Are you having chicken? I like chicken. pic.twitter.com/S4xOnXzn77

— Wil Wheaton (@wilw) April 7, 2015

I sure do like chicken. pic.twitter.com/5qHf6O0cEW — Wil Wheaton (@wilw) April 7, 2015

… pic.twitter.com/SnY8MFNVoV

— Wil Wheaton (@wilw) April 7, 2015

Thank you all so much for your kind words. It’s been a rough few days here at Castle Wheaton.

Last night, our dog, Riley, died. Today would have been her thirteenth birthday.

Riley had a long and wonderful life. She lived much longer than the person who locked her in a closet at a motel that was being torn down thought she would, and though she could be a huge pain in the ass, she was an important part of our family.

Riley was anxious and nervous to the point of being neurotic. She was terrified of the garden hose, had terrible arthritis in all of her joints, and was almost completely deaf. Still, she was happy these last few months, getting to sleep on a the couch whenever she wanted, or sleeping at my feet while I worked in my office. She didn’t want to play very much, but when she did I’d swear she was ten years younger. She still liked to take walks, but she was slow and stayed so close to Anne and me, she hadn’t needed a leash for almost a year.

She wasn’t crazy about Marlowe, and I think Marlowe knew it. Marlowe has so much energy, I think she sort of scared Riley, who was brittle and nervous as a result of it. But Marlowe always tried to help calm Riley down. She would lick her face and nuzzle her all the time, and she stayed out of Riley’s way the rest of the time.

Riley was the last direct connection we had to Ryan and Nolan’s childhoods. She has been part of their lives for so long, through so much and so many things, they lost a member of their family even more intensely than I did, and I have a huge IMADOG hole in my heart right now.

I want to take a second and share a moment Riley and I had several years ago, right after our dog Ferris had died. I was alone in our house because Anne was out of town, Ryan was in college, and Nolan was busy being a teenager. Ferris had died the day before, practically in my arms, in the lobby of the vet:

I saw Ferris’ empty dish last night when I fed Riley, and it unleashed an agonizing wave of sadness so overwhelming, I dropped to the floor in our living room and cried as hard and as long as I ever have in my life.

After she was finished eating, Riley came over to me and sniffed at my face. Through my tears and gasping sobs, I told her it was okay, I just missed Ferris a lot and I was sad.

She rubbed her face against my cheek and trotted into the family room. A moment later, she returned with her soggy tennis ball, which she gently put into my lap. She looked up at me, and then walked into the corner of the family room, where she picked up her rope – her favorite toy, which she brings with her to the front door whenever we come home – and brought it over to me. She set it on the ground next to me, and then laid down and put her head in my lap. I cried for a good long time, but I was comforted by Riley’s actions, even if I’m projecting my own feelings onto her. I felt like she could tell I was grieving, so she brought me the things that make her happy, before letting me cry on her until the fur on her neck was soaked with my tears. When I finally stopped, mostly because I was physically and emotionally exhausted, I felt a tiny bit better.

Riley was a pain in the ass sometimes. She was  complicated, damaged, and difficult, but she was ultimately a sweet and loving member of our family.

I really miss her, and her terrible breath, and that wonderfully derpy look on her face that always said “IMADOG!”

Bye bye, piles. I love you.

A small request: if you choose to comment, please don’t post that Rainbow Bridge thing. I know you mean well, but it has always made me uncomfortable.

“Can I come over and play Dragon Age?” My son asked me.

“Sure. I’m just going to watch more Land of the Lost tonight, so knock yourself out.” I said.

Ryan doesn’t have Dragon Age at his house, and when he was house sitting for me a few weeks ago, he fell in love with it the same way I did. He likes to unwind with his Inquisitor the same way I do, and the world of Thedas has come to live in his imagination the same way it has in mine.

“I think we’ve both earned a night of goofing off,” I added. Ryan is the co-creator of the world and main storyline in the Tabletop RPG show, and he and I have been writing together for months, now, almost every single day, and yesterday we finally finished the hardest part of our work. Yesterday, we handed everything off to the lead RPG designer, and exhaled for the first time in weeks.

“Yeah, we totally have. You’re gonna be Mister Done tonight.” He said.

Mister Done?

“Um,” I said.

“Because I’m going to destroy you at Mister Do!,” he said.

“Come at me, bro.”

