Writings of a Bug

I didn't have to look at the weather forecast to know that a storm is on the way; I could feel it with the first step I took outside this morning with my dog.

As I stood on my patio and watched the steam rise off my coffee and swirl up through golden shafts of golden morning sunlight shot through a cloud-filled sky, I remembered a day like this one fifteen or sixteen years ago.

I'd just gotten home from Nice, where I'd lived and worked on a film called Mister Stitch for a few months. It wasn't the most pleasant movie in the world to work on (the other lead actor was an unprofessional nightmare) but the time I spent there working on it remains some of the best time in my life. I'd been acting since I was a child, but it wasn't until I lived in Nice and worked on Mister Stitch that I truly felt like an artist. I was fundamentally changed by the experience, seeing the world - especially entertainment - differently than I ever had before.

The day I got back from location, sometime in mid-January of that year, my friend Dave picked me up from LAX, and we went directly down the road to Manhattan Beach, to wait out the terrible rush hour traffic which stood between the airport and my house. After ten hours on an airplane, another 120 minutes to crawl 40 miles up the freeway wasn't exactly an appealing notion.

We parked in a mostly-empty lot and walked down toward the water. There was a winter storm on its way, driving powerful waves ahead of it that were so huge, they crashed up against the bottom of the pier and occasionally broke over the end of it. Wrapped up in the irrational immortality that's endemic to 22 year-olds, we walked dangerously close to the end of the shuddering pier, angry waves boiling beneath, and dared the Pacific Ocean to reach up and touch us.

I don't recall specifically what we talked about - I'm sure I regaled him with slightly-exaggerated tales of glamor and excess and artistic awakening along the French Riviera - but even now I can I clearly recall the terror and exhilaration I felt whenever foamy, freezing sea water splashed up through the spaces between the planks and soaked into the tops of our shoes.

Since I grew up and became a husband and a father, I've gone out of my way to avoid anything more dangerous than driving on the Los Angeles freeway system, so I can't imagine defying a Pacific winter storm like I did when I was in my early twenties ... but standing on my patio in my late thirties, not really defying as much as tolerating the morning chill, I was grateful for the memory.

I never quite managed to get started today, and haven't written a single word that wasn't part of an e-mail or something stupid on Twitter. Dammit.

So, in an effort to continue my daily-blog-o-phonic creative output, a very very short story:

The wind came down the canyon and blew ice and snow into Colin's face. He brushed it off his goggles, but had given up keeping it out of his beard days ago.

He looked up, but the summit was obscured by clouds. Still, he knew it was there, even if he could not see it, and so he continued to climb.

Well, it's more of a scene, (a very very short one, at that) but it's more than I've been able to muster all day, so ... that's something.

See you tomorrow, Internets.

Yesterday, I wrote:

Well, the power just went out, so it's time for me to pack up my Mac and head out to a cafe with WiFi where I can work on my novel in front of people and get this posted. The weird thing is, while it's likely going to take an hour at least from the time I finish writing this paragraph until it actually posts on the internet, there is no perceived delay from whoever reads this, because as far as you're concerned, the post didn't exist until it was published, though it already existed for me.

Um. Yeah. I'm sure someone who's actually studied physics is going to knock me around for that, but since my knowledge of the field is limited to what I've picked up on my own, it's a fun thought exercise.

Okay, little post, go sit in an eigenstate for the nice people.

Reader Gevmage says:

Your analogy is reasonable. The post existed on your laptop while you drove to the coffee shop, in a state such that it was stable but not portable. Once you got to the coffee shop, by connecting to the internet, you promoted it to an energy state where it could slide easily through the intertubes to our screens.

Since quantum mechanics describes ONLY the behavior of the very small, it has problems when extended directly to the macroscopic (which the idea of Shroedinger's cat is an illustration). You extended the notion as well as it could be.

The eigenvalue then is just a scalar logical value indicating if the post is visible to the world. Every eigenvalue has to have a corresponding operator; the operator is a complicated set of tests of whether or not if you point our browser at wilwheaton.typepad.com, you get a certain character string that's in the post.

