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.
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