Playing dodgeball yesterday up in Sacramento with Boomer and The Dave was a very traumatic experience, and it brought back all the painful childhood memories associated with goddamn fucking dodgeball.
Matter of fact, the only difference between playing yesterday, and playing in 3rd grade, was that I wasn’t crying when I walked off the court.
I still sucked, I still got hurt, I still felt humiliated and embarrassed when I tried to play…
But at least I knew why I felt so terrible when I was done: I just suck at dodgeball. I’m weak, I can’t throw, and that stupid ball always slips out of my hands when I try to catch it.
My wife, on the other hand, rules at dodgeball. In 6 games that we played, she was the last person left on our time 4 times.
So Dodge Club (har) really sucked for me, but I did have fun the entrire rest of my trip up there. Boomer and The Dave are really cool guys, and the whole crew from KWOD is always super hellacool to me when I visit them.
But I hate dodgeball, man.
I fucking hate fucking dodgeball so much, I could sit here all morning, and well into the evening, and rant about how fucking much I hate fucking dodgeball.
But I won’t.
I’ve got lots more to write, but I have to get to work and finish an Arena episode today, so I’ll briefly say:
The show last night was really fun. Holy crap there were TONS of soapboxers and posse members and farkers all in effect, and it really made me feel great.
I know that I got to meet lots of you, and that I had to literally run from the building to catch my plane (which had 4 people on it, including me and Anne) so I missed a few of you, and I’m really, really sorry that I didn’t have time to stop and talk and stuff.
Coolest thing yesterday: Hanging with Tiffany. Wow. What an amazingly cool person. She agreed to be a guest on the JKvS next month, so all of you who are in LA should come out and see us. I’m trying to get her on the May 10th show.
As I was running out to the car to get to the airport last night, there were a few people walking in front of me…and one of them reaches up, and puts a sticker on a stop sign, the way I put OBEY stickers on everything in the world. So as we approach the stop sign, I look up at it, and see that it’s a “Wil has a posse” sticker.
How cool is that?!
So I took a picture, which I’ll scan and upload next week sometime.
Speaking of pictures, here’s a color version of Sweet Uncle Willy.
If you’re looking for something to do today, you should check out The Mystery of Wil’s Pants over at Retrocrush.
Oh, and the Soapbox is fixed. Send your thanks to jbay.
91 thoughts on “Last Place You Look”
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I looked at it, curiously. Why do I still have this?
this is correlation, not causation
Just a couple of days ago, I told Anne that though I am always a little sad to wrap a season of Ready Room, because I genuinely love my job that much, I was glad to have the time and energy to do stuff together. It's always so weird how we can live together, sleep in the same bed, see each other every single day, and still miss each other because we're just so damn busy, and going in opposite directions most of the time. I was so happy that she had the idea to go out together, which is something we just haven't done in a long time.
Being a weakling has very little to do with sucking at dodge ball. I’m a half-cripple with a bad hip and very few developed muscles, but dodgeball was my game. It’s all about hand-eye coordination.
::sigh:: dodgeball. I have a memory of a seventh grade gym class: We were playing dodgeball, and as a cruel joke, God said, “Hey, let’s have Cayla be the last person left on Team A, and let’s make sure that the ManWoman from Team B is left, too!” I spent ten minutes running away from that rubber ball frantically, while the ManWoman through it with all her muscley might over and over again.
I feel for you, Wil.
::ahem:: I meant to say “threw”
spudnuts said y’all
that’s funny
A’IGHT!
Pimp Daddy Willie!!!!!!
Re:To the color picture.
This one time, at dodgeball camp, I was behind this kid, and he had a ball in his hands, and someone threw a ball at him, and the ball that they threw at him, it bounced off of the ball that he was holding, and went up into the air, and hit me in the head. Teacher said I wasn’t out though. Yay.
Great pictures of you playin’ and chillin’ with Tiff. That just rocks. Le Maison du Pleasure Retreaux.
Us dodgeball haters have to stick together. I was mauled constantly in fifth grade. I swear those kids aimed at my face on PURPOSE…
So much to make fun of, so little time…
Ohmygoodness – I am looking at the link you provided to RetroCrush, and I am laughing hysterically! (but in a good way.) For the love of god, I can not wait to ANALYZE THE LEECHES! 🙂 🙂 🙂
Dodgeball sucks… but I wish I had been able to get up to Sacto to see it. So close, and yet so far. I know Unca Willy is heartbroken I didn’t come 😉
Go coyotes.
dodgeball owns! i used to work people with my look away pimpass arm.. now with my water polo skills i would riock your world big willis
.
kwod was an awesome radio channel.. along with kits in san fran LIVE 105. good stuff.. the radio stations here in arizona suck ass.. all they play is current pop shit.. o well.
1 month left til episode 2 hits the theaters.. i keep dreaming of it.. if it sux.. i dont think ill die theres still episode 3!
my thought for the day.
