Still Just a Geek, page 54
But just like my parents, Creation could only see a very small part of me, and just like my parents, Creation was only interested in what they could squeeze out of that small part of me. The rest of me? The parts I cared about? That mattered to me? My wife saw those parts of me, but people I thought of as authority figures (Creation, my parents, Rick Berman) didn’t.
And never would.
As I am about to say in the original text, I was willing and eager to embrace Wesley and Star Trek, and the only way I knew how to do that then was to proudly and enthusiastically take the stage at a convention and do it in public. Having that opportunity taken from me felt like I had the rug pulled out from under me, and that was a familiar feeling I did not like at all.
Maybe in this post I was saying, “I did everything I could to be part of this world, and I want everyone to know I am not the reason it isn’t happening.” And even though I lie to myself and the readers throughout it, insisting it’s really a good thing I’ve been pushed out by Creation, it hurt.
It hurt a lot.
* And as a son.
* At that point, ten years was a third of my life, and half of my adult life. It was significant.
* I’m reading this now, and the fact that I didn’t name this post “The Wrath of Con” is a Top 5 regret in my life.
* Since I originally blogged this, Slanted Fedora’s reputation has been tarnished by canceled events, bounced checks, and poor fan relations. I’ve never had any problems with Dave or his company, but I’ve run into several fans who are pretty upset with him, and I know a few Star Trek actors who won’t work with him. 1
1 In case you’re wondering, last time I checked, Dave Scott was in trouble with the feds, and his company was dissolved in 2004.
* I will spare you five pages of thoughts about, for instance, the fair use rules and copyright laws regarding reprinting of song lyrics.
(This is in no way directed at anyone who may be involved with editing this version of the book.)
* I was not used to ANYONE standing up for me.
* Think about what a fax campaign entails? You’re in your office, and all of a sudden, your fax machine is wasting paper and toner telling you how much you stink.
Sometimes old technology is the best.
Hey, real quick: Remember the old agitprop trick where you’d loop black paper through the fax machine and just send it all night to someone you hated, to use up all their toner? No? Oh. Me, uh, me neither.
Also: fax reference! Masturbation was starting to pull ahead . . . oh, it just did again.
* This word has a very different connotation now than it did when I wrote this. If I could do this all over again, I’d use the word “diminished.”
* I’m almost fifty and I still feel this way. The thing that is different, though, is now I love and cherish being the kid, while the cast is my family.
* And, to be honest? This guy was STILL lowballing and negging me. I was surprised and happy to be sort of welcomed back to the con, and I was thrilled so many people had grabbed pitchforks and torches for me. I felt like that was something I needed to honor . . . at the same time, it was deeply insulting to be lowballed AGAIN, when Creation’s initial lowballing was the whole reason any of this had happened.
Adam Malin was full of platitudes about family and fandom, and all of it meant nothing.
* EarnestBorg9 is the name of our sci-fi improv and sketch comedy group. We were originally called Mind Meld, but we changed this after WILLIAM FUCKING SHATNER and Leonard Nimoy1 released a DVD with the same name.
1 Those two are always ruining everything.
* Travis was one of the founders. He directed me at ACME, and taught me how to write sketch comedy.
* I thought a lot about Leonard Nimoy’s books I Am Not Spock and I Am Spock.
I was somewhere in between.
And this book would be an essay, if I hadn’t made a choice to put myself into a revolving door in the first place.
* Hundreds of pages in, and I have to be completely honest: this process has been exhausting for me. I’ve wanted to do wholesale cuts on huge sections of this book, and my editor has continually reminded me that there’s a difference between writing a speech, a novel, a novella, a blog, and hundreds of notations.
So I want to be clear why so much of this might have seemed repetitive—because it was. But that’s because there was a very distinctive voice we all used in the 2000s when we wrote in our blogs.
Unfortunately, as I read through it now, it isn’t aging well for me. There was a deliberate immediacy, an unpolished, unvarnished, raw, conversational tone that, today, feels amateurish. In the moment I sent these thoughts out into the ether, though, it was important to me that the readers receive only real emotion and real truth from me (except, of course, when I was deliberately lying to them because I was lying to myself), especially because to that point, I’d spent my life trying to present a public face that would make my parents proud of me.
I say all this because I hope you’ll believe me when I say I’m a better writer now than I was then. More experienced and more confident. I cringe at my overuse of repetition to make a point. I cringe at—Ah, see, I was going to do it there, again.
Maybe I’m not as great as I think I am.