Why yes, I am procrastinating, why do you ask? :-D

Even though I don't understand the math behind quantum physics, I have a good enough grasp of the theory behind quantum physics to allow me to follow along when the math is discussed. Put another way: I know enough French and Spanish to put together what someone is telling me, but not enough to actually sit down and compose a letter in that language.

I'm sure I've just oversimplified the whole thing, and insulted a lot of actual scientists and mathematicians, so let me apologize for that before I continue, because I think I'm about to make it even worse.

I was easily bored as a kid. I wasn't athletic, strong or coordinated, but I was smart and I loved to read. I still enjoyed playing tag, hide and seek, and riding bikes, but none of that stuff satisfied me the same way that exploring imagined worlds in my mind did. Those imagined worlds were usually delivered in the form of Science Fiction and Fantasy books, within D&D modules, and occasionally created (or spun off from existing imagined worlds) using action figures. (I guess it's no surprise, then, that I make my living and found my place in life using my imagination.)

I always loved exploring strange new worlds in books and magazines (Dear Asimov's, I never thought it would happen to me, but ...) and there was even a time in my late teens when I actively sought out all the weird conspiracy, occult, UFO and supernatural stuff I could find (I truly despise that crap today) because even though I knew it was bullshit, it was yet another weird and fantastic imagined world to explore.

As I wrote in an old Things I Love post, it was the book Hyperspace that fundamentally changed my worldview:

[S]omeone (I think it was my brother) suggested that I read A Brief History of Time. I picked it up, read it in just a couple of days, and realized that my life could be divided into before I read it, and after I read it. On my next trip to the bookstore, I went straight to the science section, and looked for something – anything – to continue my education.

My eyes fell on a book with an interesting cover, and a provocative title: Hyperspace: A scientific odyssey through parallel universes, time warps, and the 10th dimension. It was written by a guy called Michio Kaku. I pulled it off the shelf, and after just a few pages, I was hooked.

There's a story in Hyperspace, right at the beginning, that I'm going to paraphrase. It's the story that grabbed my attention, captured my imagination, and fundamentally altered the way I thought about the nature of existence. I already had "before and after" with A Brief History of Time, and when I got to the end of this story, I had "before and after I read about the fish scientists." The story goes something like this:

In San Francisco, there's this botanical garden, and near the entrance there is a pond that's filled with koi fish. Dr. Kaku describes standing there, looking at the fish one day, and wondering what it would be like if the fish had a society as complex and advanced as our own, but the whole thing was confined to the pond, and they had no idea that there was a whole other world just beyond the surface of the water. In the fish world, there were fish scientists, and if a human were to pluck one of them from the pond, show it our world, and return it to the pond, it would go back to the other fish scientists and say, "Guys! You're never going to believe this. I was just doing my thing, and suddenly, this mysterious force pulled me from our world and showed me another, where the creatures don't need gills to breathe, and walk on two legs!"

The other scientists would look at it, and ask it how it got to this new world, but it wouldn't be able to explain it. They'd want the scientist to recreate it, but it wouldn't be able to. The fish scientist would know, however, that the other world was there, and that there was something just as complex as life in the pond on the other side of some mysterious barrier that they couldn't seem to penetrate.

I'm sure I've mangled the story, but that's essentially what I remember from it. I thought, "Well, shit, if there could be a world like that in the pond, maybe we are in something else's pond!" I didn't know if it was possible, I didn't know if it was just science fiction, but I didn't care. It was this incredible possibility, and my world opened up again. I felt like I'd been granted membership in a secret society. I devoured the book, and I began to think about the nature of existence in ways that I'd never even considered before. When I finally read Flatland a few years later, I was blown away that Abbot had written essentially the same story a hundred years earlier, in 1884, and I was thrilled that I could actually understand it.

My elementary school teachers were real good at putting the fear of God into us kids, but they were just horrible at teaching us math. I tried and tried, but I never understood it, and "you have to learn this because you have to learn it" wasn't the type of inspiration that worked for me. Even today, I'm not very good at math, never having found that teacher who could translate it into something I could actually use and appreciate. 

