Free The Happiest Days of Our Lives by Wil Wheaton Page B

to be an old man and wish that I’d played more video games…
    “Augh!” he said, with what I hoped was mock irritation. “Why do you have to make so much sense!?”
    “Because I’m weird,” I said.
    He gave me the I-see-what-you-did-there look. He turned around, typed something into the chat box, laughed, and shut the game down.
    “People are so stupid,” he said. “I’m 8 and 1 in this match, but when I stop to talk to you and get killed, some guy on my team tells me that I’m a dipshit. And that guy was 1 and 6.” He shook his head. “This is why I only like to play with my friends.”
    “That’s what I’m talking about when I say ‘don’t be a dick,’” I said. “That guy would never talk to you like that if you were face to face.”
    “Meh, whatever. I don’t care.” I listened for the sarcasm in his voice that would say, “I care a lot more than I’m willing to admit to you or anyone else,” but I didn’t hear it. I obviously cared about it more than he did, both as a gamer and as a dad.
    I walked to the closet where the Frisbee lives. It wasn’t there.
    “Oh, it’s still in the trunk of your car,” he said.
    “Augh!” I said, imitating what I hoped was his mock irritation. “Let’s go get a new one.”
    “Don’t you just want to wait until Mom gets home and you can trade cars?”
    “It’ll be dark by then, and I really want to play with you.” It had now become, as we say, a thing .
    A few minutes later, we stood in a local sporting goods store. I yanked a bunch of 175 gram Frisbees off the rack, trying to get at a particular one near the back.
    “Are you getting seven Frisbees?” Nolan said.
    “Nope, I’m getting this one.” I handed it to him. “It glows in the dark, so we can squeeze a few more minutes out of the dusk.”
    He barely nodded, a generous expression of approval. Apparently glow-in-the-dark stuff is not “weird,” or at least not so weird that it requires comment.
    That evening, we played in the street, long after the sky had turned purple and the sun’s rays barely lingered, pink and gold, on the bottoms of clouds in the west. We played until our depth perception couldn’t pick out the softly glowing disc with much accuracy, as the stars were starting to come out.
    I woke up the next morning with searing pain in my left arm and shoulder, joined by some familiar pain in my right hip. Even though I was pretty damn achy, it was worth it. I’m not going to be an old man and wish that I’d played less Frisbee with my son.

the big goodbye
           When we were teenagers, my friend Terry said to me, “You’re a pretty big geek, and you’re part of the biggest geek phenomenon in history…but you hardly ever talk about it. How come?” It was true. I didn’t talk about it very much. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy it, or didn’t think it was cool, but when I was with my friends, the last thing I wanted to do was talk about work. That reluctance persisted until I wrote “The Saga of Spongebob Vegaspants—or, how I learned to stop worrying and love Star Trek ” in late 2001 for my book Dancing Barefoot . That story and this one bookend a time in my life that was so significant to me, I—well, I’ll just let you read this, and I think you’ll understand why.
    L ast week, I went to Paramount to film some host wraps for a Star Trek: TNG DVD documentary, and I discovered that the old cliché is true: You can’t go home again, especially when your home has been torn down and replaced with sets for a Farrelly Brothers movie.
    It wasn’t the first time I’d been to Paramount since Wesley Crusher turned into a magic ball of light and floated out into the galaxy to fight crime and save amusement parks from evil developers with The Traveler. In Just A Geek , I wrote:
    I found myself at the Melrose Avenue guard shack, half an hour early for my 8:30 a.m. call time.
    “ID, please,” the guard said.
    I pulled my driver’s license out of my wallet and