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It’s Friday afternoon, so I narrated another pulp story.

Yesterday, I finally turned in the manuscript of my novel. I’d been revising it for seven months, and by “revising” I mean, “trying to fit a scene in that I wanted to put into it, but which doesn’t seem to fit anywhere and also staring at page after page wondering why I ever thought I should tell this story in the first place.”

Yeah, it was fun. Thanks, depression brain!

Anyway, doing that narration last week did the thing I hoped it would do, and it opened up the door to the place in my brain where the creativity lives. With access to that room, I was able to step out of the room where Everything Sucks And It’s All My Fault And I’m Terrible At Everything So I Should Just Stop Trying and look at my creative work without fear or judgment.

I could be wrong (my agent and eventual editor will tell me if I am), but I feel like I spent all this time trying to make something better for the sake of making it better, when I had gotten it as good as I was going to get it on my own already. There’s a lesson in here about knowing when your desire to work hard becomes a self-defeating exercise in impossible expectations.

So anyway, it’s Friday, and I wanted to be creative and to feel productive, but I’m giving my writing brain a few days off because it’s been working really hard for a long time and it needs to recharge. Luckily for me, my performer brain was inspired to do another pulp fiction magazine audiobook narration, because it was so much fun the last time I did it, and the feedback was so positive and effusive.

Therefore, I am happy to present to you, Please Help Me To Die! from 1938, written by Leon Byrne, and found at the Pulp Magazines Project.

As before, you can stream or download from my SoundCloud. BUT FIRST YOU HAVE TO KNOW that the mic was hot, and I really needed a pop filter. The audio quality is not particularly great on this one, which is a shame because the story is awesome. But, I promise to give you a full refund for your purchase price if the audio quality does not meet your expectations.

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In which I narrate a story from 1930

I took a vacation (the first real vacation I’ve ever taken in my life, where I just got to relax and enjoy myself without ever feeling like I was a Pokemon for people to catch), and it seems to have restored a lot of access to my creative self.

I’m still working through some story problems that I need to solve so I can do the revisions and add the scenes to All We Ever Wanted Was Everything, but I’m doing the work, even if I don’t have words added to the manuscript to show for it. That feels pretty good.

I’ve also been, while not exactly feeling great, getting better and feeling closer to “good” every day. Jesus, it’s been so long since I felt good, I’ve almost forgotten what it’s like to have a day without sadness and anxiety in it.

But today, rather than feel creatively stifled and stuck in the mire of depression, I decided to get out of my comfort zone and make a thing.

So I went to Project Gutenberg, clicked through a few bookshelves until I got to classic Science Fiction, and decided to do an unrehearsed, essentially live narration of a story that was published in Astounding Stories of Super Science in 1931.

It’s not the greatest story I’ve ever read (if I’d read it before I narrated it, I wouldn’t have chosen it), but it’s a fine representative of that era’s genre fiction writing. I had some fun doing my best impression of someone reading it in 1931, and I recorded it to share with any of you who are interested in this sort of thing.

I can’t get WordPress to let me upload it, so you can stream it from my Soundcloud, download it to listen to later, or totally skip it. I’m not the boss of you.

However, if you do listen to it, I’d like to know what you think about the story, the experiment, and … um … I think that’s all.

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I will try not to sing out of key.

It was … not the best night of sleep I’ve ever had. I got into bed around midnight, and almost immediately kept waking up, coughing and gasping for breath, as my sinuses poured phlegm and something that can best be compared to a non-Newtonian fluid down my throat while I slept.

Around 3, I got out of bed and walked out of the room, so I wouldn’t wake up Anne, and loudly cleared my throat. I unsuccessfully tried to blow my nose, drank some water to soothe my scratchy throat, and got back into bed. It felt like I’d been asleep for second when Anne woke me up.

“You’re snoring really bad,” she said, kindly, “can you do something about it?”

“I’ve been trying, but I’ll try again,” I said. I dragged myself out of bed and repeated the ritual. I got back into bed and fell back asleep.

“Dude, you’re still snoring,” Anne said, again, after what felt like seconds. Again.

“Do you think you could go into your office and sleep on the guest bed, so we can both sleep?” She asked.

“Yeah,” I said.

