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precious and fragile things

I remember in the eighties our local ABC station did a summer promotion thing where they broadcast a different 1950s 3D movie every weekend for a month. I feel like we bought the glasses at 7-11; maybe they came with a Slurpee or something like that.

However we got them, I remember watching local weather guy Johnnie Mountain host a movie called Gorilla At Large. He shot the host segments wearing a striped suit and straw hat at Magic Mountain (and my memory insists that it had not yet been bought by Six Flags, but the timeline just as stridently disproves that, so we’re going with the data-driven argument while we stare real hard at people who ignore the data-driven argument because they don’t like the way it feels.)

I’m realizing as I type this that I just described Lyle Langley, so maybe my memory on that specific point is also unreliable. But, you know, print the legend I guess.

Gorilla At Large is the only movie I remember. I feel like there was one other gorilla-focused film, but I can’t say for sure. What I do recall about Gorilla At Large is that it was a lot of a guy in a suit who found reasons to lunge toward the camera, the 3D was cool, but not as immersive as I hoped it would be, Johnnie Mountain’s host segments were SO CORNY, and that I loved every second of it. I watched it on the floor in the den, with my brother and sister, on a huge pile of blankets and pillows we built, with all the lights turned out so there were no reflections on the TV. Mom made us Jiffy-Pop (we did the kind of helping where you watch), and dad must have been at work because I don’t remember him being there.

I just remember staying up past our bedtimes, watching a bad movie that was still fun, feeling the way I imagined families were meant to feel.

Wow. I’d forgotten all of that, but now I can see it as clearly as if the blue blanket was wrapped around me right now. Jeremy is wearing one of his hats, and Amy is still really little, so she falls asleep before the second or third commercial.

This must be from a time I call Before. It’s the most precious time in my life, before my mom sold me and my sister to The Curse, before I knew how my dad felt about me, before he decided to be my bully. Before sadness, loneliness, confusion, and fear filled up all this space in my life that I am still cleaning up today.

I don’t have a lot of clear and happy memories from my childhood, and when I saw this picture on Tumblr earlier, and thought it would be fun to write about watching a 3D movie on TV, I had no idea it would unlock this particular one, literally seconds ago.

But it’s like I’m looking at one of the pictures I don’t have because my mother still refuses to let me have any of my childhood. I can see it all so clearly, how much fun it was, how I felt like the big brother I always wanted to be, even if it was just for that one evening in the eighties.

I’m grateful for that. It’s nice to experience one of these memories, instead of the usual, for a change.

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two thousand nine hundred and twenty-two days

January 9, 2016 is the day my life — a life that belongs to me, that centers my needs and dreams, that I built out of the ashes of my abusive childhood — began. It was the day I chose to stop numbing my pain and started a slow, deliberate, committed journey toward healing the trauma that I experienced at the hands of my abusive, neglectful, emotionally immature narcissist parents.

Here’s what I wrote about this in 2021, the first time I think I was ready to talk about this in public, on my fifth soberversary:

For probably three years, I knew that I was slowly and steadily killing myself with booze. I was getting drunk every night, because I couldn’t face the incredible pain and PTSD I had from my childhood, at the hands of my abusive father and manipulative mother.

It was unsustainable, and I knew it was unsustainable, but when you’re an addict, knowing something is unhealthy and choosing to do something about it are two very different things.

On January 8, 2016, I was out in the game room, watching TV and getting drunk as usual. I was trying to numb and soothe the pain I felt, while also deliberately hurting myself because at a fundamental level, I believed the lies the man who was my father told me about myself: I was worthless. I was unworthy of love. I was stupid. The things I loved and cared about were stupid. It did not matter if I lived or died. Nobody cared about me, anyway.

I knocked a bottle into the trash, realized I had to pee, and — so I wouldn’t disturb Anne — did not go into the bathroom, but instead walked out into the middle of my backyard and peed on the grass. I turned around, and there was Anne. I will never forget the look on her face, this mixture of sadness and real fear.

“I am so worried about you,” was all she had to say. I’d been feeling it for a long time, and I faced a stark choice that I had known I was going to face sooner or later.

“So am I.”

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I assure you that I am a fully functional human with a backstory and everything.

Yesterday, in r/losangeles, someone asked folks to share their weirdest celebrity encounter. This comes up about every three months, and regular posters in that subreddit know that it’s only a matter of time before the entire thread is horrifying, shocking, come-on-that-never-happened tales starring Andy Dick. Like, every single time. And the stories are always different, though basically the same.

