We are all extremely multi-faceted, I believe. Even the most shallow, bland, lacking-in-common-sense, uneducated or bad-at-thinking types of people -- have scores of experience, different motives, wants and needs. The minor villain in one person's life has got to be a major hero in another's.
And then there are some of us who are a little more unusual or skewed in our outlook, reactions, or products. We may think we're hard to describe, explain, or pigeonhole.
And that, frankly, brings us down to "He's just this guy, you know?"
JACK
Clicking around Apple Mail showed me that
Jack Fleischer's blog had been updated, and I hadn't read a few entries. He's trying to make a living as a writer in Los Angeles.
I read the most recent entries, and started looking around his other info pages. In the spirit of "you always find it in the last place you look," I eventually got to
his basic About page, and he'd invoked Douglas Adams at the end of the summary paragraph:
In short, "I'm just this guy, you know?"
I started to leave a comment, and be snarky and say 'You should link to Wikipedia about Zaphod Beeblebrox,' but then I started looking up what he should link to in hopes of including it -- and then realized he wasn't by any stretch of the imagination the first to think of adopting the phrase.
ZAPHOD
As a writer, how do you make things happen on the page? You need an engine: something for the characters to do. A journey or quest. Maybe your engine is not a goal, but someone stirring things up.
Zaphod Beeblebrox -- as written by Douglas Adams in
The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy radio series, television series, series of novels, film, computer game, and Zarquon knows what else -- is not really stirring things up, but he's nevertheless a poke in the ribs to the story's engine all the same.
What he definitely is, is hard to describe. Visually, he's startling. He has two heads, and a third arm.
His attitude (generally, as portrayed in most cases) could be termed as very stereotypically L.A., coming from one who has never worked or lived there: almost anxiously trying to look relaxed while being behind and trying to get ahead of everyone else.
An early scene in the Hitchhiker's radio series has Zaphod trying to out-cool his cousin, Ford Prefect (whose name, Americans, might as well be Ford Taurus, Ford Focus, or
Harry LeSabre). Zaphod has punched the Infinite Improbability Drive button on the Starship Heart of Gold, and something not totally impossible, but extremely unlikely and improbable happens: Zaphod's own cousin is saved from Earth's total destruction (with some joker in a bathrobe and pajamas, if you please, answering to the name of Arthur Dent) and ends up on the very ship Zaphod's just stolen from the intergalactic government.
Before they meet, at least one of them, probably Zaphod, realizes just how gargantuan of a coincidence this is, and realizes he's got to win at playing it cool.
You know, just because.
Losing your head about something that big would just be ...well, not as cool as playing it cool would be.
Zaphod is irresponsible, selfish, an egomaniac and narcissist, devious. Sam Rockwell played him in the movie as more of a sh*t-kicker in cowboy boots. How else do you become the president of the galaxy?
Since he is so famous, journalists talk about what he does, and that leads them to talk to other people about what he does. Investigating turns up the fact he has a private brain-care specialist. Not a shrink or psychiatrist, oh, no. That would be too bourgeois.
The man, whose name is
Gag Halfrunt (pronounced, unless I miss my guess, as HAL-front, not HALF-runt), is interviewed on a radio program within the radio program, starting with a question like Has Zaphod Gone Crazy?
"Vell, Zaphod's just zis guy, you know?"
...Well, what does that mean?
Zaphod kind of does what he wants, he is a very smooth talker to seduce women, seduce officials, take low-level security guard robots under his spell, and is one of the guys you wish you could have the life or the cojones of.
WIL
While Wil Wheaton doesn't strike me as wild as Zaphod Beeblebrox, we tend to describe ourselves in different terms than those around us.
Wil Wheaton's Twitter bio invokes the Zaphod catchphrase, just as Jack did:
I'm just this guy, you know?
