I Never Saw Wil Wheaton Coming

Perhaps one of the coolest things about the Information Super-InterWeb is that you simply can’t anticipate…well, anything. Not with any degree of accuracy, at any rate. I mean, you’re just sitting there, happily emailing, listing and newsgrouping when wham! Tim Berners-Lee comes up with this dub-dub-dub thing. So you start getting used to that when wham! some schmuck tries to commercialize their little corner of the web…a few years later I’m getting my freebies via snailmail from this little start-up called Amazon.com. Well, there I was minding my own business on Twitter when I noticed people retweeting stuff by this @wilw person. So I clicked on the name (like you do) and wham! I discovered that it was none other than Wil Wheaton.

(I hear crickets.)

(No, really. My window is open. I hear crickets. Ah…summertime!)

Wil Wheaton. The only connection I knew of was that he played Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG). I hadn’t watched his earlier film, Stand by Me. I was unaware of his writings. For me, he was just Wesley Crusher.

Now–and let’s be clear on this–I didn’t view Wesley with quite the venom as so many other TNG fans did. I mean, they could get brutal. I was more annoyed that the character was poorly written, especially in the beginning. But I never had any problem separating the character from the actor. Not that I knew anything about the actor other than the Stand by Me reference that was dutifully noted in every article that mentioned Wil to any degree. So it’s with shocked awe that I now find myself anticipating each new WW project.

Let me take a step back.

I was coming to enjoy the geeky tweets that @wilw would send our way (at least when whales weren’t being all obstructionist). I started listening to his Memories of the Futurecast, which are audio excerpts from his book, Memories of the Future, Volume One, where Wil recaps the episode with heart & good humor and adds on additional recollections from his behind-the-scenes perspective. It dawned on me that I’d read his original posts discussing these episodes before. Being a sucker for non-mean behind-the-scenes tales, I waited with great anticipation for each new episode to be recorded and released into the wild.

By the time w00tstock 1.x rolled around, with excerpts of this geek-centric vaudeville getting posted on the web for the enjoyment of we locationally-challenged nerds, I was hooked. I can honestly say that I’m now a Wil Weaton fan. …And I’m still not sure why.

From w00tstock 1.1 (2009):

From w00tstock Chicago (2010):

Perhaps the key is Wheaton’s honest and earnest geekiness. He grew up in a time when geek culture was firmly rooted and growing. I’m eleven years his senior. Geeks and nerds were weird-but-tolerated when I was in college. These tech-types didn’t start to become cool until after I’d graduated. While DnD was in full-flower in the early 80s, you still didn’t shout too loudly that you were a member of the Maryland Star Trek Association (MSTA), or that you thought hanging out with chain-mail-clad Society for Creative Anachronism (S.C.A.) types was cool and fun. No…it was just accepted that, being nerds, we were likely going to do weird and deeply disturbed things (like invent the web…and twitter) and get rich doing it.

As I said, Wil grew up in a time after the initial battles had been fought. I think that might be one of the reasons I enjoy his insights. He sees tech and geek culture from a totally different perspective than I’m able to (his level of celebrity being beside the point). It’s a joy to witness. He’s a good communicator who, as has been said, is able to bridge the divide between nerds and normals.

I will also confess a small very tangential connection between us that does sort of make me smile: La Crescenta, CA. Though my parents moved from SoCal (taking me with them, I should probably add) a couple of years before Wil was born, my time there is still vivid in my mind’s eye. Living in La Crescenta in the late 60s is one of the most treasured times of my life. Perhaps there is only a certain amount of nascent awesomeness one place can comfortably hold. Perhaps I had to leave so that…

But I digress.

It’s been an odd and unlikely journey. With my TNG tapes having long since been boxed and stored, I honestly hadn’t devoted any time with thoughts of Wil Wheaton. And now, he’s one of my favored celebrities. Perhaps it’s because I’m also a geek. Perhaps it’s because of some youthful La Crescenta mojo. Whatever it is, I think he’s very deserving of his renaissance.

And I never saw it coming.