Category: blog

Yesterday morning, Anne and I were walking Marlowe up the street, and both of us noticed a house that we’ve never seen before. This is strange, because we’ve lived here for years, and you’d expect us to know our own neighborhood, but there it was: a house that has clearly been here longer than we have, but that we’d somehow never noticed.

Now, it’s easy to understand why: we’re almost always looking at the house across the street from it when we walk or drive past, because we like the dogs who live there, or we’re looking at the house next door to it because it has a really nice yard with lots of plants and flowers.

But I thought it was way more fun to imagine that we never saw that house until yesterday because it wasn’t there until yesterday. It just showed up, because there was a glitch in the matrix, or because we walked though a membrane that separated two realities and ended up in one where the only difference that we’re aware of was that house … and why we’re even aware of the change, why we retained the memory of it not being there, the memory from the previous universe that should have not made it across the membrane, that’s where I think some kind of cool science fiction story could bloom.

Sometimes my brain does stuff like this, just takes something like “I never noticed that before,” and turns it into … well, that whole complicated thing.

I mean, think about it: I bet every single one of you has seen something that you were positive wasn’t there the day or hour or [unit of time] before, but holy shit there it is and surely it must have been there all along… right?

Or how about when you walk into a room looking for something, you see it, but when you blink and look again it isn’t there. It turns out the cat, which you’re positive looked at you and blinked its eyes and opened its mouth and everything was just a backpack. But that’s weird, because you know you saw the cat.

What’s that in the periphery of your vision? A person? Oh, no, it’s just a shadow or nothing at all. But you’re pretty goddamn sure you saw something, someone there a second ago.

I know that there are totally logical explanations for these things, but isn’t it more fun to imagine?

So with that in mind, keep reading:

A couple of years ago, I came across part of a recording called “Found on the Elevator”. It was just a few minutes of a recording from the future, that was archived on a record in the past. It was supposedly found in an elevator in New York City in 1969.

Here’s the way it was described: “This recording is an “unauthorized experiment” that was made in the year 2058 C.D.S. (Carbon Dating System), a “blue verbal data feed” sent backwards in time to “retro A.D.” by Decker, T. L., index J-3, CMR 00965 of T-Group Roaring Vectors 252, a human cyborg who suffers from a malfunctioning number nine electrode in his head which causes him to have an emotional breakdown as he records this message. It’s a secret message to a past world he has trouble imagining, a world of foreign substances like metal, plastic, animals, soldiers… a world all physical and “impossibly slow.”

It was really fantastic. It reminded me of a lot of the late night Joe Frank broadcasts I listened to in my 20s on KXLU or KCRW when I’d be driving around late at night, because I could.

For months, I scoured the Internet, looking for the rest of the recording, or more information about it. Mostly what I found were blogs and BBS posts form other people who were looking for the same thing, but no leads. I knew it was a work of fiction, a work of art, but I desperately wanted it to be real, so while I searched for the entire recording, I imagined the world that it came from. (I won’t tell you how it lives in my mind, because I don’t want to affect how it lives in yours, should you chose to create it for yourself.)

Eventually, I gave up the search and went back to looking at pictures of cats who want to buy boats, and forgot all about it.

Until last week.

Last week, my friend Mer RT’d a link from William Gibson that led to the entire first side of the record. It is just as amazing and wonderful as I always hoped it would be, and well worth the wait.

Now I just need to find a recording of Side Two…

Boy, this week really got away from me, didn’t it?

I’m working on some of those exciting-but-secret projects I work on from time to time, and that means no brain cycles left to write the things I want to write.

So, rather than write nothing until I can write what I want to write, I will offer up a link to my friend Shane Nickerson’s podcast — helpfully titled The Nickercast — which includes me talking to Shane and his co-hosts for about 90 minutes. We discussed creativity, depression, Weird Internet Bullshit™, and how they all mash together to create the fabric of our lives.

Oh, and here’s a picture I took after a meeting at Geek and Sundry earlier this week. The cast of Learning Town was getting drunk for some reason.

I started this post yesterday, and couldn’t finish it until today. So turn yesterday into the day before yesterday and tomorrow into today and then ask yourself why you even bothered because it really isn’t all that important.

I woke up this morning because my dog was fussing to go outside.

“I didn’t know this was a pet-friendly hotel,” I thought as my brain got off the train from Dreamland. “I have to move to part of the hotel that doesn’t have pets in it today.”

Then I opened my eyes, and experienced the glorious moment when, after being away from home for a week, I realized that I was back in my own house, in my own bed. I got up, let her out, and made myself a cup of coffee … then I enjoyed that glorious moment when, after drinking hotel “coffee” for a week, I get to make it myself, just the way I like it.

The flight home last night was pretty rough until we got over Texas. It was so turbulent over the Gulf of Mexico the flight attendants didn’t even get out of their seats for close to an hour after take off. A few years ago, I would have been an absolute mess during the whole thing, but I’ve been flying so much, I just ride it out and try not to spill my water all over myself. I’m about halfway through book three of A Song of Ice And Fire, and I want to finish it before the new season premieres, so while my body was bouncing around on an airplane, my mind was in Westeros. It was pretty great.

So I promised I’d share a couple of memorable moments from MegaCon. Before I get to  the pictures I took yesterday, I’ll do that now.

