Starship Crossing

I am a trekkie.

I freely and openly admit that here and now. As with all serious affectations, it started with a family member. In this case, I blame my brother, Mark, who is the other bookend for my family and 12 years older. I still look up to him in a way I suspect all little brothers naturally do. For Mark, I suspect this makes him feel slightly uncomfortable. Like me, he can be painfully conscious of his failings and I think having a brother as a yap dog and worshipper. Still, I've lived in awe of his abilities and talents. His gift of a working Space Shuttle was perhaps the greatest and most timely gifts I've ever gotten. Okay, okay, it was a model, but with the exception skipping the SRB sep, it performed exactly like the real thing.

Mark planted the seeds of Star Trek. Since I've known him, Mark has had the ability to recite word-for-word any of the original series (TOS) episodes, though he has long since stopped performing on cue. When I was 5 years old, we went to Disneyland and oddly we went back to the motel room for a nap in the afternoon. Mark found a station playing an episode and laying there, he would say the lines verbatim before th actors would. I found it mesmerizing and strangely comforting. If Mark knew what happened in the episode, then everything should turn out well by the end of the show. A redshirt may die, but Kirk, Scotty, McCoy, Uhura, Spock and the rest would make it through okay. To this day, Star Trek is a touchstone for me to think about him.

Growing up, I would watch the episodes in syndication every time I was allowed to stay up as late as KWGN, our local independent station in Denver would show the reruns nightly, usually 9 or 10 p.m. or later. For many years, they'd run a 10/11 double-header, one with TOS and one TNG. Eventually that became TNG and DS9 and by then my inner Trekkie had asserted itself, at least at home.

I liked Spock and the way he would get into it with Bones. I wanted to be Jim Kirk and be able to save the day with my courage and daring. I was utterly deflated when I discovered that they were no longer making the series and that the actors had aged quite a bit since it ended. Around the time that Star Trek II - The Wrath Of Khan came out, I was horrified to hear  that Kirk (William Shatner) had gone bald, and that even worse, he was too vain to appear without a wig. For me, it was inconsistent with the character of Kirk and I found it to hard to like either Kirk or Shatner until I learned to separate the two. Somehow, I still find Kirk tainted by Shatner's vanity. Even though I make the separation of actor and character, some part of me must not be able to fully understand the difference.

My autistic tendencies might be at work in that, and probably run rampant throughout my Trekkie life. I too know nearly every line of nearly every episode of The Next Generation after watching episodes I had taped until 2001, when I found my library had the boxed DVD sets. They had seven DVDs for seven seasons. I would have only a week to watch those seven DVDs, an entire season of TNG. To Karen's dismay, I would attempt and usually succeed in doing so.

Karen does not share my enthusiasm for Star Trek or Sci-fi in general, and I have needed to temper my enthusiasm as a result. She's different from me. Sometimes I find that we are polar opposites in preference or opinion and Trek is something she doesn't get. I used to let it bother me until I discovered that my unhappiness actually was making her upset with herself. Our love naturally manifests itself in the desire to please each other, and when the other is discontent, it causes me or her deep distress. When I found out, I naturally released her and purposefully resolved never to put her in that distress again. It hurt her, and it could have alienated me, so to speak, from her. My kids find it a little more relatable but they don't have more than a few episodes memorized [Melodramatic chuckle, sotto voce] ...yet.

A Post With Waterproof Paint

Life sure has changed in a few years, culminating at 40, I expect. Until a year ago, I was a cat person. This in the face of a cat allergy that once produced mild respiratory distress and swelled both eyes shut. We even went so far as to get manx kittens from a couple of breeders a few years back in order to allow me to still enjoy them. Manx lack an enzyme in their saliva that tends to produce the dander that provokes the allergy symptoms. Manx are incredibly aloof, which is not the case with the Burmese chocolate brown, yellow eyed females my mother has loved since before I was born. It is this "love me when I want to be loved otherwise you don't exist" aloofness that has forced a change.

Now, I'm a dogger. I have changed sides in the cats vs. dogs debate. And, I'm starting to wonder if one is enough. Ace, my year old loyal to a fault Labrador, is incredibly social. If he were any more social, I would fear for his safety. If you are accepted by us as a friend, you are part of his pack and therefore subject to extensive welcoming by him. This does include the customary sniffing in areas that, for the life of me, I'll never appreciate why, are exactly the height of a Labrador's head. So part of me still does appreciate aloofness at times.

He's not "intact," as breeders say, although for all his beauty, you would want to clone him. Actually, it is his sweetness and loyalty that you wish you could bottle, not just his looks. He likes to chase our two Manx whose aloofness seems to be crumbling one claw at a time to his impetuous persistence. He will not kill them, I don't think. He's never once shown anger to them. He's always wagged his tale on approach.

Manx cats don't speak Dog, I don't think, anyway. They haven't let on. On the other hand, I think they've regretted trying to teach him Cat. They've repeatedly said, "Stay back!" and now Ace tries saying it back by swiping his paw at them, presuming, I think that "Stay back!" means "I love you." Half the words in Dog mean some variant of "I love you." The other words are "Out. Out now. Out, please! and Do you want me to eat that for you?"

So, Ace needs a friend, if only to spare my aging Manx's nerves. We're praying about it, because at this point, a paid brother, half-brother or cousin would not be in the cards. It would also increase our dog food consumption and waste removal, things we struggle with like all dog owners. Still, I figure that the more dogs I have, the warmer this house will be. Or maybe is it the more broken-in and loved on the furniture is. Regardless, one lesson we've learned is that dogs will teach you to keep your treasures in heaven. It's the only place they can't reach your stuff.

These Amazing Shadows

I watched a few documentaries about films and film making last night. One of them was These Amazing Shadows. It was about finding and preserving films in the Library of Congress. One of the interviewees quoted the literal "Librarian" of the Library of Congress, James H. Billington, who said in his own interview after 20 years of service on June 30, 2007, this amazing pontification:

"Stories unite people. Theories divide them."

I see why my daughter wants to write stories.