Growing up, I was a creative kid, an imaginative kid, and while I loved reading and learning about scientists and mathematicians, I never had a teacher or tutor who could help teenage me understand their work the way I understood their lives. (NB: My tutor while I was on Star Trek, Marion, who took me through most of high school, did everything she could to help me get excited about math, but to borrow from a parable: that ground in my brain had never been cultivated, and it just wasn't fertile enough to bear fruit.)

My lack of mathematical ability held me back in science, and it prevented me from ever studying physics or astronomy at anything exceeding the "for dummies" level. Here's a sad and embarrassing truth: I still can't sit down and develop equations for things, I struggle to calculate simple problems that my kids can do in their heads (they were taught math in a fundamentally different way than I was) and few things make me feel as stupid and frustrated as a simple algebra problem.

But when I sit down to read books like Hyperspace, articles about the LHC, anything my friend Phil Plait writes, or comments like the one I quoted above, I understand what they're talking about. I get excited, and take a look at a world that seems fantastic and imagined, but is actually real and right here.

I seem to have wandered away from the reason I sat down to write this post, so let me try to bring it all back together: I love exploring fantastic worlds that only exist in books and my imagination. But I also I love exploring the real world, which is so amazing, it just seems imagined.

(I once read a story about this for an audiobook. I forget the title, but it was about a kid who wanted to leave Earth with a dimension-hopping guy to explore the universe, and the dimension-hopping guy tells him that he shouldn't leave Earth for parts unknown until he really explores all the wonderful and incredible things that Earth has to offer, because due to the laws of dimension-hopping, it's a one-way trip. I wonder if that's still in print? I'd love to listen to it.)

I still wish I had a better understanding of the science and math that makes understanding and exploring the most fantastic parts of our real world possible, but until I do, I'm happy I have a pocket phrase book and a tourist map to help me get around a little bit.

I heard a Tom Jones song yesterday, and resolved to spend some time listening to his catalog today while I worked. This lead me to discover two really great albums on Rhapsody that I probably never would have found otherwise. The first is called James Bond 007 13 Original Themes which is exactly what it sounds like. The second is called The Mod Scene, which is this sensational collection of British Invasion Modsound from the 60s that, unlike most compilations, doesn't seem to have a single lousy track on it (provided, of course, that you enjoy the Mod sound of the 60s as much as I do.) The two Tom Jones tracks which lead me to these albums, for the sake of completeness, were the theme to Thunderball and Dr. Love.

This reminds me of the time I saw a Tom Jones billboard on the way down to San Diego for Book and a Beer this summer, which prompted me to say to Anne (in what I decided is my Tom Jones voice): "I may be old enough to be your grandfather, but I'll still eat your panties for breakfast and lunch, baby!" It was, as most things are, much funnier in context and more amusing to me than it ever will be to anyone else. Oh well.

I can't record a Memories of the Futurecast today, because there's fifteen thousand pounds of giant crane parked in front of my house, making thirty thousand pounds of noise. When it goes away, though, I'll get to recording, and the Futurecast will post sometime tonight.

The good news, though, is that I'm able to make good progress on Memories Volume Two. I'm already behind schedule (because I stupidly gave myself a deadline last week, forgetting about Thanksgiving) but I think I'll be able to catch up by the end of this week. So far, it's been a lot of fun and tremendously amusing, which is always a good sign.

Speaking of things that are fun and tremendously amusing, here's a Twitter exchange that made me laugh quite a bit:

theelkmechanic: I love living in the future. Sitting in Charlotte airport using my machine in Troy to update 4 servers in Phoenix. Beat that, @wilw

wilw: @theelkmechanic I drove the Starship Enterprise. [::dramatic pause::] Your move.

theelkmechanic: @wilw

I'm not going to lie to you, Marge, that made me gigglesnort, and I was relieved that @theelkmechanic took my joke in the spirit it was intended.