Appearing as a guest at a big convention like this is a lot of fun, but it’s also exhausting. People always ask me if my arm or hand or wrist is tired near the end of a long day of signing, and I always tell them the truth: my body never gets tired; it’s my brain that is exhausted. Signing is so much more than, well, signing. It’s listening and engaging and sharing moments and meeting hundreds of people in a relatively short amount of time, doing my best to not rush people while understanding that the person in front of me and the person still waiting behind them may have been in that line for over an hour. It’s drawing out shy kids who are excited to meet me, but don’t know what to say. It’s handling people who can be a little strange — if harmless — who may not know when it’s really time for them to move on. It’s telling someone that I’m sorry, but I can’t sign that thing, or I can’t pose for that picture, or I’m really not going to go have beers with you because I don’t know you at all even though you think you know me.

I suppose I could make it less mentally taxing if I just sat there and didn’t make an effort to engage people or treat them like human beings (and there are some folks who do exactly that), but that’s not how I roll, and I will stop attending conventions before I become That Guy. That Guy has no perspective, no humility, no gratitude, and while I’ve met him a few times (there are a few people who act like fans at conventions are simply meatbags attached to wallets) I won’t ever be him.

And I wouldn’t have it any other way. Because I was a fan at conventions long before I was a special guest, I know what it’s like to be on that side of the table, and it’s important to me to treat people the way I want to be treated. It’s also wonderful, because I get to meet remarkable and inspiring people, and share in the mutual joy we have for Doctor Who, Tabletop gaming, Game of Thrones, Star Wars, Star Trek, beer, hockey, and silly Internet memes.

This weekend, I met dozens of people who told me that they were scientists, engineers, doctors, or programmers because they were inspired by Wesley Crusher. I met tons of women and a few men who told me that I was their first teenage crush. I met a lot of people, men and women, my age and younger, who thanked me for speaking out about depression and anxiety. I held a young woman’s hands while she cried because her anxiety was so intense and scary, and I promised her that she would be okay. I was moved by her bravery, and inspired by her courage. I met some families who were all geeking out about different things at the convention, from Star Trek to My Little Pony to LEGO to Star Wars, and happily sharing in each other’s joy. I was honored to be part of all of these experiences, and grateful to have them.

But there is one meeting that stands out, that moved me so much, I’ve been struggling to find the right words to recount it. On Saturday, a young woman walked up to my table with her husband and her two children. She handed me a typed letter and told me that she knew she wouldn’t be able to get through what she wanted to say to me, and would I please read it.

I unfolded it, and read her story. When she was a young girl, she had a serious complication due to her Lupus, and her doctors told her that she would never walk again. She had a photo of me, though, that she took with her to physical therapy every day, and the therapists would hold it up for her and encourage her to walk toward it — toward me — while she recovered. She made a promise to herself, she said, that she would walk again some day, and if I was ever in her town, she would walk up to meet me. At the end of her letter, she thanked me for being there, so she could *walk* to meet me.

I looked up at her through tears, and she looked back at me through her own. I stood up, walked around my table, and put about fifteen feet between us. I held my arms open, and asked her to walk over to me. She began to cry, and slowly, confidently closed the distance between us. I embraced her, and we stood there for a minute, surrounded by thousands of people who had no idea what was going on, and cried together.

“I’m so proud of you,” I said, quietly, “and I am so honored.”

We wiped the tears away, and I sat back down to sign a photo for her. I looked at her young children. “Your mom is remarkable,” I said, “and I know you don’t get it, because she’s, like your mom? But you have to trust me: she is.”

The kids nodded, and I could tell that they were a little freaked out by the emotion of the thing, even if they didn’t understand it. They looked at their father, who said, “Mommy’s okay. Mommy’s okay.” That made me tear up again. Mommy was okay, and she is a remarkable woman who defied the odds and her doctors, and *walked* up to meet me. I’m still overwhelmed when I think about what that means, and how I was part of it.

Okay. While I compose myself, here are some pictures from the final day of MegaCon 2013:

I was pretty geeked out by this awesome AWESOME-O cosplay.

I’ve forgotten this young woman’s name, but she drew an incredible Wilthulu for me.

Another remarkable artist who’s name has gone out of my head (my brain rotates those logs pretty quickly). She drew this fantastic picture of the TNG cast with Q, and gave me a copy of it. I really, really love it when people get excited and make things, and I love that Star Trek is something that inspires that so frequently.

Chris Hamer drew this commission for a couple, who asked me to sign it for them.

How incredibly cute is this Borderlands 2 Cosplay?! I just love the little muscles his mom drew on his shirt.

Fix-It Felix and Vanellope Von Schweetz cosplay! How adorable are they together?

Last one: it’s me and my space mom, Gates McFadden!

Gates has a wonderful theatre here in Los Angeles (Atwater Village, to be precise). Her theatre’s tumblr is one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen: Gates has a Doctor Crusher action figure that she takes all over the place and puts into darkly comic situations which are photographed and captioned. The individual images are hilarious, but when they are taken as a whole, they tell a story that … well, I don’t want to spoil it for you.

Seriously, check it out, and tell your friends.

MegaCon was really great. I had a good time on my panel Saturday morning, where I told some jokes and did a Q&A with about 3500 or so people in the room. The TNG panel Saturday night suffered from appallingly bad moderation (Patrick was interrupted during a wonderful story about working on the show when the moderator decided to make it all about him with an inappropriate  unprofessional, and disrespectful Harlem Shake bit)  but I think the group of us overcame it as best as we could.

I’m really glad I went to the convention. I got to visit with my TNG family again, knowing that the entire group of us probably won’t be in the same place like this for at least a year, and I got to share in some of the most wonderful and inspiring moments I’ve experienced in years. If you were there, thanks for making it a great weekend for me.