Author: Wil

I was attracted to Geocaching because, even though I may not probably won’t find the cache, I’ll still get to enjoy an awesome Journey. Part of my fundamental philosophy of life is that it’s about the Journey, not the Destination, so hiking is a wonderful metaphor for me.
Over at blogging.la, I found out that the Los Angeles Times has created a bunch of really spiffy printable maps to some of the greatest hikes in Los Angeles County. As Robert says at b.la, hurry and grab them before the Times puts them behind their Cone of Registration.

When I was in my very early twenties, and oh-so-very-very-with-it, I went through this phase where I just couldn’t get enough of the Beat Generation. I had always been a fan of Burroughs, (especially anything involving Doctor Benway) but that was just about the extent of it. In fact, I didn’t even associate him with the Beats until my research for Coppola’s version of On The Road spiraled completely out of control and became an obsession. I listened to Ken Nordine and Steve Allen, and I read everything from Kerouac to Neal Cassidy to Allen Ginsberg that I could get my hands on. I even spent several days with Howl, pretending I knew why it was so important. Anyway, the point is, for a couple of years, if I could have grown a goatee, I totally would have done it, man. *snap* *snap*
There are only two things that have survived from that period of my life. The first is a love of Jazz music (if you haven’t stayed up all night listening to Miles Davis, you haven’t . . . well, stayed up all night listening to Miles Davis. Sorry, bad example. But it really is cool. Oh, and when the weather warms up, there’s nothing quite like Charlie Parker, and when you love someone so much your heart aches, Chet Baker is your guy.)
The second is my desire to take images from my mind and turn them into stories. One night, I was “free-forming, man, *snap* *snap*” in my notebook (that was covered with pen drawings of stars, a piano, a mugwump, and — incongruously — a martini glass) and I came up with this short story about a guy who is so worked up about the problems of the world, he smokes cigarette after cigarette after cigarette, and composes letters to people in an effort to enlighten them. Eventually, he starts drinking, and ends up in an alcoholic coma. When the Sun comes up, it finds him the floor, surrounded by his final thoughts, beneath “an ashtray overflowing with the weight of the world.”
Over the weekend, I bought Wilco’s Summerteeth. The second third song has a lyric that goes, “The ashtray says / you were up all night.”
Woah. Did I wander into Jeff Tweedy’s cosmic creative wake one night, and not know about it until Sunday? Or did he wonder into mine, since that album was released in 1998, and I wrote that story around 1995? Maybe I hit a creative wormhole or something.
Whatever. I don’t care. This is pretty much just an excuse to blog about how fucking amazing Wilco is, and how much they’ve eaten my brains.

I was really disappointed by the story MSNBC tried to tell yesterday. I was hoping we’d discuss the empowering nature of blogs, and how anyone, even celebrities, can use blogging software to communicate with people. I hoped to point out that blogging is very egalitarian, and it doesn’t matter how famous a person is offline, if their blog just isn’t relevant or interesting, nobody will pay attention once the novelty wears off, and they’ll be stuck with little more than a promotional tool that is largely ignored. When we started out, I tried to explain that I was a “blogger with a high-profile job”, rather than a “celebrity blogger,” but they just weren’t interested in hearing that. Instead, they did everything they possibly could to turn the conversation to She Whose Name Will Not Be Spoken, Britney Spears, and other vapid media whores darlings who would probably vanish in a puff of smoke the instant the media stopped fawning over them.
I thought that MSNBC would really “get” blogs, since several of their on-air hosts have them, including Keith Olbermann, whose bloggermann is absolutely fantastic. Seriously, that guy should be on TV.
I tried my best, and I’m sad that I lost an opportunity to help introduce to a large TV audience a powerful (new-ish) way to communicate. Unfrotunately, I left feeling like it was further evidence of the Mainstream Media’s inability (refusal?) to understand what blogs truly are, and why blogs matter.
While I was on the air, I mentioned a few blogs that I think are fantastic, and a few people have asked me to link to them. So here are the ones I can remember:

• Nickerblog is written by my friend Shane Nickerson. Shane and I are part of the “I keep my blog because I want to write the way you do” club. He’s an amazing writer.
• + busblog is written by Tony Pierce. Tony just won a bloggy, which he fully deserves. When I won my bloggies, I don’t think I had earned them, yet. Tony completely earned his.
• Neil Gaiman’s Journal. Neil Gaiman gave the world an incredible gift when he created Sandman. Then, presumably because he likes us all so much, he gave us American Gods. He also gave me the greatest honor in the world when he wrote the foreword to my book Just A Geek. Like most bloggers, he writes about whatever is on his mind, but because he’s one of the finest authors in a generation, it’s always interesting.
• James Wolcott is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. He clearly doesn’t need a blog, since he’s a contributing editor to a respected magazine, but he does it anyway. More evidence of why blogs matter, if you ask me.