Well, the power just went out, so it's time for me to pack up my Mac and head out to a cafe with WiFi where I can work on my novel in front of people and get this posted. The weird thing is, while it's likely going to take an hour at least from the time I finish writing this paragraph until it actually posts on the internet, there is no perceived delay from whoever reads this, because as far as you're concerned, the post didn't exist until it was published, though it already existed for me.

Um. Yeah. I'm sure someone who's actually studied physics is going to knock me around for that, but since my knowledge of the field is limited to what I've picked up on my own, it's a fun thought exercise.

Okay, little post, go sit in an eigenstate for the nice people.

One of my great regrets is that, when I was super famous (back in the Swatches-on-jacket years), I didn't get to do one of these bizarre Japanese commercials. I think I would have been the most number one super terrific selling power in the entire prefecture for surprise time.

I, uh, had trouble coming up with a title for this post. Sorry about that.

So season Three of The Guild wrapped up this week, and if the feedback I'm getting via Twitter and e-mail is any indication, we can make a note here: HUGE SUCCESS.

Felicia has a post at her blog where she talks in a spoileriffic way about her creative process and the choices she made for this season. 

So the episodes. Two Guilds. Fifteen Actors. 20 Extras. What a nightmare, who thought of this storyline anyway?!?! Well, for episode 11 it is the finest frenzy we’ve ever done. I was determined to give everyone a grace note in one of these episodes, and I think everyone got wrapped up pretty well. There were, frankly, too many storylines going on this season, but out of necessity I made them work, because I couldn’t think of any other way to do the season. I think for season 4 there will be a more streamlined story on my writing part, but due to the chaotic nature of this season’s storyline I’m really happy with how it turned out.

Don't read it if you haven't watched all the way to the end, but if you have, I think it'll entertain you to the max, for sure.

Speaking of entertaining things ... here's the episode 9-12 gag reel!

Felicia points out that you can watch all of Season Three at Bing Video, which is kind of a big deal because it means that Bing is finally useful for something. Mark this day in history, kids.

And Felicia, if you see this: Kick ass, dude. Once again, you owned it.

Warning: Assume that there will be Guild Spoilers™ in the comments.

All my creative energy is currently spoken for, so let's into The Vault and pull out an old post about that time I auditioned for On The Road. 

When I wrote this, I was waiting to find out if I'd been cast in I, Robot. I'd had a sensational audition that got great feedback from the casting director, only to find out that the director (who I recall was annoyed at my mentioning the audition on my blog) "didn't respond" to my tapes. It was pretty heartbreaking, and without more specific information, I wondered for weeks if I sabotaged my chances to work on the film by excitedly blogging about the experience, or if I really did just suck out loud and fooled the casting director and myself, but not the director. I'll never know, and I haven't even thought about it until about an hour or so ago, but just reading those posts has stirred up a lot of turmoil that I wish I'd left alone and locked away in a room on the other side of the house.

Anyway, this is a story that says as much about kindness and professionalism as it does about staying focused and doing your best. It contains, I hope, an important lesson that isn't just for actors...

This project has been around for almost ten years. The first time around, sometime in 1992 or so, I auditioned to play Neil Cassidy. I read a scene straight out of Dharma Bums.

I was manic about preparing for the audition: I was already familiar with most of the Beat Generation, and was a huge fan of Burroughs, but I'd never read Kerouac. I wanted to have a good sense of his style, so I could bring his character to life faithfully, so I furiously read "On the Road," and skimmed through "Dharma Bums." I was already a jazz geek, but I took the opportunity to fill several gaps in my collection, so I could listen to Charlie Parker and Chet Baker while I learned my scenes. I worked with an acting coach - at great expense - to develop body language and dialect. I bought clothes from a thrift shop, and went through lots of different hairstyles until I got the correct look.

A little over a week later the audition came. I drove myself to this old church on Highland where they have auditions from time to time, listening to Bird the whole way. I walked into a large empty courtyard, filled with fountains, birds, and a beautiful garden. Only the sign-in sheet betrayed the presence of Hollywood. I sat down, focused and ready to go get this job.

While I was waiting, Emilio Estevez arrived.

