Month: October 2013

So in 24 hours, two people who were hugely influential on my life have died.

I almost wrote “passed away” or “left us” because they feel more gentle, while “died” feels more raw, more uncompromising, more brutal, more … final. But that’s the way I feel this morning, so I’m leaving it. It’s an interesting example of how different words can mean the same thing but say it in distinctive ways.

I wasn’t into Velvet Underground when I was a kid, but I fucking loved Bowie. When I learned that there would probably not be a Bowie without Lou Reed, I dug into his catalog. I was in my early 20s, and mostly listening to punk and electronic music at the time. I fell in love with The Velvet underground, though, and it was very common for me to listen to Lords of Acid’s Lust, Tool’s Opiate, and the Velvets’ The Velvet Underground & Nico back to back to back.

I’ve written before about my introduction to The Simpsons when I was about 17 or maybe 18. Those first five season of the show, along with Ren and Stimpy, Beavis and Butthead, and MST3K basically created my sense of humor at a time when I was looking to cast off the trappings of youth and don the mantle of adulthood, not realizing that I was still very much a child.

I met Marcia Wallace once, briefly, when I worked with my friend Keith on his live talkshow in a theatre. She was kind and awesome and insanely funny. I never worked with her, but everyone I know who did just loved her. John Dimaggio positively adored her. The voiceover community is very small, much smaller than you’d think, but even within this tiny community there are a couple islands few people ever get to visit, and The Simpsons is one of them. Futurama was another, and it’s not surprising to me that they shared a few very talented performers.

I’m 41, and I have at least another 50 years ahead of me. Hell, by the time I’m an old man, science and medicine will probably done something to extend our lives even longer than that, but when two people who were so fundamental to my coming of age die, it makes me face my own mortality in a way that is a little more visceral than I’d like.

It seems like a lot of us who are in the creative community and in our 40s are hit pretty hard by Lou Reed’s death. By all accounts, he wasn’t the nicest person in the world, and one of those “don’t meet your heroes” kind of guys. But the music he created spoke to us at important times in our lives.

I was never part of the drug culture that Lou Reed wrote about, and I never had any interest in being part of it, but it was positively fascinating for me to read and hear about it from afar. His willingness to write plainly and honestly about being a junkie made me feel like he was saying to me, “Hey, kid, it’s okay to be a weird outsider. Let’s be weird outsiders together.”

I feel the same way about Kurt Cobain, for almost the exact same reason.

I think it’s kind of weird when people die and those of us who didn’t know them feel obligated to memorialize them, but here we are: Thank you, Marcia Wallace and Lou Reed, for being part of my life, even though you never knew you were.

“Is everything okay?” Anne asked me. She sat at our counter, and I stood on the other side, next to the microwave, watching my bowl of soup slowly turn around inside it.”

“No, it’s not,” I said, “I’m having a terrible day, and I know it’s because my brain is fucked up and I know it’s going to eventually get better but right now I just want to fucking scream because I feel irritable and anxious and overwhelmed and I know that there’s no logical reason to feel any of these things, but I also know that it’s my fucked up broken brain and I can’t do anything about it so I feel helpless and angry.”

I am, as you can tell, the master of the run on sentence.

“I’m trying really hard not to blow up at you for something you didn’t do, or yell at the dogs for barking, or just freaking out at everything … but it is really fucking hard and I’m just sick of this shit.”

The microwave beeped and I reached in to take the soup out.

“OUCH GODDAMMIT MOTHER FUCKER SHIT COCK FUCK SHIT FUCK!” I shouted, which is “Wil’s having a bad depression day” for “This bowl is very hot and I should have used something to protect my hands before I touched it.”

I yanked my hands out of the microwave, and took several deep breaths. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m really struggling today.”

“It’s okay,” she said.

“It’s not okay, but I appreciate you being patient with me.” I thought about the years — at least a decade — we were together before I got help for my depression. I thought about all the years that Anne and our kids had to deal with me freaking out at stupid things for no rational reason. I felt guilty, like I always do, even though I know that it wasn’t my fault.

I got a hot pad, and took my soup out. I waited several minutes for it to cool off, and I ate it. It was delicious.

Anne went to bed a little earlier than I did, and Seamus was snuggled up next to her when I got into bed. I slept soundly through the night, and woke up to Marlowe’s little puppy face just a few inches from mine. I kind of love it that she gets it into her head between 930 and 10 every morning that it’s time for me to get out of bed, so I get to wake up to a happy puppy every morning.

I pet her little face, and took a sort of emotional inventory. I noticed that all my systems were running normally, and the Very Bad No Good Day of Depression had passed. I felt as close to normal as I can feel, which is probably about 97% of normal (but who really wants to be completely normal anyway? Normal is boring.)