I think I mentioned a few others, but by that point in the interview, I just wanted to get off the air and back home so I could finish my latest Games of our Lives, which is about one of my favorite games of all-time. If someone remembers and wants to link it, put it in the comments or send an e-mail, and I’ll update accordingly.
As Balance to the MSNBC piece: Salon‘s featured story today is called Attack of the Celebrity Blogs. I was hopeful that Salon would get the story right, but when I saw my name in the first paragraph, I cringed and expected the worst.
I have never been so happy to be wrong in all my life.

There are as many different types of celebrity blogs as there are celebrities: We have blogs from celebrities who have fallen out of the spotlight and who want back in, at least in some marginal way (Rosie O’Donnell); blogs from celebrities who are too big to need blogs but who still maintain them, at least in some cursory faction, to maintain the illusion of intimacy with their fans ( Gwen Stefani ); blogs from celebrities who actually seem to enjoy recording their thoughts about mundane day-to-day activities and manage to do it in a conversational, entertaining way ( Moby ); blogs from celebrities who feel strangely compelled to lecture us on the meaning of the universe ( Fred Durst ); blogs from celebrities who feel strongly about politics ( Barbra Streisand ); and, most fascinating — and most readable — of all, a blog from an actor whom few of us have thought much about in recent years but who has become a kind of touchstone for many people in the readersphere who are simply attempting to do what they want to do with their lives and finding it more difficult than they ever imagined ( Wil Wheaton, who appeared in “Stand by Me” as a child actor and in “Star Trek: The Next Generation” as a teenager, and then seemingly dropped off the Earth’s surface).

The story goes on to make many of the points I had hoped to make on TV yesterday, and ends with some unbelievably kind words about me and WWdN:

The overarching point of that entry [about CSI] may be that celebrities aren’t like you and me, except when they are. WIL WHEATON dot NET is appealing because it’s written by a regular person with intelligence and a sense of humor. When he’s lucky enough to do the work he obviously loves, he also has a pretty interesting job. But while his readers leave lots of comments congratulating him on his “CSI” performance, there are plenty more who are eager to offer advice about the sick cats. In the end, that’s what writing — and reading — blogs comes down to. The Inner Self isn’t the stuff of everyday life: The cats with the kidney problems are.

Wow! How cool is that? Like I said, I have never thought of myself as a celebrity blogger. I’ve always thought of myself as a blogger who once had a high-profile job. While MSNBC completely missed that point, and chose to focus instead on viewing blogging through the traditional “celebrity” filters, Salon completely grokked it, and I’m really psyched that they chose to use my blog as a favorable example. That’s really, really cool.
. . . this has been sitting here since I got up this morning, and I’ve been reluctant to publish it because it feels like a big old “Yeah! go me! I rule!” pile of shit . . . I want to say how happy and flattered I am that Salon chose *me* as an example of Some Guy with a blog that doesn’t suck . . . but I just can’t figure out a way to quote it without feeling like I’m jerking off. I hope it doesn’t come off that way.

I taped a bunch of segments for an awesome VH-1 show today. I won’t name it, because I don’t know if they’ve announced it yet and I’m trying to avoid The Goon Squad, but it’s going to be really funny. I had so much fun, and I may even get to go back and tape some more stuff next week.
Rock.
Anne and I took Sketch over to his vet today for his Moment of Truth check-up. Long story made very short: his lungs are clear, his heart is on the large side, but not looking too scary right now, and everything else about him is very, very positive. The only thing left is his blood work, which comes back from the lab tomorrow. If his kidney levels are okay, then I can officially relax just a little bit.
Felix seems happier and more relaxed today than he has in over a week. I hope the combination of love and medicine is helping him feel better. Thank you to everyone who left comments in and sent e-mails my previous post . . . I almost didn’t publish it, because I felt so — well, you know if you read it. But now I’m really glad I did.
Star Trek dot Com mentioned my appearance at this weekend’s Grand Slam convention:

Wil Wheaton may be the best-kept Star Trek secret at conventions. Often eliciting intense conflicting opinions about his role as Wesley Crusher on The Next Generation, Wheaton is now a successful writer who’s made peace with his sometimes difficult past. What’s more, he’s a funny, engaging speaker who should probably appear at speaking engagements on college and high school campuses.
Wheaton said that, as a child, he hated attending conventions that felt repetitive. Therefore, he tries to offer something new each time that he appears in public. This time around, he read several selections from his Internet blog to be compiled into a new book that will be published by the end of this year (2005). These selections refer to his happy-but-sometimes-challenging family life with a wife and two step-sons. Wheaton’s fresh, witty delivery generated several hearty laughs.

