks and generally have great lives, being A-list looks exhausting. Everyone is constantly second-guessing your choices, you can’t go anywhere without making yourself look like a movie star (or catching flak because you don’t), every mistake or public foible is blown up into something huge . . .
They are successful people, who live in fabulous houses and have enviable careers, but I can’t believe I ever wanted the kind of fishbowl life they have.
* My editor said I’m only allowed a certain number of masturbation jokes, and I used them all up . . . like . . . like a . . . a . . . jerk. *thumbsupemoji*
* And this is now the only instance of the Internet being a place for good. I humbly accept my Nobel Prize for Internet Positivity.
* Can’t kill your career if you don’t really have much of a career to begin with! *head tapping guy meme*
* As you might have expected, we have since drifted apart.
* Okay, I made this one up, but I like the idea of a product that doesn’t remove stains, but transforms them into something interesting.
* In 1968, the Sunday Times sponsored a yacht race around the world. Anyone could enter, and the rules were simple: leave from England between June and October, and return after circumnavigating the globe around the three great capes without making port. Nine men entered, and only one finished.
Donald Crowhurst was a struggling businessman and husband, who had no sailing experience. He was connected to the maritime industry by a handheld navigation device he sold with limited success. He entered the Golden Globe race, even though he knew he was totally out of his depth, because he thought it was the only way he could support his family and overcome his business failures.
His voyage was beset by tragedy and complication almost as soon as he left the dock. His boat was a model unproven in heavy seas. It began taking on water shortly after he set sail. Crowhurst fell overboard more than once.
In spite of all these obvious signs he wasn’t qualified for the voyage, Crowhurst persisted. From October to December 1968, he made his way south toward Africa, struggling the entire way. One of his motivations for entering the race was to promote and sell a device he’d thought up, to prevent small pleasure craft like his from capsizing. It was a series of air bladders (think huge balloons) that would be mounted on the main mast, hooked to sensors that would inflate them if the ship got into trouble.
Crowhurst couldn’t navigate very well, and he wasn’t much better at building this balloon device. He felt like he had no choice, though, like this was the only thing he could do. This was his last chance to be someone who mattered in the world. He had to complete this journey, and he had to win.
But somewhere off the west coast of Africa in December 1968, Crowhurst admitted to himself he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t get the boat’s safety features to work before he needed to enter a very dangerous southern Atlantic Ocean, he was in way over his head, and he had a difficult choice to make.
Everything in his life was riding on his success in this race. He’d poured all his money into it, and he’d mortgaged his future against the successful sale of his handheld navigation device, and the floating bag thing.
Faced with this reality, Crowhurst decided to cheat. He began sending false location reports on his radio, followed by very long periods of silence. While he gave the impression that he was in the treacherous southern seas with the rest of the competitors, he was actually in relatively calm waters off the coast of Brazil. According to Crowhurst’s logs, he was despondent, knew he was in trouble, knew he was a fraud, and knew the charade would fall apart as soon as it came under any meaningful scrutiny.
He’d given the impression through his false reports that he was very close to being in the lead, having made it around all three capes, pushing as hard as he could to get back to England. One of his other competitors believed Crowhurst, and not knowing he was actually days ahead of Crowhurst, pushed his boat so hard, he overdid it and abandoned ship on the final leg of his voyage.
Crowhurst, meanwhile, was beginning to crumble under the pressure of his scheme. If he won, which seemed likely to him, he knew he would come under tremendous scrutiny, and he knew his fraud would be exposed. He writes in his log book that when he returns to England, he is going to face the choice between admitting his fraud and the public consequences, or living with the guilt and fear of ultimate exposure should he somehow be successful in his deception.
The last few weeks of Donald Crowhurst’s logs reveal a man who had been forced into something he wasn’t ready for, convinced it was the only path he had toward happiness and success. He seems to have had a complete mental health breakdown. He talks repeatedly about life being a game that is controlled by cosmic creatures, as a way to explain and understand what seem like manic episodes.
On June 29, 1969, Crowhurst sent his last radio transmission. His final log entry is dated July 1. His boat, the Teignmouth Electron, was found adrift and unoccupied on July 10 of that year. Crowhurst was never found, and is presumed to have committed suicide.
When I wrote “I thought about Donald Crowhurst,” I was thinking about this man, who loved his family, who wanted and needed success and approval from authority figures, who had been talked into doing something he knew he couldn’t do, and had bet everything, including his life, on it.
I couldn’t identify with the man who sailed that boat into the waters off Brazil, but I could heavily identify with the man who was talked into getting on that boat in the first place.
* And, to be honest with myself, I wasn’t even that big when I was at my biggest. Yes, I was huge in teen magazines, but so was Mario Callestro in 1956, and you can’t even tell if I made that name up, because one teen idol is so easily exchanged for another.
* This applies to all creative endeavors, and doesn’t even mention the part where a lot of people don’t take artists seriously and diminish our work as not being real or worth anything.
* Arrested Development Voice-over: Not only was it the right decision, it was the only decision.
* From 2018 to 2021, I had two auditions, total. So I think I made a good choice.
* When this was written, “downloading porn” was the same as “stealing porn” because Pornhub and that whole network didn’t exist. Porn was certainly on the internet, but it wasn’t nearly as accessible as it is now.
Have I overexplained the joke? I think I’ve overexplained the joke.
Anyway, my point is: Sex work is work. Pay for your porn.
* Which is hilarious to the very small subset of you who understand probability, play tabletop games, watch me playing tabletop games, have seen how badly I roll dice and get fucked by probability, and who know how integral rolling dice is to success in Risk.
* “Especially your father!”
* Not sure what I was going for, here. There’s nothing about Steve Garvey that isn’t respectable. This is just younger, stupider, Wil, being younger and stupider than I’d like to admit he ever was.
* It’s a thousand times better than the Ab Master 5000, and one step beyond the Penultimate Ab Machine 6000.
* This was hardware and software that turned anything on your computer into stereo optic 3D. It wasn’t anything like VR, but it was a step in that direction.
Like so many things I obsessively worried about during this period in my life, this whole thing turned out to be a lot of anxiety and stress about nothing. X3D was around for a few months, and nobody even remembers it. In fact, I searched (on DuckDuckGo because privacy) for “x3D system” and the first four pages are nothing but results for something else called X3D. This X3D is an ISO-ratified, file format and run-time architecture to represent and communicate 3D scenes and objects. X3D fully represents three-dimensional data. X3D is developed and maintained by the Web3D Consortium.