“oh baby baby its a wild world. I’ll always remember u like a child girl”
oh ya speaking of pop.. i got an extra ticket to see blink 182 and green day tomorrow with jimmy eat world opening.. who wants to go>??? 🙂
Oh Superfly, you’re gonna make your fortune by an by
But if you lose at dodgeball don’t ask no questions why
The only game you know is do or die
As the lame fan that I am, I am always glad to find something that I have in common with the master.
I can’t even spell the word doge ball, much less play. I was ALWAYS humiliated at ball games. (Hey Wil, wanna found a self-help group?)
It makes me feel a lot less inferior to know that Wil throws like a girl.
And man, I surely never wear either pimp-purple or a gazillion watches around my ankles.
Thank God for the Iron Curtain. Spared us Eastblockers the 80’s.
Re: The color photo and dodgeball. The color photo is very strange. Looks like a sailor pimp! Dodgeball Hum, you dodge the ball and run like heck when it comes towards you….I’m just saying this because it’s what I always did. My game was tether ball. Um, a ball tied to a pole. You whack the ball around the pole….this I was always good at.
Wil, thanks for reawakening a memory.
Like you, I passionately hated dodgeball in grade school. Partly because I always got hit and it hurt, but mainly because I just didn’t have the killer instinct. I didn’t WANT to try to hit people with a ball. It was something I might do in anger, but there was no fun in it.
But the other boys in my class loved it, so much in fact that we had our own, less-structured variation called Powder. Getting Powdered was our synonym for getting Creamed. Powder had all the violence of dodgeball with none of the annoying formalities. There were no teams, no court and no scoring. The object was simply to run around hitting each other as hard as possible with the ball.
We more or less stampeded around the playground, following the ball wherever it went, playing right through whatever anybody else was playing. We inflicted a lot of collateral damage on kids who were playing kickball, softball, 4-square, or just standing around talking, unprepared for either a hurtling basketball or a dozen boys running blindly at top speed and making sudden, random turns. We were like those crack-fueled felons on America’s Wildest Police Videos trying to escape through the suburbs.
For me the worst part about Powder was that I was even worse at it than Dale, a kid who wore a metal brace on one leg because he had had polio earlier in life. Dale was about a foot shorter than anybody else in our class, and was the favorite target because he was the hardest person to hit, in spite of his disability. He seemed to sense when the ball was coming at him. Following some strange psychic impulse, he would suddenly hurl himelf into the air, hauling his bad leg up behind him, and a shot that should have hit him right in the ass would pass harmlessly under him and hit somebody else, frequently me.
Watching Dale repeatedly avoid danger in the nick of time, I began to wonder how in the hell he did it. He said he didn’t know. Some kids thought he had ESP, which was a hot topic at that time, in the late sixties. I favored that theory because it was a cool idea. But I started noticing that Dale often performed his expert leaps when the ball was nowhere near him. For one thing, he seemed to have a routine: when somebody got the ball, Dale would veer away at an angle, run a few steps, then either dodge sideways or leap into the air. His timing was impeccable, but he really didn’t seem to know whether the ball was coming at him or not. He just knew when it would get there if it did.
Another thing he probably did was look at other kids. Most kids react when they see somebody in motion to throw a ball toward them. Instead of looking over his shoulder while running, which may have been physically awkward for him to do, Dale probably watched the kids in front of him, timing his movements according to theirs.
Watching and thinking about Dale taught me things that I have carried into adulthood. Like the importance of timing, observation skills, and crowd psychology; that the most interesting theory is the one people will probably believe; that being little doesn’t guarantee failure; that the rules of society are made by people who are good at dodgeball but would suck at Powder.
Ah! No! Wil! Do NOT take up pimping, ever! It is NOT for you! Sorry…but, it’s true. :-\ I think you look best as yourself.
I don’t know what Dodgeball is, but if you don’t like it, then it must be bad, no? What is this game like? Like what is the point of it…or the goal? I would like to learn it, for myself, so that I may teach it to my brothers and sisters, and they may play it, and stay away from me! ~_^
I saw “The Mystery Of Wil’s Pants”…..and I found it quite amusing! ^_^ I loved it! It was really quite…informing, I think. I love Pink Floyd, so I really wanted your pants! *G*
Liebe Alles!
~Gipsie
Great concert pics! Wil’s a rock star!!!!
Hey, is that the t-shirt you’re gonna go to hell for? Heh!
Do you know that situation when you’re running a fever, and suddenly people seem to say the weirdest things and there are walls where there used to be doors and there are pictures of Wil Wheaton wearing a purple nightmare all over the internet?
And you wonder, are you hallucinating?
Or awake?
oh my goodness. I just got back from clubbing, and I haven’t decided whether the photo (in its 32 bit glory) has stunned me to sobriety or if i’m transfixed by the colors…mmm…pretty colors…or maybe it’s going to make me yak. hmm.
“I’m weak, I can’t throw….”