The convention was kind of a drag for me this year. It was almost 2/3 smaller than it’s ever been (I think Creation and most of the fans are saving themselves for the Vegas show in August, which has grown into something truly incredible and supermegacool), and the energy just felt “off” to me for some reason. But my reading on Sunday afternoon was great. I read to a mostly-empty theatre, but the audience that came out was just amazing! I took a BIG chance: rather than read a set of material from Geek and Barefoot which I know very well, I read some newer stories that I’ve never put up in front of an audience before. The audience was very cool, and I felt like they were “with me” from the very beginning right up until my time ran out. I hardly sold any books, though, so if you’re looking for an autographed Just A Geek or Dancing Barefoot, watch this space next week. I’ve got some extras here, and I’ll be offering signed books for a couple of days, just as soon as I can get the ordering all set up.
Several WWdN readers e-mailed that Television Without Pity said some very kind things about me on last week’s CSI:

And now, a word about Walter. If I didn’t know that was Wil Wheaton, I wouldn’t have guessed. He’s convincing enough as a homeless guy to fit in with any of the regulars that used to hang out in Multimedia Gulch. I had avoided reading his weblog entries about shooting this show, because I didn’t want them to influence how I received his performance, but now that I’ve seen him, I am all about sending you here and here. He provides a pretty lively look at how the CSI sausage is made.

As if that wasn’t cool enough, I also there’s also this:

Know what else sucks? If you’re Wil Wheaton and you’re acting the hell out of your crazy-homeless-guy role, and you’re on screen for all of five minutes, maybe. We love Wil Wheaton! We want at least ten minutes. And why is Wil Wheaton acting like a crazy guy? Because he, too, is a red herring suspect in the fatal beating of a young boy. The actual killer is the boy’s adolescent brother, proving yet again that if the children are our future, the Earth will be one giant, smoking crater by 2015. But in the here and now, this is the case that makes Nicky a man, as he grows a pair and tells Cavaliere to shove his tool-like behavior.

I seriously love Television Without Pity, but I expected a full-on cockpunch from them (because that’s their job, you know, and they do it very well. Not cockpunching me, I mean, but cockpunching in general. The TWoP staff are serious black belt masters of the cockpunch.) It was supercool that they seemed to like my craziness.
MSNBC is going to have me on tomorrow (Friday the 18th) at Noon EST to talk about blogging. I hope the story is more “blogging is an incredibly empowering medium” and not “hey! look! celebrities!” Tune in if you can, and let me know what you think. I’ll be wearing The Shirt. Update: Boy, could they have tried just a little harder to completely miss the point of blogging? Lame.
This Saturday is our second to last ACME Love Machine show, so if you’ve been waiting until the end to see us cough up some funny, this is your golden moment. Carpe ACME, and such.