Wow, I thought, I'm at the same audition as Emilio Estevez, and I'm about to meet the man who is responsible for The Godfather and Apocalypse Now!

I totally forgot why I was there, and became a drooling fan boy.

Emilio Estevez said hello to me, one professional to another, and I said, "Hey."

There was a pause, and I heard myself say, "I want to tell you how much I like your work. Repo Man is one of my favorite movies of all time, and Breakfast Club is a classic."

He went one better:"Wil, Stand By Me is a classic, and I love your work too. It's really nice to meet you."

I hadn't told him my name, yet.

The casting assistant came out, and looked at the two of us. Emilio was on the "A" list. I was on my way to the "C" list, having been off TNG for a few years, and still waiting to properly follow-up Stand By Me. She said, "Emilio, would you like to come in now?"

He looked at her, and said, "Wil was here before me. It's his turn."

She told him that it wasn't a problem. They were ready for him.

"Well, if you're ready for me, you're ready for Wil, and he was here first." He crossed his legs, and looked at his script.

I was stunned. He didn't need to stand up for me, and it really didn't matter to me who went first, but I thanked him and went in.

The room was large and very dark. Like the rest of the church, it was mission-style, with high, open-beamed ceilings and terra cotta tiles on the floor. Coppola was sitting behind his massive beard, a flimsy card table between us.

I approached him, and extended my hand. He didn't take it, so I sat down.

"You don't mind if I film you, do you?" he asked rhetorically, showing a palm-sized video camera, already in his hand.

"No, of course not."

He asked me to slate my name, and begin the scene. I did, and proceeded to give the worst audition of my life.

I'd forgotten why I was there, and was a drooling fan boy. I didn't want to read this scene, I just wanted to talk about Apocalypse Now, and Rumblefish. I wanted to ask him about Marlon Brando, Dennis Hopper, and James Caan.

All these thoughts flooded my head while I stumbled through the scene. My Inner Voice, that internal critic/director/coach that all actors have, was screaming at me that I was doing horribly. I didn't listen, instead hearing Robert Duvall shout, "Charlie don't surf!" It screamed louder, telling me to stop and start over, but I was too busy watching John Cazale get on that boat, knowing that he was going to get whacked.

Before I knew it, I was done, and Coppola was thanking me for coming in. We both knew that I'd blown it. We both knew that I'd wasted everyone's time. I knew that I'd wasted a lot of time and money on my preparation. I'd had my one chance in front of Francis Ford Coppola - one of my favorite filmmakers in the history of cinema - and I had completely blown it. I walked out, head hung low.

I passed Emilio Estevez, who asked me how it went. I shrugged, and told him to break a leg.

I drove home in silence, hating myself, Chet Baker wondering how deep is the ocean?

Whenever I write about and link to my brother's photography, the positive feedback is just overwhelming. It seems that people all over the world love his work just as much as I do, and as a big brother that makes me put my hands on my hips and smile like a goon.

If you haven't seen them before, here are a few of his pictures, from Jer's Flickr thingy (click to embiggen):

On his website, Jeremy says:

I'd have to say that my father was my biggest influence for photography. While I was growing up it seemed like he always had a camera in one hand pointing it at us kids. But looking at his boxes of photos in recent years I noticed that he also had lots of photos of pine cones, rusty nails in boards, fence posts, etc. He didn't just capture wonderful moments of our childhood, he also captured the beauty of the world around us that we probably never noticed back then. 

I got my first digital camera only a few years ago but I quickly fell in love with the artistic value in photography. I love to get outdoors with my camera. Having the camera makes me slow down more than I would otherwise and look at my surroundings a bit more closely in different ways. The one thing I love about photography more than any other aspect is the ability to capture that one single moment the way I saw it. I hope you like what I saw in those moments. 

I hope this doesn't sound too paternal, but I just love it that Jeremy is carrying on the Wheaton Photographic Tradition™. I am as proud of him as I am happy for him*.

Jeremy lives in Montana, which means I don't get to see him ... well, ever. I miss him a lot, so I talk to him as often as I can, which is pretty easy since we live in the future and everything. 