I walked through the empty and dark house. I squinted at the clock on our microwave which I thought displayed a blurry 5am, or maybe 6am. I looked out the window and saw the suggestion of a sunrise, still far beneath the Eastern horizon.

I got into the very cold guest bed in my office, fell asleep, and actually stayed that way until about 10am.

Working (or not working, as the case has been for weeks and weeks of Depression) from home has its benefits.

I made a coffee and started some oatmeal. While they brewed and cooked, I walked over to my couch and snuggled my dogs.

When my coffee was ready (inverted Aeropress, for those keeping score) I filled my mug and sat down at my desk to do the 21st century version of reading the newspaper.

Jesus, the news is terrible. There’s the ongoing dumpster fire in DC, but we lost Luke Perry and Keith Flint, just a week after we lost Brody. We get it, universe. We are in the worst timeline. You’ve made your fucking point, already. I mean, you make your fucking point several times a day, but you’re really being a shit about it right now.

This timeline. I swear to god.

Since September, I’ve been in the worst depressive episode I have ever had in my life. There’s a difference between feeling depressed and having depression that is often so subtle, to someone who isn’t living inside of the host organism, it is a difference without distinction. But it’s real and it’s significant to me. Since September of last year, I’ve been overwhelmed by grief, loss, sadness, and sorrow. These stacked themselves up in a trenchcoat like Vincent Adultman and brought paralyzing depression (different from Depression) into my life. It’s been so overwhelming, I haven’t been able to relax and explore the creative part of my brain that produces stories, so I can write them down. When I’ve opened the door to what I think is the creative room in my mental house, so I can work on rewrites and revisions to the novel I expected would be with an editor by now, all I’ve been able to find is grief and sadness and loss and depression.

But thanks to literal months of therapy, working with a professional who is trained to get me through grief and loss, I have finally started to come out of the depression. I can finally think about my narrative character, Liam’s, story,about how I want to work on it for him (and my agent and eventual publisher). I can finally let my guard down without being overwhelmed by sadness. I feel like I can finally open a door into the 1983 I created, find it, instead of a giant room filled with unclaimed emotional baggage, and complete the story that lives there.

So I finished my coffee, closed the tabs on my browser, and opened the most recent copy of my manuscript.

Four … gosh, almost five … hours later, I still haven’t done anything except sneeze and cough, and curse the trees and flowers who are fucking in my neighborhood right now.

But I don’t feel worthless or useless or any of the hurtful, destructive self-image things that were imposed on me at such a young age, and so consistently reinforced throughout my adult life, they were like the air I breathe: invisible, always there, and fundamental to my existence.

You know that essay This is Water? I feel like I recently became aware of the water, and it forced me to reexamine my entire life, all 46 years of it. I’m healing. It’s hard. It’s painful. It’s frustrating. But I’m doing it, one day at a time, and every little bit of progress is meaningful.

I want to get into Liam’s story and do the work that I know needs to be done, but my inner child, so hurt and abandoned by the people who should have cared for and protected him, needs the things he never got, and I’m doing my best to be the person I need in the world. I have to take care of him, because he is real, before I can take care of Liam, who is not. But their stories are intertwined in ways that I’m only partially aware of, even though I’m the author of one of them and the subject of the other. And that’s what makes working on both of them so hard, right now.

But, in an effort to be the person I need in the world, I will close with something I’ve been telling my kids since they were small: everything worth doing is hard. Don’t give up just because it’s hard, because it’s supposed to be hard.

This is hard. This is challenging. This is painful. This is water.

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this and that and things and stuff

Back in the old days, before social media destroyed the world and blogs were a relatively new thing, we would do these posts that were a lot of random things, instead of one main thing. We’d usually do this when a lot of time had passed since our previous post, and we just needed an excuse to add something new. Social media kind of took that away, because now we just toss a link or a picture or something silly onto Tumblr or Shitter or Facebook or whatever.

But I cling to the Old Ways, from the Before Times, when Everything Was Better (even though it really wasn’t), so here’s a bunch of stuff that I have posted in other places since my last post here.

Last night, I got my highest ever high score on Mr. Do!: 251,000. That’s 100K higher than what was my highest score for over a year.

If you haven’t watched Big Mouth on Netflix, I can’t recommend it enough. It’s maybe the most honest, frank, truthful and hilarious look at puberty, ever. I wrote a little bit about it on my Facebook.