Anne and I took Felix to his vet on Monday for a blood panel. We hoped the results would let us know what our next step was.
Of course, the blood work came back yesterday that his red cell count is extremely low (17 or 19 or something like that) and his kidney values are very high. But his vet said that he’s not suffering unless he’s vomiting or some other stuff that I’ll spare you all. She told us that our options were to put Felix to sleep, or give him Epogen injections three times a week, sub-q fluids twice a day, liquid vitamins and an aluminum hydroxyde suspension each morning, and hope that all that helps him feel better.
It sounds like an awful lot, doesn’t it? Anne and I talked about it, and tried to figure out what was best. We are absolutely dedicated to doing what is best for Felix, and we’re not going to prolong his life simply because we don’t want to say goodbye . . . but if we can help him feel better, and have good quality of life then we want to do whatever we can afford to do. We asked his vet how she thought he’d respond to all this stuff, and she told us that she didn’t know. Apparently, it varies an awful lot from kitty to kitty. She told us what I’ve heard from hundreds of WWdN readers: “Your cat will let you know if he’s ready to go, or if he wants to stick around and try to feel better.”
The thing is, I’ve really felt like Felix has been telling us that he doesn’t feel well, and he’s really over it. He doesn’t want to be cuddled or scratched, or loved, and when I come near him he complains at me and slowly walks away.
Our choice should be pretty clear, right?
I wish it was.
We spent most of yesterday agonizing about it, and we eventually decided to let Felix tell us what we should do. The only question was . . . how?
About two weeks ago, Sketch had a couple of days where he seemed to really go downhill. His breathing was up to almost 50, and he had that freaked out look in his eyes that he had the weekend that we found out he had CHF. I made several frantic phone calls to his vet and his kitty cardiologist, and they advised me to give him extra medication to clear his lungs. After several hours, he was down to the low 40s, but was clearly still struggling. I worried that the medicine just wasn’t enough, and I hated seeing him in so much discomfort, so I sat down next to him on the floor in my bedroom and said, “I know that you’re feeling pretty lousy right now, and if you’re tired of medications and trips to the vet and feeling this way, I understand. I love you, and you’ve brought a lot to my life, but if you’re really suffering, I don’t want to force you to stay alive. But if you want to fight, we can help you feel better, and your doctors have told me what to do.” I scratched his little head and told him that he could let me know what he wanted me to do.
Okay, I realize how insane this sounds. Normally, I’m a pretty cold and rational person, and I would scoff at the idea of talking to my cat like he’s a person. I know, I know. It’s lame, right? But I don’t think it’s much different than praying, or asking the universe for help, or keeping someone in your thoughts, or anything like that. It’s just . . . it’s just putting a little bit of hope (or faith, or whatever) into Something Else. I’d never let it take the place of things like medication, trips to the doctor, or good solid science . . . but we humans have all these constructs in our minds, and sometimes we do some pretty silly things to stay comfortable. At times like this, I don’t care if I’m anthropomorphizing my pets. If I can assign some human qualities to their body language or behavior and feel a little closer to them, so be it.
I finished talking to Sketch, kissed the top of his head, and left him alone. I hoped the medicines would work, and I hoped that he’d “tell” me that he was feeling better. I walked out to the kitchen, called his vet, and had The Talk with her. She told me what my options were, and when I hung up the phone I just sat in there and stared at a blank AbiWord document for what seemed like hours.
It was actually closer to thirty minutes or so when I walked out into my living room, and saw Sketch. He was sitting up, eyes bright, in the middle of the floor.
“How you feeling, fatty?” I said.
He meowed at me. It was bright and clear. No gurgling. I crouched down, and he walked over to me, purring loudly. He rubbed his face against my hands, and walked little circles around me for a minute or so. Finally, he lay down on his side next to me and closed his eyes. He continued to purr.
I pet him for a bit, and he fell asleep. I counted his breaths: he was in the low 30s and he seemed to be doing fine. Clearly, the medication was working. Why it chose that particular moment to work rather than hours earlier when the vet said it should have is beyond me, and I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that I’d just had “The Talk” with my cat . . . and now I’m starting to realize how stupid I sound so I’ll just stop this right now. The bottom line is: whether it’s a coincidence or not, I asked Sketch to let me know what he wanted me to do, and I felt like he was telling me that he had some fight left in him. He continues to improve, and he’s been sleeping on my chest or on his back between me and Anne every night since then.
In fact, when I got home from What’s My Line tonight, Sketch hopped off my bed, walked with me into my office, and is currently on his back at my feet. I can hear him purring over the soft hum of my CPU’s fan.
Again, I’m really struggling with the . . . uh . . . metaphysical(?) aspect of this whole thing, but to get back to my point:
I walked out onto my patio this afternoon, and found Felix sleeping in this blanket I got from Think Geek that we call “The Geek Blanket.” It’s all fleecy and soft and snuggly, and all my animals love to sleep in it. (We put it on the patio near the spot Felix’s been spending most of his time, and stuck one of his catnip mice in it, because we thought it would help him feel more comfortable.) I was on the phone with my manager, telling him how Felix was doing.
“So we’re going to see what Felix wants us to do,” I said. “I know it sounds stupid, but I’m going to talk with him, and take the advice of our vet: Felix will tell us what he wants us to do.”
While I was talking about him, Felix looked up at me, walked over to where I was on the patio, and did the same thing Sketch did: the walk, the meowing, the nuzzling, the whole thing. I hung up the phone, and had “The Talk” with him. Yes, I know how stupid this sounds, and believe me it sounds insane to me to write it down . . . but it’s what I did. While I talked to him, he was more affectionate and vocal than he’d been in days.
I hung up the phone and called the vet. I told her that we’d try the vitamins and shots. When I hung up with her, Anne called.
“I thought about it, and I want to at least try to help Felix for a week. If he’s not feeling better, and if he’s got no quality of life, we’ll say goodbye to him and put him to sleep . . . but I couldn’t live with myself if we just gave up on him.”
I told her about him walking around me, just like Sketch. I told her how stupid it feels to talk about this like I had some kind of mystical conversation with my cats, but the bottom line is that we both really know what’s going on, and we know the odds are against us. But Felix’s vet says that he’s not in pain, and there’s a chance that he may respond positively to this treatment. It’s not too expensive, and we’ll see what happens in the next three to five days.
I’m exhausted, and I don’t know if this makes much sense. I started writing it before I left for ACME tonight, and I just don’t have the energy to edit or rewrite it. But people are e-mailing about Felix and Sketch, and I figure that if I’m going to share my concerns, at least I should share their progress.
Thanks for your comments and e-mails, and for keeping us in your thoughts.