I got out of bed, made some coffee and oatmeal, and started my day. A few hours later, I went to a very important meeting. I can’t talk about the meeting I had, but it’s for something I love, something I’m super excited and proud to be part of, and something I hope I can talk about soon. The meeting could not have gone better, and as I walked to my car after it was finished, I was grateful for the incredible creative team I’m working with, and excited for our future together.

So I got better, and that’s the reason I’m putting these words down right now. I have depression, but depression doesn’t have me. I have bad days, I have really terrible days, and I have MMMMMARRAAAHHH days, like I did yesterday. Those days suck, but they always pass, and knowing why they happen, even if I can’t control them, gives me a great deal of comfort on the truly awful days.

If you’d told me yesterday, when I was at the nadir of my MMMMMARRAAAHHH that I would spend significant time today sitting in a room with people I like, alternately laughing my ass off and marveling at how clever and creative they are, I probably would have told you to stop being mean to me, because there was no way I’d ever be happy again.

And yet.

Thank you, hundreds-of-thousands-of-people-I’ve-never-met, for being kind to me when I was having a really MMMMMARRAAAHHH day. I hope you have a wonderful weekend.

There’s this classic commercial with Orson Welles where he’s struggling with the whole thing, and makes this primal, existential expression of frustration that sounds like sort of like MMMMMARRAAAHHH. People look at the video and laugh at an old guy who may be drunk, but I see one of the greatest creative minds of his generation struggling like crazy to  make it through something he knows he needs to do. It’s not that hard, it shouldn’t be that hard, but still, when staring into the abyss that only he can see, MMMMMARRAAAHHH.

Today, I heavily identify with the MMMMMARRAAAHHH. I’ve spent hours trying to customize my blog, only to end up where I was, visually, about a year ago. I gave up, decided to write something instead, and just found my brain refusing to cooperate. I get out a couple of paragraphs, declare, “this is fucking stupid” and then … MMMMMARRAAAHHH.

So I’m caught in this MMMMMARRAAAHHH cycle, and this is my attempt to get out of it.

Last night, I blocked a dickhead on Twitter. I noticed that this particular dickhead declared that he was “proudly blocked by” a couple of people in his bio, and I said: These people on Twitter who proclaim that they are “proudly blocked by” people may want to reconsider their priorities in life … speaking only for myself, I block people who are dicks, and people who are obnoxious. So if that makes someone proud … um … good job?

My friend Nika observed, “@wilw Everyone wants a reason to feel important in life. Being unpleasant is one of the easiest ways to assert power.”

That made me think about how different things are now than they were

…

Annnnnd MMMMMARRAAAHHH

Jesus Shit Cock. Let me try again.

While I worked on the backend (hurr hurrr hurr) of my blog today, I thought about that exchange last night. I thought about the years I spent playing whack-a-mole with dickheads, dealing with trolls and griefers, and keeping my blog running as smoothly as I could. I thought about how much has changed since then, from a technology standpoint, a cultural standpoint, and how different my life is.

While I was having my coffee this morning, I responded to a comment on Reddit about the reasons I left Star Trek. I’ve covered this in books, so I’m not going to go into it again, but I wanted to share this part of it:

Me: The tl;dr from me is that I was treated quite badly by the producers, and they were actively sabotaging my career outside of Star Trek, preventing me from working in movies that would have been a huge boost to my standing in the industry.

Redditor: Do you think their sabotage has affected you to this day or do you think as a celebrity you have moved past it?

Me: I’ve moved past it. I have learned a lot in the years since that happened (among them the fact that all producers aren’t automatically jerks) and coming to grips with my experience back then allowed me to let it go, focus on what was important to me now, and …. [sunglasses] plot my own course in life.

Now, I’m sure that I would have a very different life if I’d been able to work in the movies they prevented me from working on. For example, I wouldn’t have wanted out of my contract, and I probably would have stayed with the show as long as they would have had me, through all the movies. I probably would have worked on other serious films, and would be in a very different place right now.

But if that had happened, I probably would have grown up to be a douchebag, because I would have been stupidly rich, stupidly famous, and I never would have grown up.

I love my life right now, and I’m grateful for the pain and the struggles that I went through to get to where I am today.

tl;dr Yeah, I’m fine.

Redditor: You’re an amazing, down-to-earth guy. I’m impressed that you’ve moved past everything as well as you have, and I’m glad that you’re doing well. I’m also glad that you appreciate what you have, because so many people don’t.

I appreciate the response and wish you nothing but happiness.

… MMMMMARRAAAHHH.

I’m not going to give up and delete this. I’m going to keep going.

My life is awesome, and I’m so grateful for all the great stuff that I get to do with it. I really, really am.

But today? Today, I just can’t shake the MMMMMARRAAAHHH.