Doesn’t this have the same tone as Kramer complaining about his golf skills.
I swear I’ve seen the OBEY posters and stickers in August of last year in VEGA$. They were everywhere. I remember stopping by and examining them, because they were just so damn peculiar… Now I know what they are about… However, they have not yet reached my end of the world.
Thanks for the enlightment, Prof. Wil.
I must say again: “Rawwwr. Sexy!” Even better in color, even though I usually like my celebrities clean-cut. 😉 And the picture on RetroCrush was adorable. Hey, it was the early 90s! The pants were cool!
Ah dodgeball, I used to hide in the corner and then I’d wind up always being last.. ducking to make sure the arses didn’t swipe my head off. It was all in good fun though..
Right there with ya, Wil.
I was bad at all the sports, but at least with the other games they weren’t *supposed* to hit you. And we did this in gym class. What are you supposed to think when the hitting is teacher-mandated???
Sticker on a stop sign?!?!
Hrmph.
That lady said the sign had been obscured when she ran into me. But I didn’t believe her.
I guess now I owe her an apology.
I liked dodgeball back in gradeschool when we were all pretty much the same size…
Then we got to junior high school, and the sadistic PE teachers would force us to play co-ed dodgeball and volleyball…
At this point the boys were already nearing 6 feet tall, and I was still pushing 4’10″…
I’ll never forget the day I spent the rest of the afternoon with a big red welt just below my left eye, in the shape of the word SPALDING written backwards….
Hmm, we don’t have dodgeball at schools here in the UK. Must suck to be American in Games, huh?
Oh, and it’s always in the last place you look Wil, because after that, you stop looking.
before they face the kings, uncle willie, your lakers have to take out the blazers… methinks that wil be harder this year than last…
I hated dodgeball when I was a kid. Not b/c I was weak or slow or had bad hand/eye coordination -in fact I was the opposite of that. When we played dodgeball the teacher would put all the kids she didn’t like in the middle & all the kids she did like in a circle around them & let the kids in the circle just hurl the balls at the unlikables as hard as they could. No one was supposed to aim for a person’s face/head but they did & once there was even a broken nose as a result. Sometimes when it was the unlikables turn to be in the circle one would try to get revenge on one of the meaner well-favored kids. It was ok when the likeable did something really mean -he could convince the teacher it was an accident- but when it was one of the others, well that kid always got detention. Sometimes I was one of the well-favored kids -I always did what I was told & never mouthed-off. But sometimes I was surprised by finding out I was one of the unlikeables. I knew most of the kids didn’t like me (shy kids, especially when they are bigger than most of the other students are always targets of hate), but the teacher? Anyway, it was horrible. I couldn’t believe how teachers would segregate us like that & just let the students she liked beat the crap out of the ones she didn’t like. Thank goodness we stopped playing dodgeball after elementary school -teachers found more subtle ways of letting you know if you were one of the unlikeables. [I don’t mean to pick on teachers. Many of my teachers were good people & good educators but the ones that were bad were really bad.]
Argh, right there with you on dodgeball. I was the shortest kid in class, and always ended up on the side *opposite* the biggest kid in class.
Ow. You’d think after the second broken pair of glasses, they’d put a stop to that, no? Bleah.
Totally diggin’ the purpleness.
Hey Wil, you’ve got enough talent in so many other areas. If I were you, I wouldn’t worry how much I sucked at dodgeball (hey, I should follow my own advice, ya think? 🙂 ). The game sucks anyway. I was supposed to wear glasses as a kid but the other kids teased me so I didn’t wear them. As a result I couldn’t see the ball coming, so I always got hurt. This also applied to volleyball, tetherball, etc. I don’t think they should make kids play those games if they don’t want to. Now I’m old and crochety and I couldn’t play them to save my life! 🙂
did you guys see the extreme flash dodgeball over at bbspot ? I thought it was appropriate given Wil’s recent adventure.
Wil plays Harmonica….rock! let’s have some MP3’s
That pimp suit is just too much to handle, especially in colour. It’s enough to give a person nightmares.
And Pink Floyd on your jeans, Wil please!
Don’t worry about dodgeball Uncle Willy, u have enough talents, you don’t need to strain and embarrass yourself, we know you rock!
So like, what is this? Are you auditioning for a production of “The Importance of Being Earnest”? For the role of Dame Edith Evans as Lady Bracknell?
“Purple haze all in my face…”
Dig it, Wil. You are the MAN!
DUDE!
I’m not sure if I should be more disturbed at the fact you’re WEARING that, or at the fact it’s freakishly purple and you’re wearing afro hair.
Yikes.
~Kaylin
Yep, pimpin’ photo definitely sexier in colour. Yum.
Dodgeball is the suckiest suck that ever sucked. I got hit in the head all of the time.
Great photo at Retrocrush. The Swatch watches on the ankle…you were so cooool.
I HATE U WILL WHEATON
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