I have a Mister Do! machine (well, it’s actually a multi machine that I mostly use to play Mister Do!) in my game room, and I think I’ve gotten pretty good at Mister Do!. I’m not, like, Kill-Screen-Coming-Up good, but my high score at the moment is just over 92,000, and I average in the mid 70,000s per game. Ryan’s made it one of his life goals to beat my high score, and while part of me wants to keep that score safely out of his reach, another part of me wants to teach my son how to master the intricacies of being a clown who runs away from dinosaurs and eats many times his weight in cherries.

“I’ll see you in a few hours,” he said.

I went out for lunch, had a delightfully spicy Cajun chicken sandwich, and read a bunch of the material I needed to prepare for work on Monday. For the first time in weeks, the overwhelming sense of panic and dread that I didn’t have enough time and wasn’t ready to do this show was met by some genuine excitement and anticipation, because I only have to wait a few days before I get to start exploring the world we created with some amazing players who have created extremely interesting and complex characters.

CUT TO:

A clown running through a brightly colored maze. He is chased by a small dinosaur, that is rapidly gaining on him. He runs beneath an apple, which falls on and crushes the dinosaur. Then another apple that was above the first shakes itself loose and falls on and crushes the clown, because this game is bullshit.

“What the shit?!” I shouted.

“Wow, that sucked. I’m up.”

I stepped aside and began to weave a tapestry of profanity over the game room, in the style of The Old Man from A Christmas Story.

Electric Ladyland played on the Sonos, the doors to the game room were wide open, and the dogs chased each other around the back yard. It had been 91 a few hours earlier, but now it was about 83, and suddenly the oppressive heatwave we’re having in freaking March didn’t seem so bad.

As we played the game, I told Ryan why I made certain choices to maximize points, why I chose to let a level end rather than chase another few thousand points, and how to avoid the giant fucking bullshit of an apple falling on you for no good reason.

“I try to average ten thousand points a level, and if I don’t have my first extra guy by the third screen, I know I’m gonna have a bad time,” I told him.

He heeded my advice, and over the course of several games, I watched him get better and better, averaging a score in the mid to upper 40s.

I don’t know if it’s because we’re only separated by 17 years, or if it’s because we had to work so hard to earn our family, or if it’s because Anne and I raised two really awesome, amazing kids, but I genuinely love hanging out with my adult children. I’m closer to my boys than I am to anyone in my nuclear family, and if you’d told me that this is how it would be when they were on the cusp of adolescence and their biological father was making our lives a miserable hell, I would have told you that you were full of shit.

And yet.

With Anne out of town, and Ryan’s girlfriend spending the evening with her sister, here we were. We were two adults, father and son, playing games together after having burritos for dinner (of course), after working really hard to write a TV show together and I wouldn’t trade a single second of the pain we endured to get here.

We played a few more games, and I headed inside to watch TV while he played Dragon Age in the game room.

I ended up watching TNG on BBC America. The episode was Pen Pals, and I had completely forgotten everything about it, even though it’s a fantastic Wesley Crusher story — maybe one of the best ones we ever did.

I felt like I was watching someone else, who looked just like me, rise to the occasion of some really great writing, in an episode that completely holds up, almost 30 years later. It was a strange feeling to be watching myself without judgment or wishing I’d made a different choice or just … acted better, I guess.

Put another way, I could see how a smart kid or the parent of a smart kid could have watched that episode and identified with Wesley Crusher, because he wasn’t just an idea. He was a person who was dealing with some heavy stuff that he wasn’t quite ready to deal with.

I watched the entire episode, and I cheered for Wesley when the stupid adults who never listened to him or respected him gave him credit for having the insight to run the fucking scan that made all the difference. I can see how a cynic or someone who was just determined to hate the character no matter what could roll his eyes at that, but I thought it was handled in a way that was grounded in the reality of the show, and not just I feel strange but also good.

I looked at that kid, who grew up to be this adult, and I identified with him in an entire new way. I identified with him as a parent who raised two kids who were a lot like that him — struggling to deal with with a bunch of really heavy shit they weren’t ready to deal with, wanting to do the right thing, but being paralyzed by self doubt — and for the first time in decades, I had a new reason to be proud of wearing Wesley Crusher’s goofy grin and helmet hair.

I turned off the TV, and went back out to our game room, to spend some more time with my son.