I’m almost finished with my first *real* rewrite of Just A Geek. I’m right up to just about the end, when I found out that I got cut from Nemesis, and how I dealt with it. After that, there’s really just two brief chapters to clean up (mostly cutting a LOT of stuff out, plus some minor rewriting) before I write a whole new chapter that talks about Dancing Barefoot, and some of the stuff that’s happened since I finished the first draft of Just A Geek over a year ago.
It looks like I’m going to make my April 2 deadline! w00t!
So. I am a little fuzzy on some stuff, and I’ve been reading lots of old comment threads, to help jog my memory. I noticed a TON of comment spam in some of the old stuff, so I was manually deleting some things . . . and I just now came across an entry that I started, marked as a “draft” and never finished.
I have no idea what story I was going to tell here, but I thought it was kind of cool. An “unfinished symphony,” if I may be so bold.
It looks like I wrote this on June 21, 2002, at 11PM. It’s untitled.
Growing up, we never had very much.
We were poor white trash from The Valley, but my parents never let us know that. They never once made us aware of precisely how little we had, or how many sacrifices they must have made just to give my brother, sister and me birthday and Christmas presents.
I lived in a small and very unassuming house in the northeastern San Fernando valley community called Sunland/Tujunga. Back in the late 70s and early to mid 80s, our claim to fame was being a regular location for the hit TV series CHiPs.
Around 1982, one of the numerous times CHiPs was filming in our neighborhood, the kid next door (Steven, who was always putting his hand in his pants) rode his Huffy over The Big Hill, went over to the set, and returned with autographed photos of Larry “John Baker” Wilcox and Erik “Ponch” Estrada. Steven’s sister Tina was a few years older than we were and she was quite taken with Ponch. So I sold my autographed picture of Ponch to her for 5 bucks.
I guess 5 bucks had become synonymous with real wealth in my young mind, since it was the value of my precious Death Star, and I felt great pride shaking down Tina, extorting 5 glorious dollars from her in exchange for the picture that I didn’t care about having, anyway.
That 5 bucks went into a fund, which eventually was used to purchase an Atari 2600 at KMART. It came with Combat and 2 joystick controllers, and Invisible Tank Pong with the most walls remains one of my favorite games to this day.
I tell you this because I’ve just been hit with a painfully lucid memory of being 10 years old, sitting on the shag carpeting of our family’s den in Sunland, playing that Atari 2600.
That memory was brought on when I was sitting here, just an hour ago, playing Circus Atari on an Atari 2600 emulator.
I loved Circus Atari, but we didn’t have it, because playing it required the purchase of paddle controllers, which my parents just couldn’t afford.
But Kent Purser, one of The Cool Kids, had Circus Atari, and I always hoped for the casual invitation to come to his house on the weekend, and play it with him…
Maybe I was going to talk about Atari? Or how I never fit in with the cool kids? I can’t recall if I was invited to Kent’s house or not. I *do* remember an invite to this kid Steven’s house to watch Jaws on Beta, where the Cool Kids all ended up playing Atari and never gave me a turn (and we never watched the movie) . . . Maybe it was going to be something about how we were super poor White Trash when I was a kid, but my parents never let us “feel” poor? I have no idea. But I thought, “Hey, this is kind of cool,” when I saw it.
So there.
Goddammit. I’m supposed to be working, and all I want to do is go play Yars Revenge.
Yeah! Show up and leave a comment at MY blog, too!!!! 🙂 (I’ll understand if you can’t). 😉
Hey Will,
I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of them, but there is a song by the Atari’s you should hear. It’s call My Diary, and part of the refrain is Being grown up isn’t half as fun as growing up. It seems almost a title for your blog. That it’s not the end result of life that matters as much as the bumps and bruises/smiles and laughs we get in getting there. A great counter testiment to how we are thrown in life and pushed by those around us to succeed beyond their wildest dreams, and in turn pushing others to succeed beyond ours…
i just realized soemthing shocking. i can explain this feeling no other way. when i read “Somewhere in Brooklyn, Wesley Crusher falls silent forever. ” and tears pooled in my eyes, and felt this sudden sadness… i am a trekkie! oh god. i knew i was a fan. hell, i have seen every episode at least twice in reruns. but to get all shaken over that wee little line spoken two years ago by the actor portraying… my goodness.
in other news, your news… its ok to play some too. and congrats on the rewrites! one of the many reasons i do not write (other than a sever lack of writing patience) is my lack of drive. i just cant get into it unless something has to be complete the next day. and, well, writing a whole book isnt the field to choose with that kind of procrastination.
good job darlin. 🙂
wil,
ahhhh…procrastinatory (i don’t even know if that’s a word) bliss…one of my favorite past times…reading that atari 2600 story reminded me of my beloved intellivision and a game that i played on it that was like missile command and space invaders but the background would change colors and i can’t remember the name of it…anyone out there know what i’m talking about?
anyways…peace out and great job with sticking to your deadlines.