I spent much of the last 18 or so months writing a novel about being 12, so I feel like I have a pretty good handle on how kids that age talk and feel (or at least, how I remember feeling when I was 12). At some point about 10 months ago, I came across the Netflix series BIG MOUTH, and I instantly fell in love with it. It’s an absolutely hilarious look at how weird and hormonal we are around 12 and 13 years-old, and it gets so much right about what we are like at that age. I just love it.

But as much as it gets right about the kids, I’ve always felt that the adults in the show were kind of cartoonish, which seemed kind of odd to me … until I realized last night that the adults are all portrayed THE WAY THE KIDS SEE THEM. So the parents are totally lame and embarrassing (Nick’s dad), always screaming about everything (Andrew’s dad), and trying too hard to be one of their friends (Coach Steve). [gif of Andrew and Jesse’s heads exploding]

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe this isn’t intentional, but it feels like it is, and it would surprise me if it wasn’t, because everything else in the show, especially how frankly it deals with how hormonal and irrational we are at that age, is pitch perfect and grounded in reality.

I’m about 2/3 through season 2, and I’m doing everything I can to not binge it, because I don’t want to make my wait for season 3 any longer than is has to be.

Oh, hey, and speaking of season 3 … I’ll work for scale, if anyone at Netflix is interested.

Also on my Facebook:

I just realized that when I see a post on Reddit that is some version of “My idiot parents can’t figure out this meme” or “When your parents are so dumb they _______” I am likely looking at a post made by a teenager, whose parents are my age. (I’m 46).

I also realized that, until about ten minutes ago, I have always created a mental image of Boomers when I hear “my parents” because that’s *my* version of parents.

Getting old is weird, man.

My friend, Andrew, sent me this, because he just gets me:

Speaking of Bob Ross, Anne and I got a private Bob Ross painting lesson, and we both leveled up pretty substantially. I post all my Bob Ross paintings on my Instagram, but here’s a link to all the photos I took when we were learning. We both had so much fun, and as soon as I make meaningful progress on my novel revisions and rewrites, I’m going to try out my new skills and see how well I can use them.

They should make a sushi roll that’s squid, with every other fish in the bar wrapped around it. They’d call it Calamari Damacy.

My friend, Brad, is writing and hosting a new True Crime podcast that I think you’re going to love, especially if you are a fan of Serial, Heaven’s Gate, or Making a Murderer. Check out Murder, Etc.

TL;DR Wikipedia is one of my favorite new Instagram follows.

Mike Doughty is currently on tour, performing the entire first Soul Coughing album, Ruby Vroom. I’m seriously considering going full Deadhead for this tour.

Did I ever mention that I have an account at Goodreads?

I may as well round up my social medias:

Nazi punks fuck off.

I’m sure there’s other stuff that I’m forgetting, but that’s something we would say at the end of these posts back in the early 2000s, so there ya go. If you got this far, feel free to use comments in this post to AMA, and I’ll do my best to answer your questions.

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it all started with a big bang

About ten years ago, I was stuck, professionally, and doing my best not to freak out every day about where the next mortgage payment would come from. I was doing moderately well as a writer, but I wasn’t earning enough to sustain myself and my family, and my acting career was … well, if it were a patient in a coma, we would have been having serious discussions about pulling the plug to end the suffering.

Everything changed when Bill Prady called me, and pitched me on playing a version of myself on his series, The Big Bang Theory. Believe it or not, I didn’t instantly say yes. I felt like playing myself meant I would only get to do one episode, nobody would care, and the industry wouldn’t respect me for it because I wasn’t playing a role. So I called my friend John Rogers and asked him what I should do.

“YOU SAY YES YOU DUMMY WHY ARE YOU EVEN CONSIDERING NOT DOING THIS?!” He hollered at me, throwing much-needed cold water on the doubts and fears I had unnecessarily created in my fucked up head.

So I thanked John for his advice and guidance, called Bill back, and accepted the gig. A few days later, Bill called me back and carefully told me that the character had changed. Now, the version of Wil Wheaton I would be playing was, and I quote, “Delightfully evil.”

Now I said YES without hesitation. I was playing a character, just like I wanted to, but I was the only person in the world who could play him, because he was literally a version of me.

