Enormous thanks to Steph, Jess, and Pat. You guys were amazing!
I spoke with John Moe about my mental illness for his podcast, The Hilarious World of Depression:
Wil Wheaton was a child star in Stand By Me, a regular on Star Trek: The Next Generation as a teenager, and has been trying to figure out his role in show business for a long time since then. He was dealing with the pressures of fame and the fickle tastes of Hollywood, all while dealing with a chemical imbalance in his brain that made him prone to anxiety and depression. Wil’s better now thanks to medication, but despite his long IMDb page and regular work on The Big Bang Theory, his hit YouTube show, and a thriving and varied career, he sees himself primarily as a failed actor.
It’s a good show, as they say. Go give it a listen.
After the show, we got to go backstage and meet them, because Chris is a big deal. When Steve Martin shook Chris’ hand, he told Chris, “I am a huge fan of your work. It’s so nice to see you.”
I felt like I was going to cry. I’m so proud of Chris and everything he has created, and so grateful that he’s been my friend for almost 30 years. I can’t even imagine what it must feel like to meet someone who inspired you to do the work you do, someone who played a part in shaping who you became as a human, and finding out that they not only know about your work, they enjoy it and identify as a fan.
Some really funny things happened when we were there, but I’m putting them into my next live show, so you’ll have to come see me perform if you want to know about them.
What do you want me to know?
Stephen walked up to the frisbee where it had landed in the grass, and said, “Hey do you guys want to go to my house and play D&D?”
“Jerry isn’t here,” I said. One of my many skills was observing the obvious and sharing it with my friends who had already made that observation.
“It’s fine. We won’t play the campaign. You’ll just go into a dungeon and fight stuff.”
“With our regular characters?”
With exasperated, exaggerated patience, he said, “Yes. With your regular characters. We just won’t count experience and you can’t die. It’s just, like …”
“It’s like the mirror universe,” Larry said.
“Well, not exactly, Stephen said. “You’re not going to be evil … I mean, unless you really want to.”
When we played D&D, I always wanted to be a good, honorable, honest character. I was playing my idealized self. But for a moment, I imagined my Lawful Good wizard, Joral, who was sworn to stand for the safety and protection of the citizens of Flanaess, using his staff and spells to terrorize them instead, steal their gold, and reduce their villages to rubble. The opportunity to release some pent up aggression and frustration was more attractive to me than I probably would have been willing to admit.
Freed from the risks of permanent character death, Joral would charge headlong into the first group of innocents he saw, fireballs exploding from his fingertips, engulfing them in glorious flames.
I would never have admitted it out loud, but the villagers who fell in the face of Jor-al’s wrath would look a lot like Evelyn’s mother, a few of them would look like the adults in the casting office, and at least two of them would have looked like my mom and dad.
“That sounds radical,” I said. “let’s do that!”
“But if you die, you’re out. You don’t get to resurrect.”
“That’s fair,” I said.
“But we’re still alive in the campaign, right?” Larry asked.
Stephen rolled his eyes. “YES! Jeeze! Are you even listening?”
“Well I want to be sure!”
“Why would I even say that we’re playing in the mirror universe and then put you in the regular universe, without Jerry even being here?”
“Maybe it’s like a Twilight Zone thing! I don’t know! Like you make us think it’s a fake universe but it was real all the time!”
“Oh my god you are so lame,” Stephen said.
They stared each other down for a long thirty seconds or so, and I wondered if their weird (and to that point amusing) nerd fight was going to turn into a real fight.
I like this scene, because I was watching these kids play frisbee, and then I was listening to them, and then they were arguing the way kids do about nothing important, and I just transcribed the voices in my head.I’m just over 44000 words, now, and it feels like this is going to finish at around 60000 words. This is still the puke draft, where I just puke up everything I have in my head onto the page and worry about fixing it later, so there’s a good chance that this won’t end up in the final draft, but it’s at least a nice foundation to build upon later.
Okay, that’s what I want you to know today. What do you want me to know?
I have this idea to make something as a unique art project. It is either the craziest, dumbest, most impractical thing ever … or it’s a crazy, dumb, impractical thing that will be awesome.
I will need exactly one million people, from anywhere in the world, to make it happen. I wonder if that’s possible.
Feel free to speculate, if you’re into that sort of thing.