Wil,
Ah…the Atari 2600. Too many memories to count. Did you ever find the Easter Egg in Yar’s Revenge. I remember writing to Atari, think I broke my cartridge; the wrote back reassuring me I only found the “secret message.” 🙂
If you ever need a videogame fix, and you’re somewhere around Torrance, you have an open invitation to play Atari, Intellivision AND NES. Take care, Wil!
Wow – Yar’s Revenge. Just the sound of that name takes me back to a simpler time, a time when pixels were two meters on a side, and audio consisted of creatively timed beeps and squawks that suggested, rather than delivered, music.
Great, now I feel old. =(
I still have my old Atari 800XL, which I’m now so tempted to go and dig out. I loved that computer, even though all its games came on tape and took forever to load. It’s weird to think about it now, but I remember staring at the computer, then at the phone, and wondering if there was any way to get it to do that thing I’d heard about where computers talked to each other over phone lines.
Damn, I bet I end up taking the thing out of it’s box this weekend.
I don’t know how this works out but a lot of the actors I like get cut from the projects they do for whatever reason. Lance Henrikson wound up on the cutting room floor for something like the 1st 15 years of his career. He’s managed to make a living and you will too. I expect the real challenge is refraining from blowing up the studio or the director’s cabanna house or at the very least, leaving a flaming bag of dog poop somewhere or another. (I’m not in showbiz. That’s for the best, I think.) IMHO you show admirable restraint. 🙂 Keep writing. 🙂
Warlords. That was our Atari game of choice. We’d walk home from Jr High School and go over to my buddy Brian’s house and play for hours. (That was of course after we stopped by the Supercade to play the real version). I miss those days sometimes.
your brain must work like my brain Wil.
I associate everything to music as well.
This one is the BloodHound gang 😛
I counter with :
‘Place your space face close to mine’
Yars Revenge!!! That was MY game. The last time I played it, it was 2:30 in the morning and I was up to over 820,000 points and WELL on my way of making my goal of 1,000,000 points! Listening to Bonnie Tyler, Holding Out for a Hero, and Linda Ronstadt, Long Distance Love Affair, zipping around the screen like a madman while telling the little flashy thing to piss off and leave me alone when my Mom walks in and asks why I am up so late on a school night and then does the unthinkable. SHE TURNS OFF MY ATARI!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!I was so heartbroken, I never turned the thing back on. Still have yet to beat that game.On a side note, if that poor white trash story is true, I can sympathize. We were so poor, we could not even afford to pay attention. But I NEVER felt poor or new we were, thanks to my Mom.
Sorry, I meant Knew./damn big hands.
Now you got me really confused here, Wil.
I just read the entry about you being cut from Nemesis and now I think I had hallucinations while I saw it in the cinema.
Because I remember seeing Wesley during the wedding scenes. Very briefly. But Wes was there.
Hm, did they show a different version in Germany?
I am really puzzled now. Must go and rent the DVD. Just to check that I did not have hallus.
We couldn’t afford a real Atari (I’m about 5 years younder than Wil, so I was quite small) in the early 80s, so my parents bought an off-brand system called a Gemini. It came with controllers that were paddles on the top half and regular joysticks on the bottom. It would play all Atari’s games, but the one I remember playing with the paddles was Warlords–my folks, my little sister and I would play for hours. I don’t think anyone I knew back then had Circus Atari; at least, I never played it.
Good job on staying on line to meet your deadline!
Now there’s an interesting story – how does a poor kid from ‘the Valley’ get into acting? And poor’s relative of course – if you’re happy at home then you’re richer than a lot of well-paid folk. :/
I once played Yars Revenge for so long I couldn’t stand up for about 20 minutes when I was done.
My mom started keeping an eye on how long I played after that….
Combat for the Atari 2600 is STILL one of my favorite games to play too. The other games I remember buying/playing Frogger which I bought on sale at Payless, and Gorf.
Long live the Atari 2600!
Ah..Pong. Those were the days. The first (and last) video game my parents ever bought. I wasn’t allowed to play it all the time, since my mom would always hide it in the same closet with the artifical Christmas tree. Every year when the snowflake beast of Christmas came out it was like I had a brand new Atari. What could be better?
Kelly
Your blog entry brings back my own Atari 2600 days … when I was a kid our family visited our relatives in Honolulu, Hawaii. After I got tired of the beaches and humid summer days, I stayed indoors and played Combat and Space Invaders.
One day, my dad surprised me with PAC-MAN (just imagine the OMG expression on my face!) … my second favorite arcade game (next to Galaxian). In retrospect, I’m embarassed by the irony of having so much fun indoors at one of the world’s most beautiful locations.
I don’t remember what happened to my 2600 (sold, given, trashed?), but I wouldn’t mind playing co-op Space Invaders with some of my friends, some too young to remember the good ol’ days when controllers only had ONE button … and you could still play Defender with it.
(I wasn’t L33T enough to play Defender at the arcade – and to think how many games nowadays use all the mouse buttons + scroll wheel + keybaord keys).