So I went into that thread to see how long it took for the Andy Dick stories to get to the top (4 hours) and saw someone relate how they saw Gary Busey at LAX, and he was just sort of badgering everyone who was near him. I commented that I have seen him at LAX two different times, separated by at least a decade, and he was doing exactly that both times. You know that Far Side “How Nature Says Do Not Touch”? This is where I gesture toward Gary Busey and his teeth.

In response to that, someone asked me to flip the thread and share my weirdest fan encounter. I don’t know that I have one that’s weird (the space between weird and terrifying in this instance is measured in microns), but I do have two that are especially memorable, so I shared those.

I’ve had people behave in appalling ways, treating me like a thing, like a Pokemon to be caught and displayed. One guy followed me into a bathroom at an airport, literally trying to shove a pile of 8x10s into my face while I was at the urinal. I’m a generally laid back person, and I lost my shit at that guy. In retrospect, I should have just peed all over him. His version of the story must be … interesting.

But that’s a real outlier. I’m so lucky that I seem to draw the attention of kind and gentle people more than anything else, so those are the people who tend to approach and interact with me.

My favorite (well, most memorable) experience in recent memory was about … maybe six or seven years ago. My wife and I were in San Francisco for work, and we were waiting at a light to cross the street. This guy comes up from our left, jogging, and as he passes us, this sixth sense I have developed to keep me safe tells me that this guy just made me, and I need to be aware of that. Luckily for me, there are endless escape routes in this moment, but something in this guy’s body language tells me I won’t need them. (Hypervigilance, which is part of my body’s response to trauma, takes all of that stuff in, processes it, and blares it all back at like an air raid siren in the span of about a second and a half. WE ARE AT DEFCON 2 PEOPLE.)

He stops jogging and does that jogging backwards thing. He says, “Are you on The Big Bang Theory?”

He’s jogging in place which always looks funny to me, even though I’m a runner and do it myself.

I tell him that I am. His face lights up. “I knew it! Oh man! I love you on that show!”

WE ARE BACK AT DEFCON 5.

“Thank you!”

Then he takes a second while he’s thinking of something and says, “this is embarrassing. I know that your character is Wil Wheaton, but I don’t know what your name is.”

That’s when I got to tell him that I am Wil Wheaton Prime, and that the Wil Wheaton he sees is a character.

“I had no idea you were a real person!” He said. Then, he kind of caught himself, like maybe he’d insulted me or been unkind.

Oh buddy. You have no idea.

“Oh, I assure you, I am a fully functional human being with a backstory and everything,” I laughed.

He laughed with me. The light changed. We did a terrorist fist jab, and went on our separate ways.

I related this to Anne last night. She remembered all these things, because she was there for them.

“Weird shit happens around us a lot,” I said, “because of this weird job I have. But I read that whole thing, and I gotta tell you how grateful I am to know that I’m never showing up in one of those threads as the bad guy in someone’s story.”

“Except the bathroom guy,” she said.

I laughed. “I would love to hear that guy justify how he was the aggrieved party in that story.”

Of course, I know what that guy told himself. He told himself that he waited at the airport for hours and I owed him. That’s a thing that happens all the time, and it’s why I have this blanket policy of never engaging in photos and autographs at airports, ever, for any reason. And I don’t feel guilty about it. I used to, sure, thanks to all my mom’s conditioning, but I gotta tell you, the day I said to a belligerent guy at PDX, calmly and simply, “No, I’m not signing anything for you and I don’t care how long you waited here. You chose to do that, and I don’t owe you anything. Respect my boundaries.” And walked away while he sputtered in self righteous anger? Yeah, that felt great.

I am a fully functional human being with a backstory and everything. 99% of people I encounter know and honor that, and I am so grateful.

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Write, you fool! [Arcade Games] [Bagman]

A couple years ago, I gave myself this challenge to post something new to my blog every day in the month of December. I liked the alliteration of Daily December and I needed to practice the discipline of creating and posting something new every day.

At the time, I hoped it would sort of revitalize my blog, which had taken a back seat (in a vehicle that was parked in a garage across town) to social media and the like. I hoped I would be inspired to keep writing in the new year, maybe get that vehicle out of storage and drive it around town.