That week on the set was the best week of my life. I was already a huge fan of the show, but by the time I was wrapped, I was an even bigger fan of the cast and crew. Everyone treated me with kindness and respect. They made me feel so welcome, like I deserved to be there, like I was a valued member of the show. One of the producers told me “I hope you had a good time here, because we are definitely bringing you back for more episodes.”

That was awesome, but I’ve worked in film and television long enough to know that people say things like that all the time, and nothing ever comes of it.

Only this time, it did! A little while later, they brought me back for another episode, and then another and another and then it was ten years later and I’ve done like seventeen episodes. Along the way, I became good friends with the entire cast and most of the writers and producers. Along the way, they welcomed me into their family, and made me feel like I was as important to the production as anyone else who works there. They accepted me and always made me feel like I deserved to be there, like I was valued, like I was not someone who had done under twenty episodes, but who had been there for every moment of every day. It has been a remarkable experience, and the greatest joy of my professional life. Personally, it ranks second, behind my marriage and partnership with the best person on the planet, Anne Wheaton.

Last night, I took what is probably my final curtain call in front of an audience at Stage 25. There are only 9 episodes left, and the math of it makes it unlikely there will be another space in any of the stories they have left for my version of Wil Wheaton.

And while that breaks my heart, it’s really okay. Things end, and I’m always grateful to be sad at the end of something, because it means I am grateful that it happened.

When I was a kid on Star Trek, I never had the emotional maturity to appreciate it. I loved my cast mates, and we were a family, but I was just too young and immature to fully appreciate what we had, until it was gone. For years, when I thought about TNG and my space family, I felt shame and regret. But I finally got to publicly express my love and gratitude to them at a big TNG reunion panel in Calgary. I got a second chance that I never thought I would get, and I made the most of it. Since then, I can look back on TNG with fondness and pride, instead of sadness and regret.

I wasn’t going to let 25 years go by before I got to share my gratitude with the cast and crew of Big Bang Theory, so yesterday during a break in camera blocking, I stood in the middle of the set, and I took a minute to tell them all how grateful I am for the years of love and kindness they have all given me. I thanked them for making me feel like I’m part of their family, and for being my friends. I did my best not to cry, and I mostly succeeded.

We went back to work, and over the next hour or so, pretty much everyone from the cast and crew came up to me and made sure I knew that I didn’t just feel like part of their family, I was part of their family. Every single person who talked to me told me they will miss me as much as I will miss them.

Over the course of the day and night (we tape in the evening after rehearsing and camera blocking all day), I was able to share meaningful and joyful (and tearful) moments with everyone in the cast, and most of the producers and crew. I was able to directly express my gratitude to all of the people who have been such an important and wonderful part of my life since we shot my first episode, way back in 2008.

I’m so sad that the show is ending. I’m so sad that, in just a few short weeks, they’ll start tearing down the sets and preparing Stage 25 for whoever is going to move into after we leave.

But I am so grateful that I’ve had the privilege and honor to spend nearly a quarter of my life working with and becoming friends with these amazing humans.

The episode we shot last night will probably air in 3 to 4 weeks, and it’s likely to be the last time we see Formerly Evil Wil Wheaton in his natural habitat, but as you probably saw from the pictures I posted from the set, I could not have asked for a better and more wonderful way to bring this incredible chapter in my life to a close.

My life and career are in a much better place now than they were ten years ago. I feel happier (recent kick in the face by my damn Depression notwithstanding) and I feel better about my career choices and opportunities than I have in a long, long time. Being part of this show, and forming friendships with my cow-orkers there has been a very big part of that.

Thank you, Bill Prady and Chuck Lorre, for giving me the opportunity to be part of your creation. Thank you, Steve Molaro and Steve Holland, and all the writers, for always giving me the funniest stuff to perform, and letting me play a version of myself who is so much cooler than I am. Thank you, Mark Cendrowski, for always directing me toward my best possible work, and for making me a better actor. Thank you, Anthony Rich, and everyone on the crew, for creating such an amazing and joyful and supportive working environment.

And thank you most of all to the cast for allowing me to be part of the family. I don’t know what’s next for any of us (I hope you all take a deserved vacation) but I want you all to know that I love you, and being part of your stories has been a gift, an honor, and something I will cherish for the rest of my life.