The persona I see most often these days of him is in guest appearances on
The Big Bang Theory, playing an evil nemesis version of himself to get on the nerves of
Jim Parsons's Sheldon Cooper. My own trying-to-be-hilarious constant admittance that I want to have Jim Parsons's babies does not affect my opinion of Wil Wheaton at any time, of course.
Wil has gotten relatively far along with his own writing career -- namely, in books. Writing what you know is what everyone is encouraged to do, and as Wil blogged, he got material for memoirs.
"Other celebrities have kept web-logs, but few have matched the candor and self-deprecating wit of Wheaton's posts to wilwheaton.net, which explore subject matter both universal (parenting, losing a relative) and not-so-universal (getting cut from the latest Star Trek movie)."
Some of this material derived from his experience becoming a niche icon: the teenager on syndicated 80's sci-fi television series, Star Trek: The Next Generation. Wesley Crusher was the son of single starship mom, chief medical officer Dr. Beverly Crusher. He wanted to be a Starfleet officer, and had a major 'in' since, dude, your mom's totally top shipboard brass. But, teenagers doing what teenagers do, he tended to get into trouble and be annoying for a chunk of the viewership.
Where do we share complaints? With friends. If we don't have friends in person, then this being the digital age, we find friends through computers. Huge forums dedicated to the hatred of the character of Wesley sprang up on the earliest versions of the Internet.
But that wasn't what got Wil Wheaton off TNG. His first sightings of what stardom does kinda did, as he told Rabin later in the article.
I can't find any reference to his going to college, but he went and worked on the Video Toaster, programming and selling. And then acting school for some years to perfect his craft there. So, these days he's an actor, and a writer, and this and that, and while he's surely not anyone's major villain in real life, he's doing what he wants.
THE OTHERS
Google shows us it's being done elsewhere.
- Posicat, Mark Balliet, of Grayslake, Illinois
- A Kent in Brussels
- An actual guy with the name Guy, who's been writing for h2g2, the Douglas Adams guide to the real world, so it's quite appropriate
- Someone named Ryan Betts, who is working on Thinglink, a social network for furniture -- or a photo-tagging something-or-other
- One Chris Read, who works in IT for a stock trading firm
- Jess Sutherland - who's actually a girl; then again, using it without a comma, which makes it specifically someone *YOU KNOW* as opposed to saying, don't you understand me without my elaborating further?
- A guy from my home whereabouts, Evan Davis, actually came up with a third permutation of the phrase: "He's just, you know, this guy..." which really doesn't take it to anywhere new, frankly
- Not a full usage, since it's describing someone else, and it doesn't seem like the subject is extremely out of line, but a Catholic blogger called Jimmy Akin uses it for a Vatican astronomer-type person
- Then, wriggler in Dublin
I also got a lot of references to "He's Just Not That Into You."
AND SO...
I believe Douglas Adams started giving Zaphod Beeblebrox a second head just as a throwaway joke in the radio series; the listener could make him come alive in their mind's eye. Putting that second head into actual real practice was a headache for the television series. For one thing, how do you move an actor's spine to the side so two heads can fit on his body symmetrically? You don't. The fake head had to be placed dead center between the real actor's spine and the shoulder, and the effect was extremely out of kilter -- that's even before you managed to get the fake head to look anywhere near lively or real. In the film, I guess the cost of CGI-ing the actor would have been prohibitive -- every single gol-dang shot containing him would have had to be drawn, I suppose -- and they solved the problem by HAVING ONE HEAD FLIP UP TO REVEAL THE SECOND. I felt it was a cop-out.
Can everyone relate to "He's just this guy, you know"? Surely this badge needs to be earned.
For one thing, you should adore Hitchhiker's, and all the wacky, strange world behind it, inhabited by nasty green beings, sweet but huge birds, sentient flowerpots, and a whale that simply cannot fly but dies real funny-like.
I'd like to think I'm "just this guy, you know," or even just a guy that you know, apart from other people you run across in your day-to-day life, but I guess I don't feel I'm weird enough.