But I felt like all the effort was for nothing. I wasn’t creating to satisfy myself; I was posting to create content. Eww. Gross. And the numbers on my blog didn’t move at all. Hardly anyone commented, I didn’t see an influx of returning or new readers, and when January rolled around, I remember thinking, “well, thank god that humiliating waste of time is over.”

Until just recently, I didn’t see any value in the exercise. Like I said, the goal was to generate interest by posting new content every day. And I didn’t hit that goal, because generic content isn’t what people came to my blog to read (and it isn’t what I like to write). I wasn’t all that interested in what I posted (though I love the Blades of Steel post I did, and still laugh when I think of calling my team “The Los Angeles Los Angeleses” as they played the “Vancouver Vancouvers”) and the old adage “When you are interested, you are interesting,” has an equal and opposite adage “When you aren’t interested, you’re labored, or trying too hard.”

You can see — I can see, rather — the very meaningful difference between the two. And with the benefit of hindsight and experience, I get why I didn’t achieve what I wanted. I went about it in a way that was unlikely to deliver what I was looking for. Lesson learned.

Yesterday, I saw that my friend John gave himself a Daily December last month, where he wrote about a different comfort movie every day. He said it was to get that daily writing muscle stretched out and warmed up, because he has two novels due this year.

I don’t have anything due, at least not right now, but I do have some things I want to finish and release this year, and the muscles and discipline I need to use them have been neglected while I’ve been focused on mental health therapy and complex trauma recovery for much of the last year.

I’m not ready to commit to daily posts. I’m going to do daily writing (I’ve written this over the last six days), but I don’t know for sure that I’ll have something to publish every day. I’m not going to pressure myself with expectations. I’m going to start out with weekly posts from a list of topics that interest me, in the hopes that I will be interesting when I write about them, as well as looking forward to the creative process involved.

Inspired by a lifetime of RPGs, I made a table featuring all the different topics that are interesting to me. I’m going to roll on the table, and use the result as my prompt.

Today, my rolls landed on Classic Arcade Games: Bagman.

Okay, here we go.

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my biggest rpg surprise of 2023

Someone on Reddit in r/rpg asked what the biggest surprise of 2023 was for us.

This is the kind of thing I enjoy talking about, so I thought I’d share it here.

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The biggest surprise for me this year was finding my way back into the depths of my library.

My first RPG was D&D Basic in 1983, and I’ve played ever since, tons of systems. I love it. It’s even part of my job.

But somewhere along the line, I lost the ability to pick up a module, some rules, a sourcebook, whatever, and just read it for the sake of reading it, to enjoy the prose, the box text, the illustrations, the fiction, unless I was going to play the game.

So I have entire shelves in my library that are filled with RPGs I haven’t read, but “want to play someday.”

This year, I read an AMA here from Stu Horvath, and someone asked if it was normal to just read RPG materials for fun, with no intention of playing them. He observed that there was nothing stopping anyone from doing just that, and for some reason, that’s what I, a 51 year-old Ur-Gamer from the Old Times needed to hear.

It was late in the year, but since then, I’ve gone through maybe a dozen of my books, some of them various flavors of D&D, most of them indie RPGs, all of them games I don’t think I’ll ever play, but *intensely* enjoyed reading.

The pandemic delivered a metaphorical (and practical) TPK to my group, and I don’t know how quickly or easily I’ll be able to assemble a new one, but when I do, it’s going to be one hell of a game, because I have all these new ideas and inspirations in my head, from reading systems and adventures I’ll probably never play.

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When I was in my teens, I read every GURPS sourcebook I could, cover to cover, losing myself in the imaginary worlds they represented. I loved those things as much as I loved any novel. I read all the FASA Star Trek RPG sourcebooks, because I wanted to know everything I could about the imaginary world I lived and worked in. Also: blueprints. So many wonderful blueprints.

I’ve recently read The Skeletons (the players are the undead who guard a tomb that is defiled by adventurers), Maschinezeit (what if dead spaceships were possessed by Lovecraftian cosmic horrors and you went to one, anyway?), Mothership (in space, no one can survive), and about half of The Lost Mine of Phandelver (5e starter box) because I hope to run it in the new year for a small group of friends.

I have shelf after shelf of books from popular systems, indie systems, out of print systems, loved and hated systems, and 2023 was the year I stumbled into permission to read them on my terms, rather than reading them to prep for a test.

Maybe 2024 will be the year I played more RPGs than I have in a long time.