One of those nights when everything changed

Listen to this post:

Sept. 8, 1966. The family gathers around the black-and-white television set to watch the debut of a new show about the crew of a ship that explores outer space. Over the opening credits, the ship’s captain explains that its mission is to “seek out new life and new civilizations” out there “where no man has gone before.”

We were a family that loved science fiction. Forbidden Planet was one of my mom’s favorite movies, and Dad buried himself in E.E. “Doc” Smith’s acclaimed Lensman series. The night after Star Trek premiered on NBC, we sat down to watch another science-fiction show debut over at ABC, The Time Tunnel. Those were heady days for sf fans.

My memory is that my brothers and I, all navigating our teenage years, were more impressed by the first episode of The Time Tunnel. That opinion changed over coming weeks as one series offered a range of thought-provoking adventures while the other quickly became repetitive and eventually sort of dumb.

For a long time I wondered why, with at least a half-dozen episodes already filmed, the producers decided to introduce Star Trek with “The Man Trap.” On the surface it’s little more than a horror story about a monster that disguises itself to lure victims and suck their blood. On the other hand, the story lures the audience into some degree of sympathy with the monster, and the creature’s defeat comes with a degree of sadness. This was a more nuanced tale than the man-versus-monster episodes of Lost in Space and other science-fiction offerings of the time.

In any case the characters and themes of Star Trek led to a great deal more than almost anyone could have imagined on the night of Sept. 8, 1966. Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock and their crewmates are now the stuff of popular legend, and that original series has spawned 11 more TV shows, more than a dozen movies and hundreds of stories.

It’s hard to believe that when Arthur Conan Doyle wrote a novel called A Study in Scarlet in 1887, he could have known that Sherlock Holmes and his friend Dr. Watson would still be familiar names almost 150 years later. Likewise, the producers of Star Trek probably knew they had created something special, but could they have imagined a gala 60th-anniversary celebration on this scale?

It has been a fun roller-coaster ride through 79 original episodes, cancellation, revival through syndication of reruns, a cartoon and a motion picture, and arguably the coup de grace that cemented the franchise’s future, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. 

Much has been said about this anniversary and how much this ambitious TV show has affected the world. I’m just thrilled to have been one of the millions of kids who was there, sitting in front of the TV set when Star Trek was broadcast for the first time. 

And then

Listen to this post:

Then there are the days when you stare at the wall searching for something to say, and the wall gives you a belligerent scowl and says, “What are you looking at?”

And you look at the calendar thinking it’s Monday and the calendar says, “It’s Labor Day. It’s a holiday. Take the day off.”

Then you notice Tuesday will be the 60th anniversary of the first airing of Star Trek, and the only ideas you have for the blog are more appropriate for tomorrow.

And you reach the conclusion that your only idea today is to write a “place holder” post that serves no other earthly purpose than to preserve the streak of consecutive daily posts.

“Well, I haven’t done one of those for a pretty long time,” you say, while the wall and the calendar roll their eyes.

Happy Labor Day, one and all.

A run-on sentence about writing anything until you write Something

Listen to this post:

So it seems to be more complicated than, “OK, I’m going to sit down and write something now,” because your brain goes, “I don’t know what to write,” and you say, “write anything except nothing,” and the next thing you know, you’ve doodled the word “SOMETHING” in big block letters with googly eyes and duck faces all around it and maybe a little shading around the edges of the letters, and then you write about the weather, how it’s cloudy out and you sure wish the sun would shine and that it would cool off or warm up (depending on what time of year it is), and you keep on moving your fingers to spill words onto the page, sometimes for pages and pages of incoherent nothingness, and what do you know all of a sudden you’re in the Arctic searching for a lost shipwreck, and just as you’re giving up hope the sun comes out from behind a cloud and there’s the wreck just where you expected it to be, but suddenly the villain is standing in your way aiming to snatch your victory away, or maybe you’re a young child racing across a field of wildflowers with not a care in the world except to get your mom’s batch of cookies over to the neighbors, when all of a sudden you realize the neighbor won’t know if you’re bringing a dozen cookies or 10 and they sure smell good.

But if you don’t move your fingers and you don’t write nonsense until it starts to make sense and tell a story, well then, I hope you have a nice day even though you didn’t write anything. I’m just here to tell you that nothing is nothing and nonsense is something, and something is better than nothing almost every time. And if you’re hoping that maybe this is the time that nothing is better than something (I did say almost), well, yes, and maybe this is the time you win a million bucks in the lottery, too.