For at least a year, we've been talking about collaborating on a book together, where he'd take pictures and I'd write prose to go with them, but we've both been too busy with our jobs and families and dogs to actually work on it. Last week, though, I was able to convince him to get excited and make some things on his own with his pictures, which he put into a CafePress store. I think they're lovely, and I thought that some of you, out there in Internetland, may agree.

And if you see this post, Jer: I love you and I miss you.

*(That's a lot.)

This is a little bit of gallows humor that I whipped up and sent to Scott Kurtz and my friends at Penny Arcade when we all knew that Aeofel was dead, but couldn't tell anyone else in the world.

It seems pretty stupid and clunky now, but at the time, it was as hilarious as it was cathartic to me.

(Oh, and just to clarify for anyone who doesn't know: This is an image that was meme'd a little while ago. It was originally from a webcomic called Bigger Cheeses [thanks to reader phuzz for the link] I didn't do the art; I just filled in the word balloons. Hey, it's like I'm a Marvel writer in the 70s!)

It turns out that all this talk about getting excited and making things, uh, got me excited to make something.

I don't remember the precise moment this hit me, but I'm pretty sure it happened during one of those times I felt stuck on a story or something, and decided to get out of my office and take a walk. These walks are a fundamental part of my creative process, a time when I let my mind wander away, confident that it will come back with something cool.

During this particular walk, I was thinking about my plans for 2010, what I'll do with my podcasts, and getting excited to do more work on Memories of the Future Volume Two.

That's when my mind ran off like a dog chasing an idea through the forest, returning a few minutes later with something awesome. If I were to create a dialog to dramatically illustrate the way it all came together, it might go something like this:

My Mind: DUDE! OMG! This is going to be so cool!

Me: Okay, I'm listening.

My Mind: We're going to make a mug that goes with Memories of the Future.

Me: Tell me more...

My Mind: On one side, it will have those beautiful space jellyfish that Will designed for the cover.

Me: I love how those look.

My Mind: Everyone does. Will did a great job with them. Now listen, because this is what takes this mug from cool to awesome: On the opposite side of the mug, it says:

Tea,

Earl Grey.

Hot.

Me: Holy crap, My Mind! That's awesome!

My Mind: I know, right?!

Me: High five!

My Neighbor's Kid: Why did Mister Wheaton just slap himself in the head?

My Neighbor: He's a writer, honey. They do weird things like that.

And ... scene.

When I got back to my house, I e-mailed the idea to my friend Will Hindmarch, who did the cover and interior design for Memories of the Future, Volume One. About 2 hours later, we'd built the mug and put it into a store at CafePress. I remember saying to Will, "I think this is awesome, and I don't know if anyone else will ... but who cares? It's a 2 hour project that has great potential, and if I'm the only person who wants one of these mugs, so what? I'll have one, and I'll be happy."

I vaguely recall Will saying that he thought more than one person would want to have one, but I'm not entirely sure, so I'm not going to quote him. I'm sure he'll chime in here if he wants to add to the historical record. (Edit: Will says, That's pretty much how I remember it going, with the enthusiasm and the hope that people would like it and the glaven. Except that I remember gasping and saying, "That's magnificent!" when you said it should say "Tea, Earl Grey. Hot." on it.)

Now, I'm going to restate something I said on this week's Memories of the Futurecast: In just two hours, my friend who lives on the other side of the country and I created something that anyone in the world can get, if they want it. We didn't have to invest anything other than a little time (and, honestly, Will did all the hard work; I just came up with the idea and tweaked the final specs a couple of times.) I. Love. Living. In. The. Future.

Okay, enough backstory. Here's the 1000 words that matter:

If you'd like to purchase a Memories of the Futuremug for your very own (or as a gift for the luckiest person you know), you can head over to make it so at my Memories of the Futureshop at CafePress.

Please note that, in addition to Earl Grey, the Memories of the Futuremug is suitable for other types of tea, various kinds of coffee and other hot beverages, pencils, or pudding.