Seriously, though, writing is a process. It should be about putting words down on the page, revising those words, throwing out some (or all) of those words, and continually honing and shaping and polishing and crafting.
In the early 2000s, that’s not how really anyone blogged. I certainly didn’t.
So maybe I’m not “great” at writing yet, but I’m literally decades better, and that’s part of being an artist: keep working on the craft.
End Inspirational Speech.
* In case the pages—and pages and pages—about this very topic haven’t made that clear.
* Yes: My friend actually made a Sue Olson reference in a note back to me. We. Are. Geeks!
* Fun fact: Patrick Stewart HATES the word “neat.”
* THE. LARCH.
* First off, anyone who is upset about “only” $500,000 in profit has some issues. Second: He’s almost certainly full of shit, and that number was probably much higher.
* Because there’s no way people would want to see me twice.
* Translation: I didn’t really care about you beyond what you could do for my bottom line and wasn’t willing to do any research on my end.
* Hey, why did this finger just close on my Monkey’s Paw?
* Patrick always makes me feel the way you want your parents to make you feel.
* This meant, and means, so much to me. Being a writer is hard. Someone said it’s like having homework every night for the rest of your life.
Note, too: I get a LOT of rejections. But they don’t hurt the way rejections as an actor felt. That felt personal; this feels like instruction and guidance toward being the writer I want to be.
Logan is right. It is a noble and respectable profession, and even though I’m not as good at it as I wish I was, I still love it.
* Sadly, I wasn’t invited to the cast and crew screening of the film. Though I was assured it was an oversight,1 I’m pretty sure it was yet another Code Red2 from The Powers That Be.
1 Oh, just an oversight. That’s okay then.
It’s one thing to be disrespected, but then to be lied about that disrespect? God, this industry almost destroyed me . . .
In case you hadn’t noticed that theme yet.
2 You want me in that holodeck! YOU NEED ME IN THAT HOLODECK!
* Get your minds out of the Oedipal gutter!
* If you’re this far into the book and hadn’t figured that out by now, I think we need to talk about your reading comprehension skills.
* Or, alternately, VERY fairly.
* But not sad enough to, you know, do anything about it.
* And the other cast members. Take that, Spiner!
*Steve Miller Band, not the fascist white nationalist who was part of the Trump administration.
*What’s it called when the narrative character goes on a journey, comes back to the village, and then immediately does the stupid childish thing he did at the beginning? The thing he was supposed to learn from and overcome?
*So, real talk: this epilogue never happened.
Something like it happened, and I used the emotional truth of that experience to inform this, which felt at the time I wrote it like a clever and amusing bookend.
But, to be fair to me then and now: lots of people over the years have told me they love my writing and my website. Just a Geek wouldn’t exist if not for them, and if you’re one of those people, thank you. I love my job. I love my family. I love my life, and I am so grateful to everyone who has been part of my journey to this moment.
*If there’s a scarier thing to hear from someone you love, I challenge you to find it.
*If you’re so inclined, you could insert “time is a flat circle” joke here.
I’m not so inclined.
*Which is probably as high as mine, but nobody took my vitals that day.
*To be clear: I’m pretty sure Anne was calm. Me, though . . . well, I’m a pretty good actor, and I think I gave a convincing role that day.
*If you’ve ever been to the ER with a loved one and you hear this, you start to wonder if it will help to threaten lives yourself in order to get people treatment.
(Note for later: diatribe about American health care system . . .)
*Because in a crisis, of course it is.
*I’m almost surprised how much perspective I had when I wrote this. This was all pretty fresh in my memory, and yet there’s definitely empathy here.
I’m not patting myself on the back, but it’s interesting to try to remember if this is how I actually felt at the time, or just at the time of writing it.
Memory is a funky thing.
*If you can’t laugh at a good statistics joke, then you’re probably not a fan of mine.
And what doctor doesn’t love a good statistics joke? This one, it turns out.
*I’ve been worried about her the whole time. But, with the whole acting thing, I’ve done a good job at hiding it. But time—it wears you down. And the erosion of my mask (along with the erosion of my cell battery) started to show my true state.
*If you know, you know. For me, it feels like I’m a Tex Avery cartoon character whose head has been struck like a bell, and the world swims sideways for a minute.
*Even as my own worry doubled.
Hello worry, my old friend.
*This should just read “the Alpha.” Anne is the leader of our household (pack) no question.
*Brain meds, every morning, no matter what. I am not ashamed of my mental illness, and I am so grateful to science for helping me manage it.
*I knew it was going to be a long day, but this was not what I envisioned at all.
It’s funny how the interesting days, the ones we remember, very rarely go the way they were originally planned. Or maybe that’s just me and my life.
*This might be the toughest thing about medicine, whether it’s physical or mental health: we have all these highly trained, very intelligent people working hard to understand our bodies and minds and figure out what’s wrong with us and make us feel better. And yet they get stumped, too, and it’s so frustrating, because we have such high expectations (and even higher worries . . . and bills).
Again: I’m a giant fan of those in the medical profession. But hearing “I don’t know” from a doctor is a terrible thing, especially when your loved one is clearly in distress. I mean, if the freaking DOCTOR doesn’t know, who does?
*Behind the purple stuff.
*If you’re a parent, you know this feeling all too well: your child will be sick, and you’ll watch them sleep and worry that you can’t see their chest rising and falling.
Loving other people is hard work.
*To be clear: I played GTA V, or tried to, anyway.
*Or rather, I know there’s something wrong, but don’t know exactly what, and that’s a problem . . . and I’m guessing you’ve already surmised that by now.
*I know you’re thinking it: Scrawny Wesley Crusher can carry a human being?
Hell yes he can. It also helps that I had the “mother lift the car off their child” adrenaline going.
*The urge to not scream “WE FUCKING TOLD THE OTHER DOCTORS THAT AND THEY BLEW US OFF!” was palpable that day.
I’m very proud of myself.
*Later—and even today—I allow myself to be fully angry at them. Their jobs are hard, but this is part of their job. I’m sure they helped numerous people the days they met with Anne, but they didn’t help her, and that sucks.
*Try getting rest in a hospital. If you spend one night there (and aren’t medicated or in a coma), I guarantee you’ll be tired by the end of it, even if you “sleep.”
*Does this sound awful to you? It should. It’s fucking awful.
Imagine something in your body is growing that shouldn’t be there.
Imagine it then explodes inside you.
Imagine that explosion is enough to completely twist around an organ.
If you haven’t at least started to think about that scene from Alien, I bet you are, now.
(Also, unlike that movie, this was really happening.)
*If you’re a guy, you might think this isn’t a big deal.
“We’re going to admit you and have that testicle cut off from your body.”
That’s what the doctor is saying to my wife.
*This is still true, and when you hear about needing more women in STEAM, this is exactly what we mean.
And if you think it’s bad for women like my wife, imagine how bad it is for women of color (I’m serious—look this up; it’s scary stuff).
*We never went back to that doctor again. Your doctor is your business, but if their first impulse is to shove a bunch of pills into your face and hope for the best, maybe they aren’t as concerned about you as they are about their relationship with the pharmaceutical industry. At least, that was our experience with this guy.
*I still didn’t have my brain pills or my charger. I was a little distracted.
*I also clearly never spellchecked this, because it’s still spelled wrong. My jerk, er, editor says to keep it in as a learning experience.
I want him to experience a laparoscopy without anesthesia (spelled it right that time, jackass).
*The mask fell a little the last time in the ER, but good actors learn from their mistakes, and I wasn’t going to mess up this take.
*Yes, this is a thought I had. This is a thought I have more often than I like: the idea that someone I love might be hurt or die. As I get older, and as the people in my life become more and more valuable to me, the fragility of life is never far from my mind. Interestingly, it was an audiobook performance that first forced me to confront how I would exist without Anne as my constant companion. In John Scalzi’s Redshirts, there is a letter a main character writes about his late wife. The material calls for it to be performed with solemnity and fondness for the memory. But when I was narrating it, all I could think of was how I would feel if I were writing this letter about Anne, and I started to cry. Like, I felt the loss and the fear and the loneliness and all of that stuff as intensely as I think I could, without it actually happening. I had to ask the director to give me a solid ten minutes to compose myself, and it still took several takes before I was able to deliver the performance the material demanded.
*Except, of course, there’s every rational reason: someone is going to cut into my wife and pull something out of her body.
I don’t care how many times they’ve done this, or what the statistics are: when it’s your wife on the table, none of those things matter. Trust me on this (if you’ve never experienced it yourself and I hope you haven’t).
*I literally love her inside and out.
*I have experienced this, and it is the worst pain I have ever endured.
*When a surgeon does abdominal laparoscopic surgery, the patient’s abdomen is filled with an inert gas to make room for stuff to move around. Then, when they finish, they literally deflate the body like a balloon, and it just goes back to whatever it was before. Our bodies are pretty incredible.
